While there are plenty of SEO tools available, the four most popular in the industry are MozSEMrushAhrefs, and Spyfu.

Whether you’re running SEO for an enterprise-level business or improving a personal blog, finding the right tool can make a huge difference in your SEO strategy and overall site health.

Therefore, this post dives into key features, differences, and similarities of each tool to help you select the perfect solution for your business.  

Specifically, I’ll examine their merits in these categories:

Here we go!

Comparing Keyword Research Tools

Let’s begin by determining which tool is best for researching your keywords.

To compare the tools, I started with an analysis of each tool’s keyword volume estimates.

I checked the monthly search volume of 150 keywords across Google Adwords and all four tools and averaged them together to get a holistic view of the difference in estimates.

As you can see, among the four tools, Moz, Spyfu, and Ahrefs all have very similar averages, while SEMrush is a higher outlier.

These differences have to do with the methodologies they use to calculate their search volume. SEMrush uses an algorithm, while the rest use combinations of Google Adwords and clickstream data.

Unfortunately, gathering 100% accurate data is pretty much impossible. 

For example, take a look at the data from Google Adwords, which you might expect to have the most accurate data. The average volume of these 150 keywords was 72,729—over 50,000 higher than SEMrush.

The discrepancies occur for a variety of reasons. For example, Google Adwords uses a rounded annual average. Therefore, a keyword like “Valentines Day gifts” might show a monthly volume of 1200, though the distribution might be closer to 1,000 in February and the other 200 spread out between March through January.

In addition, Google Adwords conflates keywords together. Therefore, if you have two synonyms like “NFL” and “National Football League,” Adwords might show you the same search volume for the two combined. 

However, each tool differs in both how it calculates data and the frequency in which they update their search volume data.

We get a slightly different view when we look at median keyword volumes across the 150 keywords.

While still being a high-volume standout in comparison to the tools, Google’s median keyword volume is closer to the other tools. The few keywords that were clearly made of several combined keyword volumes have less of an impact.

Moz again has the lowest numbers, which when examining the data, happens because Moz shows a lot of keyword volume estimates as 5 searches per month, which brought the median down considerably.

Interestingly here, Spyfu has the highest median keyword volume compared to the other tools, rather than SEMrush, which means it had more total keywords on the higher side and fewer on the lower side.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the features.

Moz

Their Keyword Explorer tool includes four main features:

  • Keyword Overview
  • Keyword Suggestions
  • SERP Analysis

Put in your keyword, and the Keyword Overview provides a simple at-a-glance view of its Monthly Search Volume, Keyword Difficulty, and Organic CTR.

Image via Moz

A high Keyword Priority score (100) means that the keyword has a high organic CTR and volume, yet a low difficulty. Therefore, it should be a priority to rank for. However, a low Keyword Priority score means that you have a low organic CTR/volume and high difficulty. 

If you click on “Keyword Suggestions,” you can find similar keywords and sort by a variety of different factors including volume, group keywords, and the type of keyword suggestion (for example, keywords based on similar topics vs keywords that contain your identical keyword).

Image via Moz

You can also get a closer look at the keyword’s SERP with Keyword Explorer’s SERP analysis.

This is helpful to get a quick overview of the SERP competition, with metrics like Page Authority, Domain Authority, Page and Root Domain Backlinks, and an overall Page Score for each.

Therefore, if you’re considering writing a post for a certain keyword, you’ll know whether or not you’ll have a shot at ranking for it based on the links that the top posts have.

Image via Moz

Pros:

  • The “Display keyword suggestions that” option allows you to pull up a list of broadly related keywords for more keyword ideas than most other tools
  • The priority feature and simple interface make it beginner-friendly 

Cons:

  • Doesn’t provide metrics for SERP features, or even show the results in “Related Questions” or “People Also Ask.”
  • Excludes key metrics like organic click percentages, a visual breakdown of traffic geography (US, Canada, etc)
  • No PPC data

SEMrush

SEMrush’s keyword research tool is similar to Moz, but includes some extra metrics, which we’ll go over here.

Within its Keyword Research tool, SEMrush also offers:

  • Keyword Magic Tool
  • Keyword Manager
  • Organic Traffic Insights

The Keyword Overview provides a detailed report on the keyword of your choosing.

mage via SEMrush

It goes a little bit deeper than Moz by including:

  • CPC value
  • Global volume broken down by country 
  • Total number of URLs in the SERP
  • Types of SERP features.

SEMrush also shows a PPC competition metric next to the CPC price. This gives you an idea of the competition level between advertisers over this keyword, on a scale of 0 to 1.0. A Score of 1.00 shown here means “Backcountry Skis” is extremely competitive.

Image via SEMrush

You also get keyword variations, related keywords, and questions, which can be helpful for finding long-tail keywords.

SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool can help you search for keywords to target, whether for SEO or PPC.

This tool is super filterable and sortable by Keyword Difficulty, CPC, Competitive Density, SERP Features, and results, making it easy to find the right keywords for your SEO campaign.

mage via SEMrush

Another cool feature on the left lets you look at keyword clusters—or keywords that often occur together. This is great for finding other relevant keywords to include in your post.

Pros:

  • Useful for those who also run PPC campaigns
  • Offers the most keyword features, along with Ahrefs

Cons:

  • It can be difficult to get the hang of, especially for beginners
  • Its user interface is a little overwhelming and not very clean

Spyfu

The sheer amount of metrics that Spyfu offers in its Keyword Research tool is impressive, including Advertiser History, Ranking History, Backlinks, SERP analysis, and a helpful Google Ads Advisor for PPC research.

Let’s dive into it.

The Keyword Overview page includes all of these tools mentioned above as modules, and you can also click on the tabs at the top to get greater detail for each.

You’ll see an overview of standard metrics like monthly volume, keyword difficulty, and CPC for each keyword. 

However, it also shows some more unique and useful metrics like estimated clicks and “Clicked any result,” which shows the proportion of users that click on something. For example, you may find that some SERPs have a featured snippet that answers the user’s question and results in a no-click search. 

You can also see the proportion of people who click on ads and whether they tend to search for this keyword on mobile or desktop, which can help tailor your PPC strategies.

Image via Spyfu

You can also see a variety of ways to browse new potential keywords, including questions for long-tail keywords and “Also buys ads for” to see what other keywords companies are spending money on in PPC.

Advertiser History quickly tells you who your top advertising competitors are and estimates their ad spend and coverage.

Image via Spyfu

Organic Ranking History provides a graph of the changes in rank of the results in the SERP over time.

Image via Spyfu

I like how it points out when Google implements algorithm changes, giving you a sense of the difference those changes make on you and your competitors’ progress.

Like the SERP analysis offered by Moz, Spyfu’s SERP Analysis goes a bit deeper, providing rankings for the first 6 pages of the SERPs. SERP features, however, are not included.

Image via Spyfu

In addition, they also recently came out with a competitive analysis keyword research tool that makes it easy to see what the most valuable keywords for your competitors are and sort those keywords by difficulty, topic, and much more.

Pros:

  • One of the most in-depth competitor keyword analysis tools, enabling you to track competition’s most valuable keywords and gains and losses.
  • The only tool that allows you to view historical rankings for up to five years for free
  • Extensive PPC information with an Also Buys Ads section and even makes recommendations for other great PPC keywords

Cons:

  • It doesn’t offer search volumes based on countries
  • Their keyword database is still growing, so much of the data it shows is only relative to other keywords in their database

Ahrefs

Ahref’s keyword research tool also offers a lot of data when it comes to their Keyword Explorer.

On the Keyword Overview page, you get Keyword Difficulty, Search volume, and CPC value as well as estimated clicks and volume by country. 

The percentage of paid vs organic clicks over time is particularly interesting, as you can get a sense of what types of links are driving clicks in this SERP.

Image via Ahrefs

One thing I should note is that the keyword difficulty that Ahrefs shows for “backcountry skis” is radically different from the other tools, which ranged between 37 (Moz) and 82 (Spyfu).

The reason that Ahrefs differs so greatly is because of the way they calculate it. Ahrefs takes fewer variables into account when determining the score, which leads to a less nuanced view of a keyword’s difficulty.

There’s also a variety of ways to get new keyword ideas related to your topic:

  • Phrase match
  • Having same terms
  • Also rank for
  • Also talk about
  • Search suggestions
  • Newly discovered
  • Questions

For example, if we look into People Also Talk About, it shows the keywords and phrases that the top 100 ranking pages for your target keyword frequently mention.

Image via Ahrefs

Along with normal metrics, it tells you when it was updated (which is very often) and lets you look at the SERP overview as well as position history for each keyword.

Image via Ahrefs

Ahref’s keyword research tool also includes a nifty Ads History tool, which you can sort by domain and landing page to see who has been spending the most money on this keyword over time.

Image via Ahrefs

If you’re planning to run a PPC campaign, this helps you get a quick lay of the land and understand who your main competitors would be for different keywords.

 Pros:

  • One of the most extensive keyword research tools with a large database
  • Easy user interface

Cons:

  • Their keyword volumes tend to range quite a bit compared to other tools
  • Not very good at showing other related keywords (for example, if you search for “pants,” it won’t show other keywords like “jeans.”

Comparing Backlink Analysis Tools

Let’s begin our analysis of backlink tools by comparing the respective platforms’ link index size. To do this, we’ll use a domain from the popular Outside Magazine, www.outsideonline.com.

Here’s what we get when we put this domain into each backlink index tool.

The first thing you’ll notice is that we don’t have data for Spyfu. The reason is that Spyfu only looks at backlinks that are in the first 50 pages of search results, so it can’t provide a full picture.

Moz has been able to detect the most linking domains, which are more straightforward to compare and more important than inbound links for ranking keywords.

SEMrush has detected the most inbound links by far, beating out Ahrefs in inbound links by 6.5 million. However, it’s important to note that each tool’s methodology impacts the results for inbound links and ranking keywords, so these aren’t great comparisons.

You’ll also notice that the number of linking domains are all very similar, with SEMrush Moz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs showing index sizes within a few thousand. SEMrush and Ahrefs are within less than 100. 

Let’s dig into the features.

Moz

Moz’s Link Overview tool, Link Explorer, gives you a nice topline view of the types of metrics you would expect from a backlink analysis tool: Domain Authority, Linking Domains, Inbound Links, and Ranking Keywords.

Image via Moz

If you’re doing competitive research, you can easily download the links you need without having to do much digging.

You also can see the number of links that have changed over the last two months at a glance.

Image via Moz

For Inbound Links, Linking Domains, and Top Pages, there are individual pages that you can use to filter and sort by Domain Authority, the number linking domains, and Spam Score.

Image via Moz

You can also view anchor texts to see whether links tend to be branded (include the brand name) or generic (click here, etc.).

Image via Moz

 Pros:

  • recent study shows Moz does indeed have the largest link data set
  • Only tool that shows a spam score while scrolling through backlinks

Cons:

  • Downloading reports can be slow
  • Offers fewer features than SEMrush and Ahrefs

SEMrush

Like its keyword research tool, SEMrush shows a ton of information on its Backlink Analytics tool overview.

At the top, you can see the Domain Authority, Referring Domains, Number of Backlinks, Monthly site visits, and keywords. This is similar to Moz’s topline backlink metrics, with the addition of monthly visits.

Image via SEMrush

The UI for adding competitors for comparison is easy to use and even suggests competitors without you needing to do any research.

Image via SEMrush

The domains that come out on top are clearly highlighted.

If you move over to the Referring Domains tab, it shows you the types of websites that link to your domain, as well as where the majority come from.

Image via SEMrush

Plus which domains provide the most backlinks.

Image via SEMrush

Pros:

  • The only tool that shows an overview of other websites with similar backlink profiles to give you an idea of what other links you can target
  • Breaks down links by category type (arts & entertainment, travel, etc) which can be useful when presenting to clients
  • Overall dashboard is easy to navigate

Cons:

  • It may take a few more clicks to get to what you’re looking for, but overall quite effective

Spyfu

Spyfu’s Backlinks tool automatically surfaces the highest performing backlinks for a keyword. 

A useful feature is Backlink Kombat, which can help you find backlinks to your competitor’s domain that you’re missing.

mage via Spyfu

However, I found this tool slightly frustrating because I couldn’t put in a domain and get information like the number of Linking Domains and Inbound Links.

Again, they don’t offer these metrics because Spyfu only ranks backlinks that rank in the top 50 organic search results.

 Pros:

  • I like that it allows you to sort each backlink by the kind of website (blog, news, forums, etc)
  • Backlink Kombat makes it easy to see links your competitors have that you’re missing

Cons:

  • It’s overall underdeveloped as it’s purely used for competitor analysis and doesn’t hold its own as a standalone backlink tool

Ahrefs

Of all of the backlink tools we’ve analyzed, Ahrefs’ Site Explorer had the most to offer in terms of data.

Take a look at just the top half of the overview page. Jam-packed, yet still an easy user interface.

Image via Ahrefs

This shows not just the domain rating, but also URL rating, which assesses the strength of an individual page and takes intra-domain and nofollow links into account.  

You can see your total backlink domains and referring pages over time, as well as your target keyword’s overall rank according to Ahrefs.

Another handy metric that it provides is the traffic value, which estimates the total value of organic clicks if you were to pay for them. This is especially important to estimate the value you receive from ranking in this SERP organically.

And with Ahrefs’ frequent crawls, you can keep tabs on new backlinks and reevaluate your strategy on the fly. This spotted new ones in minutes.

Image via Ahrefs

Ahrefs’ backlink tool also gives you a variety of ways to look at how individual pages within your domain are performing in terms of backlinks. Here’s Top Pages.

Image via Ahrefs

Use this to identify and build more content around your highest performing pages.

And you can look at the pages with the most growth to see what’s hot right now.

Image via Ahrefs

Finally, Competing Domains allows you to see your top competing domains and how much your keywords intersect. Cool!

mage via Ahrefs

The link intersect feature also makes it easy to see which domains link to your competitors but not to you. 

 Pros:

  • Ahrefs is virtually tied with SEMrush for the most features, though it has an easy user interface with clear graphs that makes it easy to use during pitches and presentations.

Cons:

  • It’s really an excellent tool for all of your keyword research needs.

Comparing Technical SEO Tools/Site Audit

A website audit tool is crucial for making sure your website performs well in search. It can help you uncover errors and ensure your website is more crawlable for Google.

Let’s take a look at what these tools offer.

Moz

Moz has an On-Demand Crawl tool that shows you topline issues but doesn’t go super deep in its analysis.

You can see the total pages within the domain crawled, as well as critical crawler issues, which it labels as the most important.

You also get Crawler Warnings—a step down from critical—Metadata Issues, Redirect Issues, and Content issues.

Image via Moz

All of the pages crawled are searchable and filterable farther down, with metrics like Page Authority and Crawl Depth.

Image via Moz

Moz also has an On-Page Grader tool, but the information it returns is pretty sparse in comparison.

Image via Moz

At the bottom, there are dropdowns to explain the different factors affecting your page, which is helpful for learning about factors that affect score, but it seems slightly disconnected because it lacks specifics for your site.

Image via Moz

 Pros:

  • It makes it easy to find basic issues like status code errors, crawl depth, meta/title description length, and more

Cons:

  • It could be more specific about why page score is what it is and what your website specifically could do to improve it

SEMrush

In the Site Audit tool, SEMrush breaks down your issues into 3 categories depending on urgency.

The biggest problems are bucketed as Errors, then you also get Warnings and Notices.

Image via SEMrush

You also get an assessment of overall site health, including benchmarks for websites in different categories like Arts & Entertainment and Autos & Vehicles to compare against your website.

Image via SEMrush

With the statistics tab, get a closer look at several metrics like crawl depth, which helps you understand your site’s architecture. It’s not as robust as Ahref’s structure explorer (which I’ll cover below), but it can get the job done.

Image via SEMrush

Flip the toggle at the top back and forth to see in graph or list form.

Digging into the details for internal links, there’s a link distribution module. This is great as it can show you which pages are strong and not linking to any weaker pages and which weaker pages could use links from stronger pages.

mage via SEMrush

 Pros:

  • Quite robust with thorough data including page markup, status codes, AMP links, internal links, canonicalization, and more. 
  • The internal link feature is quite useful as you can use it to ensure you’re sending links from high performing pages to weaker performing pages. 
  • It gives you an organized list of what to work on first.

Cons:

  • Overall, it has a really great site audit tool, though it limits the number of sites you can enter. 

Spyfu

Spyfu doesn’t offer a site audit tool. To do this while using Spyfu, you’ll need to use one of these other platforms.

SEMrush allows you to do a site audit for 1 site with 100 pages on their free version, so I would recommend that for beginners. However, if you need to do audits on multiple sites, you’ll need to pay.

Ahrefs

Ahref’s Site Audit tool has a lot to offer in terms of different metrics and ways to analyze your site.

It has a health score front and center, which tells you right away whether it needs a lot of work or not. It’s also good for establishing a baseline to improve upon if you’re just getting started.

Image via Ahrefs

There’s also a Top Issues module on the overview, which helps you narrow down where to start your work. I only did one crawl, but if you continue your crawls, this will update to keep you abreast of changes to issues with your site.

Image via Ahrefs

A cool feature that I like is Link Opportunities. This tool shows you all the places where you might want to add a link. Good, plentiful internal links help search engines to better understand your site and spread page authority.

Image via Ahrefs

Another cool feature is the Structure Explorer. This tool analyzes your site’s architecture to ensure that your site is relatively flat, so that getting anywhere from the homepage requires fewer clicks. This will help with ranking as well as make the user experience better.

Image via Ahrefs

There are also a variety of different reports:

  • Internal Pages
  • Indexability
  • Links
  • Redirects
  • On-Page
  • Social Tags
  • Duplicate Content
  • Localization

For example, this is the Links report.

Image via Ahrefs

Right away you can see all the broken links you need to fix and the distribution of internal to external links.

Overall, I’d say the best tool for a site audit is Ahrefs. There’s a ton of information there, and the UI is better than the competitors.

 Pros:

  • Provides an easy user interface with all the information you need in one dashboard
  • For each error, they offer an explanation on why it’s an issue and how to solve it
  • The only tool that offers a visual site architecture map

Cons:

  • Overall, it’s a great tool and probably the best for technical SEO

Comparing Rank Tracking

Now, let’s take a look at the difference in rank tracking capabilities between the two platforms.

Because I’m just testing these products out for however long the trials last, you’ll notice that there isn’t a ton of historical data on each keyword. However, what they CAN do is most important, and that’s what I’ll show.

Moz

To see how your site is performing for a certain keyword, simply input the keyword and URL at the top of the page, and it will be added to the list at the bottom.

It provides metrics like rank, which maxes out at 51+. To be fair, your page is irrelevant if it’s that far down, but it would still be helpful to know the exact rank.

Image via Moz

It also provides keyword volume and difficulty and tells you the last time it was updated. In Moz’s case, this takes place once a week.

But that’s everything. It doesn’t go deeper or provides graphs, just those few metrics on a weekly basis.

You could perhaps export these metrics and create a graph that way, but most other ranking tracking tools in this review do that automatically.

SEMrush

SEMrush’s Position Tracking tool, like its other tools I’ve covered, provides a lot of metrics for measuring your standing in the SERP.

At the top of the landscape tab, we get visibility, estimated traffic, and average position.

mage via SEMrush

Visibility is an interesting metric—it shows the percentage of clicks within tracked keywords that land on your website. Our own Visably Score is similar in that it also calculates “share of click,” but we look at whether your brand is mentioned in all results—not just your website.

Ahref’s version of Visibility is also helpful to determine where you stand in the SERPs.

Estimated Traffic is similarly interesting—it takes into account keyword traffic and your position in the SERP to estimate the probability that someone will click on your domain.

There are graphs to show you the distribution of your rankings, which is a good top-down view of how you’re performing in your keywords.

Image via SEMrush

I particularly like their Competition Map in the Competitors Discover tab. You can easily see who your top competitors are and the size of their impact on the SERP relative to you. Below, it lists out their Visibility in comparison, Estimated Traffic, and Average Position.

Image via SEMrush

I found the Featured Snippets tab useful as well, which breaks down snippets into “Already Featured” and “Opportunities” should landing in featured snippets be one of your SEO goals.

mage via SEMrush

 Pros:

  • It does precisely what a rank tracker should do and updates frequently (every few days)
  • It also has plenty of graphs and visual elements that make it easy to see how far off you are from certain competitors which can be helpful for identifying long term competitors and smaller immediate competitors
  • SEMrush sensor also allows you to monitor keyword volatility

Cons:

  • None apparent

Spyfu

I found Spyfu’s Rank Tracking tool to be easy to use thanks to their simple UI, and it includes some helpful metrics and graphs.

First, let’s look at the Keyword Universefeature. If you’re just getting started with rank tracking, this automatically lists and tracks all the relevant keywords for your domain.

No need to start with keyword research if you want to see how you rank—this is a great way to view your standing in the wider universe of keywords. It’s pretty exhaustive, too. Almost 37,000 keywords are included right away.

Image via Spyfu

As you can see, it provides CPC, Monthly Searches, and Estimated Clicks, as well as your change in rank for these keywords.

Once you’ve put a bit more effort into keyword and competitor research, you’ll probably have a more targeted set of keywords to focus on.

Add those to groups for your specific needs, and you get a nice dashboard to analyze your performance.

mage via Spyfu

If you click on any of the metrics in the dashboard, you’ll get a graph showing their progress over time.

Some nice topline metrics here include the total number of ranks where you’re improving or losing steam, as well as some estimates for how many clicks your site is getting in the keyword group.

Spyfu also auto-populates some other groups, like “Easy Wins” and “Biggest Traffic Opportunities,” which you can incorporate into your own keyword strategy.

 Pros:

  • Automatically enters your top ranking keywords
  • An overall quality tool with rank tracking of up to one year
  • Biggest Traffic Opportunities gives you actionable data to implement in your SEO strategy

Cons:

  • The data is only updated weekly, so if you need something more often, you might want to consider a different tool

Ahrefs

Ahrefs’s Rank Tracker tool can get really granular and includes some unique features.

On the Overview page, there are tabs for Visibility, Average position, and SERP features, which allow you to dig into the details.

Image via Ahrefs

Depending on your plan, these update every 3, 5, or 7 days.

Another useful feature is the ability to rank position filter. For example, if you want to focus your efforts on improving only keywords you rank below position 3, you can exclude keywords that rank at or above position 3. 

Image via Ahrefs

There’s also really good competitor ranking analytics, where all the same metrics are applied against your competitors over time.

Image via Ahrefs

 Pros:

  • Easily track keywords with all basic features and some advanced features
  • A granular view of each keyword complete with graphs, SERP analysis, and more
  • Sort keywords by position, declined, and improved

Cons:

  • None apparent

Other Unique Features

Here are some tools and features that aren’t their bread and butter, but are interesting and/or helpful for certain tasks.

Moz

Moz has a cool extension for chrome that’s free (well, all it costs is your browsing data) called MozBar.

When you add it to your Chrome browser, it allows you to get some quick metrics for whatever page you’re viewing.

Image via Moz

At a glance, you can view that page’s Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Spam Score.

You can also use it to highlight any links on the page, whether they’re internal or external, and follow or nofollow.

Here’s what the page looks like when I highlight all follow links.

Image via SEMrush/Moz

Moz also offers Moz Local, which can help you manage your presence in local search.

If you rely on Google, Yelp, or Facebook reviews to bring in customers, this tool can come in handy by keeping track of your reputation and making sure that all your listings are accurate.

SEMrush

As part of its Content Marketing tool, SEMrush has an SEO Content Template, which analyzes the best performing results for your keywords to recommend how to create content around them.

As I writer myself, I found this super interesting.

It recommends semantic keywords to help bolster your writing, as well as the most important backlinks to get. It even tells you the ideal length of a post.

Image via SEMrush

If you’re looking to make content that really pops in search, this could be a great tool that saves you some time.

The Real-Time Content check will even make recommendations on your drafts.

Cool!

Spyfu

A cool and unique tool that Spyfu offers is their Google Ad Advisor, which recommends keywords for PPC campaigns and even tells you whether they’re a “great buy” or not.

Image via Spyfu

I really like this feature because it makes evaluating a keyword’s worth in advertising super simple. You also also see who your competitors would be.

This includes insight into their budgets and how much they’re spending on specific keywords.

Ahrefs

Content Explorer is a tool that goes deep to help you determine a topic’s popularity over time and reverse-engineer your competitors’ content strategies.

If you’re trying to find the most prolific authors in your topic to help grow your backlink profile, they conveniently show them on the overview page, and you can click through to see the top 100.

Image via Ahrefs

When you do this, you can see the authors’ total pages, websites, traffic, and traffic value. Being able to assess the traffic value is important for determining how valuable the author’s content is, and whether it’s worth your time forging a connection.

Image via Ahrefs

Back on the overview page, you can instantly see which are the most valuable pages in the topic. 

Image via Ahrefs

And, when you click the details dropdown, you can go really deep and see the article’s performance over time with organic traffic, referring domains, backlinks, and organic keywords.

Image via Ahrefs

Overall, this is a really interesting and helpful tool to help SEOs create better content and keep an eye on the competition.

Support

Let’s take a look at the type of support you should expect from using these tools.

Moz

When you sign up, you have the option to book a 1-on-1 walkthrough with an expert. If you’re new to SEO, this is a good place to start.

Image via Moz

Once you’re up and running, the best way to get help is through their extensive resources, including guides, a help hub, and seminars.

There’s also a community forum where you can ask questions, and other community members or Moz team members can respond.

Image via Moz

If these don’t work, you can also contact Moz by email.

SEMrush

SEMrush has a chatbot that you can use to ask questions and be provided with helpful articles. You can also use the chat window to live chat with a support member.

Image via SEMrush

This is great for getting the answers you need quickly, especially if the articles don’t answer your question sufficiently.

If it’s not a pressing matter, you can leave them a message to get back to you.

In addition to the chatbot, SEMrush also has a help center with manuals, how-to’s, and videos. You can watch webinars from experts on how to use the tool, and there’s also SEMrush Academy, with lessons and quizzes towards becoming officially certified in using SEMrush.

Image via SEMrush

Spyfu

Spyfu also has a support chat where you can choose to speak to someone in support or look up articles to answer your questions.

Image via Spyfu

These articles also live in their searchable Help Center.

Image via Spyfu

You can also learn more with their video tutorials and glossary. However, their resources aren’t as extensive as that offered by SEMrush and don’t include a community forum like Moz.

Ahrefs

Like Spyfu and SEMrush, Ahrefs has a chat feature to help you access their help center, live chat, or their Ahrefs Academy.

Image via Ahrefs

Ahrefs Academy is similar to SEMrush’s Academy in that it provides a curriculum with videos and quizzes to help you become an Ahrefs master.

Something that I found useful while using Ahrefs was their “How to use” buttons within their tools, which provide helpful articles to help you understand what you’re looking at and how to use them.

Image via Ahrefs

You don’t have to navigate away to a different page—it just pops up on top of whatever you’re working on.

Pricing and Value

Now, let’s examine the pricing tiers for these SEO tools, including add-ons.

But, before we get into the details of the features for each tool, here’s a quick comparison of the lowest tier buy-in, as well as the free options and the people that these tools are ideal for.

Moz

Moz offers four different pricing tiers—Standard, Medium, Large, and Premium, starting at $99 and going up to $599.

You can see the features offered at each tier here.

In addition, there is Moz Local, which helps you manage your presence in local search. It comes in 3 tiers:

  • Lite: $129/year
  • Preferred: $179/year
  • Elite: $299/year

If you want to try the tool for free, they offer a 30 day trial. 

You can also sign up for a free Moz Community account, which gives you free, but limited, use of these tools, which is the gold standard in free SEO tools.

However, considering what you get in the paid version in comparison to these other tools—particularly Ahrefs and SEMrush—it’s not great value.

SEMrush

SEMrush has three pricing tiers, which start at $119.95 and go up to $449.95. And you can pay extra for different add-ons.

There isn’t a free trial, but there is a free version that gives you 10 reports a day. While it is rather limited, if you’re working on a small project, the scope of data included in those reports is great.

Spyfu

Spyfu plans start at $39/mo and go up to $299/mo. Here are the tiers and features:

Spyfu is nice to use, but it has some significant limitations if you’re an SEO. 

For example, when it comes to backlink research, Spyfu only looks at links in the top 50 results, so you can’t get a total view of your backlink profile.

Spyfu also doesn’t offer any kind of SEO audit, which is a big deal if you’re trying to optimize your site for search.

For what it does do, though, it does it well.

Spyfu has a generous 30-day free trial.

Ahrefs

Ahref’s monthly plans start at $99 and go up to $999. Here are the different tiers and features: 

As you can see, it’s long and extensive. Ahrefs has the most capabilities of all the tools I reviewed, so it’s the best value.

The lowest tier costs $20 less than SEMrush and includes similar capabilities.

There isn’t a free version or trial, however—a 7-day trial costs $7.

Conclusion

After trying all of these tools, I’d have to say I prefer Ahrefs or SEMrush. 

To pick a top one, that would have to depend on your specific needs, as they both have a ton to offer and are generally easy to use.

If you’re a content marketer, I would go with Ahrefs. But, if you’re an advertiser, I’d go with SEMrush.

I particularly liked Spyfu’s UI, even though it included fewer features than Ahrefs or SEMrush.

Moz’s free tools are great, especially if you’re a beginner or working on a single project.

If I had to rank the tools from my favorite to least favorite, I’d have to say:

  1. Ahrefs
  2. SEMrush
  3. Spyfu
  4. Moz

But then again, everyone has their preferences. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my review, and that maybe I’ve helped you make up your own mind.