SEO tool comparisons

How to choose an SEO tool

Almost every SEO tool shows you the same five things: keywords, backlinks, rankings, site errors and competitors. What separates them is not the feature list — it is the size and freshness of the data behind each feature, and which one of the five they were actually built around. Pick on that, and the choice gets simple.

1. Which data set is the real product?

Ahrefs was built as a link crawler and everything else was added later, which is why its link index is still the one to beat. Semrush was built on paid-search data, which is why its keyword and advertising side is deeper than its links. Moz is the oldest metric, kept simple. Screaming Frog is a desktop crawler and does not have an index at all. Buying a tool for the part it treats as a side feature is the most common and most expensive mistake.

2. How old is the number on screen?

A backlink report is only as good as the last crawl. Ask when the index was refreshed, not how many links it claims to hold — a 30-billion-link index rebuilt twice a year is worse for outreach than a smaller one rebuilt monthly, because the links you want to chase are the new ones your competitors just earned.

3. Are search volumes measured or modelled?

No third-party tool has Google's real query counts. Every published volume is modelled from clickstream panels and Keyword Planner ranges, so two tools will disagree on the same keyword by 2–5× and both can be defensible. Use volumes to rank keywords against each other, never as a traffic forecast. That is also why we publish where those numbers actually come from.

4. What does the price look like at your size?

Entry plans are priced to look affordable and then meter the thing you need most — rows per export, tracked keywords, crawl credits, users. Take the job you will actually do every week, work out how many units it consumes, and compare on that instead of on the headline monthly price. Cheap tools become expensive at the moment they stop showing you all your data.

5. Does it cover AI answers yet?

A growing share of searches end inside an AI answer instead of a blue link, and most suites are still catching up on this. If ChatGPT, Perplexity or AI Overviews recommend your competitors and not you, no amount of classic rank tracking will show it — that is what our free AI Search Visibility checker is for.

Where Seoluma fits

We are not trying to be the sixth all-in-one suite. We publish the authority and link data free and without an account, because that is the part people open a paid tool for once a week and then close again. Every comparison on this page is written on that basis — including the cases where a paid tool is genuinely the better buy, which we say plainly.