Content marketing tools are the software a business uses to decide what to publish, write it, design it, distribute it and measure whether it worked. For a UK business the useful question isn't which one is best in the abstract. It's which one handles British English properly and what it really costs once dollars, euros and VAT are added.
The lists on the first page of Google UK are mostly written for the US market, and some are old: on 10 October 2026 one of the results for "content marketing tools" was dated May 2019 and another was titled "for 2025". Three things you'll only find on the vendors' own pages: Grammarly lists British English but its FAQ says it doesn't yet recognise language variations, Mailchimp's UK pricing page still quotes dollars, and Yoast keeps the Flesch reading score for English behind its Premium plan. Below are sixteen tools grouped by stage of work, with prices read from the official price lists in October 2026 and what each one actually does for someone writing in British English.
The 16 tools compared: price and British English support
The table sums up what we checked on the vendors' official pages on 10 October 2026. Where a page doesn't say how it handles British English or UK billing, we wrote "not stated" rather than guessing.
| Tool | Stage | Entry price | Free plan | For UK users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Ideas and measurement | Free | Yes | Real click and query data for your site on Google, filterable to the UK |
| Ahrefs | Keyword research | Lite $129 a month ($1,290 billed annually) | Ahrefs Free, verified sites only | UK database; prices in dollars only, plus 20% VAT unless you give a VAT number |
| Semrush | Keyword research | $139 a month ($117.33 billed annually) | Yes, 10 requests a day | UK database; prices in dollars |
| Grammarly | Proofreading | Pro $12 a month | Yes, 100 AI prompts a month | Lists British English, but says it doesn't yet recognise language variations |
| LanguageTool | Proofreading | Premium €19.90 a month | Yes, 2,000 characters per field | British English in the free version; the 20,000+ extra Premium checks cover English |
| Hemingway Editor | Readability | Plus $100 a year | Free web editor | British English can be set as dialect, described as an Editor Plus feature |
| Yoast SEO | On-page readability | Premium $118.80 a year + VAT | Yes, free plugin | Full English analysis, but Flesch score and word complexity are Premium only |
| ChatGPT Plus | Drafting and editing | $20 a month | Yes | Not assessed: the pricing page showed no sterling price |
| Canva | Graphics | Pro £100 a year | Yes: 5 GB, 20 AI uses, brand kit with 3 colours | UK site and price list in pounds |
| Metricool | Social | €20 a month (€16 billed annually) | Yes: 1 brand, 20 posts a month | Prices in euros or dollars only, before VAT |
| Buffer | Social | $5 a month per channel | Yes: 3 channels, 10 posts per channel | Prices in dollars |
| Mailchimp | Essentials $13 a month (12-month promotion) | Yes, 250 contacts | UK pricing page shows dollars; pounds only in the currency menu | |
| Brevo | Price list not readable on 10/10 | Yes, 300 emails a day | Not stated | |
| Microsoft Clarity | User behaviour | Free | Yes, no traffic limits | Records behaviour, not text: language doesn't matter |
| Trello | Organisation | $5 per user a month (annual) | Yes, 10 boards | Prices in dollars |
| Notion | Organisation | Plus $10 per member a month | Yes, with upload limits | Prices in dollars |
Three rows change the choice for anyone writing in British English. Grammarly's language table lists "English (British)" next to "English (American)", but the FAQ on the same page says: "At the moment, Grammarly does not recognize language variations." LanguageTool supports British English in the free version, and according to its support page dated March 2026 the "more than 20,000 additional checks" in Premium cover English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Portuguese: for an English writer the upgrade adds more than it does for most other languages. And Hemingway Editor lets you set British English as your dialect, a setting its help page describes under Editor Plus.
Which tools people in the UK actually search for
Before choosing, some context we pulled ourselves: how many times a month each tool's name is searched on Google in the UK. It measures how widespread a tool is, not how good it is, but it tells you which tools a new hire or a freelancer probably knows already.
| Search | Monthly searches in the UK | Lowest and highest month in the last 12 |
|---|---|---|
| canva | 2,740,000 | 1,500,000 to 3,350,000 |
| grammarly | 246,000 | 135,000 to 368,000 |
| notion | 201,000 | 165,000 to 246,000 |
| google search console | 135,000 | 90,500 to 165,000 |
| mailchimp | 110,000 | 90,500 to 135,000 |
| google analytics | 110,000 | 90,500 to 135,000 |
| trello | 90,500 | 60,500 to 110,000 |
| semrush | 27,100 | 22,200 to 40,500 |
| brevo | 22,200 | 18,100 to 27,100 |
| ahrefs | 18,100 | 12,100 to 22,200 |
| hootsuite | 14,800 | 9,900 to 18,100 |
| metricool | 12,100 | 9,900 to 14,800 |
| microsoft clarity | 8,100 | 5,400 to 8,100 |
| hemingway editor | 2,400 | 1,900 to 2,900 |
| surfer seo | 1,600 | 880 to 2,400 |
| languagetool | 1,300 | 880 to 1,600 |
Grammarly is searched about 190 times more than LanguageTool, even though the two do much the same basic corrections for free. Hemingway Editor gets 2,400 searches a month, more than Surfer SEO: in an English-speaking market it's a known name, which fits with the fact that it works on English only. Canva is in another league at 2.7 million searches, partly because schools and individuals use it, not just businesses.
Stage 1: deciding what to write
This is the stage where the most effort is wasted, and there's a measured reason for it. Ahrefs analysed its own Content Explorer index, around 14 billion pages: 96.55% get no visits from Google and another 1.94% get between one and ten a month (source: Ahrefs, search traffic study, updated August 2026, global sample). On the sites we work on the proportion is less extreme but still high: in an analysis of 3,194 pages from six Italian websites visible on Google, 30.7% produced less than one estimated organic visit a month, as we describe in our piece on content pruning. That sample is from the Italian market.
The tools for this stage help you write only what someone is looking for:
- Google Search Console, free, shows the queries your site already appears for. Rows with lots of impressions and few clicks are the first ideas to develop: the method is in our guide on how to find blog post ideas and in our page on Google Search Console.
- Google Trends, free, tells you whether a topic is growing or shrinking and in which months. It doesn't give absolute volumes, and we explain the limits of its numbers in our page on Google Trends.
- Ahrefs and Semrush give volumes, difficulty and competitors for Google UK. Ahrefs Lite starts at $129 a month (about £97.54), Semrush at $139 (about £105.10), both before VAT. We compare the suites in our guide to the best SEO tools.
- AnswerThePublic collects the questions people ask around a word. Many of those questions have tiny volumes: in a test we ran on two topics in Italian, between 62% and 67% of the questions had 10 searches a month or fewer, as we wrote in our piece on AnswerThePublic alternatives. Check the volume of each question before building an article around it.
The step no tool does for you is ranking the ideas against your commercial goals. We explain it in the content marketing plan: the best questions come from quotes and customer emails, and the tools are there to measure how many people ask them.
Stage 2: writing and proofreading in British English
This is where language settings matter most, because a checker set to American English will "correct" organise, colour and centre on every page, and an editor who accepts those suggestions without thinking ends up with a site that mixes both spellings.
- Grammarly: according to the Grammarly languages page, basic spelling and grammar are free in every supported language, including English (British) and English (American). Advanced suggestions on clarity, fluency and tone, and paragraph rewrites, are paid, with free users limited to 3 of these suggestions a day. The same page's FAQ says Grammarly "does not recognize language variations" for now, so check British spellings yourself. Pro costs $12 a month (about £9.07).
- LanguageTool: British English is supported for free up to 2,000 characters per field. Premium costs €19.90 a month (about £16.86) or €59.89 a year, and its 20,000+ additional checks include English, so for an English text the jump from free to Premium is bigger than for many other languages.
- Yoast SEO: for English, the features per language table, updated in May 2026, lists paragraph and sentence length, consecutive sentences, passive voice, transition words and function words in the free plugin. Word complexity, related keyphrases, keyphrase distribution and the Flesch reading ease score are Premium only. Premium costs $118.80 a year plus VAT (about £89.82).
- Hemingway Editor: you can set British English as your dialect, along with Canadian, Indian, Australian, Irish, South African and New Zealand English; the help page describes the setting under Editor Plus, which costs $100 a year or $10 a month. For short, plain English it's the most direct of the four.
A warning about readability scores. The Flesch formula was built for English, so the score means something here, but it penalises long words: a B2B page full of necessary technical terms can score badly and still be clear to the people it's written for. Use it to compare two versions of the same text, not as an absolute mark. We tested how much grammar and typos weigh on rankings in the article does grammar matter in content marketing?.
Stage 3: AI in writing
Generative AI is already the most widely used content marketing tool, as the latest content marketing statistics show. According to the Content Marketing Institute's 2026 research, carried out between June and August 2025 among 1,015 B2B marketers, mostly in North America, 95% say their company uses AI-powered applications. Among the uses, 89% name tools for writing or optimising text, 53% tools for images and video, 41% SEO tools. 87% say productivity has improved, but only 58% say quality has.
Across UK businesses as a whole the numbers are lower. According to the ONS article on AI in UK businesses published on 20 July 2026, about 35% of businesses with ten or more employees used at least one AI technology in June 2026, up from about 12% in September 2023. 18% used large language models and 16% used AI for visual content creation. Among businesses with fewer than ten employees the figure was 28%, against 49% for those with 250 or more. The data comes from the Business Insights and Conditions Survey (wave 159, fieldwork 5 to 28 June 2026).
On the web, AI-assisted writing is already the norm. Ahrefs analysed 900,000 new English-language pages published in April 2025: 74.2% contained AI-generated text, only 2.5% were entirely AI and 25.8% entirely human (source: Ahrefs, English-language web). Google doesn't ban this kind of text, but its guidance on AI-generated content warns that producing many pages without value for users can breach the spam policy on scaled content abuse.
ChatGPT Plus costs $20 a month (about £15.12). How we use it, and which steps stay with a person, is described in our piece on AI agents for SEO, while the risks and obligations are in our guide on AI-generated content. If you're looking for a content optimisation editor, see our comparison of Surfer SEO alternatives.
Stage 4: graphics and video
Canva is the de facto standard: its official page claims more than 220 million monthly active users in 190 countries. The free plan includes 5 GB of storage, up to 20 AI uses and a brand kit with three colours; Canva Pro costs £100 a year for one person, according to the UK price list. For a business with a brand palette, the three-colour limit is the first one you'll hit.
Charts and diagrams that contain data should be published as text or an HTML table: a number inside an image can't be read by Google or by an AI assistant. We explain separately how to put together an infographic that also gets cited.
Stage 5: distributing on social media and email
Your audience is there: according to Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report, published in December 2025, YouTube is used by 94% of UK online adults, Facebook and Messenger by 93% and WhatsApp by 90%. To schedule posts:
- Metricool is free for one brand and 20 posts a month, then from €20 a month (€16 billed annually) for up to five brands. It lists prices only in euros or dollars, before VAT: €16 is about £13.56.
- Buffer costs $5 a month per channel (about £3.78). The pricing page also shows "$60 billed yearly (save 2 months)", which is the same as twelve monthly payments: check the annual price at checkout.
- Mailchimp and Brevo for email. Mailchimp is free up to 250 contacts, then Essentials starts at $13 a month (about £9.83) at a promotional price for 12 months; even its UK pricing page quotes dollars. Brevo's free plan lets you send up to 300 emails a day.
How much social distribution affects organic rankings is a separate question, which we answer in our piece on social media and SEO.
Stage 6: measuring what worked
Two free tools cover almost everything. Google Analytics tells you what people do once they reach your site, Search Console how they found it on Google. Microsoft Clarity adds session recordings and heatmaps: its official page calls it "Free forever" with "No limits on traffic".
Measurement is mainly there to decide what to update or remove. A piece that still has no impressions in Search Console after six months usually doesn't have a distribution problem. It has a demand problem.
Stage 7: organising the calendar
Trello is free for up to ten boards and ten collaborators per workspace, then costs $5 per user a month billed annually ($6 billed monthly), about £3.78 and £4.54. Notion Plus costs $10 per member a month (about £7.56). For a small business's editorial calendar, the free plan of either is enough, or a shared spreadsheet.
What a tool stack costs over a year
Three combinations built from the prices in the table, with annual billing where it exists. We've converted dollars and euros at the Bank of England spot rates for 8 October 2026 ($1.3226 and €1.18 to the pound). The amount on your card will differ a little, because each vendor applies its own exchange rate and VAT treatment.
| Profile | Tools | Annual cost |
|---|---|---|
| Free tools only | Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Trends, LanguageTool free, Yoast free, Canva free, Metricool free, Brevo free, Clarity, Trello free | £0 |
| One person writing and publishing | Free tools + Canva Pro (£100) + Metricool Starter annual (€192, about £162.71) + LanguageTool Premium annual (€59.89, about £50.75) + ChatGPT Plus ($240, about £181.46) | about £495 |
| With an SEO suite | Previous profile + Ahrefs Lite annual ($1,290, about £975.35) | about £1,470, Ahrefs VAT excluded |
The line that changes the total is the SEO suite: on its own it costs about twice everything else combined. For many small businesses the sensible choice is to start with the free profile, work for six months with Search Console and buy a suite only when your questions go beyond what Search Console can answer. A longer list, with the order in which to take out subscriptions, is in our guide to marketing tools for small businesses.
How to test them on your own text before paying
A test that takes an hour and tells you more than any ranking:
- Take a paragraph with three known problems: a subject-verb agreement error, an American spelling such as "optimize", and a 50-word sentence.
- Paste it into the free plan of each checker, set to British English where possible, and count how many problems it finds and how many false alarms it raises.
- For SEO tools, look up three keywords in your sector whose real clicks you know from Search Console and compare them with the volumes the tool claims for the UK.
- For social tools, check the price in the currency you'll be billed in and whether VAT is added on top, before the trial ends.
If you'd rather have someone set up the strategy and measurement for you, that's the work we do in our SEO service: first we decide what to write, then we choose the tools.
Frequently asked questions about content marketing tools
Google Search Console to see which queries bring impressions and clicks, Google Analytics to measure what visitors do, Google Trends for seasonality, Canva's free plan for graphics and Microsoft Clarity for heatmaps. With these five a small business can cover most of the work without spending anything.
Partly. Grammarly's languages page lists English (British) and offers basic spelling and grammar checks in it for free, but the FAQ on the same page says Grammarly does not yet recognise language variations. Advanced suggestions on clarity, fluency and tone need the Pro plan, which costs $12 a month.
It adds more for English than for most languages. British English is supported in the free version up to 2,000 characters per field, and the more than 20,000 additional Premium checks cover English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Portuguese. Premium costs €19.90 a month or €59.89 a year.
You can start at £0 with free tools only. With Canva Pro, Metricool Starter annual, LanguageTool Premium annual and ChatGPT Plus it comes to about £495 a year. Adding Ahrefs Lite on annual billing takes it to about £1,470 before VAT. October 2026 prices, converted at Bank of England rates for 8 October 2026.
Yes, if the result is useful to the reader. Google's guidance on AI-generated content warns, though, that producing many pages without added value for users can breach the spam policy on scaled content abuse. Someone needs to check the facts and figures before publishing.
One last observation, from the numbers in the second table. In the UK the name Canva is searched 2.7 million times a month, Google Search Console 135,000 times: about 20 times less. The tool that produces content is searched far more than the one that tells you whether the content is any use. In the projects we work on, the right order is almost always the opposite: first you open Search Console, then you decide whether you need another graphic.
