A Semrush alternative is a tool, or a combination of tools, that replaces the jobs you currently pay Semrush for: keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking, technical audits and, more recently, tracking citations in AI answers. Semrush's entry-level plan, the SEO-only one, costs $139 a month or $117.33 a month billed annually (Semrush price list, October 2026). That's about £105 and £89 at the Bank of England rate for 8 October 2026, $1.3226 to the pound.
On 10 October 2026 the first page of Google UK for "semrush alternatives" was all roundups, and two of them were written by vendors that put their own product first (Writesonic and Surfaceable). None of them starts from two facts that matter more than the list: Semrush isn't one SEO suite but a bundle of six or seven different jobs, and each job has a different replacement; and since 28 April 2026 Semrush has belonged to Adobe. Below you'll find the alternatives sorted by job, with the official price lists, the UK databases each vendor declares and a figure we haven't seen anywhere else: how often people in the UK search for each tool. For a wider overview there's our guide to the best SEO tools.
What you're actually paying for when you pay for Semrush
Semrush sells, under one brand, tools that are separate products elsewhere. Most people looking for an alternative use one or two of them.
- SEO: keyword research, competitor domain analysis, backlinks, Position Tracking and Site Audit. This is the core of the base plan.
- AI visibility: monitoring prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and similar assistants. The SEO plan only includes a basic part of it: prompt tracking starts on the Starter plan.
- Advertising: competitors' Google Ads campaigns, their ads and the keywords they bid on.
- Traffic & Market: estimates of a site's total traffic, channel by channel. This is Similarweb's territory.
- Local and Content: managing local listings, plus the writing tools.
These are the plans on the price list, checked in October 2026:
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | Sites | Tracked keywords | AI prompts per day |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SEO | $139 (£105.10) | $117.33 (£88.71) | 5 | 500 | - |
| Starter | $199 (£150.46) | $165.17 (£124.88) | 5 | 500 | 50 |
| Pro+ | $299 (£226.07) | $248.17 (£187.64) | 15 | 1,500 | 100 |
| Advanced | $549 (£415.09) | $455.67 (£344.53) | 40 | 5,000 | 200 |
The price list is in dollars for UK customers too. On VAT, Semrush's support page is clear: individuals resident in the UK pay VAT at 20%, while a business that enters a valid VAT number isn't charged it. For a VAT-registered business the real cost is the list price converted at the day's rate, with VAT accounted for under the reverse charge.
The practical consequence: if you open Semrush only for Position Tracking and Site Audit, you're paying $1,407.96 a year ($117.33 times twelve, about £1,065) for two jobs that have cheaper replacements, or free ones.
Semrush after Adobe: what we know
Adobe announced the purchase on 19 November 2025, at $12 a share, for about $1.9 billion (press release filed with the SEC). The deal closed on 28 April 2026. In its closing announcement Adobe says Semrush joins its CX Enterprise offering alongside Experience Manager and Commerce, and that customers of every size can expect continued investment. The same release credits Semrush with more than 28 million users worldwide.
For now, in October 2026, the price list is the one in the table above. One roundup has already taken a new angle: SEOTesting lists only "independent" alternatives, meaning tools not owned by large groups, precisely because of the acquisition. It wasn't on the first page of Google UK when we checked on 10 October. It's a fair criterion if you're worried about a shift towards enterprise customers, but so far no change to prices or plans backs it up. We'll keep an eye on it.
Which tools people in the UK actually search for
Before looking at features, it's worth looking at demand. We pulled the monthly Google searches in the UK for the names of Semrush and its competitors, averaged over the last twelve months available.
| Tool | Monthly searches in the UK | Compared with Semrush |
|---|---|---|
| Semrush | 27,100 | 100 |
| Ahrefs | 18,100 | 67 |
| Similarweb | 18,100 | 67 |
| Ubersuggest | 6,600 | 24 |
| Screaming Frog | 5,400 | 20 |
| SE Ranking | 4,400 | 16 |
| SpyFu | 1,600 | 6 |
| Sistrix | 590 | 2.2 |
| Mangools | 590 | 2.2 |
| Majestic SEO | 390 | 1.4 |
| Serpstat | 260 | 1.0 |
| SEO PowerSuite | 170 | 0.6 |
| SEOZoom | 30 | 0.1 |
Three things stand out. Semrush is the most searched SEO tool in the UK, with wide swings: 40,500 searches in March 2026, 22,200 in December 2025 and again in August 2026. Ahrefs and Similarweb tie in second place, each with two thirds of Semrush's searches. And SEOZoom, the Italian suite that in Italy gets more than half of Semrush's searches, barely exists here: 30 a month. The query "semrush alternatives" gets 390 searches a month, 1.4% of the people searching for the name, with a spike of 1,600 in September 2025. Most people who want to switch tool search straight for the name of the replacement. They usually know it already.
Semrush alternatives, job by job
The prices below come from the vendors' official pages, checked between September and October 2026. Where a vendor quotes in dollars or euros only, we've left that currency and added the pound equivalent for dollar prices.
A complete SEO suite: Ahrefs and SE Ranking
These are the only two that replace the whole of Semrush's SEO plan at a similar depth. Ahrefs starts with Lite at $129 a month (about £97.54) for 5 projects and 750 tracked keywords, and declares a UK database of 1.4 billion keywords out of 29 billion in total (price list and data page, checked on 10 October 2026). We couldn't find a current UK figure published by Semrush, so there's nothing reliable to set against it. The full comparison between Ahrefs and the other tools is in our article on Ahrefs alternatives.
SE Ranking costs the same as Ahrefs Lite, $129 a month ($103.20 billed annually, about £78), but the Core plan already includes 10 projects, 2,000 keywords tracked daily and 100 AI prompts a day (SE Ranking price list). Its declared UK database is 769 million keywords in the country table on its data page, while the FAQ on the same page says 755 million: either way, a little over half of Ahrefs'. The free trial lasts 14 days. Google's AI Overview for "semrush alternatives" in the UK calls it the best overall substitute for agencies and mid-market teams at a lower price, and on the price list numbers it's hard to disagree: for slightly less money it tracks four times the keywords of Semrush's SEO plan.
Backlinks only: Majestic
Majestic is a link index built in Birmingham by Majestic-12 Ltd, and it does one job: backlinks. Its Fresh Index covered 186 billion unique URLs crawled between 11 June and 10 October 2026, and the Historic Index goes back to 2006 (Majestic company page). The Lite plan costs $49.99 a month, $41.67 a month billed annually ($499.99 a year, about £378); Pro is $99.99 (Majestic price list, before VAT). The site offers a pound selector but, when we checked, it showed only dollar figures. The limit is scope: no keyword research, no rank tracking, no site audit. For a site whose main question is who links to it and to its competitors, it pairs well with a crawler and Search Console.
Visibility and prices in euros: Sistrix
Sistrix, founded in Germany, is known for its Visibility Index: a single number that sums up how present a domain is on Google in one country. The Start plan costs €119 a month plus tax for one user, Plus €239 for three users, and each extra user €24.90 (Sistrix price list, which shows euro prices only). In the UK it gets 590 searches a month, the same as Mangools. It makes sense if you have to show a board how several domains have performed over time, less so for daily keyword research.
Google Ads competitors: SpyFu
If you mainly use Semrush's advertising side, to see which keywords competitors bid on and with which ads, SpyFu does mostly that. The Basic plan costs $39 a month (about £29.49), Pro + AI $119 (SpyFu page). The UK is one of the 32 countries it collects data in, according to its documentation dated March 2026. If you run campaigns, you still have to check against the real account data: estimates of other people's budgets are reconstructions, not bank statements.
Traffic and market: Similarweb
Semrush's Traffic & Market toolkit answers a different question from SEO: how much traffic a site gets in total, and from which channels. Similarweb is the best-known tool for this, and in the UK it's searched as often as Ahrefs (18,100 searches a month). It has free high-level data on its website and paid plans from $125 a month, about £94.51 (Similarweb price list). To estimate a competitor's traffic without paying anything, there are also the methods we describe in our guide to checking a website's traffic.
Citations in AI answers
This is the feature moving price lists most in 2026. In Semrush, prompt monitoring starts on the Starter plan: 50 prompts a day for $199 a month. SE Ranking includes 100 a day in its $129 Core plan. Ahrefs sells Brand Radar AI as an add-on from $199 a month. Before paying, check how many real prompts exist in your sector: in July 2026 a B2B company we work with in Italy dropped the add-on after seeing that the volumes in its niche were too low to justify the cost. We compared the tools in this category in our article on AI visibility tools.
On a tight budget: Mangools and Serpstat
Mangools, which includes KWFinder, starts at $37.70 a month (about £28.50) and sets that price against Semrush's $117.33 on its own comparison page, claiming savings of up to 65% (Mangools comparison page). Serpstat costs $50 a month for one user and $100 for three, with a 7-day trial that puts a $1 verification charge on your card and renews automatically unless you cancel (Serpstat price list). They work for a blog or a small site, as does Ubersuggest, which we compare job for job in Ubersuggest vs Semrush. With smaller databases, though, the estimated volume for many niche queries drops to zero, and from there it's a short step to deciding that a keyword "has no searches". Our guide to keyword research tools compares the estimates.
The free part
Part of Semrush can be replaced at no cost. Your site's real clicks and impressions come from Google Search Console, which is more reliable than any outside estimate. Search volumes come from the Google Ads Keyword Planner. Site Audit can be replaced by Screaming Frog, free up to 500 URLs and £199 a year with no limit (Screaming Frog price list, checked on 10 October 2026): for an SEO audit of a site with a few hundred pages, you don't need anything else. What no free tool gives you is your competitors' keywords and backlinks.
Which part of Semrush each tool replaces
| Tool | Job it replaces | Entry plan | Declared UK database |
|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush SEO | benchmark | $139 a month ($117.33 annual) | no current figure found |
| Ahrefs Lite | full SEO | $129 a month | 1.4 billion |
| SE Ranking Core | full SEO and AI prompts | $129 a month ($103.20 annual) | 769 million |
| Majestic Lite | backlinks only | $49.99 a month ($41.67 annual) | not applicable |
| Sistrix Start | visibility and domain monitoring | €119 + tax a month | not published |
| SpyFu Basic | Google Ads competitors | $39 a month | not published |
| Similarweb | traffic and market | from $125 a month | not applicable |
| Mangools | keyword research, tight budget | from $37.70 a month | not published |
| Serpstat Individual | basic suite, tight budget | $50 a month | not published |
| Screaming Frog | Site Audit | free up to 500 URLs, £199 a year | not applicable |
What a year costs: three profiles compared
The monthly price tells you little. These are the annual totals from the price lists in the table, with annual billing where the vendor offers it, before VAT, with dollars converted at $1.3226 to the pound (Bank of England, 8 October 2026).
- Freelancer or small business working only on Google UK: a Screaming Frog licence (£199) plus Majestic Lite billed annually ($499.99, about £378) comes to about £577 a year, with Search Console and Keyword Planner covering keyword data. Semrush's SEO plan costs $1,407.96, about £1,065. What you give up is rank tracking and competitors' keywords.
- Anyone who also wants AI citations: Semrush Starter costs $1,982.04 a year (about £1,499) for 500 keywords and 50 prompts a day. SE Ranking Core costs $1,238.40 (about £936) for 2,000 keywords and 100 prompts.
- Anyone who uses Semrush almost only to watch competitors' ads: SpyFu Basic costs $468 a year (about £354), a third of Semrush's SEO plan.
Two items change the total more than the price list does. Extra users: SE Ranking sells them from $16 a month, Sistrix at €24.90 from the Plus plan, Ahrefs at $40 on Lite. And history, which is often short on entry plans (Ahrefs Lite keeps six months): if you work with several years of data, as we do when we measure keyword rankings over time, look at the plan above the base one.
How to choose without getting it wrong
The first step costs nothing: for two weeks, note which Semrush reports you actually open. If it's only Position Tracking and Site Audit, SE Ranking and Screaming Frog cover everything for less. If what you need most is backlinks, Majestic. If you also open domain analysis, backlinks and keyword research across several markets, the only like-for-like alternative is Ahrefs, and the saving is small.
We still use Semrush to measure results for some clients: the share of voice in the Macropix case, an Italian LED screen manufacturer, comes from there (25.55% on the ledwall cluster, ahead of Amazon at 18.08%). But it isn't the only tool we open, and for almost every small project it isn't needed. If you'd rather someone else chose the tools and read the data, our SEO service includes access to the suites we use. For citations in AI answers there's our SEO for AI service.
There's a cost of switching tools that roundups never mention: every database estimates volumes in its own way. The day you move from Semrush to an alternative, your estimated traffic reports shift even if nothing on the site has changed, and anyone who only reads the chart sees growth or drops that don't exist. To avoid it, run both tools side by side for at least a month on the same keywords, note the gap and recalculate the baseline before you cancel. Skip it and for a couple of quarters you won't know whether the work is paying off.
Frequently asked questions
Not one that covers everything. Google Search Console gives you your site's real clicks and impressions, the Google Ads Keyword Planner gives you search volumes and Screaming Frog crawls up to 500 URLs for free. Semrush itself has a free plan with 10 reports a day. No free tool, though, gives you a complete view of competitors' keywords and backlinks.
Among the suites with competitor data, Mangools starts at $37.70 a month and Serpstat at $50. For backlinks only, Majestic Lite costs $49.99 a month or $41.67 billed annually. If you only need the advertising side, SpyFu Basic costs $39 a month.
It depends on what you use. SE Ranking Core costs $129 a month and includes 10 projects, 2,000 daily tracked keywords and 100 AI prompts a day; Semrush's SEO plan costs $139 for 5 sites and 500 keywords, and prompt tracking starts at $199. Semrush covers more jobs, such as traffic estimates and local listings, and Ahrefs is the only alternative with a comparable depth of data.
It depends on who pays. Semrush charges UK VAT at 20% to individuals, while a business that enters a valid VAT number isn't charged it and accounts for the VAT under the reverse charge. The price list stays in US dollars for UK customers too.
Nothing on prices so far. Adobe completed the purchase on 28 April 2026, for about $1.9 billion, and said it will keep investing in the product for customers of every size. In October 2026 the price list still has the SEO plan at $139 a month.
