Ubersuggest and Ahrefs are two paid SEO tools that cover the same jobs: keyword research, competitor analysis, backlinks, technical audits and rank tracking. Ubersuggest belongs to Neil Patel, who bought it in February 2017 for $120,000, and starts at $29 a month, with a lifetime plan from $290. Ahrefs is based in Singapore, starts at $129 a month for the Lite plan and is built around a backlink index of 35 trillion records.
The short answer: Ubersuggest if you look after one site or lots of small ones and mainly need keyword research, Ahrefs if you work on links or competitive markets. The long answer depends on two things the comparisons on page one don't look at: how much each tool knows about the UK market, and how much each costs in pounds for every keyword you track.
We checked the Google UK results for "ubersuggest vs ahrefs" on 10 October 2026. The first organic result, a comparison on top10seosoftware.com last modified in February 2024, still lists Ubersuggest at $12-40 a month and Ahrefs Lite at $99, price lists that no longer exist. Two other comparisons on the page, from Mavlers and Real Dr Seattle, give no prices or index figures at all, and the rest of the page is Reddit and Quora threads, YouTube videos and Neil Patel's own Ubersuggest page.
Ubersuggest vs Ahrefs: the numbers side by side
Figures taken from the two vendors' websites on 10 October 2026. Where a vendor doesn't publish a number we say so, rather than filling the gap with third-party estimates.
| Ubersuggest | Ahrefs | |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Neil Patel, bought in 2017 | Ahrefs, Singapore |
| Keywords in the database | 100 million (stated by the vendor) | 29 billion across 217 locations |
| Keywords in the UK | not published | 1.4 billion |
| Source of backlink data | Moz data, announced in March 2022 | own index, 35 trillion records |
| Link data updates | not published | every 15-30 minutes |
| Entry price | $29 a month | $29 (Starter), $129 (Lite) |
| Lifetime plan | yes, from $290 | no |
| Trial or free version | 7-day free trial on monthly plans, limited free version | Ahrefs Free for verified sites |
| Languages | 9 interface versions, English included | English interface, site also in other languages |
| G2 rating | 4.2 out of 5 (160 reviews) | 4.5 out of 5 (717 reviews) |
The row that matters most if you work on Google UK is the third, and we come back to it below. The fourth is the one almost nobody knows about: when you look at backlinks in Ubersuggest, you're largely looking at Moz data.
How much Ubersuggest and Ahrefs cost in pounds
Both bill in US dollars and neither publishes a sterling price list. The conversion uses the Bank of England daily spot rate for 8 October 2026: £1 = $1.3226. Prices exclude VAT.
| Plan | Price | In pounds | What's included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ubersuggest $29 | $29 a month or $290 lifetime | £21.93 (£219.27 lifetime) | 1 project, 125 tracked keywords, 150 reports a day, audit of 1,000 pages a week |
| Ubersuggest $49 | $49 a month or $490 lifetime | £37.05 (£370.48 lifetime) | 7 projects, 150 keywords per project, 300 reports a day, 5,000 pages a week |
| Ubersuggest $99 | $99 a month or $990 lifetime | £74.85 (£748.53 lifetime) | 15 projects, 300 keywords per project, 900 reports a day, 10,000 pages a week |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 a month | £97.54 | 5 projects, 750 tracked keywords, 1,000 credits per user a month, 6 months of history |
| Ahrefs Standard | $249 a month | £188.27 | 20 projects, 2,000 keywords, 2 years of history |
| Ahrefs Advanced | $449 a month | £339.48 | 50 projects, 5,000 keywords, 5 years of history |
| Ahrefs Enterprise | $1,499 a month | £1,133.37 | annual only, unlimited history |
Ahrefs also sells a $29 Starter plan (£21.93), which the price list presents as a way to see what people search for and study competitors. We've left it out of the table because the pricing page doesn't state its limits.
The lifetime plan is the argument Neil Patel uses to sell Ubersuggest, and the sum is simple: $290 is ten months of the $29 monthly plan. Use it for more than ten months and you're ahead. Two lines of the price list are worth reading before you buy: lifetime purchases are final and non-refundable, and the 7-day free trial applies only to monthly subscriptions. So it makes sense to pay for a month first and switch to lifetime only afterwards.
The same $290 buys a little over two months of Ahrefs Lite. With annual billing Ahrefs states a discount of up to 17%, which brings Lite to about $1,285 a year (£972). We've done the full sum, with extra users and add-ons, in our guide to Ahrefs pricing.
The sum that changes the ranking: what a tracked keyword costs
The entry price tells you little if you mainly use the tool to follow rankings. Divide the subscription by the number of tracked keywords included and the order flips after the first step.
| Plan | Monthly price | Tracked keywords | Cost per keyword per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ubersuggest $29 | $29 | 125 | $0.23 |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | 750 | $0.17 |
| Ahrefs Standard | $249 | 2,000 | $0.12 |
| Ahrefs Advanced | $449 | 5,000 | $0.09 |
| Ubersuggest $49 | $49 | 1,050 (150 for each of 7 projects) | $0.05 |
| Ubersuggest $99 | $99 | 4,500 (300 for each of 15 projects) | $0.02 |
Ubersuggest's base plan is the most expensive per keyword: $0.23 against $0.17 for Lite. From the second step up Ubersuggest wins by a distance, and the $99 plan tracks 4,500 keywords, almost as many as Ahrefs Advanced, which costs 4.5 times as much.
There's a constraint to read carefully. Ubersuggest counts keywords per project, so you only reach 4,500 if you spread them across 15 sites: on a single domain the ceiling is 300. For a consultant with fifteen small clients Ubersuggest is very good value. For an online shop that needs to track 2,000 keywords on the same site it isn't, and there the comparison goes back to Ahrefs Standard.
How many keywords you really need depends on how you build the set, which we explain in our guide to keyword rankings. Often you need fewer than you think: in the Macropix case, a project of ours in Italy, the result that matters, from position 88 to 2 with a 25.55% share of voice ahead of Amazon, is read on one keyword cluster, not on thousands.
How much the two tools know about the UK market
Ahrefs publishes the make-up of its database by country. On its Big Data page the UK has 1.4 billion keywords, behind only the United States (2.7 billion) and Brazil (1.5 billion), level with India and ahead of Germany (1.2 billion) and France (1.1 billion). On its Ubersuggest page Neil Patel claims a "100 million keyword database", with no breakdown by country.
Taken literally, the numbers say that the UK alone, in Ahrefs, is fourteen times the whole database Ubersuggest declares. Treat that as an order of magnitude, though: Ahrefs separates its 29 billion filtered keywords from the 110 billion it has seen in total, while Ubersuggest doesn't explain how it counts. We don't know whether the two numbers measure the same thing.
In practice the difference shows on keywords with 20-30 searches a month, which make up the long tail of almost every B2B sector in the UK too. Ubersuggest's reviews on G2 name exactly this as the main weakness: volumes and difficulty scores that don't match Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs. Before you pay, look up ten keywords from your sector in both during the trial and compare them with the volumes in Google Keyword Planner. If keyword research is mainly what you need, there are more focused options in our roundup of keyword research tools.
Language isn't a deciding factor for a UK team: both tools work in English. Ubersuggest's interface comes in 9 language versions, which only matters if someone on the team prefers to work in Portuguese, Japanese or another of the languages offered.
Where Ubersuggest's backlinks come from
Ubersuggest doesn't maintain a link index of its own. Neil Patel said so in March 2022, in a blog post announcing the new data: "So we now have Moz link data within Ubersuggest" (source). Neither of the two comparisons on page one of Google UK that we checked for it, top10seosoftware.com and Mavlers, mentions it.
So comparing Ubersuggest and Ahrefs on backlinks largely means comparing Moz and Ahrefs, which we did in our Ahrefs vs Moz comparison. The authority score follows the same path: in Ubersuggest you see Domain Authority, Moz's metric, in Ahrefs Domain Rating, and the two values for the same site can be very different. How to read the first is explained in our guide to Domain Authority.
On the Ahrefs side the numbers are public: 35 trillion external backlink records, 286 million domains, 5 million pages crawled a minute, data updated every 15-30 minutes (Big Data). On limits, Ubersuggest's price list shows 2,000, 5,000 and 10,000 under backlinks for the three plans. Ahrefs sets a maximum of 2,500 rows per report and 500,000 export rows a month for Lite.
If your work is link building, the freshness of the index counts for more than its size: a competitor's new link that you see a month late is an opportunity someone else has already taken. It's the part where Ahrefs earns its price, and it's also the part we look after in our link building service.
The figures doing the rounds on Ubersuggest and Ahrefs
To write this comparison we read the top results on Google UK on 10 October 2026, plus the Google.com results checked on 7 October 2026 for the Italian version of this article. Many of the figures don't match what the vendors publish today, and some don't match each other.
| Figure | What the source says | Source and date | Vendor figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs entry price | $99 a month (Lite) | top10seosoftware.com, last modified February 2024, first organic result on Google UK | $29 Starter, $129 Lite |
| Ahrefs entry price | $99 a month | SEO.com, updated 1 October 2026 | $29 Starter, $129 Lite |
| Ahrefs backlink index | over 14 trillion live backlinks | top10seosoftware.com, February 2024 | 35 trillion records |
| Ahrefs backlink index | 15 billion links | Search Atlas, June 2025 | 35 trillion records |
| Ahrefs keyword database | over 19.2 billion | top10seosoftware.com, February 2024 | 29 billion |
| Ubersuggest prices | $12, $20 and $40 a month ($120-$400 lifetime) | top10seosoftware.com, February 2024 | $29, $49 and $99 a month ($290-$990 lifetime) |
| Ubersuggest keyword database | 1.25 billion | Fahim AI, June 2025 | 100 million |
The biggest gap is on the Ahrefs index: 15 billion against 35 trillion, a factor of more than two thousand. Ubersuggest's database goes from 100 million to 1.25 billion depending on who's writing. And the comparison that ranks first on Google UK quotes prices at least two years old for both tools, with Ahrefs Lite at $99 instead of $129. A figure that doesn't lead back to the vendor's own page should be treated as hearsay, not data, even when it sits at the top of Google.
How often Ubersuggest and Ahrefs are searched for in the UK
A piece of context we gathered ourselves from Google Ads search volumes, UK market, monthly average from September 2025 to August 2026, pulled through DataForSEO on 10 October 2026.
| Search | Monthly searches in the UK | Low and high in the period |
|---|---|---|
| semrush | 27,100 | 22,200 to 40,500 |
| ahrefs | 18,100 | 12,100 to 22,200 |
| ubersuggest | 6,600 | 3,600 to 8,100 |
| moz | 2,900 | 2,400 to 4,400 |
| neil patel | 1,300 | 880 to 1,900 |
| ahrefs backlink checker | 1,300 | 720 to 1,900 |
| ubersuggest login | 320 | 170 to 480 |
| ahrefs webmaster tools | 210 | 90 to 390 |
| ubersuggest pricing | 70 | 30 to 170 |
| ubersuggest free | 40 | 20 to 70 |
| ubersuggest vs ahrefs | 10 | flat |
In the UK Ahrefs is searched for almost three times as often as Ubersuggest: 18,100 searches a month against 6,600. In Italy it's the other way round, with Ubersuggest ahead. Both brands are falling over the period, Ubersuggest from 8,100 searches in September and October 2025 to 3,600 in August 2026, Ahrefs from 22,200 to 14,800. Going the other way is "ahrefs webmaster tools", the version of Ahrefs you can use on your own sites without paying, which rose from 90 searches in December 2025 to 390 in March 2026.
Semrush stays above both, and Moz sits at 2,900. Plenty of people working on the UK market end up on Semrush, as we explain in our piece on Ahrefs alternatives. The comparison with Semrush is in Ubersuggest vs Semrush, and the full overview in our ranking of the best SEO tools.
Keyword research and AI: where the difference shows in day-to-day work
The two tools limit usage in different ways, and that changes how you work. Ubersuggest thinks in days: 150, 300 or 900 reports a day depending on the plan, with 20,000, 50,000 or 100,000 keyword suggestions a month. Ahrefs thinks in months: on Lite you get 1,000 credits per user a month, so an intensive bout of keyword research packed into a few days eats into the whole month's budget.
The two tools also calculate keyword difficulty differently, so the same keyword can come out easy in one and medium in the other. Read the score within the same tool, never compare it across tools: the reason is in our guide to keyword difficulty.
On AI the price lists part ways. Ubersuggest includes an AI chat in every plan and a section on AI model answers, refreshed monthly, fortnightly or weekly depending on the plan. Ahrefs sells Brand Radar AI separately, from $199 a month (£150.46), on a stated database of more than 470 million prompts. If that's why you're choosing a tool, compare the dedicated tools first in our guide to tools that track AI Overviews.
Which to choose: three typical situations
A blogger or small business with one site
Ubersuggest at $29 a month is enough for keyword research and a weekly audit, and after a few months of use the $290 lifetime plan pays off. Before you pay, though, try Ahrefs Free on your verified site together with Google Search Console: for many UK small businesses those two no-cost tools already cover audits and backlinks. If budget is the main constraint, there are other options in our guide to Ubersuggest alternatives.
A consultant with lots of small clients
Here Ubersuggest is hard to beat on price. The $49 plan covers 7 projects with 150 keywords each, the $99 plan goes up to 15 projects. The same number of sites on Ahrefs needs Standard at $249, because Lite stops at 5 projects. The limit to accept is the depth of data on low-volume keywords.
An agency, or anyone doing link building
Ahrefs, from Lite upwards. Its own link index updated every 15-30 minutes, 2 or 5 years of history on the Standard and Advanced plans and data by country are why it costs four times as much. The cost grows with the team: Lite includes a single user, extra users cost $40 a month each (£30.24), $60 on Standard (£45.37).
If you'd rather have someone else choose the tools and use them on your site, that's the work we do in Visilay's SEO service.
Frequently asked questions about Ubersuggest and Ahrefs
It depends on what you use it for. Ahrefs has its own backlink index of 35 trillion records and states 1.4 billion UK keywords, so it's the better fit for link building and competitive markets. Ubersuggest costs less, from $29 a month or $290 lifetime, and suits a single site or lots of small ones.
Partly. There's a free version with limited features, but Ubersuggest doesn't publish how many searches it allows. Paid plans start at $29 a month and the monthly ones come with a 7-day free trial.
Yes, if you use the tool for more than ten months: $290 is ten months of the $29 monthly plan. Lifetime purchases are final and non-refundable, though, so it's worth trying the monthly plan first.
Lite costs $129 a month, about £97.54, Standard $249 (about £188.27), Advanced $449 (about £339.48), before VAT, at the Bank of England rate for 8 October 2026. Annual billing brings a discount of up to 17%.
No. Since March 2022 Ubersuggest has used Moz's link data, as Neil Patel wrote on his blog. The authority score it shows is Moz's Domain Authority too.
Yes, it works in English. Ubersuggest doesn't publish how many UK keywords it has in its database, though, while Ahrefs states 1.4 billion.
One thing the industry rarely says: for a small UK site, the most reliable number isn't sold by either of them. It's the Search Console impressions for the queries you're already visible for, which come from Google, not from an estimate. Before you decide, take twenty of those queries, look them up in Ubersuggest and Ahrefs during the trial and see which gets closer to the numbers Google shows you. The tool that gets your data least wrong will get your competitors' data least wrong too, and it's a test no comparison on page one can run for you.
