Ubersuggest and Semrush are two paid SEO suites that do the same basic jobs: keyword research, competitor analysis, backlinks, technical audits and rank tracking. Ubersuggest belongs to Neil Patel and starts at $29 a month, with a lifetime plan from $290; Semrush has belonged to Adobe since 28 April 2026, starts at $139 a month and states 1.3 billion keywords for the UK market alone (a 2022 figure).
The short answer: Ubersuggest if you look after a few small sites and want to pay once, Semrush if a single site goes over 300 tracked keywords or if you work on UK competitors. The long answer is in a sum none of the comparisons on page one does: what the two tools cost in pounds for the same work, not for plans with the same name.
Why keep coming back to "the same work"?
Because the entry price misleads in both directions. On 10 October 2026 we read the first page of Google UK for "ubersuggest vs semrush". The first organic result still gives Ubersuggest at $12 a month. The second is an SEO.com page comparing Ubersuggest with Ahrefs, not Semrush; the rest are a YouTube video, Reddit threads, a G2 page with no price for Ubersuggest and a piece last updated in March 2024. Two mistakes keep coming back:
- out-of-date prices: 99signals, updated in January 2026, still lists Ubersuggest at $12 a month, while today's price list says $29;
- plans compared by name: one tool's "basic" against the other's "basic", as if they covered the same work. They don't.
We see it on the projects we run. Macropix, which makes LED screens in Milan, went from position 88 to 2 and today has a 25.55% share of voice on the LED wall cluster, ahead of Amazon at 18.08%: a result read on one keyword cluster, not on thousands (the full case is here).
Sunscape develops solar farms and looks for land all over Italy: with an SEO architecture built region by region from March 2026, impressions went from 329 to 5,809 by August, as we explain in our guide to how long SEO takes.
And what has that got to do with Ubersuggest and Semrush?
In both cases the right tool is decided by the number of keywords you need to track per site, and on that number the two price lists behave in opposite ways. Here you'll find:
- the official price lists converted to pounds at the Bank of England rate for 8 October 2026;
- six working situations with the cheapest set-up in each tool;
- the cost over three years, lifetime plan included;
- two sets of data we collected ourselves on the weight of the two brands on Google UK;
- the wrong figures doing the rounds in the comparisons on page one.
Let's start!
Ubersuggest vs Semrush: the numbers side by side (from the vendors, not third parties)
These are the figures the two vendors publish, checked between 5 and 10 October 2026. Where a number isn't published we say so, rather than filling the box with third-party estimates.
| Ubersuggest | Semrush | |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Neil Patel, bought in 2017 | Adobe, since 28 April 2026 |
| Keywords in the database | 100 million (stated, total) | 28.8 billion across 142 geographic databases |
| Keywords in the UK | not published | 1.3 billion (April 2022 figure) |
| Backlinks | Moz data, since March 2022 | own index, 43 trillion |
| Entry price | $29 a month | $139 a month (SEO plan) |
| Lifetime plan | yes, from $290 | no |
| Extra users | $5 a month each | $45 to $100 a month each |
| Technical audit | 1,000 to 10,000 pages per weekly report | 100,000 pages a month on the SEO plan |
| API | not available | on the Business and Advanced plans |
| Capterra rating | 4.4 out of 5 (94 reviews) | 4.6 out of 5 (2,329 reviews) |
For anyone working on Google UK, the row that matters most is the third. Semrush, for the UK alone, states thirteen times the whole database Ubersuggest declares for the entire world. Treat it as an order of magnitude: the two vendors don't explain in the same way how they count keywords.
The users row is the one almost nobody looks at. And it turns the sums upside down as soon as the team has more than one person.
What Ubersuggest and Semrush cost in pounds (at the same rate)
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 | Monthly | In pounds | Sites | Tracked keywords |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ubersuggest $29 | $29 ($290 lifetime) | £21.93 (£219.27 lifetime) | 1 | 125 |
| Ubersuggest $49 | $49 ($490 lifetime) | £37.05 (£370.48 lifetime) | 7 | 150 per site |
| Ubersuggest $99 | $99 ($990 lifetime) | £74.85 (£748.53 lifetime) | 15 | 300 per site |
| Semrush SEO | $139 | £105.10 | 5 | 500 |
| Semrush One Starter | $199 | £150.46 | 5 | 500 + 50 AI prompts a day |
| Semrush One Pro+ | $299 | £226.07 | 15 | 1,500 + 100 AI prompts |
| Semrush One Advanced | $549 | £415.09 | 40 | 5,000 + 200 AI prompts |
Semrush also keeps its old price list alive: Guru at $249.95 and Business at $499.95, with the same limits as Pro+ and Advanced but without AI tracking (Semrush knowledge base). They don't appear on the pricing page, but we need them for the next sum.
The full Semrush bill, with VAT, refunds and the toolkits sold separately, is in our guide to Semrush pricing.
The comparison for the same work (where the gap reaches seven times)
The entry price says Semrush costs 4.8 times as much as Ubersuggest. But the two tools count keywords differently: Ubersuggest sets a limit per site, Semrush a total per account. So we fixed the work first, then looked for the cheapest set-up that covers it in each tool.
| Work to cover | Ubersuggest | Semrush | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 site, up to 125 keywords, 1 person | $29 plan (£21.93) | SEO, $139 (£105.10) | 4.8 times |
| 7 sites, 150 keywords each, 1 person | $49 plan (£37.05) | Guru, $249.95 (£188.98) | 5.1 times |
| 15 sites, 300 keywords each | $99 plan (£74.85) | Business, $499.95 (£378.01) | 5.1 times |
| 7 sites, 3 people | $49 + 2 users = $59 (£44.61) | Guru + 2 users = $409.95 (£309.96) | 6.9 times |
| 1 site, 500 keywords | not possible: the limit is 300 per site | SEO, $139 (£105.10) | Semrush only |
| 1 site, 2,000 keywords | not possible | Business, $499.95 (£378.01) | Semrush only |
With more small sites the ratio holds at around five times. With more people it rises to seven. On Ubersuggest a team member costs $5 a month, on Semrush Guru $80: for a three-person agency the difference is $351 a month, $4,212 a year, about £3,185.
So Ubersuggest always wins?
No. The last two rows are the ones American comparisons skip: above 300 keywords on a single site, Ubersuggest isn't an option at any price. An online shop with 2,000 product pages, or a site with one page per region, gets there fast: 20 regions times 15 keywords already makes 300.
How many keywords you really need depends on how you build the set, which we explain in our guide to keyword rankings. You often need fewer than the tool nudges you to load.
Are you paying for keywords nobody looks at?
You've just seen that the same work can cost $59 or $409 a month, and that above 300 keywords per site the cheap tool stops being an option. Let's look together at how many keywords you track, how many bring in clicks and which tool you actually need.
Book a strategy consultationWhat they cost over three years (and why Semrush has no lifetime plan)
The lifetime plan is the argument Neil Patel uses to sell Ubersuggest, and over three years the sum is clear-cut.
| Set-up | Cost over three years | In pounds |
|---|---|---|
| Ubersuggest $29, lifetime plan | $290 | £219.27 |
| Ubersuggest $29, monthly for 36 months | $1,044 | £789.35 |
| Semrush SEO, annual for three years | $4,223.88 | £3,193.62 |
| Semrush SEO, monthly for 36 months | $5,004 | £3,783.46 |
Semrush's SEO plan, billed annually, costs 14.6 times Ubersuggest's lifetime plan. The lifetime plan pays for itself in ten months compared with Ubersuggest's own monthly plan.
Two lines of the Ubersuggest price list are worth reading before you pay: "Lifetime plan purchases are final and non-refundable", and the 7-day trial applies only to monthly subscriptions. Semrush's rule is the mirror image: its refund policy covers only first annual purchases, within 7 days, and not monthly ones.
So is lifetime a bargain?
It depends on something no price list can promise: that in three years the tool will still be the one you bought. On r/SEO, in a thread from August 2026, one user says they bought the lifetime plan in 2021, have hardly used it and don't know how reliable the data it shows is. Lifetime pays off once you've already used the monthly plan for a month, not before.
How much they know about the UK market (1.3 billion against 100 million in total)
Semrush has published a figure for the UK: in April 2022 it announced that its UK keyword database would grow by 45%, "from 894 million to 1.3 billion keywords" (Semrush news). Today it states 28.8 billion keywords in total across 142 geographic databases, without an updated UK breakdown. On its Ubersuggest page Neil Patel writes "100 million keyword database", with no split by country.
There's an American test that gives an idea of the distance. Style Factory, in a comparison updated in 2026, counted the suggestions both tools return for the same keywords: for "Amazon" 8 million on Semrush against 1.3 million on Ubersuggest, for "Canva" 1.1 million against 138,000, for "Shopify" 363,000 against 165,000. That's a test on global brands: on keywords with 20-30 searches a month, the long tail of most B2B sectors, nobody has published one.
To measure at least the weight of the two brands in the UK, we ran two checks of our own on 10 October 2026. The first with DataForSEO Labs: how many searches on Google UK the domain of Neil Patel, which hosts Ubersuggest, and Semrush's domain rank for.
| Domain | Keywords ranking on Google UK | In the top 10 | Estimated organic traffic a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| semrush.com | 12,103 | 5,045 | 279,800 |
| neilpatel.com (Ubersuggest's site) | 4,106 | 610 | 12,960 |
The second with Google Ads volumes for the UK, monthly average from September 2025 to August 2026.
| Search | Monthly searches in the UK | Low and high in the period |
|---|---|---|
| semrush | 27,100 | 22,200 to 40,500 |
| ubersuggest | 6,600 | 3,600 to 8,100 |
| semrush pricing | 880 | 390 to 1,600 |
| semrush free | 320 | 210 to 590 |
| ubersuggest pricing | 70 | 30 to 170 |
| ubersuggest vs semrush | 40 | 10 to 170 |
| semrush vs ubersuggest | 10 | flat |
In the UK Semrush is searched for 4.1 times as often as Ubersuggest. Worldwide, on English-language searches, Brandwave puts the ratio at 4.5 for August 2026 (736,000 against 165,000). So the UK is close to the English-speaking average: the advantage Ubersuggest gets in countries such as Italy from its translated interface doesn't apply here, because both tools work in English.
And on documentation Semrush is far ahead: semrush.com has 5,045 keywords in the top 10 on Google UK, Neil Patel's site 610. When a report doesn't add up, the answer is much more likely to come from Semrush's own help pages.
Both brands fall over the period: "ubersuggest" from 8,100 searches in September and October 2025 to 3,600 in August 2026, "semrush" from 33,100 to 22,200, with the caveat that August is often a quiet month. For any estimate on small keywords, the reference point is still Google Search Console, because it comes from Google and not from a model.
The figures doing the rounds (and which don't match the price lists)
In the comparisons on page one, British and American, many numbers don't match what the vendors publish. Some don't even match each other.
| Figure | What the source says | Source and date | Vendor figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ubersuggest entry price | $12 a month | 99signals, January 2026, first organic result on Google UK | $29 a month |
| Semrush entry price | $129.95 a month | SEO.com, 30 September 2026 | $139 a month |
| Semrush entry price | $139.50 a month | Neil Patel's blog, April 2026 | $139 a month |
| Semrush entry price | $139.94 a month | G2, August 2026 | $139 a month |
| Keywords in Semrush's database | 20 billion | 99signals, January 2026 | 28.8 billion |
| Keywords in Semrush's database | 25 billion | SEO.com, September 2026 | 28.8 billion |
| Keywords in Ubersuggest's database | about 1.25 billion | Style Factory, 2026 | 100 million |
| Refund on Ubersuggest's lifetime plan | 30-day money-back guarantee | Shane Barker, March 2024 | final, non-refundable |
The $129.95 price appears on a page updated on 30 September 2026, and it's the page Google.com's AI Overview cited as its source. On 9 October the American AI Overview gave Semrush as "$129.95 to $139.95" with a database of "over 26 billion": two numbers that aren't on the vendor's page.
And a note on Neil Patel's comparison: it's written by the owner of one of the two tools. He says himself he'll be "as fair and honest as possible", and the piece should be read with that in mind. The rule we've applied since our comparison with Ahrefs holds: a figure that doesn't lead back to the vendor's own page is hearsay, not data.
AI tracking: how many checks you actually buy (from 10 to 1,500 a month)
Both tools now say they measure how a brand shows up in AI assistants' answers. But they count in different units, so we've brought them back to the same one: prompts checked in a 30-day month.
| Plan | Price list rule | Checks a month, roughly |
|---|---|---|
| Ubersuggest $29 | 10 prompts per site, refreshed monthly | 10 |
| Ubersuggest $49 | 15 prompts per site, every two weeks | 32 |
| Ubersuggest $99 | 20 prompts per site, weekly, 3 answers | 86 |
| Semrush One Starter, $199 | 50 prompts a day | 1,500 |
| Semrush One Pro+, $299 | 100 prompts a day | 3,000 |
| Semrush One Advanced, $549 | 200 prompts a day | 6,000 |
On the entry plan, Semrush checks 150 times as many prompts as Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest, though, includes them in the subscription, while Semrush charges for them: Starter costs $60 more than the SEO plan, which has no prompts at all.
Where they look matters too. Semrush One states ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. On Ubersuggest, according to Style Factory, tracking covers only ChatGPT and doesn't analyse sentiment; the price list doesn't say, so ask before you buy.
And do you really need it?
Not always. A B2B company we work with in Italy put off Semrush's AI module for six months, after budgeting about €1,200 for it: in its sector there were still too few questions to the assistants to see a return. How often your brand already shows up can be measured without a subscription, using the method in our guide to AI visibility; the dedicated tools are in our roundup of AI visibility tools. If you'd rather hand the work over, it's what we do in our SEO for AI service.
Backlinks: on Ubersuggest you're reading Moz (since 2022)
Ubersuggest doesn't have its own link index. Neil Patel wrote it on 9 March 2022: "So we now have Moz link data within Ubersuggest" (source). The authority score it shows is Moz's Domain Authority too, while Semrush uses its own Authority Score on a stated index of 43 trillion backlinks and 808 million domains.
It follows that comparing Ubersuggest and Semrush on links means comparing Moz and Semrush, which we did in Semrush vs Moz. There's a figure of ours there that's useful here: in the UK "domain authority" and "moz domain authority" add up to 980 searches a month, "authority score" and "semrush authority score" to 80. If you buy Semrush, publishers and link sellers will keep asking you for DA, and you'd do well to know it isn't your tool's number; how to read it is in our guide to Domain Authority.
On limits: Ubersuggest shows 2,000, 5,000 or 10,000 backlinks depending on the plan, and according to SEO.com the history of new and lost links covers the last 30 days. For link building, freshness of data counts for more than quantity.
Which to choose (starting from what you do every week)
| If your situation is | Choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| One site, fewer than 125 keywords, minimum budget | Ubersuggest $29, then lifetime | $290 once against $1,408 a year |
| Consultant with 7-15 small clients | Ubersuggest $49 or $99 | a fifth of the cost of Semrush |
| Team of two or three people | Ubersuggest | $5 per user against $45-100 |
| One site with more than 300 keywords to track | Semrush | Ubersuggest can't get there |
| Competitor analysis on Google UK | Semrush | 1.3 billion UK keywords stated |
| AI tracking across several assistants | Semrush One | 1,500 checks a month from Starter |
| Mainly rank tracking, low budget | a cheaper suite or a dedicated rank tracker | see the alternatives |
For the last row the options are in our guides to Ubersuggest alternatives and Semrush alternatives; the comparison with the third big name is in Semrush vs Ahrefs and the full overview in our ranking of the best SEO tools.
During the trial, run a test no comparison can run for you: look up ten keywords from your sector in both tools and compare the estimates with the real impressions in Search Console. Remember that keyword difficulty should be read within the same tool, never compared across tools. And if you'd rather not buy the tools at all, access to the suites and reading the data are included in our SEO service.
The limit that decides isn't the price, it's the cap per site
Summed up in five lines:
Ubersuggest costs five to seven times less for the same work.
Over three years the lifetime plan costs 14.6 times less than Semrush's annual plan.
Above 300 keywords on one site, Ubersuggest isn't an option.
For the UK Semrush has stated 1.3 billion keywords; Ubersuggest doesn't publish the figure.
On links, Ubersuggest shows Moz data.
One thing the industry rarely says: the choice between the two is made by how your site grows, not by today's budget. If you buy Ubersuggest lifetime for a 100-keyword site and then add a page per region or a catalogue, you'll break the 300 cap within a year and end up paying for Semrush anyway, with $290 already spent. So before you choose, don't ask how many keywords you track today: ask how many you'll track once the content plan is finished. If the number goes over 300 for a single site, the cheapest route is to start with Semrush.
Speak soon!
Frequently asked questions about Ubersuggest and Semrush
It depends on the work. Ubersuggest costs five to seven times less for the same number of sites and users and has a $290 lifetime plan, but stops at 300 tracked keywords per site. Semrush starts at $139 a month, has stated 1.3 billion UK keywords and has no per-site cap: it makes sense when a single site goes over 300 keywords or when you analyse competitors on Google UK.
At the Bank of England rate for 8 October 2026, before VAT, Ubersuggest costs £21.93 a month on the first plan, £37.05 on the second and £74.85 on the third, or from £219.27 as a one-off with the lifetime plan. Semrush costs £105.10 a month on the SEO plan, £150.46 on Starter, £226.07 on Pro+ and £415.09 on Advanced. Both bill in US dollars.
Partly. There is 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 7-day free trial applies only to monthly subscriptions.
Yes, but with a lot of limits. The free plan includes one demo project and 10 reports a day shared across the main tools. To work with it regularly you need a paid plan, from the SEO plan at $139 a month, with a 7-day free trial.
Yes, if the tool is enough for you for more than ten months: $290 is ten months of the $29 monthly plan, and over three years it costs 14.6 times less than Semrush's annual SEO plan. Lifetime purchases are final and non-refundable, though, so it's worth trying a month's subscription first.
Yes, but it doesn't say how much. Ubersuggest states a database of 100 million keywords in total, with no figure per country. Semrush announced 1.3 billion keywords for the UK alone in April 2022. Before you choose, compare both tools' estimates with your Google Search Console impressions.
Yes, both do, in very different quantities. Ubersuggest includes 10 to 20 prompts per site in the subscription, refreshed monthly, fortnightly or weekly. Semrush One starts at 50 prompts a day, about 1,500 checks a month, on the $199 Starter plan and also covers Gemini and Perplexity.
