Is Ahrefs or Majestic cheaper?

Ahrefs starts at $29 per month (Starter), or $129 per month for Lite (free plan available). Majestic starts at About £40 or €46.99 per month (free plan available).

Ahrefs vs Majestic

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Editorial assessment

Majestic compared with Ahrefs

Ahrefs' index is larger and better documented and comes inside a full suite with keyword research, rank tracking, and site auditing. Majestic gives you a genuinely independent second index, a Historic archive to 2006, Topical Trust Flow, and Link Context, for about a third of the money. Most serious link practitioners run both: Ahrefs as the daily driver and Majestic as the arbiter when a link-quality judgement has to be defensible.

Choose Ahrefs if

Agencies, consultants, and in-house SEO leads who do competitive backlink and keyword research often enough to justify a triple-digit monthly bill, and who value index quality and data honesty over breadth of features or number of seats.

Choose Majestic if

Link builders, SEO auditors, and anyone who has to make a defensible judgement about whether a domain is worth acquiring a link from, plus agencies who need a second independent index to cross-check whatever their main suite reports.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Ahrefs	Majestic
Category	SEO	SEO
Starting price	$29 per month (Starter), or $129 per month for Lite (free plan available)	About £40 or €46.99 per month (free plan available)
Pricing model	Self-serve tiered subscription with three separate meters (report credits, crawl credits, tracked keywords), per-seat charges for additional users, and API access sold as a separate capacity subscription.	Self-serve subscription in three published tiers, metered by Analysis Units, Retrieval Units, and Index Item Units, billed monthly or annually with a money-back window.
Free plan	Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives free Site Audit and limited Site Explorer data for domains you verify ownership of, plus a public library of capped free SEO tools.	Free tools without a subscription: limited Site Explorer previews, the Majestic Million top-site list, and free reports on domains you verify ownership of.
Free trial	No	No open free trial; a 7-day money-back guarantee on Lite and Pro serves the same purpose
Best for	Agencies, consultants, and in-house SEO leads who do competitive backlink and keyword research often enough to justify a triple-digit monthly bill, and who value index quality and data honesty over breadth of features or number of seats.	Link builders, SEO auditors, and anyone who has to make a defensible judgement about whether a domain is worth acquiring a link from, plus agencies who need a second independent index to cross-check whatever their main suite reports.
Setup time	Under an hour to be useful. Verify your domain, connect Search Console and Analytics, start a Site Audit crawl, and add your priority keywords to Rank Tracker. The crawl itself may take hours on a large site.	Minutes to start querying, because nothing needs installing or verifying to look up a third-party domain. Verifying your own sites for free reports takes another quarter of an hour.
Learning curve	Moderate to steep. The interface is dense, the metrics are opinionated, and the difference between volume, clicks, and traffic potential is not obvious to a newcomer. Ahrefs' own academy and blog are unusually good and are the main reason the learning curve is survivable.	Steeper than the interface suggests, and almost entirely conceptual rather than mechanical. Understanding the Fresh and Historic split, the difference between the three unit meters, and how to read Trust Flow against Citation Flow takes a few sessions. Once those three ideas land, the tool is straightforward.
Platforms	Web application, Chrome and Firefox SEO Toolbar, Looker Studio connector, REST API	Web application, Browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, REST API on the top plan, OpenApps third-party marketplace
Compliance	GDPR, SOC 2 (reported; verify current attestation with the vendor)	GDPR, UK data protection registration as Majestic-12 Ltd
Founded	2010	2004
Headquarters	Singapore	Birmingham, United Kingdom
Ownership	Bootstrapped, founder-owned	Privately held and independent; Majestic-12 Ltd, registered in England as company number 05269210

Strengths and limitations

Ahrefs

Strengths

The largest and best-documented crawl in the category, with 35 trillion historical backlinks, 493.9 billion pages indexed, and 300 million pages refreshed daily, published openly rather than hidden behind marketing language.
Keyword data with genuinely useful derived metrics: clicks, clicks per search, parent topic, and traffic potential all answer better questions than raw search volume.
Content Explorer is the strongest content research and prospecting index of any mainstream SEO tool, and has no close equivalent in cheaper suites.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is a real free product for your own sites, not a trial stub, and includes full Site Audit crawling.

Limitations

Per-seat pricing at $40 to $80 per additional user on top of a $129 to $449 base is the harshest seat model in the category and punishes small teams specifically.
The credit system introduced in the 2025 repricing means exploratory research consumes a metered resource, and Starter and Lite users can hit the wall mid-project.
AI answer visibility is not meaningfully included; 5 to 20 tracked prompts is a demo, and Brand Radar at $199 to $699 per month is a second product with its own bill.
No content optimization editor, no draft grading, and no writing assistance, so content teams still need Surfer SEO, Clearscope, or Frase alongside it.

Majestic

Strengths

The Fresh and Historic index split is unique in the category and is the only practical way to audit what a domain's link profile looked like years ago.
Twenty years of continuous first-party crawling since 2004, with live index counters published openly on the vendor's own site rather than quoted in marketing copy.
Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and especially Topical Trust Flow are better predictors of link value than a single blended authority score, because the ratio and the category both carry information.
Link Context reports where on the page a link sits, which is a genuine editorial-intent signal most competitors do not surface at all.

Limitations

Single-user on Lite and Pro, with the second seat only available by jumping to the €379.99 API plan. This is the single worst thing about the product commercially.
No API below €379.99, where Moz sells Links API access from about $20 and is the only genuinely small-business-priced link API in the category.
No keyword research, no rank tracking, no site audit, no content tooling. Majestic is a component, never a platform, and buyers expecting a suite will be disappointed within an hour.
The interface is dated and the three-meter model is poorly explained in the product itself, so new users routinely burn Retrieval Units without understanding why reports stopped returning rows.

Pricing compared

Ahrefs

Self-serve tiered subscription with three separate meters (report credits, crawl credits, tracked keywords), per-seat charges for additional users, and API access sold as a separate capacity subscription.

Starter$29
Lite$129
Standard$249
Advanced$449
EnterpriseFrom $1,499

Judged purely on data, Ahrefs is worth what it charges: no competitor at any price documents an index this large or refreshes it this fast, and the clicks and traffic potential metrics are more intellectually honest than anything a rival ships. Judged as a purchase for a small business, it is expensive in ways the sticker price hides. A three-person team on Standard is really paying $369 per month, a team that wants AI visibility is really paying $448 to $948, and a team that wants API access is into four figures. The company is bootstrapped, profitable, and under no pressure to discount, so waiting for that to change is not a strategy. If one person does your SEO and does it seriously, Lite or Standard is defensible. If four people need logins, price SE Ranking or Semrush before you commit.

Majestic

Self-serve subscription in three published tiers, metered by Analysis Units, Retrieval Units, and Index Item Units, billed monthly or annually with a money-back window.

Lite€46.99
Pro€94.99
API€379.99

Lite at about €47 is one of the best-value single-purpose subscriptions in SEO, provided you understand that you are buying a second opinion rather than a suite. For a consultant or link builder who needs defensible link-quality judgements, an independent index with a 2006 archive and Topical Trust Flow for less than fifty euro is straightforwardly good value, and cheaper than the equivalent capability inside Ahrefs. Pro at €95 doubles down on volume for the same single seat. The value collapses the moment you need two people or an API, because both require the €380 plan, and that jump is severe enough that small agencies frequently keep one shared Majestic login rather than upgrade. Judged per user for a team, it is poor value. Judged per specialist, it is excellent.

Editorial verdict on each

Ahrefs

Ahrefs remains the best organic search dataset money can buy, and it is honest about what it is: the index sizes are published, the derived metrics answer better questions than raw volume, and the free Webmaster Tools product is unusually generous for a company with no investors to please. The problem is the commercial model. Report credits meter exploration, crawl credits meter auditing, keyword slots meter tracking, seats cost $40 to $80 each, the API is priced in the hundreds, and AI answer visibility, the thing everyone is buying for in 2026, sits behind a $199 to $699 per month add-on. For one serious practitioner, Lite or Standard is money well spent. For a four-person team, or for anyone who mainly needs rank tracking and client reports, do the seat arithmetic first, then look hard at SE Ranking, Semrush, and Mangools before signing up.

Read the full Ahrefs profile

Majestic

Majestic is the arbiter, not the platform. If your job involves deciding whether a link is worth acquiring, whether a domain's history is clean, or whether the number your main suite just reported is real, Majestic Lite at about €47 is the cheapest way to have a genuinely independent second index with a 2006 archive behind it, and Topical Trust Flow plus Link Context give you signals nobody else reports. Buy it as a component alongside a research suite and a technical crawler, and it earns its keep in a single avoided bad placement. Do not buy it expecting a platform: there is no keyword data, no rank tracking, no crawler, and no AI visibility. And go in clear-eyed about the seat structure, which is the worst in the category: the second user costs a jump from €95 to €380, and many small agencies quietly solve that with one shared login rather than upgrading, which tells you what they think of the pricing.

Read the full Majestic profile

Ahrefs profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Majestic last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.