Clearscope vs Frase
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
Both sides assessedClearscope compared with Frase
Frase is roughly a third of Clearscope's entry price and includes AI visibility tracking on its cheapest plan, but it meters seats and sites tightly and packs in far more surface area for the money. Clearscope does less and does it more carefully, with unlimited users and a cleaner editorial workflow. Small teams counting dollars should start with Frase; teams where writer headcount is the variable cost should model Clearscope's unlimited seats before assuming it is the expensive option.
Frase compared with Clearscope
Clearscope costs more than three times as much at entry but includes unlimited seats and a 14 day trial, and its grading and topic research are more refined. Frase includes drafting, publishing, decay monitoring, and AI visibility at $39. A team of one or two should start with Frase; a team of eight should model Clearscope's unlimited seats against Frase's $29 per seat before assuming Frase is cheaper.
Choose Clearscope if
Content teams and agencies that publish regularly with multiple writers and need a shared quality bar, especially those who value unlimited seats, a clean editorial workflow inside Google Docs or Word, and topic-level rather than prompt-level AI visibility reporting.
Choose Frase if
Small in-house content teams, solo founders, and freelance SEO consultants who want research, briefing, drafting, optimization, publishing, and basic AI-visibility tracking in one subscription under $50 per month, and who would rather have a broad tool that is adequate everywhere than three sharp tools they cannot afford together.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Clearscope | Frase |
|---|---|---|
| Category | SEO | SEO |
| Starting price | $129 per month (Essentials) (14 days trial) | $39 per month (Starter, billed yearly; $49 monthly) (7 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly tiers metered on tracked prompts, tracked pages, monthly topic explorations, and monthly drafts. Users, projects, and team members are unlimited on every plan. | Tiered subscription metered on articles per month, audit pages, seats, sites, Content Guard pages, and which AI engines are tracked. Optional pay-as-you-go on higher tiers, off by default. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | 14 days, on all plans | 7 days, no credit card required |
| Best for | Content teams and agencies that publish regularly with multiple writers and need a shared quality bar, especially those who value unlimited seats, a clean editorial workflow inside Google Docs or Word, and topic-level rather than prompt-level AI visibility reporting. | Small in-house content teams, solo founders, and freelance SEO consultants who want research, briefing, drafting, optimization, publishing, and basic AI-visibility tracking in one subscription under $50 per month, and who would rather have a broad tool that is adequate everywhere than three sharp tools they cannot afford together. |
| Setup time | Under an hour. Connect Google Search Console, install the Google Docs add-on or WordPress plugin, and run a first content report. Tracked Topics needs a little thought about which topics matter but far less setup than building a prompt set from scratch. | Under an hour to run a first research document and draft. Connecting a CMS and configuring Content Guard adds another hour or two. AI Visibility needs someone to write a sensible prompt set, which is the only part requiring real thought. |
| Learning curve | Low. The content grade is self-explanatory and the interface is deliberately sparse. The harder judgment is strategic: choosing topics worth owning, and resisting the urge to write to the grade instead of the reader. | Low to moderate. Individual screens are approachable, but the product has grown wide enough that a new user spends the first sessions figuring out which of the many modules they actually need. |
| Platforms | Web app, Google Docs add-on, Microsoft Word add-in, WordPress plugin | Web app, WordPress integration, Webflow integration, Sanity integration, Wix integration, FraseCMS hosting |
| Compliance | Not published in detail on the public site | Not published in detail on the public site |
| Founded | 2016 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | Austin, Texas, US | Remote-first; historically associated with Boston, Massachusetts, and with Birmingham, Alabama through its parent |
| Ownership | Privately held, bootstrapped | Acquired by Copysmith in October 2022 and operated within that group |
Strengths and limitations
Clearscope
Strengths
- Unlimited users, projects, and team members on every plan, including the $129 entry tier, which is a genuine structural advantage for agencies and multi-writer teams.
- The grading workflow lives inside Google Docs, Word, and WordPress, so writers never have to adopt a new editor.
- Expand ties AI visibility to your own Search Console data rather than to scraped estimates alone, and the AI Cited Pages view answers a question competitors mostly leave implicit.
- Query fan-out reporting is more actionable than raw prompt tracking, because the underlying searches are things you can write pages for.
Limitations
- The $129 entry price is high for solo operators and small startups relative to Frase or Ranktracker, and there is no free plan.
- Metering is tight: 20 topic explorations and 20 drafts a month on Essentials go quickly, and 20 drafts stay the ceiling even on the $399 Business tier.
- The topic-first philosophy on AI visibility is defensible but it also means less prompt-level, engine-by-engine forensic detail than a dedicated tracker or Surfer's AI Tracker provides.
- Clearscope names ChatGPT and Gemini most prominently in its AI coverage; buyers who need broad, explicitly documented multi-engine coverage should confirm current engine support directly.
Frase
Strengths
- By far the lowest entry price for a complete workflow: $39 per month covers research, drafting, dual scoring, publishing, and AI visibility on two engines.
- Dual SEO and GEO scores are a more honest model than a single blended number, because the two goals genuinely pull in different directions.
- AI crawler monitoring is a concrete signal that most competitors do not offer, answering whether models are ingesting your pages at all.
- Native publishing to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity, and Wix means Frase owns the last mile rather than handing you a document.
Limitations
- Generalist depth: research, drafting, optimization, and AI tracking are each competent but none is best in class against a focused competitor.
- AI engine coverage is heavily tiered, with Claude and Gemini gated behind the $239 Scale plan, which undercuts the value story for buyers who assumed the entry price covered AI search.
- Per-seat pricing at $29 each makes larger teams expensive relative to seat-unlimited alternatives.
- The 7 day trial is short for a tool with this much surface area; evaluating research, drafting, publishing, and tracking properly takes longer than a week.
Pricing compared
Clearscope
Flat monthly tiers metered on tracked prompts, tracked pages, monthly topic explorations, and monthly drafts. Users, projects, and team members are unlimited on every plan.
- Essentials$129
- Business$399
- EnterpriseCustom
Clearscope charges more per account than most of this category and less per person than any of it. If you have one writer, $129 per month for 20 topic explorations is expensive. If you have ten writers and three freelancers, unlimited seats make it the cheapest serious option on the list, because competitors that charge $29 per additional seat will pass Clearscope's price before you finish onboarding the team. The metering is honest about what the product is for: research and quality control, not content volume. Anyone planning to generate at scale will hit the 20 draft ceiling immediately and should price the add-ons before signing up.
Frase
Tiered subscription metered on articles per month, audit pages, seats, sites, Content Guard pages, and which AI engines are tracked. Optional pay-as-you-go on higher tiers, off by default.
- Starter$39
- Professional$103
- Scale$239
- EnterpriseCustom
Frase is the best dollar-for-surface-area buy in this category and it is not particularly close. Nothing else under $50 per month gives a solo operator research, briefs, AI drafting, dual SEO and GEO scoring, native publishing, decay monitoring, and two-engine AI visibility tracking in one subscription. The honest counterweight is that every one of those modules is thinner than the specialist equivalent, and two pricing decisions push the effective cost up quietly: $29 per extra seat, and the fact that half the AI engines live behind the $239 tier. Price it for the team you have in six months, not the one seat you are starting with.
Editorial verdict on each
Clearscope
Clearscope is the tool an editor picks and a CFO squints at, right up until someone counts the seats. Unlimited users on a $129 plan is a structural advantage that no per-seat competitor can argue away, and the grading workflow inside Google Docs remains the least intrusive version of this idea anyone has shipped. On AI search, Clearscope has done real work rather than slapping a badge on the homepage: Tracked Topics shipped in September 2025, AI Cited Pages answers the question that actually matters, and query fan-out reporting is more useful than another prompt counter. The reservations are metering and price steps. Twenty drafts a month at any tier and a three-times jump from Essentials to Business mean growing teams feel the ceiling early. Buy it if you have writers to coordinate; look at Frase if you have a budget to defend.
Read the full Clearscope profileFrase
Frase is the value pick and the honest one, provided you go in knowing what you are buying: breadth, not depth. For $39 per month a founder gets research, briefs, AI drafting, dual SEO and GEO scoring, native publishing, decay monitoring, and AI visibility on two engines, which is a complete workflow that no competitor comes close to matching at that price. Where the story frays is at the tier boundaries. Claude and Gemini tracking sit behind a $239 plan, extra seats cost $29 each, and the company discloses almost nothing about itself since the 2022 Copysmith acquisition. Buy it as a startup's first and only content tool, and expect to graduate to a specialist for whichever job turns out to matter most.
Read the full Frase profileClearscope profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Frase last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.