Is Featured or Semrush cheaper?

Featured starts at Free, with paid plans from $29 per month billed annually (free plan available). Semrush starts at $139 per month (SEO plan, monthly billing) or $117.33 per month billed annually (free plan available).

Featured vs Semrush

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

Featured compared with Semrush

Relevant if the real goal behind the PR is SEO. Semrush's link building and outreach tools work from a backlink gap analysis and a prospecting list, which is a systematic way to earn links from sites you have identified. Featured earns mentions from opportunities other people posted, which is faster to start and produces coverage rather than only links. Featured's own link gap feature is a lighter version of what Semrush does properly. If links are the metric, Semrush is the more rigorous tool; if credibility and quotes are the metric, Featured is the right shape.

Choose Featured if

Founders, solo marketers, boutique PR firms, and small in-house communications teams that want earned media across several channels at once, are comfortable writing their own pitches with AI assistance, and want one subscription instead of a database licence plus a monitoring tool plus a query service.

Choose Semrush if

Marketing teams and agencies that run paid and organic together, need competitive intelligence across advertising as well as search, and want AI answer visibility tracking bundled into the same subscription rather than bought separately.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Featured	Semrush
Category	PR	SEO
Starting price	Free, with paid plans from $29 per month billed annually (free plan available)	$139 per month (SEO plan, monthly billing) or $117.33 per month billed annually (free plan available)
Pricing model	Usage-based subscription metered on daily AI usage rather than seats. Every chat message, workflow run, and result review draws from a daily pool that resets each day. All plans include the same feature set (Featured Chat, workflows, journalist requests, podcast discovery, bylined articles, speaking opportunities, awards, media monitoring, GEO visibility, competitor tracking, and multi-channel delivery); the tiers differ only in how much AI work you can do per day. HARO remains free and separate, funded by newsletter sponsorship.	Self-serve tiered subscription repackaged in 2026 around SEO and AI Search bundles, metered on websites, daily-tracked keywords, and daily AI prompt checks, with per-seat charges for additional users.
Free plan	Featured Chat, daily pitching tools, journalist matching, core workflows, and GEO visibility tracking on a small daily AI allowance. HARO's three-times-daily journalist query digest is separately free forever.	One demo project, 10 daily reports across tools, and limited AI Visibility features. Enough to evaluate the interface and run occasional lookups, not enough to work in.
Free trial	No time-limited trial; the free plan serves that purpose	7 days, no credit card required
Best for	Founders, solo marketers, boutique PR firms, and small in-house communications teams that want earned media across several channels at once, are comfortable writing their own pitches with AI assistance, and want one subscription instead of a database licence plus a monitoring tool plus a query service.	Marketing teams and agencies that run paid and organic together, need competitive intelligence across advertising as well as search, and want AI answer visibility tracking bundled into the same subscription rather than bought separately.
Setup time	Under an hour. You create an account, write a profile describing your expertise and topics, and the matched opportunity feed populates immediately. HARO signup is separate and takes a couple of minutes plus an email verification.	An hour to set up properly: create your project, verify the domain, connect Google Analytics and Search Console, start the first Site Audit crawl, and load Position Tracking with your target keywords and competitors. AI prompt tracking takes another half hour if you use Prompt Research rather than inventing prompts.
Learning curve	Low mechanically, since the primary interface is plain-language chat. The skill that takes longer is pitch judgment: knowing which requests are worth answering, responding within hours rather than days, and editing the AI draft into something that sounds like a person with a specific opinion.	Steep, mainly because of breadth. Every individual tool is understandable, but there are dozens of them and the navigation assumes you know which one you want. Expect a week before a new user stops getting lost, and plan to formally ignore several toolkits.
Platforms	Web application, Email (HARO digest, workflow delivery), Slack (workflow and monitoring delivery)	Web application, Chrome extension (SEO toolbar), Looker Studio connector, Mobile apps for reporting, REST API
Compliance	GDPR, CCPA	GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 (verify current attestation with the vendor)
Founded	2020	2008
Headquarters	Scottsdale, Arizona, United States	Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Ownership	Venture-backed, independent	Subsidiary of Adobe Inc. following a $1.9 billion all-cash acquisition completed in April 2026

Strengths and limitations

Featured

Strengths

Aggregates five distinct earned-media opportunity types (journalist requests, podcasts, bylined articles, speaking calls, awards) that normally require separate tools or manual searching.
Owns HARO and Connectively, which means its journalist request feed draws on the category's largest and most recognized query sources rather than a scraped subset.
Every feature is available on every plan including the free one, so evaluation is genuinely free and upgrades are purely about throughput.
The GEO audit against ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini is a real answer to a question executives are now asking, and it is included at no cost on the free tier.

Limitations

The daily usage reset is the sharpest constraint: hit the ceiling mid-afternoon and the tool is unavailable until tomorrow regardless of how much of the billing month remains.
The company does not publish absolute usage numbers, only relative multiples (5x, 20x), so you cannot calculate before purchase how many chats or workflow runs a plan actually buys.
The Pro+ tier is named on the pricing page without a printed headline price next to the other tiers, which makes budgeting for the agency use case harder than it should be.
No guaranteed placements or links. Publishers and journalists decide, competitive categories draw many responses to the same query, and quotes are frequently published without a link.

Semrush

Strengths

By far the broadest coverage of any self-serve SEO tool: organic, paid, local, social, PR, content, and market research in a single subscription.
AI search visibility is bundled into paid plans across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, rather than sold as a four-figure add-on.
Advertising Research is genuinely unmatched among SEO suites and is the clearest reason to choose Semrush over Ahrefs.
Database scale and refresh cadence are published openly, including the honest admission that keyword updates range from daily to monthly by term popularity.

Limitations

Additional users from $45 per month each on every tier make Semrush expensive for teams and cheap only for lone operators.
Backlink data is large but is not the reference index; when Ahrefs and Semrush disagree, most practitioners believe Ahrefs.
The breadth is genuinely overwhelming, and small teams routinely pay for toolkits they open once during onboarding and never return to.
The 2026 repackaging is recent enough that plan-to-feature mapping is still confusing, particularly for customers migrating off legacy Pro, Guru, and Business plans.

Pricing compared

Featured

Usage-based subscription metered on daily AI usage rather than seats. Every chat message, workflow run, and result review draws from a daily pool that resets each day. All plans include the same feature set (Featured Chat, workflows, journalist requests, podcast discovery, bylined articles, speaking opportunities, awards, media monitoring, GEO visibility, competitor tracking, and multi-channel delivery); the tiers differ only in how much AI work you can do per day. HARO remains free and separate, funded by newsletter sponsorship.

Free$0
Lite$29
Pro$79
Pro+Listed as a 20x usage tier

At $29 a month the Lite plan is cheap against any alternative that involves a media database licence or an agency hour, and the fact that every plan carries every feature means a buyer can validate matching quality for free before spending anything. The honest caveat is that the highest-value classic workflow, answering journalist queries for a quote and a link, is free through HARO, which this same company operates. What the subscription actually buys is breadth (podcasts, speaking, awards, bylines, monitoring in one place) and drafting speed. If you would genuinely use three or more of those opportunity types, the price is easy to justify. If you would only use journalist requests, start free and see whether the aggregation earns the upgrade.

Semrush

Self-serve tiered subscription repackaged in 2026 around SEO and AI Search bundles, metered on websites, daily-tracked keywords, and daily AI prompt checks, with per-seat charges for additional users.

Free$0
SEO$139
Starter$199
Pro+$299
Advanced$549
EnterpriseCustom quote

Semrush is the best value in this category for a team that will actually use three or more toolkits, and mediocre value for anyone who will not. At $199 the Starter plan includes AI visibility tracking across five engines, which at Ahrefs costs $129 plus $199 to $699 on top; that comparison alone justifies the plan for anyone whose board is asking about AI answers. The counterweight is seats. Every extra login is $45 per month, and the pricing is designed around a single power user with reports flowing outward rather than a team working inside the tool. If your use case is keyword research and rank tracking for one small site, this is roughly three times more platform than you need and you should look at SE Ranking, Mangools, or Ubersuggest instead.

Editorial verdict on each

Featured

Featured is in an unusual position: it owns the free thing that competes with its paid thing. HARO, relaunched free and sponsorship-funded under Featured's ownership, covers the classic journalist query workflow at no cost, and Connectively covers expert to publisher matching. The subscription buys breadth and speed on top of that, and the breadth is real, since podcasts, speaking calls, awards, bylines, monitoring, and an AI visibility audit in one $29 a month product is a set of tools that would otherwise be four subscriptions. The MCP server and the GEO audit both suggest a company reading the market correctly. The reservations are that the current product is only a few months old, that daily usage caps are a harsher constraint than monthly ones, and that the company publishes usage in multiples rather than numbers, so you cannot size a plan before buying. Start on the free plan, which carries every feature, and let the placements decide whether to upgrade.

Read the full Featured profile

Semrush

Category Leader

Semrush is the most complete self-serve marketing visibility platform available, and the 2026 repackaging made it the sensible default for anyone whose leadership is asking about AI answers: prompt tracking across five engines starts at $199 per month, where the equivalent at Ahrefs is a separately billed add-on running to $699. The dataset is large, the refresh cadence is documented honestly, and the free plan plus seven-day no-card trial means you can check the claims yourself. Two caveats matter. Seats at $45 each make this a tool for one power user with reports flowing outward, not a team workspace. And Adobe's $1.9 billion acquisition, completed in April 2026, means the vendor you are signing a three-year deal with is now a division of a company with very different pricing instincts. Buy it if you will use the breadth. Buy something cheaper if you will not.

Read the full Semrush profile

Featured profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Semrush last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.