Is Majestic or Semrush cheaper?

Majestic starts at About £40 or €46.99 per month (free plan available). Semrush starts at $139 per month (SEO plan, monthly billing) or $117.33 per month billed annually (free plan available).

Majestic 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

Majestic compared with Semrush

Semrush is a marketing platform with a backlink module; Majestic is a backlink company. Semrush wins on breadth, AI visibility from $199, and workflow integration, and loses on link index depth, historical reach, and the granularity of link-quality metrics. If your suite is already Semrush, adding Majestic Lite at about €47 is a cheap way to stop trusting one vendor's link numbers unchecked.

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.

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	Majestic	Semrush
Category	SEO	SEO
Starting price	About £40 or €46.99 per month (free plan available)	$139 per month (SEO plan, monthly billing) or $117.33 per month billed annually (free plan available)
Pricing model	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.	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	Free tools without a subscription: limited Site Explorer previews, the Majestic Million top-site list, and free reports on domains you verify ownership of.	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 open free trial; a 7-day money-back guarantee on Lite and Pro serves the same purpose	7 days, no credit card required
Best for	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.	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	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.	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	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.	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, Browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, REST API on the top plan, OpenApps third-party marketplace	Web application, Chrome extension (SEO toolbar), Looker Studio connector, Mobile apps for reporting, REST API
Compliance	GDPR, UK data protection registration as Majestic-12 Ltd	GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 (verify current attestation with the vendor)
Founded	2004	2008
Headquarters	Birmingham, United Kingdom	Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Ownership	Privately held and independent; Majestic-12 Ltd, registered in England as company number 05269210	Subsidiary of Adobe Inc. following a $1.9 billion all-cash acquisition completed in April 2026

Strengths and limitations

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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