Is Moz Pro or Semrush cheaper?

Moz Pro starts at $49 per month (Starter), or $39 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).

Moz Pro 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

Both sides assessed

Moz Pro compared with Semrush

Semrush covers paid search, local, social, PR, and market research alongside SEO and bundles AI visibility from $199 per month. Moz does organic only, cheaper and more calmly, with AI visibility included from $39. If you are a marketing generalist who needs cross-channel intelligence, pay for Semrush. If you are an SEO doing SEO, Moz does the job for a quarter of the money.

Semrush compared with Moz Pro

Moz Pro is the calmer, cheaper, and far narrower option, with a clear interface and a well-known Domain Authority metric but a smaller index and much less AI-era tooling. Semrush costs roughly double and delivers several times the surface area. Buy Moz if you want understandable SEO fundamentals at a fair price; buy Semrush if you need paid search intelligence and AI visibility in the same subscription.

Choose Moz Pro if

Small businesses, freelancers, and in-house marketers who want a complete, understandable SEO suite with a credible backlink index for under $100 per month, and developers or agencies who need cheap programmatic access to link metrics through the Moz Links API.

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	Moz Pro	Semrush
Category	SEO	SEO
Starting price	$49 per month (Starter), or $39 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	Self-serve tiered subscription metered per campaign on tracked keywords and pages crawled, with published per-unit overage pricing and a separately sold row-based Links API.	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	No free Moz Pro plan, but a free Links API tier of roughly 50 rows per month, free public tools including Domain Analysis and MozBar, and the Moz Academy training library.	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	Free trial offered on the Standard and Medium monthly plans	7 days, no credit card required
Best for	Small businesses, freelancers, and in-house marketers who want a complete, understandable SEO suite with a credible backlink index for under $100 per month, and developers or agencies who need cheap programmatic access to link metrics through the Moz Links API.	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	About thirty minutes. Create a campaign, verify the site, connect Google Analytics and Search Console, add competitors and target keywords, and start the first Site Crawl. Larger sites take longer to crawl but nothing needs configuring while they do.	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	The gentlest of the major suites. Moz's whole design philosophy is making SEO legible to non-specialists, and Priority score, DA, and the issue-severity grouping in Site Crawl are all built for people who need a defensible next action rather than a raw dataset.	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, MozBar browser extension, Links API, Moz Local (separate product)	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	2004	2008
Headquarters	Seattle, Washington, United States	Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Ownership	Owned by Ziff Davis, following acquisition by J2 Global in 2021	Subsidiary of Adobe Inc. following a $1.9 billion all-cash acquisition completed in April 2026

Strengths and limitations

Moz Pro

Strengths

The best value among established SEO suites, with a full toolkit from $39 per month billed annually against $129 or more for comparable competitors.
AI Visibility is included on every plan rather than sold as a $199 to $699 add-on, which as of 2026 is a genuine competitive advantage.
The Moz Links API starts around $20 per month for 3,000 rows, making it the only realistically priced backlink API for small businesses and independent developers.
Published, granular overage pricing at $10 per campaign, $15 per 50,000 pages, and $20 per 200 keywords means you extend a plan rather than jump a tier.

Limitations

Organic search only. No advertising research, no display or social intelligence, and no market traffic analytics, so it does not replace Semrush for a cross-channel marketer.
The keyword database and historical depth are smaller than Ahrefs' or Semrush's, which matters for competitive analysis in crowded verticals.
Domain Authority is widely misused as a goal rather than a diagnostic, and Moz's marketing has never worked very hard to discourage that.
Moz Local is priced per location and sold separately, which makes multi-location businesses substantially more expensive than the Moz Pro sticker price suggests.

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

Moz Pro

Self-serve tiered subscription metered per campaign on tracked keywords and pages crawled, with published per-unit overage pricing and a separately sold row-based Links API.

Starter$49
Standard$99
Medium$179
Large$299

Moz Pro is the best price-to-capability ratio among the established suites, and it is not close. Standard at $79 annually gives you a 40-trillion-link index, 300 tracked keywords, 400,000 crawled pages, and AI visibility tracking for roughly what one additional Ahrefs seat costs. The overage model is honest, the annual discount is a real 20 percent, and the Links API at $20 per month is the only affordable programmatic access to a major backlink index anywhere in the market. What you give up is depth and breadth: a smaller keyword database, no advertising or social intelligence, no content editor, and local sold separately. If your SEO work is fundamentals done consistently rather than competitive intelligence done exhaustively, Moz is the rational purchase and the money you save is better spent on content.

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

Moz Pro

Moz Pro is no longer the tool that defines the category, and it has stopped pretending to be. What it is instead is the most sensibly priced complete SEO suite on the market: a 40-trillion-link index, credible authority metrics that need no explanation in a client meeting, honest published overage pricing, a 20 percent annual discount, AI visibility included rather than upsold, and a Links API starting at $20 per month when the nearest equivalent is reported at $500. The tradeoffs are clear and you should take them seriously if they apply to you: a thinner keyword database, no advertising or social intelligence, no content editor, and local listings sold separately per location. For a small business, a freelancer, or an in-house marketer who is accountable for organic traffic and not running a competitive intelligence operation, Moz is the rational default and the several hundred dollars a month you do not spend on Ahrefs is better spent on the content itself.

Read the full Moz Pro 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

Moz Pro 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.