Is Semrush or Serpstat cheaper?

Semrush starts at $139 per month (SEO plan, monthly billing) or $117.33 per month billed annually (free plan available). Serpstat starts at $50 per month (free plan available).

Semrush vs Serpstat

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

Serpstat compared with Semrush

Semrush is broader, better funded, better documented, and far more expensive once you add seats, with AI visibility bundled only from $199. Serpstat covers most of the same surface for a fifth of the effective cost for a four-person team. Buy Semrush if you need the local listings, PR, social, and content marketplace modules and can absorb the seat tax; buy Serpstat if the core SEO disciplines are what you actually use.

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.

Choose Serpstat if

Small agencies and in-house teams of three to six people who want one platform covering research, auditing, tracking, and reporting without paying per seat, and anyone whose target markets sit outside the handful of countries the American suites cover properly.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Semrush	Serpstat
Category	SEO	SEO
Starting price	$139 per month (SEO plan, monthly billing) or $117.33 per month billed annually (free plan available)	$50 per month (free plan available)
Pricing model	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.	Self-serve subscription in four published tiers, metered by daily search credits plus separate monthly caps on position checks, export rows, and audited pages, with multiple user seats included rather than charged per head.
Free plan	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.	A free account gives a small number of daily queries with capped results, enough to evaluate the interface and not enough to do real work.
Free trial	7 days, no credit card required	7-day trial on paid features, plus a limited free account
Best for	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.	Small agencies and in-house teams of three to six people who want one platform covering research, auditing, tracking, and reporting without paying per seat, and anyone whose target markets sit outside the handful of countries the American suites cover properly.
Setup time	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.	Under an hour for research use, since nothing needs verifying to look up a competitor. Setting up a project properly, meaning connecting Search Console and Analytics, adding tracked keywords with the right locations, and scheduling the first audit, takes two to three hours.
Learning curve	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.	Moderate. The suite is dense and the interface has accumulated features over a decade, so finding the right report is harder than using it. The credit model in particular takes a week of use before it stops surprising people.
Platforms	Web application, Chrome extension (SEO toolbar), Looker Studio connector, Mobile apps for reporting, REST API	Web application, Browser extension, REST API, MCP endpoints for ChatGPT and Claude, Google Sheets and Looker Studio connectors
Compliance	GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 (verify current attestation with the vendor)	GDPR
Founded	2008	2013
Headquarters	Boston, Massachusetts, United States	Odesa, Ukraine
Ownership	Subsidiary of Adobe Inc. following a $1.9 billion all-cash acquisition completed in April 2026	Privately held; part of the FRACTAL group of companies, originally spun out of the Netpeak agency

Strengths and limitations

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.

Serpstat

Strengths

More than 230 regional Google databases with genuine depth outside the major English-speaking markets, which is the single biggest reason to choose it over Ahrefs or Semrush.
Seats are included rather than charged: three users at $100 and six at $169, against $40 to $80 per seat elsewhere.
Genuinely all-in-one, covering research, clustering, competitor analysis, auditing, daily rank tracking, backlinks, and AI monitoring in one subscription.
SERP-overlap keyword clustering is a real feature that produces better page structures than the string-matching approach used by cheaper tools.

Limitations

The daily credit reset makes burst research genuinely painful, and unlike a monthly pool there is no way to front-load a heavy week.
Backlink data is serviceable but not competitive with Majestic or Ahrefs on index size, refresh rate, or documentation of methodology.
The site auditor is a generalist and will not replace Sitebulb or Screaming Frog for JavaScript rendering, crawl configuration, or genuinely deep technical work.
Individual at $50 is a poor plan: no API, no AI monitoring, 100 daily credits, and a crawl allowance too small for most real sites.

Pricing compared

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.

Serpstat

Self-serve subscription in four published tiers, metered by daily search credits plus separate monthly caps on position checks, export rows, and audited pages, with multiple user seats included rather than charged per head.

Individual$50
Team$100
Team x2$169
Agency$410

Team at $100 for three users is the best-value all-in-one tier in this category for a small team, and Team x2 at $169 for six users is close to unbeatable on a per-person basis. You are buying breadth: keyword research with real international coverage, clustering that works, daily local rank tracking, a competent auditor, backlinks, an LLM brand monitor, API access, and no seat tax. What you are not buying is the best version of any single one of those. The link index is mid-tier, the crawler is a generalist, and the credit meter resets daily in a way that will irritate anyone who works in bursts. For a small agency that needs every discipline covered adequately for four people, that trade is strongly in Serpstat's favour. For a specialist whose entire value is the accuracy of one dataset, it is not.

Editorial verdict on each

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

Serpstat

Serpstat is the right answer to a specific question: how does a team of three to six people get every SEO discipline covered adequately without paying a seat tax. Team x2 at $169 for six users, with daily local rank tracking, a 300,000-page crawl allowance, API access, and an LLM brand monitor included, has no equivalent among the American suites at anything close to that price. Add the 230-plus regional databases and it becomes the obvious choice for anyone working outside the handful of markets Ahrefs and Semrush cover properly. The compromises are real and predictable: the link index is mid-tier, the crawler is a generalist, the daily credit reset punishes burst work, and Individual at $50 is a plan you should skip. Buy Team or Team x2, pair it with Majestic for links and a dedicated crawler for technical depth, and you have a better-equipped small agency than the price suggests.

Read the full Serpstat profile

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