Ahrefs alternatives, and the index you are actually replacing

When you look for an Ahrefs alternative you are not replacing an interface, you are replacing an index: a crawl of the web that somebody paid to build and keeps refreshing. That is why the swap that disappoints people is the one chosen on price, and the swap that works is the one chosen on which dataset you actually open. The practical test is to ask each candidate what it publishes about the size and freshness of its own index, because only some of them tell you, and the ones that do make the comparison possible. Below are the figures each vendor published on its own pages, read on 28 October 2026, including the free routes.

Google Keyword Planner reports 10 searches a month in Singapore for this group of phrasings, harvested 26 October 2026 against geo 2702, covering "ahrefs alternatives", "ahrefs free alternative" and "free ahrefs alternatives". There is a local twist worth knowing: the footer of ahrefs.com carries a Singapore company registration and a Raffles Quay address, so a Singapore buyer shopping for an alternative to Ahrefs is shopping for an alternative to a Singapore company that bills in US dollars.

What Ahrefs costs and what the money buys, read 28 October 2026

Ahrefs publishes a full ladder on its pricing page. The figures are in US dollars and the page states "Pay annually, save up to 17%".

Plan	Monthly price	Published limits
Starter	$29	Described as "See what people search and spy on competitors"
Lite	$129	5 non verified projects, 6 months of historical data, 750 tracked keywords, 150 checks on AI prompts, 100,000 crawl credits, 1,000 credits per user, 1 user, up to 2 more at $40 each
Standard	$249	20 non verified projects, 2 years of history, 2,000 tracked keywords, 300 AI prompt checks, 500,000 crawl credits, unlimited credits per user, up to 5 more users at $60 each
Advanced	$449	50 non verified projects, 5 years of history, 5,000 tracked keywords, 600 AI prompt checks, 1,500,000 crawl credits, up to 10 more users at $80 each
Enterprise	$1,499	Annual commitment required, uncapped API access, single sign on, unlimited historical data

The limit that decides most upgrades is not the price. It is the phrase "non verified projects", because a verified project is a site you own and a non verified one is a competitor. Five non verified projects on Lite is the real ceiling for anyone doing competitive work, and it is the clause that sends agencies to Standard.

The free route inside Ahrefs itself, and exactly where it stops

Before you shop for an alternative, read what the vendor gives away. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools has been renamed: its own page now opens with "Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is now Ahrefs Free". On the same page, read 28 October 2026, the published limits are specific:

• 5,000 crawl credits per verified project per month in Site Audit, and 500 credits in total in Site Explorer.
• Up to 1,000 backlinks shown at once, and up to 1,000 keywords shown at once, with sorting and filtering on both.
• Crawl credits are consumed only on HTML pages that return a 200 status, so redirects, broken URLs and non HTML resources do not count against you.
• An unlimited number of websites, provided you can verify each one.
• The tools and data are the same as the paid product, with one decisive exclusion: competing websites, which the page describes as unverified websites, need a subscription.

So the free tier is a complete self diagnosis product and no competitive research at all. If your work is fixing your own site, that is the answer to this search and it costs nothing. If your work is reading other people's sites, no free tier from any vendor replaces that, because the index is the expensive part.

Which alternatives publish the size of their index

This is where the comparison gets usable. Moz publishes index figures in the navigation of its own pricing page, read 28 October 2026: the Moz API is described as "our index of over 44 trillion links", Link Explorer as "over 40 trillion links", and Keyword Explorer as a "1.25 billion+ keyword index". The two link numbers differ by four trillion on the same page, which is worth knowing precisely because it shows how these figures are maintained: they are marketing statements updated at different times, so treat each one as the claim on the page you read, on the day you read it.

Ahrefs' own pricing page, read the same day, carried no index size claim at all. It sells crawl credits and historical depth instead, which is the more useful disclosure for a buyer, since 100,000 crawl credits on Lite and 1,500,000 on Advanced are limits you will actually hit.

Semrush's pricing page is a third case. Read on 28 October 2026 it served no plan ladder in the page itself: the only dollar figure present was "$0" for a free tier, described as "For trying out the platform. No credit card required", with "1 demo project" and "10 reports per day across all vital tools". The paid figures arrive after the page's own scripts run, which means a reader comparing vendors from the served documents gets a ladder from Ahrefs and Moz and a single zero from Semrush.

Moz Pro, Screaming Frog and what each one actually replaces

The honest way to pick is by the dataset you open most days.

• If you open backlink data, the alternatives with a published link index are the ones to shortlist. Moz Pro's figures, read 28 October 2026, were Standard at $79 a month when paid yearly with $950 billed for the first year, Medium at $143 a month yearly with $1,719 for the first year, and Large at $239 a month yearly with $2,868 for the first year. Additional dashboards were $20 each per month and AI prompt tracking was priced at $50 per 100 prompts. The month to month figures were not present in the page we read, only the pay yearly equivalents and the first year totals, so ask for the monthly number before you budget on it.
• If you open the site audit, the cheapest serious replacement is a desktop crawler. Screaming Frog's SEO Spider publishes a free version capped at 500 URLs, which is enough for a small site and for proving a point on a large one. Its paid licence is sold per user per year, with four price bands by licence count running from GBP 199 down to GBP 169 per licence, the lower figures applying at higher licence counts. The free version excludes scheduling, JavaScript rendering, crawl comparison, custom extraction and the Search Console, Analytics and PageSpeed integrations, and those exclusions are the reason to pay rather than the crawl cap.
• If you open keyword data, the first alternative is Google's own Keyword Planner, which is free with an Ads account and is the source most third party volume figures are derived from in the first place. It gives ranges rather than a single number for low volume terms, and for a small market that limitation is real.
• If you open rank tracking, this is the job where the cheap specialists compete best, because tracking a fixed keyword list daily does not require a web scale index.

For the currency and tax side of this decision, our page on Ahrefs pricing for a Singapore buyer covers which invoice arrives in which currency, and what Moz Local and the Moz API cost covers the parts of Moz that sit outside Moz Pro.

A seven day test that settles the switch

1. Write down the five reports you opened last month. Not the ones you meant to open. The five you actually used.
2. Run those five on the candidate, on the same three domains, in the same week.
3. Compare the row counts, not the numbers. Two tools will disagree on backlink totals and that is expected. What matters is whether the candidate finds the links that changed your decisions.
4. Check the limit you will hit. Non verified projects, tracked keywords and crawl credits are the three that bite, and all three are published.
5. Export everything before you cancel. Historical depth is sold by the plan, so your two years of data does not come with you.

Questions about replacing Ahrefs

Is there a genuinely free Ahrefs alternative?

For your own site, yes, and the strongest one is Ahrefs Free itself: 5,000 Site Audit crawl credits per verified project each month and 1,000 backlinks or keywords shown at once, as published on 28 October 2026. Add Google Search Console for query data you own and a 500 URL crawler for technical work. For researching competitors, no free tier covers it.

What is the cheapest paid Ahrefs alternative that still has a link index?

On published figures read 28 October 2026, Moz Pro Standard at $79 a month when paid yearly is the lowest entry among the vendors that publish a link index size, with $950 billed for the first year.

Why do two tools report completely different backlink counts?

Because each one reports its own index, and the indexes are built by different crawlers with different refresh cycles and different rules about what counts as a link. Treat any absolute total as that vendor's measurement and compare trends inside one tool rather than totals across two.

Does Ahrefs have a free trial?

Its pricing page as read on 28 October 2026 sold a Starter plan at $29 a month and a free tier for verified sites, and did not present a time limited trial of the paid plans. Check the page on the day you decide, since this is the kind of offer that changes.

How many users does a plan include?

One, on Lite, Standard and Advanced. Extra seats were published at $40, $60 and $80 a month each respectively on 28 October 2026, so a three person team on Lite costs $209 a month rather than $129.

The one report none of these tools is built to hand you

Every tool in this article answers the same shaped question: who links to a page, who ranks for a phrase, what a crawler finds. The question a buyer now asks instead is put to an assistant in a sentence, and the answer names three or four companies. Ahrefs sells AI prompt checks on every tier, Moz sells prompt tracking at $50 per 100 prompts, and both are measuring the same new surface from inside a toolkit built for links. If that surface is the one you care about, it is worth measuring on its own terms, with the prompts your buyers actually use and the pages each answer was built from, which is the job AI Knows Us does.