Head to head · Last updated August 2026
Moz vs Semrush vs Ahrefs: Moz Pro pricing, rank tracking limits and update frequency compared
The short answer
Moz Pro Standard costs $99 a month for 300 tracked keywords, Semrush SEO costs $139 for 500, and Ahrefs Lite costs $129 for 750. The figure that actually decides this comparison is not price, it is cadence: Moz and Ahrefs both refresh tracked keyword rankings weekly, and only Semrush checks daily. That single fact reverses the verdict. Measured per keyword, Moz Large is the cheapest of the three at about ten cents. Measured per ranking check actually delivered, Semrush Advanced costs roughly six times less than Moz Large.
Every price and limit below was read off moz.com, semrush.com and ahrefs.com on August 22, 2026. Serpstracker builds a dedicated rank tracker and competes with the ranking module inside all three. We are not affiliated with any of them and earn no commission on any link here.
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What each one charges, and what the ranking module actually gives you.
These are list prices on monthly billing, in dollars, for the plans that include rank tracking. Read the last two columns together. A plan with more tracked keywords but a weekly refresh delivers less ranking data than a smaller plan that checks every day.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Seats | Tracked keywords | Update frequency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moz Pro Standard | $99 | $79 | 1 | 300 | Weekly |
| Moz Pro Medium | $179 | $143 | 2 | 1,500 | Weekly |
| Moz Pro Large | $299 | $239 | 3 | 3,000 | Weekly |
| Semrush SEO | $139 | $117.33 | 1 | 500 | Daily |
| Semrush Starter | $199 | $165.17 | 1 | 500 | Daily |
| Semrush Pro+ | $299 | $248.17 | 1 | 1,500 | Daily |
| Semrush Advanced | $549 | $455.67 | 1 | 5,000 | Daily |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | about $108 | 1 | 750 | Weekly |
| Ahrefs Standard | $249 | about $208 | 1 | 2,000 | Weekly |
| Ahrefs Advanced | $449 | about $374 | 1 | 5,000 | Weekly |
Moz annual billing is a flat 20 percent off, quoted on the vendor page as $950, $1,719 and $2,868 billed for your first year. Semrush annual works out near 15 percent. Ahrefs advertises up to 17 percent and will not switch you to annual self serve, you have to email support. Moz Pro Enterprise and Semrush Enterprise publish no figure, so we quote none. Tier by tier breakdowns live on Semrush pricing and Ahrefs pricing.
Two plans that sit outside the grid
Both Moz and Ahrefs sell a cheap entry plan that is easy to mistake for the real thing. Moz lists an entry level plan at $49 a month, described on its own pricing page as designed specifically for individuals managing a single website, and it is not part of the Standard, Medium and Large comparison. Ahrefs sells a $29 Starter plan that does not include Rank Tracker at all. The cheapest Ahrefs plan that tracks positions is Lite at $129.
Two of these three trackers update weekly, not daily.
This is the single most important line in the comparison and it is the one the roundups handle worst. We checked all three vendors' own documentation rather than trusting a review article, because the review articles disagree with each other and with the vendors.
Moz Pro
Weekly
Moz's own help documentation on Rankings states that with weekly updates you can see how your site is performing over time, and elsewhere refers to results arriving after your weekly Campaign update. The pricing comparison table offers no daily option on any of the three plans.
Ahrefs
Weekly
The Ahrefs pricing comparison table lists Rank Tracker update frequency as Weekly, Weekly, Weekly and Weekly across all four plans, including the $1,499 Enterprise tier. Daily positions require the separately billed Project Boost add on.
Semrush
Daily
Position Tracking runs daily on all four published plans. The interface strings on the pricing page still describe the allowance verbatim as keywords to track daily, which is the clearest confirmation the vendor gives.
Why this matters in practice: a weekly tracker gives you roughly 4.3 data points per keyword per month against about 30 from a daily one. If a page drops on a Tuesday and your tracker refreshes on Sundays, you can lose most of a week before the chart moves. For a content site checking a stable set of head terms, weekly is genuinely fine and you should not pay for more. For anyone running active tests, watching a migration, or reporting to a client who asks what happened this week, weekly is the wrong instrument. That trade off is unpacked in weekly vs daily rank tracking.
The phrase tracked keyword means something different at each of the three.
Comparison tables line up 300 against 500 against 750 as though those are the same unit. They are not, and Moz is the interesting case. Its pricing FAQ defines a Campaign in these words: a campaign is a process to track a site or URL plus three competitor websites, and Moz collects data on these websites across up to four search engines per tracked keyword.
Read that carefully, because it runs in the opposite direction to how most tools count. At Moz, one tracked keyword can cover several engines at once. At SE Ranking, by contrast, the vendor's own tooltip counts a keyword on each engine as a separate target, so watching two engines halves your phrase count. Semrush sits in between: a campaign is tied to one engine, device and location, so a second combination consumes a second slice of your allowance.
| Tool | One tracked keyword covers | Effect on your real capacity |
|---|---|---|
| Moz Pro | One phrase across up to four search engines | Multi engine tracking costs you nothing extra in keyword slots |
| Semrush | One phrase on one engine, device and location | A second device or location consumes another slot |
| Ahrefs | One phrase per project, refreshed weekly | Locations and devices are configured per project |
| Serpstracker | One phrase per location and device, checked daily | A second location consumes another slot |
The practical upshot: if you genuinely need Google plus Bing plus a second country, Moz's 300 keywords stretch considerably further than the raw number suggests, and the gap against Semrush's 500 narrows or closes. If you only watch Google in one market, which is most United States buyers, 300 is simply 300 and it is the smallest allowance in this comparison.
Price per keyword flatters the weekly trackers. Price per check does not.
Almost every comparison divides the monthly price by the keyword allowance and stops there. That measure quietly assumes all three tools check at the same rate, and they do not. The second column below is the usual figure. The third divides by the number of ranking checks the plan actually performs in a month, counting 30 for a daily tracker and 4.3 for a weekly one.
| Plan | Per tracked keyword | Per ranking check | Checks per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moz Pro Standard | $0.330 | $0.077 | 1,290 |
| Moz Pro Medium | $0.119 | $0.028 | 6,450 |
| Moz Pro Large | $0.100 | $0.023 | 12,900 |
| Ahrefs Lite | $0.172 | $0.040 | 3,225 |
| Ahrefs Standard | $0.125 | $0.029 | 8,600 |
| Ahrefs Advanced | $0.090 | $0.021 | 21,500 |
| Semrush SEO | $0.278 | $0.009 | 15,000 |
| Semrush Pro+ | $0.199 | $0.007 | 45,000 |
| Semrush Advanced | $0.110 | $0.004 | 150,000 |
| Serpstracker Starter | $0.156 | $0.005 | 7,500 |
| Serpstracker Growth | $0.066 | $0.002 | 45,000 |
| Serpstracker Agency | $0.050 | $0.002 | 150,000 |
The reversal is the point. On the per keyword measure Moz Large at $0.100 beats Semrush Advanced at $0.110, and a buyer reading that column alone concludes Moz is the better deal. On the per check measure Semrush Advanced costs $0.004 against $0.023 for Moz Large, about six times less, because it is doing roughly seven times the work.
One honest caveat on our own arithmetic. Because Moz can cover up to four search engines within a single tracked keyword, a team that genuinely tracks four engines would get up to four times the checks we credited it with, which would bring Moz Large to roughly $0.006 per check and put it within reach of the daily tools. Almost nobody tracks four engines. If you do, adjust the Moz row accordingly. The full field is priced on rank tracker cost comparison.
The line items that move the real monthly figure.
List price is rarely the price you pay. Seats and reporting are where each of these three quietly adds to the bill, and one of the gaps below catches agencies out regularly.
Moz Pro
- Extra user seats are $49 a month per seat on any plan level, so a two person team on Standard pays $148 rather than $99.
- Branded reports and report templates are not available on the Standard plan. They appear only on Medium and Large, which makes $179 the real entry point for anyone sending client facing reports.
- Site re-crawls are also absent on Standard, listed as 10 on Medium and 25 on Large.
- Extra AI visibility dashboards are $20 each and extra tracked prompts are $50 per 100 prompts.
Semrush
- One user is included on every published plan and additional seats are billed separately.
- The website cap matters more than most buyers expect: 5, 5, 15 and 40 sites across the four plans.
- The SEO and Starter plans share an identical 500 keyword ceiling, so the $60 step from $139 to $199 buys research and AI tooling rather than tracking capacity.
Ahrefs
- One user is included on Lite, Standard and Advanced. Extra seats run about $40, $60 and $80 per user per month, capped at 2, 5 and 10.
- Daily rankings are not a plan feature. Project Boost is priced at about $20 per project per month for Pro and about $200 for Max, though Ahrefs does not document which tier turns on daily positions.
- Report Builder is roughly $99 a month on top, and standalone Brand Radar starts around $199.
- The Ahrefs FAQ states plainly that the company never runs discounts, and there is no free trial on paid plans.
The Moz branded reporting gap is worth repeating because it is the one that costs real money unexpectedly. If you are buying Moz Pro specifically to send white labeled reports to clients, the $99 plan will not do it and you are actually shopping at $179. What white labeling means at each vendor, and what it does not mean, is set out on white label rank tracker.
Each of the three is the right answer to a different question.
Moz Pro wins on
Approachability and local. Moz is the easiest of the three to hand to someone who does not do SEO full time, Domain Authority remains the benchmark number clients recognize, and local rank tracking across multiple locations is genuinely strong. At $99 it is also the cheapest way into a real SEO platform. Up to four search engines per tracked keyword is a quiet advantage nobody advertises.
Semrush wins on
Breadth and cadence. It is the only one of the three that checks positions daily, it carries the deepest United States keyword database, and one subscription covers advertising, content, social and PR alongside SEO. If you want a single tool for a whole marketing team, this is it. It also offers a free trial, which Ahrefs does not.
Ahrefs wins on
Link data, by a distance. The backlink index is the best in the industry and its own help center describes fresh data arriving every 15 to 30 minutes. If backlinks drive your work, nothing here replaces it. Rank tracking is the weakest part of the package relative to its price.
None of that is a knock on any of them. All three are mature products doing more than rank tracking, and you are paying for the whole platform. The question worth asking is whether the ranking module inside the platform is the one you actually need, which is what do you need a rank tracker with Semrush or Ahrefs works through.
A straight recommendation by situation.
| If you are | Buy | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A small business owner doing your own SEO | Moz Pro Standard, $99 | Cheapest real platform, easiest to learn, and 300 keywords is enough for one site. |
| A local business with several locations | Moz Pro Medium, $179 | Local tracking is Moz's strongest ranking feature and Medium unlocks branded reports. |
| An in house marketer covering more than SEO | Semrush SEO, $139 | Daily positions plus advertising, content and social in one subscription. |
| An SEO running active tests or a migration | Semrush Pro+, $299 | Daily cadence at 1,500 keywords is the only way to see what a change did this week. |
| A link builder or technical SEO consultant | Ahrefs Lite or Standard | You are buying the backlink index. Treat the weekly rank tracker as a bonus. |
| An agency reporting to clients weekly | Semrush Advanced or a dedicated tracker | Moz Standard cannot send branded reports and Ahrefs will not check daily without an add on. |
| Someone who only needs positions | A dedicated rank tracker | You are not using four fifths of any of these platforms. |
We are not a fourth suite, and we should not be on your list if you want one.
Serpstracker does one job. It checks Google positions daily per location and device, stores the organic top 10 behind every check so you can see who moved above you, and alerts you the same day a tracked keyword drops. Starter is $39 a month for 250 keywords, Growth is $99 for 1,500 and Agency is $249 for 5,000. Everything is daily on every plan.
The honest comparison: Moz Pro Medium and Serpstracker Growth both cost around $99 to $179 and both give you 1,500 keywords, but ours are checked daily and theirs weekly. That is the whole of our advantage on that pairing, and if weekly is sufficient for your work then Moz gives you a keyword research tool, a site crawler, Domain Authority and AI visibility dashboards for the money, and we do not.
What we do not do, stated plainly so you can rule us out quickly: no backlink index, so Ahrefs is not replaceable by us. No keyword research database, no site audit crawler, no advertising or content tooling, so Semrush is not replaceable by us either. We store the organic top 10 rather than the full top 100, and we compute no share of voice or visibility score.
Most teams who switch to us keep a suite and drop down a tier on it, because the tier they were paying for was bought to lift a keyword ceiling rather than to use the extra tooling. That specific move is costed out in Serpstracker vs Moz and Moz alternatives. Moz also splits ranking work across two separate tools, an on demand Rank Checker metered at 200 checks a day and the weekly Campaign tracker, which is unpicked in the SEOmoz rank checker.
Questions people ask before they pick one.
Is Moz better than Semrush?
For rank tracking, no. Semrush checks positions daily on all four plans where Moz checks weekly, and Semrush SEO tracks 500 keywords for $139 against 300 for $99 at Moz. Moz is better on price of entry, ease of use for non specialists, and local tracking across multiple locations.
How much is Moz Pro?
Moz Pro Standard is $99 a month, Medium is $179 and Large is $299, read off moz.com on August 22, 2026. Annual billing takes 20 percent off, giving $79, $143 and $239 a month. A separate entry level plan for individuals managing one website is listed at $49.
Moz Pro vs Semrush: which is better for rank tracking?
Semrush, mainly on cadence. Its Position Tracking updates daily on every published plan while Moz Rankings updates weekly, which is roughly 30 data points a month against 4.3. Moz counters with up to four search engines per tracked keyword, so multi engine tracking does not consume extra slots.
Does Moz update rankings daily?
No. Moz Pro updates tracked keyword rankings weekly. The company's own Rankings help documentation describes weekly updates and refers to data arriving after your weekly Campaign update, and the pricing comparison table lists no daily option on Standard, Medium or Large.
How many keywords can you track with Moz Pro?
Standard tracks 300, Medium 1,500 and Large 3,000. Those counts go further than they look, because Moz collects data across up to four search engines per tracked keyword. Campaigns, which pair your site with three competitors, are limited to 3, 10 and 25 across the three plans.
Moz Pro vs Semrush pricing: which is cheaper?
Moz, at every comparable tier. Standard is $99 against $139 for Semrush SEO, and $79 against $117.33 annually. Per tracked keyword the picture inverts at the entry tier: $0.330 on Moz Standard against $0.278 on Semrush SEO, because Moz gives you 200 fewer keywords for the lower price.
Moz or Semrush for a small business?
Moz, in most cases. At $99 it is the cheapest genuine SEO platform of the three, the interface assumes less prior knowledge, and 300 keywords covers a single site comfortably. Choose Semrush instead if you also run ads or publish heavily, since that tooling is included rather than bought separately.
What are the pros and cons of Moz Pro vs Semrush?
Moz is cheaper, simpler and stronger on local, but tracks fewer keywords, refreshes weekly, and withholds branded reports from the $99 plan. Semrush tracks daily, holds a deeper keyword database and covers far more marketing ground, but costs more at every tier and caps the number of websites per plan.
Moz vs Semrush vs Ahrefs: which has the best rank tracker?
Semrush, because it is the only one of the three that checks daily as standard. Ahrefs lists Rank Tracker as weekly on all four plans including the $1,499 Enterprise tier, and Moz is weekly on all three. If ranking data is the reason you are buying, this is the deciding line.
Does Moz Pro include branded reports?
Only on Medium and Large. The Moz pricing comparison table marks branded reports and report templates as unavailable on Standard. If client facing reporting is why you are buying Moz Pro, your real starting price is $179 a month rather than $99.
Can you track Bing rankings in Moz, Semrush or Ahrefs?
Moz handles this best of the three, since it collects data across up to four search engines per tracked keyword rather than charging you a second slot. Semrush ties a campaign to one engine, device and location, so a second engine consumes more of your allowance. Check current engine coverage with each vendor before buying.
Why does Moz and Semrush pricing look different on other sites?
Because most comparison articles are stale. Several still quote Moz Pro Large at $359 when the vendor page reads $299, and many still sell the retired Semrush Pro, Guru and Business ladder that no longer appears on semrush.com. Both vendors also run promotions that change the headline figure.
The narrower buying questions are answered in is Moz worth it for rank tracking, is Semrush worth it and is Ahrefs worth it for rank tracking.
Price the rest of the field.
Ahrefs vs Semrush
The two way head to head, weekly against daily.
SE Ranking vs Semrush
The counting rule that changes the verdict.
Moz alternatives
What replaces Moz Pro, module by module.
Semrush pricing
Where two plans share one keyword ceiling.
Ahrefs pricing
Why the $29 plan does not track rankings.
Serpstracker vs Moz
How a dedicated tracker compares to the platform.
Rank tracker cost comparison
Cost per tracked keyword across eleven tools.
Best rank tracker
The full roundup of the category.
Serpstracker pricing
Our three plans and what each keyword ceiling costs.
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