SE Ranking vs Ahrefs Pricing Compared Plan by Plan
Published October 7, 2026 by the Rankable team
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SE Ranking and Ahrefs start at the same price: SE Ranking Core and Ahrefs Lite are both $129 a month. At that price SE Ranking tracks 2,000 keywords daily against Ahrefs' 750, gives you 10 projects to Ahrefs' 5 unverified ones, and offers a 14-day free trial. Ahrefs gives you the bigger link and keyword index and API access on every paid plan from Lite. For a team of three, SE Ranking Growth at $279 undercuts Ahrefs Standard plus seats at $369.
Most pages comparing the two still quote ladders that are gone: an SE Ranking "Essential" plan, an Ahrefs Lite at $99. The figures below were read today from both vendors' pricing pages from a US connection. The math in the tables is ours.
SE Ranking vs Ahrefs pricing at a glance
| Plan | Monthly | Billed yearly | What decides it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs Starter | $29 | Monthly only | Entry research plan, no API access |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | $1,290 a year ($107.50 a month) | 750 tracked keywords, 1,000 API credits per user |
| SE Ranking Core | $129 | $1,238.40 a year ($103.20 a month) | 2,000 keywords daily, 10 projects, 25 articles |
| Ahrefs Standard | $249 | $2,490 a year ($207.50 a month) | 2,000 keywords, 2 years of history, unlimited API credits |
| SE Ranking Growth | $279 | $2,678.40 a year ($223.20 a month) | 5,000 keywords, 30 projects, 3 seats included |
| Ahrefs Advanced | $449 | $4,490 a year ($374.17 a month) | 5,000 keywords, 5 years of history |
| Ahrefs Enterprise | $1,499 | Annual commitment | Uncapped API, SSO, audit log |
| SE Ranking Enterprise | Quoted | Quoted | Talk to sales |
SE Ranking takes 20 percent off for yearly billing. Ahrefs says "save up to 17%", which on its own figures is twelve months for the price of ten, and states plainly that it never runs discounts. So the yearly gap at entry level is small: $103.20 a month for SE Ranking Core against $107.50 for Ahrefs Lite.
Is SE Ranking cheaper than Ahrefs?
At the entry price, no: both cost $129 a month, and SE Ranking is only a few dollars cheaper billed yearly. It becomes cheaper as soon as you add people or keywords. Three users cost $279 on SE Ranking Growth and $369 on Ahrefs Standard, and 5,000 daily keywords cost $279 on SE Ranking against $449 on Ahrefs Advanced.
The 5,000-keyword case is where the difference is largest. An agency or in-house team tracking that many terms pays $170 a month more on Ahrefs, or $2,040 a year, and the Ahrefs plan updates those keywords weekly where SE Ranking checks them daily. What the Ahrefs money buys instead is five years of historical data, a larger crawl allowance and unlimited API credits per user.
SE Ranking vs Ahrefs for a team of three
Seats are where the two pricing models split. Every Ahrefs plan includes one user. Lite lets you add two more at $40 each, Standard five more at $60 and Advanced ten more at $80. SE Ranking Core includes one manager seat with extra seats from $16, and Growth includes three.
| Three people on | Monthly cost | Keywords tracked |
|---|---|---|
| SE Ranking Core plus 2 seats | From $161 | 2,000 daily |
| Ahrefs Lite plus 2 users | $209 | 750 |
| SE Ranking Growth | $279 | 5,000 daily |
| Ahrefs Standard plus 2 users | $369 | 2,000 |
Lite is capped at three users in total, so a team that expects to grow past that is really choosing between Ahrefs Standard and SE Ranking Growth. Our guide to choosing an Ahrefs plan covers the Lite versus Standard decision in more detail.
SE Ranking vs Ahrefs for agencies
For an agency the deciding line is not the plan price. It is client reporting and project limits. SE Ranking sells an Agency Pack for $69 a month, billed annually only, which adds white-label reporting, client seats and a listing in its agency catalog. Growth already covers 30 projects. On Ahrefs, projects for sites you verify ownership of are not capped on any plan, so a freelancer on Lite can run every verified client site; the 5, 20 and 50 project limits apply to sites you cannot verify.
That makes Ahrefs Lite a reasonable agency tool if the agency controls its clients' Search Console access, and SE Ranking Growth plus the Agency Pack the cheaper route to branded client reports. Agencies that live inside the backlink data usually stay on Ahrefs anyway, because that index is what they are paying for.
Which is cheaper for AI search visibility tracking?
SE Ranking. Both now track how a brand appears in AI answers, but they price it differently. Ahrefs Lite includes 5 tracked AI prompts, and the full Brand Radar AI product starts at $199 a month on top, so Lite plus Brand Radar is $328. SE Ranking Core includes 100 prompts a day across five AI engines, and its AI Search add-on is $89 a month, or $71.20 billed yearly, so Core plus AI Search is $218.
Does SE Ranking or Ahrefs include an API?
Both do, from the entry paid plan. Ahrefs lists API and MCP access on Lite with 1,000 credits per user and unlimited credits on Standard and Advanced; Starter at $29 does not carry it. SE Ranking Core includes 25,000 Research API credits a month plus MCP, Growth 100,000, an API add-on is $45 a month billed annually, and a standalone data API plan starts higher. Our SEO API pricing page lays the whole category out side by side.
Free trials and refunds
SE Ranking runs a 14-day free trial with no card on Core and Growth. Ahrefs has no trial of its paid plans; it offers a free Ahrefs plan with data on the sites you own and the $29 Starter plan as the low-cost way in. If you want to compare the two on your own keywords before paying, SE Ranking is the only one of the two that lets you do it free. For the full SE Ranking ladder with its add-ons, see SE Ranking pricing.
Which should you buy?
- Buy SE Ranking if rank tracking is the daily job, if more than one person needs a login, if you track thousands of keywords, or if you want white-label client reports.
- Buy Ahrefs if backlink research and competitive link data are the job, if you need long history, or if your developers want unlimited API credits on a mid-tier plan.
- Start with Ahrefs Starter at $29 only if you need occasional keyword and competitor lookups and no tracking.
What neither plan does for you
SE Ranking and Ahrefs are both measurement tools. They find the broken title, the orphaned page and the keyword you are close to ranking for, and then someone on your team has to make the change on the site. That is where most small teams stall: the audit reports stack up and nothing ships. Neither will tell you, either, when the site itself is down at night; that is a job for monitoring that checks your site and pages you when it stops responding, not for an SEO crawler that runs on a schedule.
Rankable covers the execution side. For $99 a month it audits one site against 147 checks, applies up to 60 fixes a month (titles, meta descriptions, internal links, schema, robots.txt and the sitemap) into WordPress or a file-served site over SFTP, and publishes 4 researched articles. It does not track rankings and does not run a backlink index, so it does not replace either tool. Paired with SE Ranking Core or Ahrefs Lite, the stack is $228 a month: one tool finds the work and the agent does it. You can see what it would change with a free site audit, and compare the wider market on our SEO software prices page.
The short version
At $129 SE Ranking Core and Ahrefs Lite cost the same, and SE Ranking gives you more tracking, more projects and a free trial. SE Ranking gets cheaper with every user and keyword you add: $279 against $369 for three people, $279 against $449 for 5,000 keywords. Ahrefs is the one to pay for when the backlink index, long history or API depth is the reason you are buying. We ran the same exercise for the other common pairing in SE Ranking vs Semrush pricing.