SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO suite with rank tracking, keyword and backlink research, site audits and AI search tracking. In the US, its Core plan is $129 a month, or $103.20 a month if you pay for a year.
That is a fair price for what it does. The question is whether you need what it does. Core is sized for 10 projects and 2,000 keywords checked every single day. If you run one or two sites and mostly want to know what to write next, you are paying for a monitoring platform you open once a week.
This guide ranks eight alternatives on price and on how their limits fit that work. The pick is ContextBolt SEO, which is ours, so weigh the bias. It runs keyword, competitor, backlink, audit and AI visibility research inside Claude, Cursor or Codex. Every result saves to your SEO Dashboard, and it costs $35 a month after a 7-day free trial.
- ContextBolt SEO is the pick. Research inside Claude, Cursor or Codex, saved to your SEO Dashboard. It is $35 a month for 1,000 credits after a 7-day free trial, against $129 for SE Ranking Core.
- Mangools is the friendliest cheap suite, at $37.70 a month billed yearly, with MCP included.
- Serpstat and Moz Pro are the mid-price suites, from $50 a month billed yearly and $49 a month.
- Ubersuggest starts at $29 a month, sized for one site.
- Ahrefs and Semrush are the bigger suites. Google Search Console is free for your own site.
What $129 buys on SE Ranking
SE Ranking’s pricing page shows three plans. Core is $129 a month, or $103.20 a month billed annually. Growth is $279, or $223.20 billed annually. Enterprise is a sales call. Both self-serve plans come with a 14-day free trial and no card.
Here is what Core includes, straight off the plan card:
- Projects: 10, with one manager seat.
- Daily tracking: 2,000 keywords and 100 AI prompts.
- Site audit: 250,000 pages a month.
- Research: keyword, competitor and backlink research, listed as unlimited.
- API: 25,000 API credits a month, with MCP access.
Then the add-ons. The AI Search toolkit is $89 a month on monthly billing, or $71.20 billed annually, for 200 prompts. The Agency Pack for white-label reports is $69 a month, annual billing only.
One warning before you compare anything. SE Ranking prices by region. The US page reads $129. The same page served to a UK browser on the same day reads £95. So check the number your own browser shows.
The MCP connection is real and included, but every call your agent makes spends those 25,000 API credits. How fast depends on the endpoint, and the SE Ranking MCP pricing guide works through that arithmetic.
So most people do not leave SE Ranking because it is bad. They leave because 10 projects and 2,000 daily keywords is a lot of monitoring to pay for when the actual job is deciding what one page should say.
SE Ranking alternatives compared at a glance
| Tool | Best for | Starting price | How limits work | Where you use it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. ContextBolt SEO | Research in your agent, saved to your SEO Dashboard | $35/mo, 7-day trial | 1,000 credits, any domain, any job | Claude, Cursor, Codex |
| 2. Mangools | A friendly suite on a small budget | $37.70/mo billed yearly | Daily request caps per tool | Web app, MCP and API |
| 3. Serpstat | A full suite for less | $50/mo billed yearly | Searches per day, by plan | Web app, MCP from Team |
| 4. Moz Pro | A familiar suite with AI prompt tracking | Starter $49, Standard $99/mo | Keyword queries per month | Web app |
| 5. Ubersuggest | A $29 plan for one site | From $29/mo | Projects, reports per day, credits | Web app and MCP |
| 6. Ahrefs | Backlink specialists | Starter $29, Lite $129/mo | By plan | Web app, MCP from Lite |
| 7. Semrush | The biggest suite, PPC included | From $139/mo | By plan | Web app, MCP from Starter |
| 8. Google Search Console | Your own site’s real data | Free | Sites you own only | Google’s web app |
Prices were read from each vendor’s own pricing page on October 22, 2026, in the US view.
1. ContextBolt SEO: the research inside your agent
Best for: founders, marketers and small teams who do their own SEO and already work in Claude, Cursor or Codex.
ContextBolt SEO is an SEO toolkit that lives inside your AI agent. You connect it once, then ask in plain English. What does this keyword look like. Who ranks for it. Which sites link to my rivals and not to me. Audit this section and tell me what to fix first.
It covers five jobs on one plan. Research (keywords, the live top ten, competitor domains). Audit and fix (a scored fix list for a site’s pages). Authority (backlink overview, referring domains and a gap finder). AI visibility (what AI answers say about you, and who they cite). Your real data (Google Search Console, connected free, with daily snapshots).
The research library in the SEO Dashboard. Every lookup your agent runs lands here, dated, and filters by type, date and website.
The SE Ranking comparison that matters is where the work happens. There is no project to set up before you can ask a question. You open the agent you were already writing in, ask what a page ranks for and what the pages above it cover, and then ask the same conversation to draft the change.
Credits are simple. You get 1,000 a month and spend them on whichever domain and whichever job the week needs. A keyword lookup costs one credit. A backlink check costs three. A site audit costs one credit per page, up to 50 a run. Your own Search Console never spends credits.
AI visibility is in the $35, not an add-on. Ask a real buying question and ContextBolt runs it through ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity live, then returns the answer and the sources it cited, for two credits. For the long view, it counts twelve months of mentions across ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers.
The data comes from DataForSEO’s keyword and link index. Like SE Ranking’s numbers, they are estimates, decision-useful and directionally right. Your connected Search Console sits beside them with Google’s own figures.
Verdict: the pick. It is $94 a month less than SE Ranking Core, the AI answer checks are included, and the research lands in the conversation that writes the page. Start with the 7-day free trial, 100 credits, card required.
I like your product because it doesn’t feel like a whole new system I need to learn. I just added the MCP to my Claude config for the local website repo and started asking questions.
Matthias, Founder, Ordicall
ContextBolt SEO vs SE Ranking, side by side.
| ContextBolt SEO | SE Ranking | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $35/mo, no annual plan | Core $129/mo, or $103.20 billed yearly |
| Getting started | Connect your agent and ask | Set up a project first |
| Live AI answer checks | Included, four AI engines | 100 prompts on Core, add-on from $89/mo |
| Daily rank tracking | On demand, plus daily Search Console snapshots | 2,000 keywords daily on Core |
| Site audits | Up to 50 pages a run | 250,000 pages a month on Core |
What you gain is $94 a month and research that lands where you write. What you give up is daily tracking of thousands of keywords and big scheduled crawls. The full ContextBolt SEO vs SE Ranking comparison goes row by row.
2. Mangools: the friendly suite on a small budget
Best for: bloggers and solo marketers who like browsing keyword tables and want a cheaper bill.
Mangools bundles KWFinder, SERPChecker, SERPWatcher, LinkMiner and SiteProfiler. Basic is $37.70 a month billed yearly, which is $452.40 up front. The page lists API and MCP access on every plan, plus its AI Search Watcher with 500 monitored prompts.
The limits are per tool and per day. Basic allows 100 keyword searches and 100 SERP checks every 24 hours, and tracks 200 keywords with weekly updates.
Verdict: about a third of SE Ranking’s price when both bill yearly, and nicer to click around. The trade is weekly tracking and daily request caps. ContextBolt covers keywords, audits, backlinks and live AI answer checks from one balance at $35, with no yearly payment.
3. Serpstat: a full suite for less
Best for: small agencies that want an all-in-one suite without SE Ranking’s bill.
Serpstat covers keyword research, rank tracking, site audits and backlinks in one web app. Individual is $50 a month billed yearly, with 5 projects, 100 searches a day and 10,000 position checks. Team is $100 a month billed yearly, and that is where API access, its Claude and ChatGPT MCP integration and 1,500 AI visibility checks come in.
Verdict: the closest like-for-like suite at a lower price. Its agent access starts at $100 a month on a yearly plan. ContextBolt’s starts at $35 a month, and the SEO Dashboard comes with it.
4. Moz Pro: the familiar name, smaller quotas
Best for: teams that want Domain Authority and a well-known brand in client reports.
Moz Pro Standard is $99 a month, or $79 a month billed yearly. It includes 3 tracked sites, 300 tracked keywords and 150 prompts tracked weekly across GPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode. Read the research line closely, though. Standard allows 150 keyword queries a month. Medium lifts that to 5,000, at $179 a month. A $49 Starter plan covers a single website.
Verdict: cheaper than SE Ranking at Standard, but 150 keyword queries is a tight month of research. The best Moz alternatives guide covers that trade in detail.
5. Ubersuggest: $29 for one site
Best for: one-site owners who want one of the cheapest paid plans in the category.
Ubersuggest publishes a US price range of $29 to $99 a month. The entry plan covers one project, 150 reports a day, 250 monthly credits, 125 tracked keywords updated weekly and 10 AI prompts per brand refreshed monthly. It also has an MCP server with an official Claude connector, and it sells lifetime plans.
Verdict: tied with Ahrefs Starter for the lowest price here, for one site. If you need a second project or AI answers checked this week, not next month, read the best Ubersuggest alternatives guide, where ContextBolt is the pick for the same reasons.
6. Ahrefs: the backlink specialist
Best for: people whose SEO is mostly about links.
Ahrefs built its name on backlinks, and its Domain Rating is the authority score many clients recognize. Starter is $29 a month. Lite, the first plan with API and MCP access, is $129, the same as SE Ranking Core. Standard is $249. Its Brand Radar AI starts at $199 a month on top.
Verdict: a sideways move on price, not a cheaper one. If you mostly want to know which sites link to your rivals and not to you, ContextBolt’s backlink gap answers that inside your agent for $35.
7. Semrush: the bigger suite
Best for: teams that want SEO, PPC and content tools in one app and have the budget.
Semrush is the largest suite here. The Semrush entry plan, called SEO, is $139 a month or $117.33 billed yearly, with 5 websites and 500 keywords tracked daily. MCP access is listed from Starter, at $199 a month or $165.17 billed yearly.
Verdict: an upgrade from SE Ranking, not an alternative to its price. Its agent access starts at $199, and ContextBolt’s starts at $35.
8. Google Search Console: your real numbers, free
Best for: everyone, alongside one research tool.
Google Search Console is Google’s own report on your site. Real clicks, impressions, average position, the queries behind them, and which pages are indexed. Every paid tool above estimates. This one does not.
It only covers sites you own, so it cannot show you a competitor, a keyword you do not rank for yet, or who links to a rival.
Verdict: free and essential. Connect it to ContextBolt SEO at no credit cost and your real numbers sit in the same chat as the estimates. The Search Console connection guide takes two minutes.
Where SE Ranking still fits
SE Ranking is still the right buy for one reader. If you manage several client sites and your contracts promise daily rank reports, white-label PDFs and big recurring crawls on a fixed timetable, Core and its Agency Pack do exactly that.
That is a reporting job. Most people searching for an SE Ranking alternative are doing the other job, which is working out what a page should say and then writing it. ContextBolt checks when you ask, keeps daily Search Console snapshots of your own site and audits the 50 pages you are changing, inside the conversation that writes the change. If reporting is contractual, run both. If it is not, start with ContextBolt.
How to switch off SE Ranking without losing anything
- Start the ContextBolt trial first, before you cancel anything. Seven days and 100 credits, card required, and it becomes $35 a month unless you cancel.
- Export your tracked keywords and competitor lists from SE Ranking while you still have access.
- Connect Google Search Console to ContextBolt. It is free, never spends credits, and gives you the real positions the tracker was estimating.
- Paste your top keywords into the agent and ask for volume, difficulty and the live top ten. The results save to your SEO Dashboard, so the list is rebuilt in one session.
- Audit the pages you plan to change this month, not the whole site.
The keyword research with Claude guide walks through step 4 in full, from seed terms to a ranked content plan. Cancel SE Ranking once a week of work has run without opening it.
Copy this prompt
Here are the 20 keywords I was tracking in
SE Ranking. For each one, give me monthly volume,
difficulty and who ranks in the top three right now.
Then tell me which five my site could realistically
rank for this quarter, and why.How to choose an SE Ranking alternative
Pick the line that sounds like you.
- You do your own SEO and work in an AI agent: ContextBolt SEO, $35 a month, 7-day free trial.
- You want a friendly table-based suite for less: Mangools.
- You want a full suite on a mid-size budget: Serpstat.
- Your clients know Moz and Domain Authority: Moz Pro.
- You run one site and want a $29 plan: Ubersuggest.
- Links are the whole job: Ahrefs.
- You want every tool in one app and have the budget: Semrush.
- You want your real Google numbers: Google Search Console, free, next to whichever tool you pick.
The strongest cheap setup is two tools, not one. Search Console for the truth about your own site, and one research tool for everything outside it. With ContextBolt SEO both land in the same chat and the same SEO Dashboard. For how credits, seats and yearly bills compare across the whole category, read the SEO tool pricing guide.
