5 Best KeywordSpy Alternatives & Competitors (Reviewed)

Finding the best KeywordSpy alternative isn’t difficult.

Let me explain…

First, there are a lot of exceptional tools in the market and KeywordSpy is definitely not the best SEO tool.

For Keyword research, competitive research, and analysis.

On the other hand, SEO tools are one of the essential tools you need to grow your audience base online and your revenue, so you need the best tool.

And finding the best tool alongside their features, pros, and cons can be best done via content like this.

To your best interest, I have curated and compared 5 best KeywordSpy alternatives with an in-depth look at their:

• Keyword research accuracy
• Backlink analysis
• SEO audits
• PPC ads
• Competitors research

And other essential SEO analysis alongside their pros and cons.

But before we dive into the main post, lets see why you should consider a KeywordSpy alternative.

Why Consider a KeywordSpy Alternative?

There are basically enough reasons to consider an alternative depending on what you aim to achieve.

To start with, KeywordSpy is basically a single solution tool that offers keyword research for SEO and PPC ads and nothing more.

In essence, there’s no backlink research, site auditing, and other essential SEO analysis.

Aside from the fact that KeywordSpy doesn’t provide keyword research for all countries. Their keyword research is targeted at some chosen audience which includes the USA, UK, and 30 other countries.

Pretty limited.

So if your target audience is basically first world countries, then it could be an option.

And to add to that, the KeywordSpy start price is quite expensive for the few services they offer. Their pricing starts from $89 per month.

However, they also have some wins too.

Like their PPC affiliate helps you know the tools other affiliates are promoting in your niche alongside their target keyword.

But if you’re looking for something more robust, think of an all-in-one solution tool, or you’re in need of a cheaper tool, then you need an alternative.

5 Best KeywordSpy Alternatives For SEOs

Below are my best five best KeywordSpy Alternatives:

#1. SemRush (Best KeywordSpy Alternative)

SemRush is by far the best KeywordSpy Alternative and one of the best SEO tools you can find. It’s my first and best pick (followed by Ahrefs). 

Founded in 2008, SemRush has constantly added more features to its tool-making them an all-in-one SEO solution.

And definitely, they’re much younger when compared to KeywordSpy in age.

But it goes without saying that, the oldest doesn’t mean the best. And that’s the case here.

Although SemRush was a latecomer to the industry, their tool is one of the most comprehensive SEO tools that includes far more than just keyword research. 

SemRush SEO tool includes keyword research, backlink research, competitors research, site auditing, PPC ads, and much other SEO analysis you can think of; a well-packed tool. 

Features of SemRush

Here are the main and best features offered by SemRush:

• Keyword Research

SemRush offers in-depth keyword research that gives enough details on the keyword alongside similar keywords and their keyword difficulty.

The key metrics that SemRush keyword overview displays are volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, competition in paid search, top-ranking pages, ad copy, similar keywords, questions asked, and many other metrics and data.

Where SemRush excels is their geolocation tool that allows you to carry out keyword research targeting a particular location (country).

• Organic Research

The organic research tool is somehow similar to the keyword research but wider.

The keyword research tool helps you have a look at the in-depth details of a keyword while the organic research provides different keywords in your niche with some details along.

Right from the organic research tool interface, you can explore your competitor keywords to know their top ranking keywords that drive traffic to their site alongside the difficulty of the keywords.

It’s a tool that helps you steal keywords from your competitors.

• Backlink Research

Aside from keyword research, another essential SEO analysis is backlinks research.

While this is a pain in the neck for SEOs, SemRush offers this as a service to help you research backlink opportunities your competitors acquired and also track your website’s backlinks.

Semrush’s backlink research is in-depth enough to offer filters to narrow your research.

The filter allows you to narrow based on the backlinks types, link attributes, backlink TLDs, and geolocation of the links; to show you how detailed enough their backlink research tool is.  

Their backlink attributes are; follow, nofollow, sponsored, and UGC (user-generated content like forums).

Right from the dashboard, you can filter links based on their attributes. 

• SEO Audit

SemRush SEO audit tool is another feature that is worth the mention here too. As a content marketer or SEO specialist, you definitely know how important an audit is before working on a site.

The SEO audit tool offered by SemRush eases the work by carrying out a detailed audit providing a neat and easy to understand report for you.

The SEO audit report includes broken links, duplicate content, canonical pages, 404 pages, redirects, site speed, and other checks.

The report places urgency on errors that might be destroying your rankings and gives a warning on some errors that need to be corrected.

• Advertising Research

As expected of an all-in-one solution tool, SemRush offers in-depth advertising research that allows you to uncover your competitor’s search ads, discover new PPC rivals, see examples of live ads and ads history of your competitors.

Plus, their advertising research tool allows you to target an international audience and also view keywords in multiple languages.

Pros of SemRush

• It’s an all-in-one SEO solution
• It offers an intuitive user interface
• The ad history helps you uncover past ads campaign of your competitors
• Provides a detailed backlink research report
• Supports local research for over 117 countries

Cons of SemRush

• Quite expensive with the basic plan starting from $99 per month
• The keyword research difficulty isn’t accurate enough

SemRush Pricing Plan

SemRush basically offers three pricing plans and a custom solution plan for companies.

The pricing plans are Pro, Guru, and Business plan.

The Pro plan costs $83 per month when billed annually and $99 when billed monthly, offering all basic features including keyword research, backlink research, PPC, and social media marketing projects. 

The plan is best for freelancers, startups, and in-house marketers with a limited budget.

The Guru plan costs $166 per month when billed annually offering all the features of the Pro plan alongside content marketing platform, branded reports, historical data, and extended limits.

Finally, the Business plan offers all the features of the Guru plan alongside white label reports, API access, extended limits and sharing options, and Google Data Studio integration.

The business plan is best for agencies, e-commerce projects, and businesses with an extended web presence.

Start Your SEMrush FREE Trial Here.

#2. KwFinder

KwFinder is also one of the best alternatives to KeywordSpy.

Having a similar structure to KeywordSpy, KwFinder also specializes in carrying out in-depth keyword research. However, KwFinder still offers all the other SEO analysis via the sister platforms.

Founded in 2014 by Mangools, the parent company.

KwFinder is one of the latecomers into the industry and they have been able to create a space for themselves in the industry.

With the help of the sister sites, KwFinder offers other services apart from keyword research, which is unlike KeywordSpy.

And their pricing plan unifies them all, for any of the pricing plans you choose, you get access to all the other tools too.

Features of KwFinder:

• Keyword Research

KwFinder basically focuses on providing in-depth keyword research with a look into your competitor’s ranking keywords.

KwFinder makes it easy to research long-tail keywords that you can easily rank for.

As part of the detailed keyword research, KwFinder provides a more accurate keyword difficulty which is one of the good sides of KwFinder. The keyword difficulty is trustworthy.

The keyword research includes the volume, CPC, similar keywords, country filter, and multiple languages.

• Backlink Research (LinkMiner)

As said earlier on, KwFinder doesn’t have a backlink research tool built-in. But it offers this service via its sister platform, LinkMiner.

And the backlink research tool does not come at an extra cost, your pricing plan covers it all.

The backlink research tool provides metric data for the trust flow, citation flow, referring IPs and domains, active backlinks, deleted backlinks, and link attributes like follow and nofollow. 

• Domain Overview and Analysis (SiteProfiler)

SiteProfiler is a sister platform to KwFinder and also comes at no cost to use, after purchasing of the pricing plans of Mangools. 

The SiteProfiler makes it easy for you to check the SEO metrics of a site including the domain authority, page authority, Alexa rank, Facebook shares, and many more.

Plus, the site profiler allows you to check the top pages that are driving traffic to a site.

Pros of KwFinder (Mangools)

• Provides accurate keyword difficulty metric
• It offers a simple intuitive user interface
• Offers backlink research and rank tracking tool
• The pricing plans are very cheap and affordable

Cons of KwFinder ( Mangools)

• All the tools are different sites and platforms
• Offers very limited research
• Lacks a site auditing tool
• Does not provide PPC and advertising research

KwFinder Pricing Plans

To start with, KwFinder offers a 48 hours money-back guarantee on all their three pricing plans. Plus, you get to save 40% off the pricing plans if billed annually.

For the three pricing plans we have; Mangools Basic, Mangools Premium, and Mangools Agency plan.

The Mangool Basic plan starts costs $30 per month when billed annually offering 100 keyword lookups, 200 keyword suggestions, 25 competitors keywords per search, 100000 backlinks rows per day, alongside other features.

The Mangool Premium plan ($40 per month when billed annually) offers basically all what the Basic plan but with extended limits and an added feature, simultaneous logins that allow 3 multiple users to use the tool at the same time.

For the Mangool Agency plan ($80 per month when billed annually), you get all that the Premium plan has to offer together with an extended limit on them. And for the simultaneous login, it supports 10 users at the same time.

Perform Your FREE Keyword Research With KWFinder Here.

#3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO solution that offers all the tools you need to take your SEO to the next level. Similar to SemRush, Ahrefs is known as an industry leader when it comes to backlink research, outreach, and keywords.

But it goes without saying that Ahrefs isn’t missing or lacking in other analyses like Keyword research, site auditing, and PPC research.

Founded in 2011, Ahrefs boasts of having the most comprehensive backlink database, 2.3 trillion external backlinks.

Features of Ahrefs:

• Keyword Explorer

For Ahrefs, their keyword research tool is called keyword explorer which allows you to explore long-tail keywords that you can rank for. 

The keyword analyzer allows you to generate amazing keyword ideas, analyze their keyword difficulty, and also calculate their traffic potential.

Quite amazing.

Ahrefs allows you to carry out keyword research for 9 different search engines apart from Google.

And definitely, that’s a great plus. The search engines include YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Baidu, and many other search engines.

Plus, the tool is equipped to carry out research for different countries, up to 171 countries are supported.

The keyword report includes the following sections; phrase match, having the same terms, also ranks for, search suggestions, newly discovered, and questions.

• Site Explorer

The site explorer is what you would call a swiss army knife.

The site explorer helps you analyze a site’s organic search and backlink profile by combining three powerful tools together; organic traffic research, backlink checker, and paid traffic research.

The site explorer analyzes your competitor’s site or your site giving you an in-depth view of your organic traffic, paid traffic, and backlinks. 

Although the organic research tool is similar to the keyword explorer, they have different purposes.

The organic research analyzes a site to obtain their ranking keywords while a keyword explorer is thorough research that requires entering a seed keyword to begin your research.

As expected, the organic traffic research includes keywords, keywords difficulty, CPC, traffic, the site position on SERP, and the URL of the post ranking for the keyword.

On the other hand, the backlink research tool allows you to research the links of a site and also filter the result based on the link type, platform, and also search for keywords based on phrases. 

You have the option to screen out multiple links from a site by choosing one link per domain which makes it easy to get a list of the referring domains.

That said, Ahrefs backlink research also includes more filters that include new links, lost links, and broken links. Link intersects, internal backlinks, and referring IPs are some of the features you get from their backlink research tool.

• Site Audit

Ahrefs has one of the best site auditors with more advanced features and flexibility in tuning the audit the way you want it to get the most of the tool.

To start with, Ahref site auditing tool allows you to carry out a full-scale site audit on your website to detect technical SEO errors and monitor your website SEO health.

For Ahrefs, having a huge website with thousands of pages isn’t an issue.

Ahrefs allows you to tune the speed of the audit. Another option you have is to exclude some pages from the audit to speed up the audit.

The issues Ahrefs checks your sites for include:

Broken links, site speed, and slow pages, HTML tags (missing, duplicate, and the length of Html tags), open graph and twitter cards, duplicate pages, low-quality content, redirect links, heavy JavaScripts, and many more.

Absolutely, Ahrefs is for both beginners and experts. For experts, Ahrefs gives you more flexibility to explore your data.

The flexibility includes reading reports for Http status code and also applying mathematical symbols for some functions. 

• Content Explorer

A content explorer is a tool that helps you to know the top-performing content in your niche which includes the domain rating of the page, the traffic the page gets, traffic value, referring domains, and social shares.

Pros of Ahrefs

• Simple and easy to use
• In-depth and detailed site auditor 
• Provides a detailed backlink research tool
• It houses a large backlinks database
• Ahrefs content explorer is another keyword bank

Cons of Ahrefs

• Pricing plans are very expensive
• Ads history tool isn’t comprehensive 
• There’s no free trial (trial costs $7)

Ahrefs Pricing Plans

For starters, Ahrefs offers a paid trial that costs $7 alongside four pricing plans which include; Lite, Standard, Advanced, and the Agency plan.

The Lite plan costs $82 per month when billed monthly and $99 when billed monthly. The Lite plan offers the most basic features including a max of 5 projects, 1 admin-level user, and many others. 

The standard plan is the most popular plan which costs $149 per month when billed monthly offering all the features on the Lite plan but with extended limits plus recent index, historical index, and broken pages.

For the advanced plan, it costs $332 per month offering all the features on the standard plan but with extended limits too.

Finally, the Agency plan is the most expensive plan offered by Ahrefs. The Agency plan features more robust tools with some unlimited features and some inexhaustible limits for agencies.  The plan comes at $832 per month when billed annually.

Start Your Ahrefs $7 Trial.

#4. SerpStat

SerpStat is the story of a tool that was built for in-house use in a digital marketing agency but turned out to become one of the options for businesses and content marketers in search of a keyword research tool.

Founded in 2013 by Oleg Salamaha.

It was built to serve NetPeak’s clients (digital marketing agency). However, the tool has undergone several changes to include other SEO analysis like backlinks research, rank tracking, site audit, PPC research, and many more.

As it stands now, SerpStat can be regarded as an all-in-one SEO solution tool as it features nearly all the essential SEO tools.

Making a perfect KeywordSpy alternative.

Let’s look at the features.

Features of SerpStat:

• Keyword Research & PPC Research

SerpStat offers a detailed keyword research tool that includes an accurate keyword volume similar to SemRush’s.

The keyword research tool includes the competition metric for ads campaign, keyword difficulty metric, CPC, organic keywords, PPC keywords, organic competitors, PPC competitors, and examples of Ads showing up for the keyword.

The keyword research tool interface also shows the result for the PPC keywords and the ads examples.

• Backlinks Research

The backlinks research tool is a newly added feature to the SEO tool.

The backlinks research tool includes an overview of the top anchors, the number of do-follow links and no-follow links, the backlinks types, and countries where the links are coming from.

For detailed backlinks research, you would need to click on any of the options on the left-hand side of the interface which includes referring domains, active links, malicious sites, lost links, external links, anchors, top pages, and batch analysis.

• Site Audit

To initiate a site audit on SerpStat, you would need to set up a project which includes filling in your domain name and the update frequency.

Before the site audit, SerpStat will provide some details about your site which would include the referring domains, the total keywords, and the country where your keywords are ranking. 

SerpStat tracks the broken links, 404 pages, redirects, Html tags, and many other ranking parameters in order to provide a detailed site audit report.

• Rank Tracker

SerpStat provides a rank tracking tool that helps you monitor your ranking on Google. The ranking tracking report includes the gain and lost rankings.

Likewise, to initiate the rank tracker, you would need to set up a project while SerpStat would give you frequent reports on the monitoring.

Pros of SerpStat

• Offers a detailed keyword research tool
• It’s an all-in-one solution tool
• Provides an easy to use user interface
• A prototype of SemRush
• Offers a chrome extension

Cons of SerpStat

• The backlinks research tool is not detailed enough
• Premium pricing plans are very expensive

SerpStat Pricing Plans

SerpStat offers four pricing plans:

• Lite plan
• Standard plan
• Advanced plan
• Enterprise plan

And on each of the plans, SerpStat offers a 20% discount when billed annually.

To start with:

The Lite plan costs $55 per month when billed annually offering all necessary basic tools with limits. The lite plan is best for freelancers and businesses with tight budgets.

The Standard plan costs $149 per month when billed annually offering all the features in the Lite plan but with extended limits alongside 3 users, branded reports, extended interface, and API credit.

The Advanced plan costs $239 per month when billed annually offering all the features in the standard plan but with extended limits too alongside 5 users, extended interface, and API credits.

Finally, the Enterprise plan costs $399 per month when billed annually offering all the features in the Advanced plan alongside 7 users, white-label, extended interface, and API credits.

Start Your SerpStat FREE Trial.

#5. UberSuggest

UberSuggest is a freemium SEO tool founded by Neil Patel, an expert digital marketer. 

The year and date UberSuggest isn’t confirmed because Neil Patel didn’t build the tool, he bought the tool and upgraded it with more advanced features.

Launched as a free tool for content marketers and business owners, only recently did Neil Patel introduced a paid plan to the tool.

However, the paid plan is nothing compared to the cost of a full SEO tool.

Here are the features to expect from UberSuggest:

Features of UberSuggest

Basically, the features of UberSuggest revolve around keyword research, backlink research, and Site auditing.

• Keywords Research

The keywords research tool allows you to plug in a seed keyword and displays the search volume, CPC, SEO difficulty, and paid difficulty.

The keyword research interface also lets you peep into the SEO authority of the sites already ranking for the keywords.

In addition, you can check similar keywords and also generate content ideas by analyzing a competitor’s domain name.

• Backlinks Research

The backlinks research tool provides a fair but not detailed enough research of a site’s backlinks.

Plus, the tool uses a different domain authority rating, domain score which analyzes the authority of the domain.

And the inaccuracy of the total linking domains is quite conspicuous. However, the simple to use interface of the tool is noteworthy.

• Site Audit

Here’s what I love about UberSuggest:

The Ubersuggest site auditing tool is quite easy to use and set up.

The site auditing tool provides a detailed report on the health status of a website giving data on the broken links, redirects, images, mixed content, meta tags, and many other ranking factors.

Pros of UberSuggest

• UberSuggest offers a freemium pricing plan (starting from $14 per month)
• Simple and easy to use interface
• Offers in-depth site audit

Cons of UberSuggest

• Does not include PPC / Advertising research
• The backlinks research is not detailed enough

UberSuggest Pricing Plans

As said earlier on, UberSuggest offers a freemium pricing plan alongside a 7-days free trial.

Surprisingly, the UberSuggest pricing plan is geo-targeted giving the price in your country’s currency.

For me, the pricing plan was stated in Naira (which is my country’s currency, Nigeria) as you can see above.

But I’ll be doing the conversion for you:

To start with, UberSuggest offers three pricing plans which include:

• Individual plan
• Business plan
• Enterprise plan

The Individual plan costs $14 per month when billed annually offering all the features but with limits.

The Business plan costs $22 per month when billed annually offering all the features in the individual plan with extended limits.

And finally, the Enterprise plan costs $45 per month when billed annually offering all the features in the business but with unlimited use.

Obviously, this the cheapest and free KeywordSpy available in the industry.

Start Using UbberSuggest FREE version Here.

Conclusion – Which is the Best Alternative To KeywordSpy?

Finally, you have it, my review of the best KeywordSpy alternatives you can choose from.

As expected, SEMrush has got my recommendation as to the best alternative for KeywordSpy. Followed by Ahrefs.

And the reason isn’t far-fetched. Semrush offers in-depth keyword analysis for both organic keywords and paid keywords.

Plus, SemRush offers an advanced advertising research tool alongside other tools for complete SEO analysis.

But Semrush isn’t without a flaw, it’s very expensive. So if you have a tight budget, then you can consider KwFinder which is way cheaper and can also replace KeywordSpy.

However, if budget isn’t an issue for you, then you should, by all means, consider Semrush as a must-have SEO tool in your arsenal.

Let me know your favorite SEO tool in our list of KeywordSpy alternatives in the comment section below.