SEMrush vs KWFinder (Mangools): What Is the Best SEO Tool?

Amidst all SEO tools, we’ll be doing a comparison of SEMrush vs KwFinder.

To help you choose a perfect match for your SEO campaigns.

But why is this so important?

To start with, digital marketers face a huge task.

They need to, as part of their business strategy, make sure that their sites are good enough for a search engine to pick them as a response to the keywords potential customers type into the search bar.

There are a lot of other online businesses jostling for attention so you can now begin to understand why this is so important.

There is so much traffic on the internet.

People looking forward to satisfying their needs and you need to make sure that some of them recognize you.  Thankfully, there are enough SEO tools to choose from.

But you want to pick the one that suits you.

Or what do you think?

Among all SEO tools, we’ll be putting SEMrush and KwFinder against one another to help you make a perfect choice.

So let’s get started!

What’s SEMrush and KwFinder?

SEMrush and KwFinder are two major keyword research tools that anyone who wants to make his online business flourish must use.

They are an extremely important part of a very good marketing strategy.

To start with:

SEMrush is a Saas tool that provides search engine analytics and marketing services for better online visibility of businesses.

Founded in 2008, SEMrush started off as a browser extension before transcending to a full-scale Saas company.

As for KwFinder, it isn’t a standalone tool but is under the parent tool, Mangools.

Mangools houses several other SEO tools with each performing different tasks. Founded in 2014, Mangools is using a vertical model for its tools.

Instead of having everything under one roof and a name like SEMrush, Mangools created each tool on separate domains but the pricing plan unifies them.

Each of the Mangool’s pricing plans gives you access to all the tools under Mangools.

Here are the tools provided by Mangools:

• KwFinder – keyword research
• LinkMiner – backlinks research
• SerpChecker – SERP analysis tool
• SiteProfiler – SEO audits and domain overview
• SerpWatcher – rank tracker

The Linkminer is Mangool’s backlink research tool that analyzes your website or competitor’s sites providing a backlink report including their sources, anchors, and other backlink attributes like the citation flow and trust flow.

As for the SiteProfiler, it helps you check the SEO authority of websites and domains giving you insights into other SEO metrics.

The SerpWatcher is Mangool’s rank tracker that monitors your website ranks for a particular keyword giving you a daily report of the changes.

Likewise, the SerpChecker helps you spot the weaknesses and opportunities for you to rank on Google for keywords in your niche.

Finally, KwFinder is an excellent keyword research tool that helps you with ideas for the best keywords.

Its a database of over 1,400,000,000 keyword ideas makes it the perfect choice for those more concerned with keyword research.

It also enables you to check those keywords with low SEO difficulty, and large traffic volume.

Perhaps the reason KwFinder is loved by some marketers is its simplicity.

It’s readily understood and is very accurate when it comes to tracking the SEO difficulty of keywords and the ability to help you choose between the high ranking keywords and those that are not so profitable is a plus.

SEMrush on the other hand is an all-in-one solution for SEO and PPC which makes it ahead.

SEMrush provides keyword research, backlink research, rank tracker, and several other tools all under the same roof, which is unlike Mangools.

That said, Mangools also offers more SEO solutions and features as a different body of the tool.

In the following comparisons, you’ll be able to make the perfect choice for your web presence SEO solutions.

Read on…

Features of SemRush vs KWFinder

As expected, the features of a tool are the most deciding factor in choosing a tool.

The features help you make a better choice based on your needs.

For SEMrush and KwFinder, the case is the same. So let’s talk about the features of SEMrush first, then those of KwFinder and you can pick which one.

SEMrush Features

#1: Analytic Report

The SEMrush analytics report is a report that includes insights into your competitor’s strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search, and link building.

#2: Organic Research

The organic research feature lets you uncover keywords in your niches that you can rank for.

The research allows you to analyze a website viewing their top keywords, performing posts, top linking sites, similar keywords all in the same research. More like an overview of all the other researches.

#3: Advertising Research

The advertising research tool allows you to take an under-look at your competitor’s search ads, paid search strategies to plan your own campaign.

#4: Display Advertising Tools

The display advertising tools allow you to take a more in-depth approach to analyze your competitor’s ads by looking into their ads texts and banners, locate where your competitors are advertising, and many more.

#5: Backlinks Research

SEMrush’s backlinks research tool allows you to carry out in-depth backlink analysis of your websites and your competitor’s sites.

The backlink research tool includes reports of the linking domains, IPs, type, and many more link attributes.

#6: Keyword Research

The keyword research tool allows you to carry-out solely keyword research. The tool includes similar keywords, CPC, keyword difficulty, and many more.

#7: Product Listing Ads

The product listing ads feature is designed for e-commerce retailers and businesses with products to advertise and sell. The product listing ads provide insights into your competitor’s top performing PLAs.

#8: Traffic Analytics

Spy on your competitors and take a look at the volume of traffic they’re receiving and the sources of their traffic.

#9: Market Explorer

Quite interesting, Semrush’s market explorer allows you to scout a niche before diving into the niche.

With their market explorer, you can know how lucrative a niche is.

#10: Backlink Gap

The backlink gap helps you find new link building opportunities that you can get hold off.

#11: Listing management

For local businesses, SEMrush provides an automatic listing solution that helps you list your business on popular business directories like Google my Business, Yelp, and a few others.

KwFinder (Mangools) Complete Features

Mangools offer similar tools just like SEMrush and only a few tools are missing. Also, the below features are the combined features of all the tools Mangools offer.

#1: Find hidden long-tail keywords

This is where KwFinder specializes in, finding long-tail keywords that are easier to rank for.

You test it below:

#2: Find your competitor’s keywords

KwFinder helps you take advantage of your competitor’s keywords by spying on them. All you need to do is put in your competitor’s domain into the box and analyze it.

#3: Backlink Research

Definitely, KwFinder doesn’t offer this, but LinkMiner (sister tool) does this. And when you pay for any of the plans, you’re automatically entitled to all the tools.

#4: Rank Tracker

Likewise, you can track your website and blog ranks on Google through SerpWatcher (another sister tool).

#5: Local keyword research

The local keyword research allows you to narrow your research based on country and audience location.

#6: SERP analysis and SEO metrics

The SERP analysis is a feature that allows you to spot weak spots to rank on Google in your niche.

In Summary: SemRush is far more versatile than KwFinder.

KwFinder is somewhat one-dimensional. Thus, SEMrush comes off the winner with its truckloads of amazing features.

SemRush vs KwFinder – Keyword Research

Keyword research plays a major role in ranking a website for a keyword. The keyword research tool provides keyword volume, difficulty, CPC, and similar keywords that you can also rank for.

For KwFinder, that’s where it finds its usefulness.

KwFinder is mainly created to ease your keyword research with advanced features.

Based on the fact that KwFinder is a tool for keyword research and nothing else, it wouldn’t be fair to go into details of other features.

In essence, I’ll focus more on the keyword research aspect of each of the tools in order to make it fair enough.

However, KwFinder has some sister sites that allow you to carry-out other SEO analysis without any extra payment; all are in the same pricing plan. We’ll get into details as we progress on.

Let’s dive into their keyword research comparison.

KwFinder as its name implies is a keyword research tool to find long-tail keywords. But KwFinder is under its parent name, Mangools, which is where other tools are found

KwFinder research tool shows the volume of the keyword, the search difficulty, CPC, and locations.

Thanks to the location feature, you can narrow your search based on the country you are targeting.

So instead of assuming or including a country’s name into your Keyword, you can use a general keyword but you select the country you are targeting.

While all these are great features, they aren’t missing on SEMrush.

SEMrush on the other hand, also displays the volume of the keyword, CPC, country, related searches, questions, and similar keywords too.

Based on experiments conducted on the two and reviews thereof, it can be hard to say which one is better.

Here, personal tastes are what dictates the winner.

Based on keywords, a comparison of the two suggests that SEMrush is more accurate in terms of keyword volume metric and KwFinder leads when it comes to keyword difficulty metric.

In other words:

If you want to find out the difficulty ranking of a particular keyword (usually indicated as a percentage where 1 is the least difficult and 100 the most difficult), use KwFinder; and SemRush when you prefer to know the traffic volume of a particular keyword (i.e. how many people search for that keyword on the internet).

Therefore, what determines the best option in this section is your weakness and strength in SEO.

If you are good at guessing the keyword difficulty just by looking at the sites ranking for the keyword, then SEMrush would complement you better.

However, if you aren’t, then KwFinder will be a better option.

Ultimately, the keyword research of both tools is a tie in performance.

SemRush Vs KwFinder (Mangools) – Backlink Research

First and foremost, KwFinder only offers keyword research tools but it offers other research tools thanks to its sister platforms.

But you don’t have to worry about additional payments as I have said earlier.

The pricing plan you choose is for all the platforms and tools Mangools offer. So in this place, we would be doing a direct comparison against Mangools (parent tool) and NOT KwFinder.

Backlinks are especially useful as they are one of the major credentials of high ranking sites.

Backlinks mean the links your other websites are sending to your website.

Wonder why backlinks are crucial to a top rating for a website?

They send the message that your website is trustworthy and noteworthy.

Yes, the more backlinks your website has, the more confidence it will engender in your site visitors, and the higher your site rankings.

SEO tools like SEMrush and KwFinder (Mangools) can be used to find out how many backlinks are present on a given website.

Let’s see how they compare:

For SEMrush, it provides in-built metrics for the backlinks to websites.

The backlink analysis report includes the anchor text used for the link, the type of links, and many more features.

With SEMrush backlink analysis, you can do the following:

• Sort backlinks by types and attribute
• Filter out received data and analyze your prospects
• Discover the richest backlink portfolios in your niche
• Identify backlinks types: text, image, forms, and frame.
• Check the incoming links, linking domains, subdomains, URLs, and their categories
• Explore singe URLs, domains, anchors, referring domain’s authority and their locations
• Track new and lost links to keep you informed whenever you lose or gain a link

To understand the health status of your website and the referring domain’s authority – SEMrush displays an authority score that scores a website from 0-100 based on the level of trust.

The authority score lets you spot spam links that could have a negative effect on your website SEO.

Before we put them against each other, let’s take a look at KwFinder (Mangools) backlink research tool features.

For Mangools, their backlink research tool is called LinkMiner.

The link miner tool helps you carry out in-depth backlink analysis.

Just like KwFinder, LinkMiner also has its own separate domain name but isn’t a standalone tool (they all work together as one under Mangools).

Their backlink miner lets you do the following:

• Filter links result based on their status: all links, new links, and lost links
• Lets you analyze domains, subdomains, exact match URL, and Path URL.
• Similar to SEMrush’s authority score, KwFinder’s LinkMiner provides citation flow score that ranges from 0 to 100
• Check the trust flow of the links which is also a score in-between 0-100
• Track total backlinks, referring domains and their various referring IPs
• Analyze all backlinks attributes; dofollow, nofollow, deleted backlink tag, image tag, and language of referring site.
• Export your result as a CSV file to be viewed using excel or copy them to your clipboard and then pasting elsewhere.

These are the major features that KwFinder’s LinkMiner has to offer.

Now to get straight to the point. SemRush offers more backlink research tools than LinkMiner. And there are some metrics present in LinkMiner and absent in SemRush.

For example, LinkMiner provides the citation flow and trust flow metric which is provided by Majestic SEO.

SEMrush provides an authority score, a metric similar to citation flow and trust flow too.

But when it comes to accuracy, the trust flow and citation flow provided by Majestic SEO is more accurate.

While SEMrush allows you to filter results based on countries/locations and TLDs, LinkMiner doesn’t.

Plus, SEMrush allows you to do an in-depth filter of links based on their types, attributes, geographics, and TLDs.

While LinkMiner analyzes the linking domain via their sister platform, SeoProfiler, also owned by Mangools – SEMrush does this as a built-in feature.

And they both do a good job in profiling domains.

With all these, it’s easier to conclude that SEMrush offers a better backlink research tool here, but I decided to look into their backlinks accuracy.

Here’s a recent study I conducted in order to see which backlink analyzer is more accurate.

In the study, I analyzed the number of links pointing to this site (KhrisDigital.com) with LinkMiner, SemRush, and Ahrefs (which is the middle man). 

When I tested LinkMiner, LinkMiner discovered 27.4K links pointing to my site and 213 referring domains.

SEMrush discovered 1.9K links pointing to my domain and 415 referring domains.

Now the two look confusing. With high gaps between the numbers.

SEMrush discovered more referring domains while LinkMiner discovered more total links.

So I’d no option than to carry out another backlink research with another tool, Ahrefs. Ahrefs discovered 1.7K links and 323 referring domains.

Even though I expected the data from these tools to differ a bit.

Can you notice something obvious here?

Without a doubt, I would deduce that the SEMrush backlink report is more accurate because it shows some correlation to the links reported by Ahrefs, while LinkMiner is out of it, reporting over 27.4K links.

At this point, SEMrush wins over KwFinder in in-depth backlink research.

SemRush vs KwFinder – Site Audit

An audit in economic terms conveys the idea of an evaluation in which case the evaluation is done to see if the company is making reasonable profits or is running at loss.

It’s the same idea with site audits.

A site audit is a process of checking a site’s visibility in search engines with the aim of addressing any factors that may make it less than prominent in a search engine.

This feature, for now, is not available in KwFinder and that’s another homage it pays to SEMrush.

Needless to say, SEMrush is also one of the greatest SEO tools for site audits.

Click here to check out SEMrush Site Audit tool!

SemRush vs KwFinder – PPC, and AdWords

PPC and AdWords are paid traffic by Google.

Unlike before, you can pay for Google ads for a particular keyword and be sure of ranking at the top for the keyword.

But now, it isn’t.

You’ve to optimize your ads to rank at the top of the first page for the keyword against your Competitors. Therefore, the same way we optimize our posts and blogs for Google organic rankings, you’ve to optimize your ads too.

So if you are juggling SEO and PPC, SEMrush gives better value.

In this regard also, it displaces KwFinder which only gives you CPC figures for individual keywords.

SEMrush transcends that as it gives you detailed CPC competition and distribution data, live ads, and PPC campaign planning tools.

SEMrush even provides more details on your competitor’s overall marketing campaigns including their social media tactics and progress.

It includes letting you know your competitor’s recent social media updates and posts.

And to be frank, all of these are missing on Mangools.

As expected, SemRush wins here too.

SemRush vs KwFinder – Pricing Plans

Although pricing shouldn’t be an issue when going for a quality product or the perfect product that suits your business; but it does matter.

When it comes to making a purchasing decision, the pricing and your budget matter too.

If pricing isn’t a problem for you, then you can move on without considering this. But if the pricing is as important as other features, then let’s take a look at it together.

KwFinder (Mangools) Pricing Plans

Mangools offer three pricing plans:

• Mangools basic
• Mangools premium
• Mangools agency

Alongside two different payment options (monthly and annually).

By choosing an annual plan, you can save 40% of the total cost of the tool. Let’s dive into each of the plans.

Mangools Basic

The Mangools basic plan costs $29 per month when paid annually and $49 per month when paid monthly.

The basic plan offers the following:

• 100 keyword lookups per day
• 200 keyword suggestions per search
• 25 competitor keywords per search
• 100 SERP lookups per day
• 200 tracked keywords daily
• 2000 backlink rows per day
• 20 site lookups per day

Mangools Premium

The premium plan costs $39 per month when billed annually and $69 for monthly billing.

The premium plan offers the following features:

• 500 keyword lookups per day
• 700 keyword suggestions per search
• Unlimited competitor’s keywords per search
• 500 SERP lookups per day
• 700 tracked keywords daily
• 7000 backlink rows per day
• 70 site lookups per day
• 3 simultaneous logins

Mangools Agency Plan

The agency plan is suitable for small businesses and marketing agencies that work hand-in-hand with clients to improve their web presence.

As expected, the agency plan is the most expensive plan of all coming at $79 per month when billed annually and $129 when billed monthly.

Below are the features you can expect from the agency plan:

• 1200 keywords lookups per day
• 700 keywords suggestions per search
• Unlimited competitor’s keywords per search
• 1200 SERP lookups per day
• 1500 tracked keywords daily
• 15000 backlink rows per day
• 150 site lookups per day
• 10 simultaneous logins

SEMrush Pricing Plans

SEMrush offers four pricing plans; Pro, Guru, Business, and Enterprise plan.

Offering two payment methods; annual and monthly, SemRush allows you to save 16% on the cost of the tool by paying annually.

Pro Plan

The pro plan costs $83 or month when billed annually and $99 when billed monthly.

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

Below are what you can expect from the pro plan:

• 3000 reports per day and 10000 results per report.
• 500 track keywords per day and supports 3 projects
• 50 social profiles monitoring and 10 social profiles for posting
• 1 user permission
• Limited access to the tools and topics to research
• Limited countries and posts to track

Guru Plan

Best for small businesses and growing marketing agencies.

The Guru plan costs $166 per month when billed annually and $199 when billed monthly.

The Guru plan features the following:

• 5000 reports per day and 30000 results per report.
• Historical data
• 1500 keywords to track per day and supports 15 projects
• 100 social profiles for monitoring and 30 social profiles for posting
• Supports rank tracking data for multiple devices and locations
• Branded PDF reports
• Unlimited topics to research
• 5 countries and 50 posts to track
• 5 plagiarism checks per month
• Content marketing platform

Business Plan

Best for agencies, e-commerce projects, and businesses with an extensive web presence, the business plan costs $333 per month when billed annually and $399 when billed monthly.

The business plan offers the following features:

• 10000 reports per day and 50000 results per report 
• Historical data and product listing ads
• Allows you to track 5000 keywords per day and run 25 projects
• 300 social profiles for monitoring and 50 for posting
• Allows you to track ranks on multiple locations and devices
• Branded PDF reports
• White label pdf reports for your clients and meetings
• Google data studio integration
• Content marketing platform
• 10 countries and 50 posts to track
• Unlimited calendars and 10 plagiarisms checks per month

Pricing – Who Wins?

KwFinder is the winner with a starting price as low as $29 per month when billed annually, and this is way cheaper than Semrush’s basic plan that starts at $83 per month (annually).

And on the other hand, SEMrush doesn’t just cost more, it is very expensive.

The basic plan costs more than the most expensive plan (Agency Plan) KwFinder has to offer when billed annually.

There’s no point going further when the basic plan costs that much, it comes at no surprise that the premium plans are steeply excessive.

So as expected, KwFinder wins when it comes to pricing.

Pros and Cons of SemRush and KwFinder

Although It has been a long and detailed comparison of both tools, I’m sure you might still have a mix of confusion trying to make a decision.

So let’s go over the good and bad sides of both tools and clear the confusion.

SemRush Pros

• It’s an all-in-one solution with all tools under the same roof
• Provides accurate keywords volume
• Includes multitargeting that allows you to track keywords rankings, and backlinks based on countries, devices, and TLDs (backlinks)
• In-depth backlinks analysis
• Supports advertising research

SemRush Cons

• Steeply expensive ( plan starts from $99 per month)
• The keyword difficulty score isn’t accurate enough

KwFinder (Mangools) Pros

• Very easy to use
• Provides a more accurate keyword difficulty
• The pricing plans are very cheap and affordable

KwFinder (Mangools) Cons

• All the tools have different platforms (KwFinder, LinkMiner, SiteProfiler, SerpChecker, and SerpWatcher) and are not under the same roof
• Backlink analysis isn’t as robust and in-depth as SEMrush
• Very limited research

Which is the Overall Best – SemRush vs KwFinder

Having gone through the features of both tools and a summary of their pros and cons; here’s my conclusion.

If you’re more interested in the keyword research and have a slim budget to work with, then KwFinder will be a perfect match for you.

If otherwise, then by all means I choose SEMrush as the overall best tool considering the large pool of features and web presence solution it offers.

Let me know your final decision in this SEMrush vs KWFinder review.