Ahrefs is an SEO tool providers. Ahrefs Site Explorer provides a suite of tools including a component for backlink & on-page SEO analysis, online brand mentions tracking, and domain comparison tool for competitor analysis, etc. They refer to themselves as “the largest index of live backlinks.”
$99
per month
SpyFu
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
SpyFu is the eponymous SEO and PPC research platform from the company in Scottsdale, Arizona focused on "spying" on competitors, or basically using their behaviors to refine your own through keyword and content analysis, and backlink poaching. This positional search engine optimization and paid listings management platform touts the ability to lower costs and raise rankings via a Kombat-oriented approach... basically a cute way of saying "it makes comparisons" of how well your site does in niche…
The User Interface and usability of the tool makes it very pleasant experience to use on a regular basis. Keyword research and topical clustering on the fly is really easy with SERP overviews and competitor keywords/traffic insights. SEMrush is a little less user friendly and …
Owner, Cofounder, and Chief Creative Marketer and Strategist
Chose Ahrefs
Ahrefs is easier to use, their features deliver understandable and logical recommendations, and in my opinion and most importantly — they list parent topics, which is huge when designing/redesigning a website.
It's competitive with SEMRush, Moz and other tools of that same ilk. It's great for serious SEO work - not at the Enterprise level - but at the small business, small agency level. I would not consider it competitive with BrightEdge, Conductor, SEOClarity, etc. - but it IS …
We found the user interface of Ahrefs slightly better than the rest. Also, the details involved in the outputs we more informative. For example, once an audit is done, the steps that are involved in fixing that issue are well explained in Ahrefs. Also, I found Ahrefs backlink …
Screaming Frog is a handy tool when it comes to performing technical SEO audits and improving technical aspects of SEO. But Ahrefs on the contrary is a strategic SEO tool that can help you do holistic SEO. This includes features like performing keyword research, building links, …
In my experience, Ahrefs and SEMrush are both powerful tools for improving SEO and content marketing efforts. However, I chose to use Ahrefs over SEMrush for a few reasons. Firstly, Ahrefs has a stronger focus on backlink analysis and identifying potential link building …
With the digital initiatives we have currently underway, both are really valuable so we keep them both. The digital ecosystem changes so rapidly that only relying on one SEO tool is, in my opinion, not a great idea, as each has its own strengths and weaknesses. And the cost is …
Ahrefs provides more accurate and important data compared to other services. It has become a very trusted service among the SEO community and collected tremendous amount of data over the years of operation. Ahrefs is designed to meet the needs of a very demanding SEO expert, …
Ahrefs is one of the best platforms available in the market dealing in developing online SEO tools and free educational material for marketing professionals. It has all the best features related to SEO and gives all the performance and analytics based on digital presence.
Ahrefs is the most comprehensive tool we've used for providing SEO and performance analysis for our website clients. It's an essential part of our analytics stack, along with Google products. It doesn't require downloading and installing software, and it's more robust and user …
Ahrefs is more flexible for a large organization and overall has more features than competitors packed within a single tool. Other tools just don't have as much ability as the Ahrefs tool does. We also found the UI to be overall better on Ahrefs and easier to understand than …
Ahrefs has the best backlink data even compared to funded competitors. On top of that, their analysis and tutorials make it possible to get value easily. Monitoring your website, your competitors, and finding SEO opportunities is very easy and there are some sophisticated …
Ahrefs is my clear choice when I need to better understand the link profile of my clients' websites as its database is unmatched. However, when it comes to keyword research, it is second only to SEMrush. I wouldn't say that it's worse than SEMrush as each is focused on …
I used to use Moz a lot and it is also a great tool. However, I found the Ahrefs UI was much friendlier and easier to navigate. I also like the specific use cases shown in the Ahrefs blog, which are much easier to follow and implement when using the Ahrefs tool itself. This …
Ahrefs provides a lot more data, in a lot more detail - and tells you exactly why it matters. Moz is a nice tool - the UI is easier to navigate and there are more prompts for new users - but anyone doing serious work will do better with Ahrefs.
Sadly we are coming [to] terms that even trough there are more and more options that Ahrefs has they are still incomplete or not working good enough. And the most important options (like frequent updates on rankings) are behind the most expensive membership.
Semrush and BuzzSumo are also good tools. Semrush is hardcore and technical; if you outgrew Ahrefs as an SEO practitioner and were doing intense work for one big client, I'd highly recommend it. BuzzSumo is more for a social media manager; it provides huge shortcuts for …
Web Production Manager Responsible for SEO, Web Design, & Social Media Marketing
Chose Ahrefs
Ahrefs has more features and more accurate data than its competitors. While both Moz and Majestic are great tools and can be used as complimentary to Ahrefs, if you have to choose one tool, definitely choose Ahrefs. It has the biggest database of links and better stats for …
Ahrefs Site Explorer gives us an easier way of obtaining backlinks when we're doing link building, whereas with other products I have a more difficult time finding viable backlinks. The keyword list you can export from Ahrefs is also a lot more clear than in other products …
The closest competitor to Ahrefs Site Explorer would likely be SEMRush. Ahrefs seems to have a significantly larger amount of data to work with. They claim that their service is powered by the second most active crawler in the world, next to Google.
SpyFu is a good tool and it certainly provides a good starting point for any basic PPC or SEO campaign. I dont believe it has the comprehensive features that a tool like Ahrefs has, as it doesnt have the granular data these tools possess. However, it is still well worth using …
I use Ahrefs for Site audit, Keyword Research, Backlink analysis, and some parts of competitor analysis. SpyFu I always wanted to keep primary, but it's not doable with the limitation of their database, which forces me to use Ahrefs for that reason.
It's a great little tool that offers pretty much everything you can get from Moz or Semrush at a fraction of the cost. My company uses a few different tools but I always come back to SpyFu because it is so easy to use and their build-in reporting is great.
SpyFu is more cost-effective than both (Ahrefs and SEMRush), but we have to compromise on the data's accuracy. However, the data reporting and user interface of SpyFu make it easy to decipher. For Paid Ads keyword lookup, we prefer SpyFu to any other tool maybe, because it's …
I was surprised to find I preferred Semrush when it comes to keyword research. SpyFu is great (and less expensive than Semrush), but I felt the data Semrush provided was vaster than SpyFu. I was able to get more competitors spending insights in Semrush than SpyFu. Overall, I …
I've used SEMRush as well. SEMRush does organic SEO analysis better than SpyFu and backlink research. I find the data more intuitive. I much prefer SpyFu for their advertising/PPC analysis and use SpyFu when researching competitors' advertising campaigns. These are the main two …
Compared to SEMRush or Ahrefs, neither of the competitors stacks up against SpyFu in terms of competitor insight of paid ad performance. It can even identify specific ad copy changes, which can be crucial for high-demand periods like Black Friday. In my opinion, SpyFu is an …
Spyfu fails to hit the mark at least when it comes to SEO since both Ahrefs and Semrush has a bigger directory and fetches data from more countries than Spyfu does, however Spyfu offers a great deal when it comes to cost effective solution to almost every digital marketing …
SpyFu has what we needed from SEMrush, and Spyfu is more reasonably priced. Spyfu does not have some of the higher level and specific tools, but is great for the price.
SpyFu offers the best keyword research platform out there. I have used this for many companies that are still using this tool today. It's always been one of my first marketing software recommendations to companies I work with. For those who understand digital marketing such as …
I spent years exclusively using SEMrush for this kind of competitor PPC data, and have used Moz in the past on several occasions. I feel that SpyFu is more well-rounded and provides deeper insights than these other products, and honestly, it's just more updated as well. Easier …
Currently we actively use SEMRush and Similar Web, along side SpyFu. To be honest, the platforms are fairly interchangeable. Each one has one or two unique things that the other doesn't have. None of it is totally earth shattering. So often it comes down to price, and SpyFu is …
When it comes to assessing the competition, SpyFu is fantastic. I prefer its competitor analysis features much more than SEMRush or any other platform out there. That is what I use SpyFu for. Regarding reporting and integrations, it doesn't quite seem like it's the best option …
I haven't checked any competitors. SpyFu was the one I found first and it works so well that I never needed to look for an alternative. I can't imagine trying to do my job without it. It's that good.
It isn't fair to compare these two tools overall. They have a few shared pieces, but SEMrush is much more expensive but includes many more tools making it a full SEO suite. When looking strictly at the shared tools from both companies (the competitor keyword tools), they stack …
We use Moz for tracking Keywords monthly, and we also use it more for backlink research. We like the keyword research available in SpyFu better than Moz.
Personally, the only tool I use as often as SEMRush. If you have the SEMrush paid version, I personally choose to use that over SpyFu. SpyFu is the best free search analytics tool online though. It has the greatest offerings in its free pack and allows you to have the most …
They both give me great value, I use them together to get the best results. SimilarWeb gives me a holistic view of a website's traffic - it includes both organic and paid traffic, while SpyFu gives only organic traffic results.
We looked at SEM Rush, but for the price, we decided to give SpyFu a chance. SpyFu is very affordable compared to other similar tools. I think that I can overlook some of the lack of intuitiveness of the platform given the low monthly price.
It gives the best report to us which helps us to find the opportunity to build backlinks. Another main feature that makes Ahrefs a safe and sound approach to SEO is that it provides information about duplicate content, URLs, redirects along with other errors that can be dangerous to the website.
If you have a Google ads PPC campaign and then I would say this is more or less essential if you want to know what your competitors are doing. You can get very useful data out of it even if you subscribe for one month. And the pricing is very reasonable. Even if you don't use Google ads, I would say this is still useful for your SEO/SMO team since it gives you a great idea of what keywords and traffic your competitors are working on.
Ahrefs Site Explorer provides an overview of domain health and the issues that can be fixed, and sometimes the suggested "critical issues" can be an astronomical number and not accurate.
For certain features on Ahrefs Site Explorer, there can a more elaborate description/guide on how to utilize the feature.
Their index is too vast to ignore when looking at a complete backlink profile. We find links in Ahrefs that do not appear in any other link detection tool. For this reason, it's a must for our agency to use for the foreseeable future. Plus, it's very affordable considering the data you get
Love this tool but would like insights from all 3 major search engines not just Google. I would also like deeper understanding of the placement for local businesses on Google Places/Maps. Insight into mobile search rankings and best landing pages per industry would also help :) Overall, SpyFu is a necessity for serious search marketers.
Ahrefs is very easy to use - you can jump right in and understand most of the assets. Overall, the dashboard snapshots give a very good picture of inbound link activity. For deeper analysis of historical trends, the system can become cumbersome, making it hard to do full work without exporting and reformatting the data.
SpyFu is an easy to use tool, and has a self -explanatroy dashborad to generate the data needed to provide insights into any B2B SEO and PPC campaign. It is not comprehensive, but it certainly provides good enough insight to make it a valuable part of any agency tool stack
Ahrefs has always been responsive when there's been a technical issue with the site. There are usually very little problems, but if there are, they announce it on their social media accounts which keeps its customers informed. Email support is prompt and the customer service people are very helpful, knowledgable and friendly.
SpyFu comes with a link to tutorial videos. I recommend you watch them. The software is capable of so much you really need to watch the videos and learn how to get the most out of it. When I have a question 90% of the time it's there. When it isn't, and I reach out to them, support is always quick and concise.
It's competitive with Semrush, Moz and other tools of that same ilk. It's great for serious SEO work - not at the Enterprise level - but at the small business, small agency level. I would not consider it competitive with BrightEdge, Conductor, SEOClarity, etc. - but it IS competitive and on par with the tools that are one level below those big enterprise tools.
I was surprised to find I preferred Semrush when it comes to keyword research. SpyFu is great (and less expensive than Semrush), but I felt the data Semrush provided was vaster than SpyFu. I was able to get more competitors spending insights in Semrush than SpyFu. Overall, I liked the ability to use both in our keyword research for both paid and organic marketing.
Ahrefs has helped save hours of work because it functions as an all-in-one SEO tool. Before Ahrefs, I would have to switch toolsets multiple times, compile the reports, then organize data. Ahrefs as an all in one helped managed the chaos that having too many tools create.
Backlink data is crucial to predicting content success. Ahrefs has provided us with better backlink data, allowing our predictions to be more accurate.
Ahrefs has helped us cut away from having another rank tracker subscription. Their rank tracking tool is good enough to not warrant a dedicated rank tracker, helping us save on costs.