A foreword: we’d really prefer not to further perpetuate the “SaaS tool slugfest” where both sides cherry-pick the product features they offer that the other doesn’t, then design tables and one-pagers to support their bias.
So we thought we’d go slightly bigger picture here.
Why should you go with Ahrefs, and not any alternative tool like Semrush that offers a similar function to the one that you’re looking for? Well…
The data behind the tool is everything.
Ahrefs has one of the top web crawlers in the world and is the first in the search engine optimization category by a landslide. (source: Cloudflare Radar)
We have the world’s largest index of live backlinks, updated with fresh data every 15–30 minutes. From a practical point of view, that means that we have fresher and more accurate data than any other SEO alternative tool. This translates into better and more effective strategies for you.
Plus, for each backlink that we store in our database, Ahrefs has also 72 unique datapoints that you can sort and filter your backlinks by to quickly identify the best ones. Search by referring page, domain, or author; whether a backlink comes from a homepage or not; by anchor text, page titles or so on. Our closest competitor has less than one-third of these datapoints.
64% of SEO professionals trust Ahrefs’ link data over its competitors. The next closest competitor (GSC) only had 14% of votes. (Source: Aira’s The State of Link Building Report 2022)
And whenever SEOs are asked to pick their favorite tool, Ahrefs usually wins.
We’ve been around since 2010, and Ahrefs is the tool of choice for tens of thousands of SEO and digital marketing professionals (plus the hundred thousand more folks who use our free tools.)
If you want to speak the same language as most people in the industry – Ahrefs is the way to go.
We’re so serious about our hardware at Ahrefs that we built our own datacenter with 4700 Servers & 916K CPU cores.
We also have a superfast supercomputer! Yep1 ranks among the Top 50 fastest supercomputers worldwide by Flops (floating point operations per second).
This gives us a huge edge over the average SEO tool that doesn’t have enough computing power to process seriously big data, and instead relies solely on third-party data.
Many Ahrefs team members are thought leaders in the fields of digital marketing and SEO – they’re invited to speak and share their expertise at top industry events worldwide. Like Patrick, who’s been called Mr. Technical SEO & the technical SEOs’ technical SEO.
Since they contribute heavily to product development, many Ahrefs reports and features developed directly from suggestions and requests from our own marketing department.
In other words, you’re choosing a product that’s shaped by people who ACTUALLY do SEO. Our tools are created for real-world processes and use cases, unlike alternative tools that may be built in silos by developers who aren’t in the trenches.
We’ve produced a huge amount of educational content over the years and countless SEOs and digital marketers learn from our articles, videos and courses.
The Ahrefs blog gets around 4M visits per year from Google alone.
Our YouTube channel has over 15M views and 540k subscribers.
Our many Academy courses get tens of millions of views across multiple platforms as well – we can’t even track these anymore.
We’re obsessed with search – we even created our own search engine, yep.com. This gives us deep expertise in how search works and what goes into ranking #1, so we can build the best tools to help you do just that.
If you’re looking for an SEO tool that won’t branch out and spread its focus thin across other forms of marketing in the near future, Ahrefs is your bet.
Ahrefs is completely bootstrapped.
This means that unlike other tools, we never have to answer to investors or be caught in a tug-of-war with a board of directors who are gunning for their own individual goals.
We have the freedom to commit to our vision, our people and our users (you!), and we plan to always stay this way.
Convinced that we’re better than any alternative? Head over to our pricing page and sign up for a plan to validate that thought 😉
Pssst: another option: we also just launched a Starter plan with limited access to our core tools.
