Most pages selling a Semrush alternative open with a feature table full of numbers about somebody else's product. This one does not, because we cannot verify those numbers and neither can you. Instead: what a full suite gives you, what MrKeyword gives you, and an honest answer about who should stay put.
A full SEO suite is expensive because building one is expensive. Crawling a large fraction of the web to maintain a backlink index, modelling traffic for domains you have no access to, and checking live search results for millions of keywords every day are all genuine, costly engineering. When a suite charges a three-figure monthly fee, that is largely what you are paying for.
MrKeyword does none of those three things. That is not a gap we are hoping you will not notice — it is the design. It reads data you already own or can verify: your Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools properties, live Google Keyword Planner search volume, and its own crawler running over your site. Because the inputs are cheap and first-party, the price can be cheap and the numbers can carry a source.
So the real question is not which tool is better. It is which half of a suite you actually use. If it is the competitive half, stay. If you open a suite each week to see what you rank for, what moved, what is broken and what to write next, that half runs on your own data and you are probably overpaying for it.
Every row below is a statement about MrKeyword, or about what full suites sell as a category. There are no invented numbers about anyone else's product here — for Semrush's current features and pricing, check their pricing page.
| Capability | In MrKeyword | |
|---|---|---|
| A third-party backlink index | MrKeyword has none. Link data covers what its own crawler and the open web graph have seen, and says so. If link building or link auditing is your job, a suite is the tool. | You give up |
| Competitor traffic and keyword estimates | Not offered. Nobody outside a company measures its traffic, so every such figure is a model; MrKeyword will not print one. | You give up |
| Rank tracking for any domain, by scraping SERPs | Not offered. MrKeyword reports on properties you have verified, using the positions Google and Bing report for them. | You give up |
| PPC and advertising research | Not offered. Keyword Planner data is used for search demand only. | You give up |
| White-label reports and a client portal | Not offered today, on any plan. | You give up |
| Your own Search Console and Bing data, kept past Google's window | Included from the day you connect, on every plan including the free one. | You get |
| A 60-check technical site audit from our own crawler | Included, with the fix written out for each issue and findings sorted by how many pages they affect. | You get |
| Keyword volumes from the official Google Keyword Planner API | Included, fetched live on every search and never invented. | You get |
| An MCP server your AI assistant can operate | 24 tools, so Claude or Cursor can read the workspace and answer questions from real data. | You get |
| AI that explains an issue and drafts the fix | Titles, meta descriptions, JSON-LD and a paste-ready prompt for a coding assistant, on Pro AI or via the 50 AI page audits pack. | You get |
Link building or link auditing is the job. MrKeyword has no third-party backlink index, and a link tool without one is not a link tool. This is the single clearest reason to keep a suite.
You sell competitive intelligence. Reports about a competitor's traffic, their keywords or their ad spend cannot be produced from first-party data, by definition.
You need white-labelled deliverables or a client portal. Neither exists here, on any plan.
You need rank tracking for domains you do not control. MrKeyword reads verified properties only.
Your team is already trained on a suite and it is working. A cheaper tool that nobody adopts is not cheaper.
Every metric names its source, carries a label — Measured, Derived, Estimated or Not available — a confidence level and an as-of date. A metric that cannot say where it came from is rejected in code before it reaches a screen. That is a different kind of comfort in a client meeting than a proprietary score.
24 MCP tools mean Claude or Cursor can read a workspace and answer questions from real data. Asking “what is hurting this site today?” in your editor is a genuinely different workflow from opening a dashboard.
SEO with ClaudeSearch Console keeps roughly 16 months. MrKeyword stores its own daily copy from the moment you connect, so next year you can still answer a question about last year.
Free forever, Basic at $1, Pro AI at $5 per website. Twelve client sites cost twelve times $5, not a tier built for fifty.
See pricingComparison pages are where honesty usually goes to die, so to be explicit:
No, and anyone who tells you their tool is should be read carefully. A full suite sells a third-party backlink index, competitor traffic estimates, advertising research and SERP-scraped rank tracking for any domain. MrKeyword has none of those. It replaces the part of a suite most people open weekly: your own rankings, keyword demand, a technical audit and reporting.
Anyone whose work depends on link building or link auditing, on competitive intelligence about domains they do not own, on PPC research, or on white-labelled client deliverables. Those are real jobs and MrKeyword does not do them.
Freelancers, small agencies and site owners whose actual weekly usage is “what do we rank for, what moved, what is broken, what do I write next”. That work runs on data you already own, which is why it can cost $0 to $5 a month per website instead of a suite subscription.
Free forever with no card, Basic at $1 a month, and Pro AI at $5 a month per website. The pricing page lists every limit. For Semrush's current pricing, check their own pricing page — we are not going to quote a competitor's prices, because they change and we would get them wrong.
MrKeyword's Free plan is free and does not expire: 1 website, 25 tracked keywords, 100 audit pages and 10 keyword lookups a month. The free tools — keyword lookup, rank tracker, site audit and domain authority checker — all run on that free account.
Plenty of people should. A suite for quarterly competitive and link work, MrKeyword for the weekly loop on sites you own or manage. They read different data, so they do not really overlap.
The same question for a tool that is mostly a backlink index.
Read moreFree, $1 and $5 per website, with every limit listed.
Read moreThe four sources behind every number, and the rules the product is held to.
Read morePer-client pricing, seats, reporting — and what is missing for agency work.
Read moreFree forever, no credit card. Connect a property and compare the numbers yourself.