Spyfu vs Semrush (2026) — Which SEO Tool Is Better?

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In this SpyFu vs Semrush comparison, I look at two of the most popular SEO tools available — and help you work out which one is right for you.

I’ll start my full comparison with a key question…

What are SpyFu and Semrush?

SpyFu and Semrush are two platforms that help you optimize your website for search engines.

They do this in lots of different ways, but the main thing they give you is information — information that you can use to:

Both tools provide you with keyword ideas — based on phrases that you enter — that can be used to create engaging blog posts that are more likely to rank highly.

They’ll also tell you how hard it will be to rank for specific keywords.

And they’ll help you identify websites to approach for backlinks.

(These days, Semrush also helps you track the performance of your content in AI-generated answers — more on this shortly.)

I’ll go through all these features in depth as I progress through this comparison — beginning with something called domain analysis.

Domain analysis

One of the most useful things you can do with SpyFu and Semrush is domain analysis. This means getting a general take on how a website is performing from an SEO point of view.

You typically perform domain analysis either on your own website — to see where SEO improvements could be made to it — or on a competitor’s, to see how hard it will be to outrank them in organic search results.

Carrying out domain analysis is straightforward in both SpyFu and Semrush — you just enter a domain into a ‘domain overview’ section and key metrics are returned quickly, in a dashboard format.

With both tools, metrics provided include:

Semrush gives you some pretty important metrics that you won’t find in SpyFu’s domain overview dashboard, however.

Chief among these is an authority score — a piece of data that tells you, at a glance, how ‘powerful’ a domain is from an SEO point of view. The higher the score for a domain, the more likely it is that content placed on it will rank highly, or that a link from it will positively influence the rankings of a site being linked to.

(That said, there is a ‘domain strength’ metric available in some SpyFu reports. For example, if you look at a backlink report for a domain, you’ll see this beside each linking domain listed. But weirdly, SpyFu doesn’t show you an authority score for the actual domain you’re investigating!).

Then, there’s search intent data. Semrush doesn’t just tell you about the number of keywords a site ranks for — it also gives you information about why people are using them during searches.

Its ‘keyword by intent’ box breaks down the type of keywords that a site ranks for into four categories: informational, navigational, commercial and transactional. These tell you what a user is trying to do when performing a search (find information, locate something, buy a product etc.).

I’ll cover search intent in more depth shortly, but for now I’ll just say that it comes in very useful in SEO, and there’s nothing really comparable available from SpyFu in its domain overview.

Now it has to be said that increasingly, domain analysis isn’t just about performance in traditional search engines. With the rapid rise of AI-powered search tools (like Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode) and conversational chatbots like ChatGPT, it’s also becoming important to understand how visible a brand is inside AI-generated answers.

The good news for Semrush users here is that it now provides detailed AI visibility statistics directly within its domain overview reports. These show how often a domain is mentioned and cited across major AI platforms — ChatGPT, Google’s AI results, Gemini, and Perplexity are currently covered. Semrush presents the data in clear charts and comparative views that make it easy to benchmark your site’s performance against competing ones.

Alongside this, Semrush gives you an authority-style metric — an ‘AI Visibility Score’ — that aims to help you understand not just how influential a site is in search engines, but also how authoritative it is within AI-driven discovery environments.

Now, SpyFu does not currently provide comparable AI visibility data inside its domain analysis reports.

That said, it does offer a separate AI Brand Monitoring feature, SpyGPT, that checks whether your brand is mentioned in ChatGPT responses. This tool is more basic in nature, however, and doesn’t provide charts, historical trends, or competitor benchmarking features.

Another key difference between Semrush and SpyFu’s domain overview tools is the number of countries you can perform domain analysis for. While Semrush shows you how a domain is performing in around 120 countries, SpyFu limits you to doing so in 30 territories.

And unlike Semrush, SpyFu doesn’t let you get a global overview of domain data — you have to do things on a per-country basis. This stops you from getting a more holistic view of a domain.

As you can see in the screenshot below, Semrush gives you a simple ‘worldwide’ option which, when clicked, gives you an analysis of a domain at a genuinely global level.

Traffic analysis in SpyFu and Semrush

As part of their domain overviews, both SpyFu and Semrush give you reports showing the monthly traffic to the domain you’re looking at — but it’s important to note that the figures provided here are estimates.

During my own testing and research, using sites for which I have access to visitor data, I found that Semrush’s estimates were the more accurate of the two — although in several cases, not terribly so!

(In general I’ve found Semrush’s estimates to be more accurate when sites with higher traffic levels — typically 50k+ visits per month — are being examined.)

In truth, the important thing to remember with either set of traffic statistics is that they are best used to identify trends (i.e., is site A more popular than sites B and C?) — rather than being taken as gospel. But of the traffic estimates returned, Semrush’s are more useful, mainly because you can use them to get a sense of global traffic levels to a website.

Overall, both SpyFu and Semrush give you useful insights into the SEO performance of a domain. But due to its more comprehensive data, its global overviews, the provision of an authority score, and the inclusion of AI visibility data, the winner here is definitely Semrush.

Now, let’s take a look at keyword research features — a very important aspect of both platforms.

Keyword research features

Keyword research involves four key steps: 

And both SpyFu and Semrush make it fairly easy to carry these tasks out.

In both platforms, you just enter a phrase into a keyword overview tool and you’ll get the info you need straight away — search volume for that phrase, its keyword difficulty score, the sites that are currently ranking for it and a list of related keywords.

Both platforms use scores out of 100 to indicate keyword difficulty — with a higher percentage indicating higher difficulty.

However, with Semrush, you get more context about keyword difficulty — not only do you get a general score that indicates how hard it will be to rank for a keyword, you’re also told how many backlinks you’ll need for it to rank in the top ten search results on Google).

(Google effectively treats backlinks as votes — the more high-quality links you have pointing to a piece of content, the more likely it is to rank highly in search results).

You also get a feature from Semrush I’ve yet to come across in any other SEO tool I’ve tested: a ‘personalized keyword difficulty score.’ This tells you not just how generally difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword, but how difficult it will be for your site to rank for it.

Semrush figures this out based on how topically relevant your website is for the keyword you’re looking at, and the strength of your domain.

Getting keyword suggestions

When you look up a keyword in SpyFu and Semrush, in addition to being presented with the ‘difficulty’ metrics discussed above, you are also given access to a wide range of keyword variations — alternative phrases that you might want to consider using in an SEO campaign.

In SpyFu, you use the appropriately-named ‘Related Keywords’ tab to access this data; in Semrush, you open its ‘Keyword Magic’ tool.

When testing keyword suggestion features, I found that both tools returned large and relevant lists, with the number of suggestions returned by Semrush for a given keyword typically being larger.

This is not surprising, given that its keyword database is considerably bigger than SpyFu’s — it contains 27.8 billion keywords to SpyFu’s 13 billion.

The other thing you get more of with Semrush when it comes to keyword suggestions is contextual data. Each keyword suggestion in Semrush is accompanied by six additional pieces of data, namely:

(If using Semrush’s personalized data feature, you’ll also see a personalized keyword difficulty score and a ‘potential traffic’ metric that lets you estimate how much traffic you’d get if you created strong content for the keyword you’re investigating.)

By contrast, SpyFu accompanies its keyword suggestions with just three pieces of contextual data — search volume, keyword difficulty and cost-per-click value.

In terms of the filters that you can use to narrow down your keyword suggestions into realistic targets, both platforms give you a good range of options too.

Unlike Semrush, SpyFu gives you quite a few filters relating to ad campaigns — you can filter by things like the percentage of paid clicks through to a particular keyword, or the total number of advertisers bidding on a particular phrase.

Semrush’s filters are more to do with sifting through organic search results — and give you more fine-grained control over things like format (broad match, phrase match, exact match, question etc.), language and search intent.

And speaking of search intent…

Identifying search intent

As discussed briefly earlier, Semrush gives you more context about why users perform particular searches than SpyFu, thanks to its very useful ‘search intent’ feature.

As part of the metrics returned for a particular keyword, you’ll see an ‘intent’ box highlighting the context in which a particular search is made:

In the example above, you can see that for a search phrase of ‘start online store,’ Semrush thinks that the intent behind the user’s search is likely to be ‘informational.’

Semrush also automatically highlights when the search intent is likely to be ‘transactional,’ ‘informational’ or ‘commercial.’

These types of keyword search intent are defined by Semrush as follows:

There’s nothing really comparable from SpyFu on this front, so it’s a definite win for Semrush here.

Now, Semrush’s keyword intent feature really comes in handy when you’re filtering keyword suggestions.

When you enter a phrase into Semrush’s ‘Keyword Magic’ tool, you’ll typically end up with a huge list of suggested phrases, and it can be hard to spot the phrases that are most likely to generate revenue for you.

But Semrush’s ‘intent’ dropdown menu helps massively here, because it lets you exclude a lot of irrelevant stuff really easily and focus on the phrases that are most likely to be lucrative for your business.

As a simple example of this, you could simply filter keyword suggestions by ‘commercial’ intent to view those that are most likely to lead to purchases.

Although SpyFu does provide some help resources on identifying search intent, it doesn’t give you a comparable feature, so it’s another clear win for Semrush in this area.

Keyword lists

Semrush allows you to create lists of organic keywords that you can refer to any time you like, using its ‘Keyword Strategy Builder’ tool (pictured below). This lets you create lists of target keywords and keep tabs on their evolving difficulty scores and search volumes.

Recently, Semrush has enhanced this feature by adding a ‘keyword clustering’ feature to it. You can use this to get Semrush to either:

The aim of this feature is to help make the process of establishing ‘topical authority‘ on a website — where you cover a topic in an exhaustive and logical way — quicker and easier.

(Google can give preferential treatment to sites that are clearly authorities on certain topics, and contain a lot of content focused on topically relevant phrases).

I like this ‘clustering’ feature, but I think it needs a little bit of work — when experimenting with it, I found that some of the suggestions it supplied were rather off target.

SpyFu lets you build keyword lists too, but the process for doing so is quite confusing. Rather than just being able to create individual lists based around topics of your choosing (as is the case with Semrush), you have to associate them with particular domains and ‘projects’.

And, when you do so, your keyword list — known as a ‘Keyword Universe‘ — is pre-populated with a lot of keywords that SpyFu thinks should be on your list (based on the content on your domain). This can be useful — but also a nuisance, depending on your aims. You can create ‘groups’ of keywords within a ‘Keyword Universe,’ which serves as a workaround, but overall the process is clunky and not remotely as intuitive as Semrush’s.

Additionally, SpyFu’s keyword lists don’t display keyword difficulty scores, making them considerably less useful than the Semrush equivalents.

So, when it comes to creating and managing keyword lists, it’s another clear win for Semrush.

What search engines do SpyFu and Semrush pull data from?

So far in this comparison, we’ve seen Semrush winning out in the keyword research department. However, SpyFu does have one advantage over its rival in this area, in that it lets you access data from more search engines. While Semrush only provides data for one search engine, Google, SpyFu gives you some organic ranking history data from Bing, which you can access when viewing a project.

Now to be fair to Semrush, the emphasis on Google is pretty understandable, given its current dominance of the search engine market — over 90% at the time of writing (source: Statcounter).

And the Bing data you get from SpyFu is pretty limited too — you won’t get search volumes or keyword difficulty scores for Bing, just some rank tracking data.

But nonetheless, the presence of some additional search engine data in its platform does represent a bit of a win for SpyFu.

Pay-per-click (PPC) research features

In addition to letting you access data relating to organic search results, both Semrush and SpyFu let you access a considerable amount of Google pay-per-click (PPC) data. Both are considerably better than key rivals Ahrefs and Moz for this purpose.

In SpyFu, a dedicated ‘PPC research tab‘ gives you access to a wealth of data about the ads currently being run by a particular domain (and key competing ones).

Metrics and tools available from SpyFu in this section include:

To access PPC data in Semrush, you go to its dedicated ‘Advertising’ tab, where you can access a range of similar features (note that this requires the purchase of a separate ‘Advertising’ toolkit, which costs between $99 and $220 per month, depending on your needs).

In terms of the key differences between SpyFu and Semrush’s PPC research tools, one edge that SpyFu has over Semrush is its ‘Google Ads Advisor’ feature. This quickly surfaces a list of PPC keywords that SpyFu thinks you should consider bidding on (based on competitor activity and cost).

Another nifty feature offered by SpyFu for which there’s no direct Semrush equivalent is its ‘Google Ads Templates’ tool. This works with the downloadable Google Ads Editor and aims to give you ‘ready-to-import’ AdWords campaigns based on criteria you specify.

SpyFu also wins in the PPC department when it comes to ad history — at the time of writing, 20 years of data is available to draw on (which compares positively with Semrush’s 14 years of history). This ad history data informs the PPC keyword suggestions that SpyFu provides, and the keywords included in its ad templates.

Semrush is no slouch in the PPC department, however, and provides some advertising research features that are not available in SpyFu.

Most significantly, Semrush gives you the option to conduct advertising research for services other than Google — you can, for example, use its ‘AdClarity’ app to research and optimize advertising opportunities on other platforms (including social media).

And Semrush has a dedicated section for analysing Google’s ‘Product Listing Ads’ (PLA). These are the product ads that typically appear in carousel format at the top of Google search results (see screenshot below for an example of some of these).

You can enter a domain into Semrush’s advertising dashboard and get a detailed list of PLA ads that are being run by a particular company (along with the keywords used to place them).

Overall, when it comes to PPC and advertising data in SpyFu and Semrush — and unlike the other features we’ve discussed so far — the products are fairly closely matched, both giving you lots of useful data about advertising campaigns.

The key advantage that Semrush has in this department is flexibility — you can access data about more campaign types using the tool (albeit sometimes at an extra cost price, via the ‘Advertising’ toolkit).

SpyFu’s advantage here is that it gives you access to comprehensive PPC data at a much lower price point than Semrush (I discuss pricing in more depth shortly).

Content marketing in Semrush and SpyFu

In addition to providing SEO and PPC research features, both Semrush and SpyFu now offer tools to help with content creation and optimization — but to very different degrees.

Semrush provides a full content marketing platform, which helps you:

• identify new topics to write about
• use an ‘SEO writing assistant’ tool to help you craft search-friendly content
• audit your existing content from an SEO point of view
• identify keywords that your competitors are using in their posts

Semrush also provides an ‘SEO Writing Assistant’ feature, which provides short sections of texts based on prompts you give it. In my tests I found this worked pretty well, especially when I was prompting it to create factual content.

Helpfully, you can use this tool outside of Semrush: plugins for Google Docs, MS Word and WordPress are available for it.

In terms of limits, free account users — and those on the ‘Starter’ plan — can generate up to two AI documents per account, while users on the ‘Pro+’ and ‘Advanced’ plans can create an unlimited number of documents.

However, access to Semrush’s broader content marketing toolkit requires purchase of the $299-per-month ‘Pro+’ plan or higher, making these features relatively expensive to unlock.

Ultimately Semrush’s content marketing tools are very helpful in quite a few contexts. However, you do have to be on a more expensive plan to gain access to them.

As for SpyFu, its built-in content marketing features are more limited, but the company now offers a related AI tool called RivalFlow AI, which focuses specifically on improving existing content so it can better compete in search results.

RivalFlow AI analyzes your pages alongside competing content and highlights:

• questions your competitors answer that you don’t
• questions your competitors answer more thoroughly than you do
• questions you both answer.

Based on this information, you can adjust your content to make it more comprehensive and (theoretically at least) outrank your rivals.

RivalFlow AI is included free on SpyFu’s higher-tier plans. Users on the ‘Professional + AI’ plan get one project, while those on the ‘Team / Agency’ plan get up to ten.

Let’s take a look now at a very important aspect of SEO, backlink analysis.

Backlink analysis

How well a site performs in search results usually depends heavily on how many backlinks — external sites linking to it — exist for the site in question.

Both SpyFu and Semrush let you enter a domain name and view a list of all the backlinks to it that each tool can find.

Backlink database size

Based on the figures made publicly available by SpyFu and Semrush, Semrush’s database of domains is considerably bigger than SpyFu’s, containing 808 million domains to SpyFu’s 125 million.

This means that in theory, Semrush should be able to provide more comprehensive data for analyzing backlinks.

I was curious to see how this played out in practice however, so I conducted some simple tests on both tools’ ability to surface backlinks. These involved running some of the websites for ecommerce and design tools that we review through both platforms.

Here’s the number of backlinks surfaced by SpyFu and Semrush in my tests:

As you can see from the data in the table above, Semrush comprehensively beat SpyFu in all six contests.

(Interestingly, I have run this test a few times now, with each test taking place a few months apart. While the number of links surfaced by Semrush changed every time the test was run, the SpyFu numbers remained static, indicating that its database may not be updated all that frequently.)

So when it comes to backlink database size, and the number of backlinks surfaced by both tools, it’s another win for Semrush.

Backlink reports and tools

In terms of the backlink analysis itself, Semrush givesyou lots of useful information about the backlinks that point to a domain, including breakdowns of:

And Semrush presents this information nicely — simple but attractive graphs spell out the key stats in a way that helps you digest them easily.

You won’t really get comparable data from SpyFu — its backlink reporting is extremely basic in nature. You do get the option to filter by backlink type (blogs, news, .gov sites etc.), which is helpful, and the ability to surface backlinks that might be relevant to particular keywords.

Semrush and SpyFu both give you ‘link intersect’ tools, which allow you to compare a URL from your website against those from competing sites; you’ll end up with an exportable list of websites that are currently linking to your competitors, but not to you.

Both these tools work in similar ways, but Semrush’s is technically better — simply because it is drawing upon a much bigger link database to provide results.

Backlink auditing and building

Semrush offers a couple of backlink-related features for which there’s no equivalent in SpyFu.

First, there’s a ‘backlink auditing’ tool which identifies ‘toxic’ links (spammy links that can lead to you being penalized in search results).

You can output a list of these links, which you can then upload to Google as a ‘disavow’ file (this asks Google to ignore them when ranking websites).

However, not all SEO professionals think that these sorts of link spam identification tools are actually that helpful, and that a more manual approach to identifying poor-quality links works better.

Interestingly, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller is not a fan of the concept of toxic links at all, or the tools that identify them!

So, although some users may find Semrush’s toxic link tool useful in highlighting suspicious backlinks, I wouldn’t really view SpyFu’s omission of a similar tool as a key reason to choose Semrush instead.

Semrush’s ‘link building’ tool is more useful, however. This analyzes your domain or URL and gives you a list of websites to target with a request for a new backlink.

What’s interesting about this feature is that you’re not dealing with a spreadsheet of URLs — you’re dealing with a more ‘CRM-style’ interface, with each domain listed as a ‘domain prospect.’ 

You can click on a button beside each domain prospect to move it into different stages of a link-building pipeline, and send outreach emails directly within the Semrush interface (by connecting your email mailbox to Semrush).

This is a lovely feature.

Now, SpyFu does give you a backlink outreach tool too — however, it’s a lot more basic.

First, rather than automatically suggesting websites for you to approach (based on a URL you enter), SpyFu asks you to supply your own list of target sites. Once it’s got that, it will try to surface contacts for these.

But when testing this feature, I found that while SpyFu occasionally managed to surface Twitter or Facebook profiles for websites, unlike Semrush it didn’t give me any email addresses (it’s technically capable of doing so — it just didn’t give me any results for the sites I was targeting).

And, while SpyFu does let you associate tasks with websites, you’re not talking about a fully-fledged ‘CRM’ tool (i.e., similar to the one that Semrush gives you).

So all in all, when it comes to backlink auditing and building, the better tool by far is Semrush.

Site auditing

Semrush provides ‘site auditing’ features that allow you to evaluate how well your site is performing from a technical SEO and on-page SEO perspective — and, more recently, from an AI visibility standpoint too.

A site audit will highlight issues that might be having a negative effect on your search ranking, including:

It will also give you an overall ‘site health’ score along with a list of problems that you need to address.

Recently, Semrush has also introduced an ‘AI Search Health’ score which helps assess how well your site is structured for AI-driven search and answer engines, by evaluating factors that influence how your content is interpreted, summarized, and cited by AI systems.

Each problem identified by Semrush — whether SEO or AI related — is accompanied by contextual help regarding the issue involved, and tips on how to find a solution.

And in a nice touch, Semrush lets you export any problems it finds as tasks to the project management app Trello (you can also use the syncing service Zapier to send them to other task management platforms).

I particularly like Semrush’s on-page SEO checker, which goes through your whole site and gives you actionable tips for improvement for each page (in order of priority).

These can include suggestions on:

…and more.

As for SpyFu, unfortunately there are no site auditing tools included in the platform at all, meaning that when it comes to identifying technical improvements you could make to your site, it’s yet another win for Semrush.

Broken link analysis

Broken link building in SpyFu and Semrush

Broken link building is an important SEO tactic.

It involves…

This approach lets you build new backlinks to your content — and the more backlinks that point to your website, the better your content can perform in search.

In order to make this tactic work however, you need to be able to identify broken links — and the bad news for SpyFu users is that this is not possible with the tool.

By contrast, Semrush does have a broken link building feature — to access broken links, you run a backlink analytics report, navigate to an ‘indexed pages’ section and click a ‘broken pages’ option.

So, if broken link building is likely to be an important part of your SEO strategy, the better tool of the two is Semrush.

Identifying broken outbound links in SpyFu and Semrush

It’s also important to ensure that your web pages don’t contain broken links to other sites — these can be interpreted as a sign of poor quality content by Google (with negative implications for search rankings).

Again, Semrush wins over SpyFu here — because it provides you with a means to spot broken outbound links while SpyFu doesn’t.

In order to find broken outbound links with Semrush, you’ll have to run a site audit on a domain; once this is done, you go to the ‘warnings’ section of your site audit report, where you’ll be able to access a full list of problem outbound links.

However, using this method of identifying broken external links will involve using one of your ‘project slots’, which isn’t ideal.

(More on project slots — what they are and why they matter — shortly).

Interface and ease of use

It’s probably fair to say that SpyFu is, in general, a bit easier to use than Semrush — its interface is less cluttered, and employs large fonts. Simple tabs at the top of the screen let you navigate easily between features.

However, SpyFu’s ease-of-use is in large part down to the fact that it is considerably less feature-rich than Semrush — the reason that Semrush’s back end feels a bit busy at time is because you can do far more with the tool.

And, while testing these products I found that Semrush’s data loads considerably faster than SpyFu’s — during my tests of both platforms, sometimes it took a very long time for SpyFu to display metrics.

(For the record, this seemed to be more of an issue with organic search data than PPC data.)

And, if you like data visualization, the Semrush approach will definitely appeal. It graphs just about every key piece of information you can think of.

There is one UX area where Semrush definitely wins hands down in the ease-of-use stakes: outreach tools.

Its CRM-style approach to link building means that a lot of the time you can identify and contact prospects ‘in the box,’ whereas with SpyFu, it’s more a case of exporting data to Excel which you then reimport into other apps (contact finders, email marketing tools etc.) for outreach purposes.

Ultimately, SpyFu is easier to use when it comes to getting at-a-glance information.

But for detailed analysis, project-based work and link building, Semrush makes life much easier.

Pricing and value for money

Compared to other types of ‘SaaS’ (software as a service) apps, SEO tools can be very expensive.

That’s understandable however, as you’re not just paying for functionality, you’re paying for access to a lot of data, including some pretty serious competitive analysis data.

Semrush offers 3 main pricing plans:

There’s also the option of creating a ‘custom’ Semrush plan — fees for this are negotiable, as are features. And an ‘Enterprise’ plan is also available (again, with negotiable fees).

A discount of up to 17% is available if you pay on an annual basis, and there’s also a free trial available (Style Factory readers can access an exclusive, extended version of this by clicking the button below).

SpyFu comes in 3 varieties:

If you pay upfront for a year, these fees are reduced dropping to $29, $89, and $187 per month respectively.

So as you can see, SpyFu can work out considerably cheaper than Semrush.

There isn’t a free trial available for SpyFu, but you can make use of a free version of the tool — one that limits you to pulling just a few reports.

In terms of which product is better value, this will depend on your business requirements (and budget).

That said, there are a few key things to zoom in on when trying to work out which offers the most bang for the buck for you. Let’s take a look at these now.

Number of users

By default, all Semrush plans only come with one user account. If you want more seats, you have to pay an additional monthly fee to add additional users to a plan ($45 per month per ‘Starter’ user, $80 per month per ‘Pro+’ user and $100 per month per ‘Advanced’ user).

As for SpyFu, multiple users are only available on its ‘Team / Agency’ plan. This plan includes five user accounts by default, with additional users costing $30 per user per month.

Projects

It’s important to be aware that some features in Semrush and SpyFu can only be used on domains that have been added as ‘projects.’

Key Semrush features that fall into this category include site audits, backlink audits, link prospect identification, on-page SEO checking and rank tracking.

Key SpyFu features that require a project slot include creating keyword lists and surfacing contacts for link building.

With Semrush, the number of projects you can create depends on your plan. The entry-level ‘Starter’ plan allows for 5 projects, the ‘Pro+’ plan allows 15, and the ‘Advanced’ plan allows 40.

SpyFu ‘Basic’ plan lets you track one website, the ‘Pro + AI’ plan supports up to 10 websites, and the Team / Agency plan allows unlimited websites.

That said, while SpyFu’s higher-tier plan is more generous in terms of project limits, the range of project-based features available is still more limited than Semrush’s, particularly when it comes to technical SEO and site auditing tools.

Rank tracking

Rank tracking (also known as position tracking or SERP tracking) lets you track a website’s daily rankings for a custom set of target keywords. 

SpyFu offers generous rank tracking limits across all of its plans. Its ‘Basic’ plan lets you track up to 5,000 keywords, the ‘Pro+ AI’ plan supports 15,000 tracked keywords, and the ‘Team / Agency’ plan increases this to 50,000.

By contrast, Semrush applies much tighter keyword tracking limits. Its ‘Starter’ plan supports 500 tracked keywords, the ‘Pro+’ plan supports 1,500, and the ‘Advanced’ plan supports 5,000.

However, it’s worth noting that Semrush’s rank tracking tools extend well beyond traditional keyword monitoring. In addition to letting you track regular Google rankings, Semrush also allows you to track prompts and citations across AI-driven search platforms — ChatGPT, Google’s AI results, Google AI Mode, and Gemini.

So, while SpyFu is considerably more generous when it comes to raw keyword tracking limits, Semrush provides a more comprehensive approach to visibility tracking in general.

Historical data

SpyFu gives you access to historical data more cheaply than Semrush.

You have to be on a $299 ‘Pro+’ plan or higher to get access to it in Semrush, while SpyFu gives you 6+ months of historical data on its $39 per-month ‘Basic’ plan and full access to its 10+ years of data on its other ones.

However, what you have to remember here is that Semrush’s database is much bigger than SpyFu’s — so with Semrush, you’ll be dealing with historical data that is better from both a quality and quantity point of view.

Semrush toolkits

Semrush makes a number of additional features available via paid toolkits. These bundle together specialist tools for different aspects of digital marketing.

Its Traffic & Market toolkit (formerly Semrush .Trends) costs $289 per user per month and provides competitive intelligence tools. It combines Market Explorer, Traffic Analytics, One2Target and EyeOn, giving you estimates of audience demographics, market share, traffic sources and competitor activity. These are best used for spotting trends and relative performance, rather than as exact numbers.

The Social toolkit helps with content planning and publishing. Prices range from $19.99 to $39.99 per month depending on how many profiles and AI-generated posts you need. The entry-level version covers scheduling, reporting and competitor tracking; the higher tiers add AI-powered content ideas and unlimited scheduling, making them more suitable for agencies or heavy users.

The Local toolkit is aimed at businesses with physical locations. At $50 or $60 per month, it lets you push your details to directories, manage Google Business Profile and Facebook listings, track local rankings and monitor reviews. The premium version adds faster review updates, improved Google Maps tracking and API access. For ecommerce or online-only businesses, it’s less useful.

Semrush also offers an Advertising toolkit, which provides deeper access to PPC research, competitive ad intelligence, and display advertising insights. Pricing typically ranges from $99 to $220 per month, depending on data limits and reporting needs. This toolkit is particularly useful for businesses running large or multi-channel advertising campaigns.

Finally, Semrush’s Content toolkit bundles together tools for topic research, SEO-driven content creation, content auditing, and AI-assisted writing. Access to this toolkit requires the ‘Pro+’ plan or higher, making it a more expensive option — but one that provides a fairly comprehensive environment for managing SEO-focused content workflows.

The Semrush App Center

In addition to purchasing one of the Semrush toolkits discussed above, you can also add features to your Semrush account by paying for a third-party app. These are available from the ‘Semrush App Center.’

At the time of writing, around 60 apps / integrations are available. Their focus is mainly on analytics and data, and they range in cost from $10 to $349 per month, per user.

Key apps in the Semrush app store include ‘Influencer Analytics,’ an app that’s designed to make finding influencer/content creator partners for your site easier, and ‘AdClarity,’ an app that gives you a 360-degree view of your competitors’ advertising activity across multiple advertising platforms.

SpyFu doesn’t provide a similar app store — but if you’re on its ‘Professional’ plan, you can use its API to integrate it with other applications.

Reporting limits

SpyFu is more generous when it comes to the number of reporting requests you can make each month, allowing you to pull unlimited reports on its ‘Pro + AI’ and ‘Teams / Agency’ plans, and 10,000 of any type of report on its ‘Basic’ plan (per month).

Semrush technically limits things a bit more tightly — but that said, it’s still one of the more generous SEO tools on the market when it comes to reporting. For example, even on its entry level plan, you can run 3,000 keyword reports per day — which in practical terms probably feels like unlimited reporting.

And you have to remember, of course, that the quality of reports you can pull in Semrush is considerably higher than the SpyFu equivalents — as we’ve seen throughout this comparison, the amount of data you get from Semrush is much more comprehensive. The variety of reports you can pull in Semrush is much greater too.

PPC 

If you’re working exclusively on PPC projects, SpyFu is arguably the better value tool. It gives you a very comprehensive set of Google Ads-related tools for a considerably lower price than Semrush.

However, if you’re happy to pay extra for Semrush — in the form of third-party apps — you’ll find that you can use the tool to do more comprehensive advertising research (i.e., research that is not limited to just Google ads but display advertising services too).

Social media

You can use Semrush to gain insights on social media activity related to your brand or a competitor’s. The platform connects to key social networks and gives you access to a dashboard that provides insights on followers, post reach and post engagements. You can also use these social media tools to schedule posts.

These features are basically online marketing tools (rather than SEO ones), and will probably be viewed by many users as a ‘nice to have’ option rather than an essential piece of functionality. But if you feel that a social media tracker or post scheduler is important to you, then you should note that there’s nothing really comparable from SpyFu.

Customer support

Semrush and SpyFu offer a similar level of customer support, both providing three channels of support: phone, live chat and email.

This offering is more comprehensive than that offered by key rivals Moz and Ahrefs (which more or less limit you to email support).

Both Semrush and SpyFu make it easy to contact support — there’s a support icon present at the bottom right corner of both interfaces. Semrush’s phone support is easier to get at however, thanks to a phone number shown prominently in the footer (you’ll need to be logged into your Semrush account to see this, however).

User reviews

Up to this point, I’ve outlined my own perspective on SpyFu and Semrush. But it’s also worth looking at what users on independent review sites are saying.

To help you get a sense of these, I’ve collated ratings from major software review platforms, which you can view in my data table below (accurate as of January 2026):

Both SpyFu and Semrush enjoy solid feedback across review sites, but Semrush consistently comes out ahead. The difference is especially noticeable on TrustRadius, where Semrush’s rating is significantly higher.

Free trials

As discussed above, with SpyFu, no free trial is available, but a free plan with limited access to data is available.

Semrush, by contrast, allows you to try the product out entirely free via a free trial. Normally speaking, this lasts just 7 days — but for a limited time, the company has made an extended double-length trial available to our readers. You can access this via this special link (note that you’ll need to enter your credit card details to start your trial, but so long as you cancel at the end of it, you won’t be charged).

SpyFu vs Semrush: conclusion

So which is better, SpyFu or Semrush? The answer is Semrush. It’s a much more feature-rich and capable tool that can be used to drive real improvements in organic traffic to a website. Yes, it’s considerably more expensive than SpyFu, but the quality of its data is higher, its database is much bigger and you can perform a much wider range of SEO and AI visibility tasks with it.

There is one area where SpyFu arguably wins, and that’s in its provision of detailed PPC data at a much lower price point than Semrush. Users on a low budget who only ever work on paid search campaigns may find that SpyFu represents the better-value choice.

But if you work on SEO, or a mix of SEO and PPC, the better option here is unquestionably Semrush.

As always, it’s a good idea to try the tools out for yourself — you’ll find links to free versions of them both below.

And finally, if you’ve got any thoughts on your own on Semrush or SpyFu, do click here to leave a comment — I’ll do my best to answer them!

Pros and cons summary

Alternatives to Semrush and SpyFu

Semrush and SpyFu are not the only options when it comes to SEO software. Other SEO tools that you might want to check out include:

For more information about how Ahrefs and Moz compare to Semrush, do check out our Moz versus Semrush comparison, our Ahrefs vs Semrush comparison and our Ahrefs vs Moz vs Semrush comparison.

Our SE Ranking vs Semrush comparison and Similarweb vs Semrush shootout may also be of interest.

You can also check out our full Ahrefs review here, our video review of Ahrefs below, or our full Semrush review here.

If you’d like to learn more about how SpyFu and Semrush stack up against each other, check out our YouTube video comparison of SpyFu vs Semrush.