Moz vs Semrush

Short answer: Moz is the cheaper tool at every matched tier and the better fit for a single site, an in-house marketer who reports Domain Authority, or any budget under $100 a month. Semrush costs 40 to 84 percent more tier for tier, and in exchange it gives you the broadest dataset in the category, an AI toolkit, and content tools Moz does not have. Agencies and content teams usually end up on Semrush. Everyone else should run the numbers below first. All prices were captured October 11, 2026 on our Moz pricing teardown and Semrush pricing teardown.

The matched-tier math

Comparing list prices tells you very little because the two companies cut their ladders differently. Moz sells four tiers from $49 to $299 a month. Semrush renamed its lineup in 2026 and now sells four tiers from $139 to $549. The honest comparison pairs plans by what they actually include, not by their position on the pricing page.

The entry pairing is Moz Standard against Semrush SEO. Both are the first plan a working marketer can live on. Semrush gives you more sites and more tracked keywords at this level, so the per-keyword cost is actually lower on Semrush, but the monthly bill is 40 percent higher.

The working pairing is Moz Medium against Semrush Pro+. This is where most agencies with a handful of clients and most serious in-house teams land. The tracked keyword count is identical at 1,500. Semrush adds five more sites, 100 AI prompts a day, and share-of-voice reporting. Moz costs 67 percent less for the same keyword volume.

The annual view is where the gap stops looking like a rounding error. Both vendors discount roughly 20 percent for paying upfront, so the ratio holds, but the absolute dollars add up.

Over a 12-month annual contract, picking Moz Medium over Semrush Pro+ leaves $1,259 on the table. That is enough to pay for a second tool or a few months of a freelancer. Whether the Semrush data is worth that money depends entirely on how you use it, which is the subject of the rest of this page.

The $49 Moz plan and why it rarely holds

Moz advertises a $49 Starter plan, and the price is real. It is monthly only, covers one site, tracks 50 keywords, and allows 75 keyword research queries a month. Seventy-five queries is about three working days of normal keyword research. Fifty tracked keywords covers a small local business and not much else.

In our Moz review we found that most working setups land on Standard or Medium within the first billing cycle. So the honest entry price for Moz is $99, not $49, and that is the figure we use in the matched-tier tables. Semrush has no equivalent decoy. Its cheapest plan is $139 and it is usable from day one.

What Semrush charges for that Moz does not

Every Semrush plan includes one user. A second seat starts at $45 a month on the lower tiers and climbs with the plan. For a three-person team on Pro+, the real monthly bill is not $299, it is $299 plus two seats, and that is before any add-ons.

The add-ons are the second layer. Local SEO, the .Trends market intelligence module, and the Agency Growth Kit are each sold separately. None of them is required, but each one is pitched inside the product at the moment you need it, and in our Semrush review add-on creep was the single most common complaint from people who had been customers for more than a year.

The 2026 tier rename also moved AI visibility tracking out of the cheapest plan. Semrush SEO at $139 has no AI prompt tracking at all. You need Starter at $199 for 50 prompts a day, Pro+ for 100, or Advanced for 200. If tracking your brand in AI answers is the reason you are shopping, the real Semrush entry price is $199.

Moz has fewer of these traps because it has fewer modules to sell. That is both the strength and the weakness. The bill is predictable. The product is smaller.

Where each tool is stronger

Lab Scores first. Semrush scores 8.2 out of 10 in our testing. Moz scores 7.6. The 0.6-point gap is almost entirely data: keyword database size, backlink index size, and refresh speed. On ease of use and reporting clarity Moz is ahead, and Domain Authority remains the metric that clients and executives ask for by name, which is not a small thing when your job involves explaining SEO to people who do not do SEO.

Who should pick Moz

Moz is the right call if you run one site or a small handful, if your budget sits under $100 a month, or if you are an in-house marketer whose monthly report has a Domain Authority line on it. In that last case the tool choice is partly made for you. Reporting DA from a third-party tool is possible, but reporting it from Moz is what people expect.

Moz is also the better pick for anyone who values a short learning curve. New team members are productive inside a day. The same cannot be said of Semrush, which has grown to the point where most customers use a fraction of what they pay for.

Who should pick Semrush

Semrush earns its premium for agencies with many clients, for content teams that live inside keyword clustering and content briefs, and for anyone whose work depends on competitive research across large keyword sets. The dataset is the product. If you need to see what a competitor ranks for in a market you have never touched, Semrush will show you more of it than Moz will.

It is also the obvious choice if AI visibility reporting is already on your client deliverables, as long as you budget for the $199 Starter tier rather than the $139 SEO tier. We cover the broader question of whether the premium pays back in our Semrush verdict.

The third option: SE Ranking

We would be doing you a disservice if we framed this as a two-horse race. SE Ranking scores 9.0 out of 10 in our lab, above both Moz and Semrush, and it ships AI visibility tracking inside its normal plans rather than as a tier gate or an add-on. Its rank tracking is the most flexible of the three, its data is closer to Semrush than to Moz, and its pricing lands between the two.

Our SE Ranking review goes through the plans in detail. The short version is that if you are torn between paying Moz prices and wanting Semrush breadth, SE Ranking is the tool most likely to end the argument. It also tops our AI SEO tools ranking for the same reason.

If keyword research is genuinely the only job, Mangools at $29 a month on annual billing is the cheapest serious option, and we compare it directly against Semrush in Mangools vs Semrush. For the full field, including the tools that did not make this page, see our best SEO software ranking.