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Every price here was copied off the vendor’s own page, and carries the day it was copied.

The SEO tool wall · prices read 24 Sept 2026

Every SEO tool is built for one job. Start by naming yours.

A pegboard hung with six tools: a magnifying glass, a plumb bob and a chain link on a blue rail, and a drill, a tape measure and a wrench on a red rail.
Open the tool mapWhat you can get for nothing

Searchbench sorts SEO software by the work it does rather than by brand, says plainly which jobs Google and Microsoft already do for nothing, and prints what every paid tool publishes as its price with the day that price was read.

The blue rail

Questions Google and Microsoft answer for nothing

  • Is this page even indexed?
  • Where am I ranking, roughly?
  • Who links to me?

The red rail

Jobs where paid software earns its keep

  • Crawl a whole site, not a sample
  • Size a keyword list before writing
  • Score a draft against what ranks

Why a wall of tools and not a top ten

A top-ten list of SEO tools compares a crawler with a keyword tool with a WordPress plugin, and then ranks them. Those three things do not do the same job, so the ranking cannot mean anything — which is why every such list quietly puts the same two suites at the top and lets the rest fight for position four.

Searchbench takes the other approach. Six jobs, named in plain language. For each one: what it is, which kind of software does it, whether something free already does it well, and what the paid options publish as their price. Then you buy the one tool for the one job you actually have.

What is on this site

The tool map is the main page: all six jobs on one table, with the free answer and the cheapest paid answer for each and the price the vendor prints. The free tools page takes the four genuinely free tools seriously — what each covers, and the exact point where it stops.

The workbench notes go one tool at a time: what a WordPress SEO plugin costs in year two, which of the six jobs an on-page tool is really doing, where the enterprise tier starts, and what a shop on Etsy or Shopify can and cannot change.

How the prices here work

Every figure on this site was read on the vendor's own page and carries the day it was read. Where a page opened on its annual panel, the monthly panel was clicked and read separately — several of these pages headline a yearly rate while the word "monthly" sits somewhere else entirely.

Where a vendor does not publish a number, this site writes that it does not publish it. There are no estimates here, no converted currencies, no figures carried over from someone else's article, and no test results, because nothing on this site has been tested.

Who pays for this

Some links here are partner links, written as /go/ and marked sponsored and nofollow. Several of the tools recommended most often across the site — Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Keyword Planner, the free Screaming Frog crawler — have no such arrangement and pay nothing, and they still go first on the pages where they are the right answer. The full list of which is which names every partner and every refusal.

From the workbench

Every note →

AI SEO tools: three different products wearing one label

"AI SEO tool" now covers writing assistants, assistant-visibility trackers and ordinary tools with a chat box bolted on. They are not substitutes for each other.

Enterprise SEO tools: what the tier actually buys

Almost every enterprise SEO tier hides behind a sales call. One vendor prints its price. Here is what the tier really changes, and when it is genuinely needed.

Etsy SEO tools, and why the usual SEO tools do not apply

Almost nothing on the standard SEO wall works on an Etsy shop. You do not own the domain, cannot verify the pages, and are ranking inside somebody else's search engine.

On-page SEO tools: what they measure, and what that is worth

An on-page tool reads the pages already ranking and tells you what your draft lacks. That is a real job — and a narrower one than the score it hands you suggests.

Rank Math review: the plugin that prices by person, not by site

Rank Math's paid tier covers unlimited personal websites at one price and prints its renewal figure next to the discounted one. Both of those are unusual.

Before you buy anything

What counts as an SEO tool?
Six different kinds of software get called an SEO tool, and they do genuinely different jobs: something that tells you what Google has indexed, something that estimates where you rank, something that shows who links to you, a crawler that walks your whole site looking for faults, a keyword tool that sizes a list before you write, and an on-page tool that scores a draft against the pages already ranking. A WordPress SEO plugin is a seventh thing again — it writes tags and schema into the page rather than reporting on it. Naming which of those you need is most of the decision, because almost nothing does all of them well.
Do you actually need to pay for SEO software?
For three of those six jobs, no. Google Search Console is described by Google as "a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results", and it covers indexing, your own search traffic including average position, and the sites that link to you. Microsoft's webmaster blog calls Bing Webmaster Tools "free and full of powerful features" and adds keyword research and a site scan. Both are limited to sites you can verify you own, which is exactly the limitation paid tools exist to remove. Neither pays Searchbench anything.
What is the cheapest paid SEO tool worth having?
Read on 24 September 2026, the two cheapest month-to-month subscriptions among the tools on this site are Ahrefs Starter at $29.00 a month and Mangools Basic at $30.50 a month. For comparison, on the same day SE Ranking Core listed at $129.00 a month and Semrush's SEO plan at $139.00 a month, both billed monthly. Ahrefs runs no affiliate programme, so recommending it earns this site nothing; Mangools does, and that link is marked. Annual billing is cheaper at all four, and every one of them says so on its own page.
How many SEO tools does one small website need?
Usually one paid tool and two free accounts. Verify the site in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools first, because those answer the indexing, position and backlink questions for nothing and no paid tool can replace the data Google gives you about your own site. Then add one paid tool for whichever job is actually blocking you — a crawler if the site is large and you suspect technical faults, a keyword tool if you cannot decide what to write, an on-page tool if you write a lot and want a second opinion. Buying a full suite before you know which job you have is how people end up paying for five modules and using one.
Is a WordPress SEO plugin the same as an SEO tool?
No, and it is the one purchase where the renewal price matters most. A plugin writes titles, meta descriptions, schema and sitemaps into your pages; it does not gather data about search results. The four best-known ones handle year two very differently, and all four publish it: SEOPress says "Renew at same price", AIOSEO says "Special introductory pricing, all renewals are at full price", Rank Math prints a specific renewal figure beside its discounted one, and Yoast does not publish a renewal price on its plugin page at all. Read the renewal line before the headline price.