Sorted by the job, not by the brand
Six jobs, six kinds of tool — and three of them are free
"Best SEO tool" has no answer until you say which job you are trying to do. Here are the six, which kind of software does each one, what Google and Microsoft already give you for nothing, and what the paid tools charge — every price read off the vendor's own page on 24 September 2026.
What is on this bench
The cheapest published way in to each tool this page names, on one scale and in one unit. Annual billing is cheaper at every one of them; these are the rates you pay if you want to stop after four weeks.
Start here: name the job, then pick the tool
The most useful thing you can do before buying SEO software is finish this sentence: I cannot currently find out ______ about my site. Six blanks cover almost every case, and the tool you need falls out of which blank you filled.
Three of those six jobs are done well, for nothing, by Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. The other three are where paid software genuinely earns money, because each one needs data about pages you do not own — and that data is expensive to collect.
Everything below is organised that way. No tool is "the winner", because a crawler and a keyword tool are not competing for the same job any more than a drill and a tape measure are.
Job one: is this page indexed at all?
The free answer is Google Search Console, and there is no better paid one. Google describes it as "a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results", and it will confirm whether Google can crawl the page, tell you why it was not indexed, and let you request re-indexing.
No third-party tool can beat this, because Search Console is Google reporting on its own behaviour. A paid tool can only infer what Google did. For Bing and, increasingly, the assistants that lean on Bing's index, Bing Webmaster Tools does the same job; Microsoft's own webmaster blog describes it as "free and full of powerful features" and lists URL Inspection, Sitemaps Report and Crawl Control among the tools it includes.
The catch is the same for both: they only cover sites whose ownership you can verify. That single limitation is the reason the paid category exists at all.
Neither of these pays Searchbench anything. We recommend them first anyway, because on this job they are simply correct.
Job two: where am I actually ranking?
Start with Search Console, and buy a rank tracker only when you need positions you cannot get from it. Search Console's performance report gives you impressions, clicks, click-through rate and an average position for the queries your own site appeared for — which for a small site is often the whole answer.
A dedicated rank tracker exists for the cases Search Console cannot cover: a position for a specific keyword on a specific day in a specific city or on a specific device, a position for a competitor's domain, or a daily reading rather than an average. That is a different job, priced by the tracked keyword rather than by the site, and it is a whole category of its own — worth buying only once you can say which keyword, which place and which day you need.
Every general SEO suite on this page includes rank tracking as one module. If tracking is the only thing you need, a suite is an expensive way to buy it.
Job three: who links to me, and to the people beating me?
Your own backlinks are free to see; everyone else's are what you are paying for. Search Console will "identify which sites link to your website", and Bing Webmaster Tools ships a Backlink Insights report. Between them, the question "who links to me" is answered without spending anything.
The question "who links to the page ranking above me" is a different product entirely. Answering it means running a web-scale crawler and keeping an index of links between pages, which is the single most expensive thing any of these companies do — and it is why backlink data sits behind the most expensive plans.
Among the tools on this page the cheapest published entry price is Ahrefs Starter at $29.00 a month, which Ahrefs' own pricing page describes in one line: "See what people search and spy on competitors." Ahrefs closed its affiliate scheme years ago and has run none since, so naming it here earns Searchbench nothing at all. Check on that page which reports the Starter tier actually opens before you buy it for link data specifically — Ahrefs lists its plans' contents there, and they change.
Job four: crawl the whole site and find what is broken
For sites under a few hundred pages, the free Screaming Frog SEO Spider does this completely. Its own page puts the offer plainly: "Download & crawl 500 URLs for free, or buy a licence for €245 Per Year to remove the limit." The free version is not a demo — it is the same crawler with a cap on how many URLs one crawl may cover.
Note the currency. That page served this reader euros, not dollars, and it carries a currency switcher, so check what your own country is quoted before comparing it with anything else here.
Screaming Frog runs no affiliate programme of any kind, so this recommendation pays Searchbench nothing. If you outgrow the cap and want a hosted crawler with scheduling and history instead of a desktop application, the site-audit modules in SE Ranking and the larger suites do that job on a subscription — and the audit allowances, rather than the headline price, are what you should compare.
Job five: size a keyword list before you write
Google's Keyword Planner is free to use, with one condition most write-ups skip. Google's documentation says Keyword Planner "helps you research keywords for your Search campaigns" and offers "View monthly searches" — and also, verbatim, that "You must complete your account setup by entering your billing information to access basic features like 'Get ideas for new keywords'." There is no subscription fee; there is a Google Ads account with card details on file.
Bing Webmaster Tools includes keyword research too, at no cost and with no card.
Paid keyword tools exist because they break Google's grouped figures apart, add difficulty estimates, and let you look at domains you do not own. The cheapest on this page is Mangools Basic at $30.50 a month billed monthly, or $18.85 a month when billed annually — $226.20 for the year against a list total of $366.00 on its own page. Mangools' pricing page opens on its annual panel, so the monthly figure only appears after you switch it.
One honest warning: no two keyword tools agree on volume, because every one of them is estimating what Google does. Treat the numbers as a way to rank ideas against each other, never as measurements. There is more on where the free keyword data runs out on the free tools page.
Job six: score a draft against the pages already ranking
This is the one job with no serious free option, and the one people buy first for the wrong reasons. An on-page tool reads the pages currently ranking for your target query and tells you what they have in common — terms, headings, length — so you can decide what your draft is missing.
Surfer is the best-known. Its cheapest plan, Discovery, is $49 per month, and every price on that page carries the caption "Billed yearly": Surfer does not publish a month-to-month rate at all, only yearly-billed ones. Its next plan up, Standard, is $99 a month on the same basis.
Whether that is worth it depends entirely on how much you publish. For one page a month it is not; for a team shipping weekly it can be the cheapest editor you will ever hire. What it cannot do is tell you whether the page deserves to rank.
The six jobs on one table
| The job | The free answer | The cheapest paid answer here | Published price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is this page indexed? | Google Search Console | nothing beats it | free |
| Where am I ranking? | Search Console performance report | Mangools Basic, tracking included | $30.50 a month |
| Who links to me? | Search Console and Bing Backlink Insights | Ahrefs Starter | $29.00 a month |
| Crawl the whole site | Screaming Frog, 500 URLs | Screaming Frog licence | €245 per year |
| Size a keyword list | Google Keyword Planner | Mangools Basic | $30.50 a month |
| Score a draft | none worth naming | Surfer Discovery | $49 a month, billed yearly |
Two rows deserve a second look. The Screaming Frog line is in euros because that is what its page printed; it is not converted here. And the Surfer line is the only one on the table that cannot be paid month to month, which makes its real commitment twelve times the number shown.
Where the full suites fit
A suite bundles most of these six jobs into one subscription. That is worth paying for when you need three or more of them and would rather have one bill and one interface.
Read on the same day, the two suites Searchbench links list $129.00 a month for SE Ranking Core billed monthly, dropping to $103.20 a month on its annual plan under a "Save 20%" toggle, and $139.00 a month for Semrush's SEO plan billed monthly, or $117.33 a month billed annually. Ahrefs' equivalent tier, Lite, is $129 a month; its pricing page offers "Pay annually, save up to 17%" but does not print the resulting per-plan figures, so this site does not either.
If you only need one of the six jobs, none of these is the right purchase. If you need four, they stop looking expensive very quickly.
Where WordPress plugins fit, and why the renewal line matters
A WordPress SEO plugin is not on this list of six, because it does not report on anything — it writes titles, meta descriptions, schema and sitemaps into your pages. Every site on WordPress should have one; all the major ones have capable free versions.
The reason they get their own page is the second year. Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress and Yoast handle renewal in four different ways, and only three of them publish what happens. The full comparison, with the figures, is in what WordPress SEO plugins cost in year two.
What this page will not tell you
Searchbench has not measured any of these tools. Nobody here has benchmarked crawl speed, counted an index, or tested whether one keyword tool's volume is closer to the truth than another's — and neither has anyone else, because the truth is a number only Google holds.
So there is no "most accurate" tool named anywhere on this site, no test results, and no score for data quality. What you get instead is the job each tool is built for and the price its own page publishes, with the day it was read. Those two things are checkable, and you can check them.