SEO tool alternatives, compared honestly.
Written by a company that sells one of them. We have tried to make that not matter: every tool below gets a fair description of what it is best at, including the jobs we do not do.
Every SEO tool is one of two things.
Tools that tell you what is wrong
Research platforms and dashboards. Excellent at finding the gap, and they will not write the page or publish it. Worth the money if you have someone whose job is to act on the data.
Semrush · Ahrefs · Surfer · most of this listTools that do something about it
Audit, write, publish, prove. Far fewer of them, and the reason most people end up paying for a dashboard they never open is that they bought from column one by mistake.
Argrow sits hereSort by that first and the shortlist gets short quickly.
Full comparisons.
Built from each vendor's own published pages, with the date we checked and a link to every source. Points in their favour stay in.
The tools, and who each one is for.
10 tools, in no particular order of merit. 2 have a full sourced head-to-head you can read.
SearchAtlas and OTTO
Full SEO suite with automationBest for: Agencies wanting one login for data, content and automation
A deep suite: keyword and backlink data, site auditing, content, local SEO and white-label reporting, with OTTO automating the fixes and deploying them through native CMS connectors, a code pipeline, Cloudflare or its own pixel. Priced from $99 USD a month and metered in universal credits, which suits a portfolio and is heavier than a single business needs.
Full SearchAtlas and OTTO comparisonLocalo
Google Business ProfileBest for: Local businesses whose website is already fine
Focused local visibility software: profile position tracking, GBP posting, review management, directory listings and profile protection, from $49 USD a month with a 14-day no-card trial. It does not audit or edit your existing website, so it pairs with something else if the site is the weak link.
Full Localo comparisonSemrush
Data platformBest for: In-house teams and consultants who do the work themselves
The most complete SEO dataset most people will ever need, and priced accordingly. It is a research and reporting platform: it will show you the gap in exquisite detail and it will not write the page or publish it. Worth every dollar if you have someone whose job is to act on it, and an expensive habit if you do not.
Ahrefs
Data platformBest for: Backlink research and competitive analysis
Arguably the best backlink index in the industry and a first-class crawler. Same shape as Semrush: it is a tool for a practitioner, not a replacement for one. If backlink research is your job, nothing here replaces it, including us.
Surfer SEO
Content optimisationBest for: Writers who want a page scored before they publish
Takes a target keyword and tells a writer what to include, with a live score as they write. Excellent at that one job. It assumes you already have a writer, a strategy and a way to publish, which is exactly the assumption that leaves a lot of small businesses stuck.
BrightLocal
Local SEOBest for: Multi-location businesses and local agencies
A long-established local platform: citation building, review management, local rank tracking and audits. Strong at scale across many locations. Like Localo, it is local-first and does not do your website's on-page work.
Screaming Frog
Technical crawlerBest for: Anyone who needs to see every URL on a site
A desktop crawler that has been the technical SEO standard for years, and still the fastest way to get a complete picture of a site's URLs, redirects, headers and broken links. It reports; it does not fix. We benchmark our own crawler against it.
Yoast and Rank Math
WordPress pluginBest for: Getting the basics right on a WordPress site
The plugins most WordPress sites already have. They handle titles, meta descriptions, schema and sitemaps, and give you a traffic light while you write. They are the floor, not the ceiling: they will not tell you what to write, research a keyword, or do the work. Argrow sits on top of them rather than replacing them.
AI writing tools
Content generationBest for: Filling a blog quickly
The category that advertises thirty articles a month. They can genuinely produce that volume, usually into WordPress and usually as new blog URLs. What they typically do not do is touch the service pages you actually sell from, match your page builder's design, or check that anything published is still there next week.
Argrow
Done-for-you SEOBest for: Owners who want the work done and proof it worked
The second kind of tool. Argrow audits the site, writes the pages, publishes them into your real website including native page-builder blocks, tracks organic, local and AI-search visibility, and shows a before and after on every change. Every change waits for your approval, snapshots the previous value, and can be rolled back individually. From $99 AUD a month.
If you need a research platform, buy one of the others.
We would rather you did. Argrow is the second kind of tool: it audits your site, writes the pages, publishes them into your real website including native blocks inside Divi and Elementor, and shows a before and after on every change. Nothing goes live without your approval and any single change can be rolled back. If what you actually want is a backlink database, none of that helps you.