Ahrefs offered four standard pricing tiers. You can pay them monthly or annually. If you pay annually, you get two months free. Choosing the right plan for your business comes down to the features you require as well as your budget.
In addition to these pricing tiers, Ahrefs also has a credit system. Using common tools such as Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Content Explorer and Web Explorer uses one credit each time you create a new report. Plans come with 500 to 750 credits per user a month. If you run out of credits for the month, it costs $35 to add 500 shared credits, regardless of plan. If you’re a business that plans on running a lot of reports, keep this in mind when planning out your budget.
Ahrefs Tiered Features and Plans
Lite ($99 per month)
Best for: Small businesses just starting with SEO that don’t need every bell and whistle.
| Key Features | What’s Missing? |
|---|---|
Site Audit | Fresh SERP updates |
Site Explorer | Broken links and backlinks tracking |
Keywords Explorer | Site portfolios |
Ahref’s Lite plan comes with everything you need to get your SEO ventures off the ground, including a robust Keywords Explorer that helps you find winning keywords based on parent topics or AI suggestions. There’s also a Site Audit that can automatically scan your website for SEO issues, which is great if you don’t have the time to investigate that yourself.
Another key feature is the Site Explorer, which allows you to research a competitor’s backlinks and keyword rankings so you can see what’s working for them. Add in the SERP comparison feature, alerts for keyword ranking changes and the ability to export your data to Sheets, and you have a tool that can definitely help any small business battle against the best in SEO.
Standard ($199 per month)
Best for: Freelance search engine optimizers and marketing consultants who want to deliver big for their clients.
| Key Features | What’s Missing? |
|---|---|
Content Explorer | No HTTP authentication crawling |
Batch analysis | Looker Studio integration |
Web mention alerts | Web Explorer |
If you need more SEO insights, the Standard plan includes everything in the Lite plan with the big addition of a Content Explorer. This feature helps you research content ideas and find link opportunities, and you can sort by both SEO and social metrics.
This upgraded plan also adds in a batch analysis feature that lets you pull metrics for up to 200 URLs at a time—way faster than checking them one by one. We also like that it includes web mentions alerts so you can see what people are saying about your company or your competitors.
Advanced ($399 per month)
Best for: In-house marketing teams that need robust data to put their company ahead in SERPs.
| Key Features | What’s Missing? |
|---|---|
Looker Studio | Unlimited historical data |
Web Explorer | Invoicing capabilities |
AI Content Grader | Audit log |
The Advanced plan builds off of the Standard plan with even more site audit features, including the ability to crawl staging and restricted websites protected by HTTP authentication. This lets you identify crucial SEO errors before you push a site live—important for businesses that consistently launch new sites to promote services and products.
The Advanced version of Ahrefs also connects seamlessly with Looker Studio dashboards so you can add the most up-to-date keyword, backlink and technical SEO data to your reports. Another new feature is the Web Explorer, which gives you advanced insights into Ahref’s yep.com search engine.
Enterprise ($999 per month)
Best for: Agencies and enterprises that handle multiple big-name clients.
| Key Features | What’s Missing? |
|---|---|
API capabilities | Unlimited API units |
Directory listing | Unlimited keyword lists |
5 million crawl credits | Predefined user and credit limits |
The Enterprise plan from Ahrefs is customized depending on your needs, meaning you can choose exactly how many users and credits you get per month. You also get unlimited historical data access, so you can compare a website’s performance from years ago to see exactly how it improved along the way.
Perhaps the most important feature of this plan is the Ahrefs API. With this tool, you can pull backlinks and ranking data from Site Explorer and keywords from Keywords Explorer, allowing you to integrate this data into other software or in your own custom reports.
Which Plan Should You Choose?
For most small businesses, the Lite plan should suffice. It has everything you need to dive in and get the data you need to push your site to the top of SERPs. The price is also manageable, especially if you don’t choose additional add-ons. However, if you think you’ll benefit from additional Site Explorer functionalities as well as the ability to analyze pages in batches, it might be worth it to upgrade to the Standard plan.
We don’t really recommend the Advanced or Enterprise plans for small businesses. But, they might work for larger businesses that have a large portfolio of sites as well as a dedicated marketing team that would utilize all of the advanced features of these plans.
