The short version
- Agency tool selection is decided by three numbers: cost per seat, projects per plan, and tracked keywords. Feature lists barely matter.
- Consider SE Ranking for these requirements: extra seats from $16/mo against $40–$80/mo at Ahrefs and from $45/mo at Semrush.
- Semrush Advanced covers 40 websites and carries the brand recognition that shortens client conversations.
- Budget for a dedicated crawler separately. No suite audit replaces Screaming Frog or Sitebulb on technical work.
Agency economics are different enough from in-house economics that most tool comparisons are useless to you. You are not optimising for the best data; you are optimising for defensible margin across a portfolio, which means the per-seat and per-project lines matter more than anything on the feature page.
The numbers that decide it
All figures from the vendor pricing pages cited in the sources below. SE Ranking Core and both Semrush tiers include one seat; SE Ranking Growth includes 3.
Read that table with your actual headcount in hand. A five-person agency on Ahrefs Advanced is $449 + (4 × $80) = $769/mo. The same team on SE Ranking Growth is roughly $279 + (2 × $16) = $311/mo, since Growth includes three seats. That is a difference of over $5,000 a year, which is a hire’s worth of margin on a small agency.
Capability comparison
Depth per cell still favours Ahrefs on links and Semrush on breadth. See the individual comparisons.
Add the crawler. Every time.
Suite site audits are fine for monitoring and useless for a serious technical engagement. If you sell technical SEO, you need a real crawler: Screaming Frog at €245 per licence per year with bulk discounts from five licences, or Sitebulb if your deliverable has to be read by a client rather than by you. Sitebulb’s hints explain why an issue matters, which saves hours of report writing. Compared properly in Screaming Frog vs Sitebulb.
Local clients need a local tool
If any meaningful share of your roster is local businesses, the general suites will not do map-pack work properly. BrightLocal or Moz Local handle grid-level rank tracking, citation building and listings management in a way none of the three suites match.
The margin problem tools do not solve
Agency margin is eaten by the gap between recommendation and implementation. You deliver an audit, the client’s developer does not action it for six weeks, the next reporting cycle shows no movement, and you spend the call explaining why. Every suite in this comparison makes the audit faster. None of them makes the implementation happen.
The agencies that solve this either take implementation in-house (becoming, effectively, a dev shop with an SEO practice) or they get access to the client’s codebase and ship the changes themselves. The second is cheaper and is the reason developer-adjacent tooling has started showing up in agency stacks at all.
Our fit for an agency
We have no white-label reporting, no scheduled rank tracking, no client management and no proprietary backlink index: four of the things this page says decide agency purchases. We are not a suite replacement. We are relevant only for the implementation step, and only when you have repository access to the client site.