Overall, I think it's a robust tool. I think they do a great job on their blog and other educational material that shows people how to use the tool to the fullest. Writing this review in anticipation of a recession (where clients have already started churning and cutting budget), I can no longer afford this tool — especially because there's an alternative that has all the same functionality and results my company needs, for about a third of the price I'm paying now.

I love everything about Ahrefs except their new pricing and plans. We primarily use the keyword research functionality and other functionality associated with it (like competitor research via content gap analysis). I also love their website audit tool and their backlink tracker. Their rank tracker is also great. There is no question that this is one of the best in the industry for all-in-one SEO needs.

Recent plan changes have made Ahrefs almost 3x more expensive for my company to use for the same features we've previously used it for. That's my biggest complaint, that the price hike wasn't gradual or sustainable. We're in the process of switching over to Semrush, whose plans are a lot more reasonable. I've always personally considered Semrush as being better for paid search and Ahrefs as better for organic search (especially when it comes to keyword research and backlink tracking) but Semrush has made many strides since I've last been in a position to compare the two and I feel confident that Semrush can handle our most important keyword research needs and the other all-in-one SEO features I mentioned in terms of what I like about Ahrefs.

It provides better recommendations for keywords. It has basic control over keywords.

It is capable of thorough monitoring and comparison of domains. Based on how much organic traffic a website receives, that is. Compared to Alexa rank, it is superior. Based on the quantity of backlinks going to a URL, URL (URL ratings) calculates the potential influence of the URL. In terms of metrics returned, the keyword results page was at first the most plain and straightforward of all the tools I examined. However, Ahrefs has significantly improved its Keyword Explorer tool with a responsive page of interactive data visualizations.

Costly for small companies perhaps. Technical SEO and on-page optimization are included in the "Domain Health" tool, which is presently unavailable. Had the experience of having some tool parts return no results.

They keep blocking our accounts for over usage even though we paid 12 months upfront for 3 accounts. This has never happened over the last 5 years and only started happening this year as soon as we resubscribed for another 12 months even though our level of usage hasn't changed. They got greedy and they will hold you hostage and force you to purchase more licences otherwise they will refuse to unlock your account. It's been extremely disruptive to our business. We are looking for alternatives as Ahrefs keep have become extremely unreliable and unethical.

Insightful data and they used to be easy to deal with.

They keep blocking our access and it's causing major disruptions to our business.

It's cutting edge, it's affordable, and it offers so many gizmos and gadgets you could never feel like you're extracting more value than it's offering.

Ahrefs is a very-near-complete expert SEO tool suite. For the price you pay and the value you get, you have to be fairly bad at SEO to not get an ROI on your investment. I think one of the great struggles with these tools is an intuitive user experience, and despite how clunky their interface might look, I think they have drawn a very nice balance between functionality and useability.

Local SEO. In my opinion, it's it's biggest and most relevant weakness. Tools like bright local massively outperform it's local KW reporting (being able to create radius-based map pack KW ranking reports), and tools like SEMrush generally outperform it here. Ahrefs still does not have a way to track map pack rankings, in any capacity. It's a huge capabilities gap in my opinion. One that can make or break a use case for the tool. I also think ScreamingFrog outperforms their crawler by having a centralized user interface and more in-depth features, however, given that the site audit and web crawler feature was not their primary function to begin with, I am very impressed with what they offer.