Prices read 24 Sept 2026
Every keyword number is somebody's estimate
Eight keyword research tools, what each one hands you for a single keyword, and what the cheapest plan that unlocks it costs — with the date the price was read. No tool is crowned most accurate here, because measuring that would mean seeing Google's own numbers.
What this site is for
Querywell exists to answer two questions about keyword research software: what does this tool actually put on the screen, and what does it cost to get it. Everything else on the page is in service of those two.
The reason it is narrow is that the usual roundup answers a third question it cannot answer — which tool is most accurate. That would require comparing each tool's estimate against Google's real search counts, and Google publishes those to nobody. So this site reports what the vendors report, quotes what they claim about their own methods, prices the plans, and leaves the accuracy trophy on the shelf.
If you have not spent money on this yet, start with the free tools and what they actually give you. If you already know you are buying, the eight tools with their entry prices side by side is the page.
How the pages here are put together
- Every price is a list price copied from the vendor's own pricing page, with the date. Where a vendor advertises an annual saving without printing the per-plan figure — Ahrefs and Ubersuggest both do — this site writes "not published" instead of doing the arithmetic for them.
- Every claim about how a tool works is either quoted from the vendor or absent. Two vendors say directly opposite things about difficulty scores, and both quotes are on this site.
- No tool was tested here. There are no accuracy percentages, no "we ran 500 keywords through each", no database counts presented as fact.
- Three of the tools covered here pay this site a share if a link turns into a subscription. Five pay nothing. Which is which is printed beside every link and on one page of its own.
The one thing worth understanding before you buy anything
A keyword tool sells you a model, not a measurement. Ahrefs says its search volume is built from Google Keyword Planner data, Google Trends and third-party clickstream, and adds that volume "in any SEO tool, including Ahrefs, is always an estimation". Google's own Keyword Planner reports a keyword together with its close variants, rounds the answer, and averages it across twelve months.
So when two tools give one keyword two different numbers, neither is lying and neither is broken. They built different models from different inputs. The practical consequence is that you should pick a tool for what it shows you and how it fits your week, compare keywords only within one tool, and treat the absolute number as a rough order of magnitude. Why two tools disagree on the same keyword goes through the mechanics.
Notes from the well
Competitor keyword research tools: what they can and cannot show you
No free Google tool will show you someone else's keywords. What the paid tools reconstruct instead, how they do it, and which entry plans include competitor data.
Using Google Keyword Planner for SEO, and what its numbers really mean
Keyword Planner is free, its data comes from inside Google, and every figure it shows is rounded, averaged over twelve months and bundled with close variants. How to use it anyway.
Keyword clustering tools: turning a list into a page plan
Clustering decides how many pages your keyword list is really worth. What the dedicated tools do, what the general tools do instead, and what it costs.
Keyword difficulty scores, compared: what each vendor is actually measuring
Ahrefs counts links to the top ten and says the result is always an estimation. Semrush names six inputs and calls its score the most accurate on the market. Both quotes are real.
Keyword Insights: paying $58 a month to stop guessing at page structure
Keyword Insights clusters keywords into the pages you should write, bills in credits at 1 credit per clustered keyword, and has no free tier. What the Basic plan's 10,000 credits actually buy.
Keyword tool APIs and bulk lookups: reading the small print on limits
Six vendors meter keyword research in six incompatible units. What a lookup, a search, a credit and a report each mean, and which entry plans allow bulk work.
Asked at the well
Which keyword research tool should I start with?
Start with the free pair before you spend anything: Google Search Console tells you which queries already show your pages, and Google Keyword Planner gives you rough demand for words you have not written about yet. Neither pays this site a penny. When you outgrow them — usually when you want difficulty scores and competitors' keywords in one screen — the cheapest ways in are Ubersuggest at $12 a month, Ahrefs' $29 Starter plan billed monthly, and Mangools Basic at $18.85 a month prepaid for a year, all read from the vendors' own pages on 24 September 2026.
Why do two keyword tools give different search volumes for the same keyword?
Because none of them can see Google's numbers, so each one models them. Ahrefs says plainly that its volume is built from Google Keyword Planner data, Google Trends and third-party clickstream, and that "search volume in any SEO tool, including Ahrefs, is always an estimation". Google's own Keyword Planner reports a keyword together with its close variants, rounds the result and averages it over twelve months. Different inputs, different grouping, different rounding — different numbers.
Is a free keyword research tool good enough?
For one small site, often yes. Search Console, Keyword Planner, Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Trends together cover demand, seasonality and what you already rank for, and all four cost nothing. What the free tier will not do is hand you a competitor's whole keyword list, a difficulty score built from the live results, or a thousand keywords clustered in one pass. That is the line where paying starts to make sense, and it arrives later than most roundups suggest.
What does keyword difficulty actually measure?
Whatever the vendor decided it measures — there is no standard. Ahrefs counts how many websites link to each of the current top ten pages and plots it on a logarithmic 0 to 100 scale, and says outright that difficulty "is always only an estimation because Google does not disclose all its ranking factors". Semrush names six inputs instead, including backlinks, authority scores, search volume, SERP features, branded terms and word count. Two scores, two definitions: a 40 in one is not a 40 in the other.
Does this site earn money from the tools it recommends?
From three of them, and it says so beside every link. Mangools, SE Ranking and Keyword Insights pay a share if a link here turns into a subscription. Semrush's link is in place but pays nothing until this site passes the thousand-visitors-a-month bar its programme sets. Ahrefs has run no affiliate programme since 2019, and Google, Microsoft, Moz and Ubersuggest are linked plainly or not at all — so several of the recommendations on this site are worth exactly nothing to it.