Eight keyword research tools, and what the cheapest way in costs

The short answer

If you want one recommendation: Mangools KWFinder, on the Basic plan, is the tool most small-site owners will get furthest with on a small budget — $18.85 a month if you prepay a year, $30.50 if you pay monthly, and 100 keyword lookups per 24 hours either way. It pays this site a share, which is exactly why the next sentence matters.

If you would rather not prepay anything, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer on the $29 Starter plan is the cheapest monthly ticket into a proper keyword database, and Ahrefs has run no affiliate programme since 2019, so recommending it earns this site nothing at all. And if your site is small and new, Google Keyword Planner plus Search Console may genuinely be enough for another six months; both are free and both pay nothing here.

What none of those sentences say is which tool has the most accurate numbers. Nobody here measured that, nobody outside Google can, and any roundup that ranks tools on accuracy without showing its working is guessing at you.

What you are actually buying

Every tool on this page does the same four things and charges very differently for them. It takes a seed word, returns related phrases, attaches an estimated monthly search volume to each, and attaches a difficulty score. The differences that matter in practice are how many of those lookups you get in a day, whether the tool will show you a competitor's keywords as well as your own, and whether it groups thousands of keywords into topics for you.

The unit each vendor bills in is the trap. Mangools counts "keyword lookups per 24 hours". Ubersuggest counts "searches a day". Ahrefs counts monthly "credits" that several different reports draw on. Moz counts "keyword queries a month". Semrush counts "reports a day" on its free account. Keyword Insights counts credits where clustering one keyword costs one. Those are six incompatible meters, so the table below prints each vendor's own unit rather than converting them into a fake common currency.

One boundary, stated once: every tool here is aimed at Google search. Keyword tools for Amazon, Etsy, Pinterest and Kindle Direct Publishing are a separate category with separate vendors, and this site does not cover or rank them — it has no basis to, and saying so is cheaper than pretending otherwise.

The eight tools, with their prices

Two cautions before you read that as a league table. First, cheaper is narrower: the $29 and $12 plans are one-user plans with hard daily caps, and Ahrefs Starter cannot buy extra users, extra credits or any add-on, and can only be renewed monthly. Second, the "prepaid a year" column is blank in two places because Ahrefs and Ubersuggest do not publish a per-plan annual price — Ahrefs advertises "Pay annually, save up to 17%" without printing the result, and Ubersuggest's annual column was showing a countdown promotion the day this was read. Neither number is estimated here.

Mangools KWFinder — the cheapest tool that feels complete

KWFinder is the pick for someone running one or two small sites who wants volume, difficulty, a trend line and the live results page on one screen without a subscription that hurts. Basic is $30.50 a month, or $18.85 a month if you prepay $226.20 for the year, and gives 100 keyword lookups per 24 hours with 200 related keyword suggestions per lookup.

Its limits are real and printed: Basic allows no extra seats at all, and only the $70.50 Agency plan refreshes rankings daily. Mangools claims on its own product page that it has "exact search volumes and the most accurate keyword difficulty" — that is the vendor's claim, not a finding, and another vendor says the opposite about the whole category. The free account, five lookups a day, is enough to decide whether you like the thing. The longer read on KWFinder covers the plan ladder.

Keyword Insights — for the job the others do not do

Keyword Insights is not a cheaper Semrush; it is a clustering tool, and it belongs on this page because grouping thousands of keywords into the pages you should actually write is the part every general tool does worst. Basic is $58 a month, $46.40 prepaid annually, and carries 10,000 credits a month where clustering one keyword costs 1 credit.

That pricing means the Basic plan clusters ten thousand keywords a month, or produces a hundred content briefs at 100 credits each, or eight articles through its AI writing agent at 1200 credits each. There is no free tier; there is a $1 seven-day trial with 5,000 one-off credits. Buy it when you have a keyword list you cannot organise, not when you are looking for keywords in the first place.

SE Ranking Keyword Tool — the one that stops counting

SE Ranking is the only tool here whose entry plan advertises "Unlimited keyword, competitor and backlink research" rather than a daily cap, which makes it the sane choice if your week involves pulling large lists repeatedly. Core costs $129 a month, or $103.20 a month prepaid annually, and includes 10 projects and one manager seat.

The catch is that you are buying a whole platform to get the keyword tool, and most of what Core meters — 2,000 tracked keywords a day, 250,000 audit pages a month — has nothing to do with keyword research. There is a 14-day trial with no card required, which is the most generous way in on this page. SE Ranking pays this site a share.

Moz Keyword Explorer — gentle, and metered tightly

Moz is the friendliest of these interfaces and the stingiest with the thing you came for: Standard costs $99 a month, or $79 a month paid yearly, and allows 150 keyword queries a month. That is five a day. Moz also sells a Starter plan at $49 a month for "individuals managing a single website", though it does not print that plan's keyword allowance, so this site does not either.

Moz describes Keyword Explorer as drawing on a "1.25 billion+ keyword index", which is its own count of its own index. Moz has no affiliate programme this site could verify, so it is named here with no link at all and earns nothing either way.

Ubersuggest — the cheapest door, with the loosest paperwork

At $12 a month for the Individual plan and 150 searches a day, Ubersuggest is the least expensive paid tool on this page by a wide margin, and for a single small site that is a real argument. Business is $20 a month with 300 searches a day and Enterprise $40 with 900.

Two things keep it lower down. Its annual pricing was behind a countdown promotion when this was read, so there is no standing annual price to quote. And its affiliate terms are behind a password, which means this site cannot read the rules it would be agreeing to — so Ubersuggest gets no link here, and earns nothing. The longer note on Ubersuggest explains that decision properly.

Google Keyword Planner — free, and more honest than its reputation

Keyword Planner is free with a Google Ads account and it is the only tool on this page whose numbers come from inside Google. That does not make it precise: Google states that its average monthly searches figure covers "a keyword and its close variants", that the statistics are rounded, and that they are averaged over twelve months by default.

So Keyword Planner's number is a bucket of similar phrases, rounded, averaged — which is exactly the thing every other tool on this page is trying to un-bucket. Use it for order of magnitude and for the seasonality chart, not for splitting hairs between two phrasings. Setting up the account asks for billing details even if you never run an ad. What Keyword Planner is good and bad at has the detail. It pays this site nothing.

Ahrefs and Semrush: what the cheapest way in costs

Both of the big suites include a serious keyword tool, and for the purposes of this page the only question is the price of the door. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer is unlocked by the Starter plan at $29 a month, which Ahrefs announced on 2 September 2024 and which carries 200 credits a month, cannot take add-ons or extra users, and renews monthly only. Semrush's Keyword Magic Tool is included from the SEO plan at $139 a month, or $117.33 a month billed annually, and the free Semrush account gets one demo project and 10 reports a day across the whole toolkit.

What each one reports is their own claim: Ahrefs advertises "28.7B Keywords filtered from 110B discovered in total" and 217 locations for Keywords Explorer; Semrush advertises "more than 26 billion keywords and growing" for Keyword Magic. Nobody here counted either. This site does not walk either suite's full plan ladder or rank alternatives to them — that is a different question from which keyword tool to use, and it is not the question Querywell answers.

What none of them can do

Three things are missing from every tool on this page, and knowing that saves a lot of disappointed subscribing. None of them can tell you how much traffic you will get, because that depends on where you rank, what the results page looks like and whether anyone clicks a result at all.

None of them can tell you whether a keyword is worth money to your business; a term with a thousand searches and no buying intent is worth less than a term with forty and a credit card behind it. And none of them can tell you whether your page will be good, which remains the factor with the largest effect and the only one entirely within your control.

What they are actually selling is time. A tool that saves you an hour a week of guessing is worth $30 a month; one that saves you nothing because you never open it is worth nothing at any price.

Which one to pick

• You have never paid for a keyword tool. Google Keyword Planner and Search Console, together, for at least another month. Both free, both pay this site nothing.
• One small site, small budget, wants a real tool. Mangools KWFinder Basic, prepaid annually at $18.85 a month, or Ahrefs Starter at $29 if you will not prepay.
• You pull big lists every week and hate daily caps. SE Ranking Core at $129, because it stops counting your lookups.
• You already have ten thousand keywords and no plan. Keyword Insights at $58, which is a clustering tool and priced like one.
• You want the deepest database and are willing to pay suite prices. Ahrefs or Semrush; compare their entry plans above and ignore the rest of this page.

Whatever you pick, the discipline matters more than the tool: choose one, learn what its numbers are built from, and compare keywords only against other keywords inside it. The long-tail tools note is where that discipline pays off fastest.