Ahrefs vs Salience
Ahrefs and Salience are both SEO tools tools aimed at agencies and small businesses. Salience costs less, from $19/mo versus $29/mo for Ahrefs. Both have a free plan.
Backlink index and SEO toolset
Log analytics that shows how bots, AI crawlers and users hit your site
| Pricing | Freemium · $29 | Freemium · $19 |
| Starting price | $29/mo | $19/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Built for | Agencies, Small businesses, Enterprise | Agencies, Small businesses, E-commerce, Developers, Enterprise |
| Platforms | web | web |
| Country | SG · 2010 | GB · 2026 |
| Rating | — | — |
Choose Ahrefs if
SEO professionals, agencies and content-driven companies that need reliable backlink and keyword data.
- Backlink data breadth and freshness
- Clean, fast UI with excellent documentation
- Traffic estimates are useful for competitor analysis
Look elsewhere if: Small businesses needing basic rank tracking and audits (Seobility, Mangools, SE Ranking) or teams also running paid ads (Semrush).
Choose Salience if
Technical SEO teams and agencies that want continuous log analysis of search and AI crawler traffic.
- Shows real crawler behaviour that JavaScript analytics never sees
- Free plan includes the API and MCP server
- Works on Cloudflare's free plan through a Worker
Look elsewhere if: Marketers who only need visitor analytics or a site crawler (Plausible, Screaming Frog SEO Spider).
Ahrefs vs Salience pricing
Ahrefs
- Ahrefs Free$0Free tier; limits not listed on pricing page
- Starter$29/moEntry plan; limits not listed on pricing page
- Lite$129/mo750 tracked keywords, 100k crawl credits; save 17% yearly
- Standard$249/mo2,000 keywords, 500k crawl credits, +$60/mo per user
- Advanced$449/mo5,000 keywords, 1.5M crawl credits, 5 years history
Salience
- Free$01 site, 500K requests/mo, 30 days of history
- Solo$19/mo1 site, 1 user, 5M requests, 6 months history; 2 months free yearly
- Starter$49/mo5 sites, 20M requests, 1 year history, webhooks; 2 months free yearly
- Growth$149/mo15 sites, 100M requests, 2 years history; 2 months free yearly
- Pro$499/mo50 sites, 500M requests, 4 years history, shared Slack support
Ahrefs · Key features
- Site Explorer: backlinks, referring domains, organic keywords, traffic estimates
- Keywords Explorer with difficulty, traffic potential and SERP overview
- Site Audit with JavaScript rendering and scheduled crawls
- Rank Tracker with mobile and local tracking
- Content Explorer for link prospecting and topic research
- Brand Radar and AI Overviews visibility reports
Cons
- Core plans are expensive; credits on Lite and Standard
- No PPC or social features like Semrush
- Historical data gated by plan
Salience · Key features
- Analysis of every request from CDN or server logs, with no sampling by Salience
- Crawler verification against official IP ranges to expose spoofed user agents
- Recognition of 200+ bots, with AI crawlers grouped by training, search or user fetch
- Requests linked to paths, status codes, sitemaps, robots.txt rules and index state
- Alerts checked every minute; Slack from Solo, webhooks from Starter
- REST API, CLI and MCP server on every plan, including Free
Cons
- Company incorporated in August 2026, so there is little track record
- Core data is hosted in AWS London (eu-west-2), with no other region offered
- Vercel needs a Pro or Enterprise team and Netlify works only on Enterprise
Ahrefs vs Salience: FAQ
Which is cheaper, Ahrefs or Salience?
Salience starts at $19/mo and Ahrefs at $29/mo. Both prices are checked on the vendors' own pricing pages.
Do Ahrefs and Salience have a free plan?
Yes, both Ahrefs and Salience have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.