Compare ยท SEO and audit suites
SiteAssay vs Ahrefs
Ahrefs has the crawl data and the discipline to go with it. It is a superb instrument pointed at a domain you have chosen. Choosing the domain is the part it leaves to you, and that is the part an agency spends its week on.
In one line
Ahrefs answers what is wrong with this site. SiteAssay answers which sites are worth looking at, and who to write to about it.
What Ahrefs does better
- Backlink data quality, which is the deepest independent index in the market
- Crawl depth and scheduling across large sites
- Rank tracking and keyword difficulty scoring
- Being profitable and independent, which tends to mean the tool you learn stays the tool you have
Published pricing: A $29/mo Starter tier introduced in 2026, then $129 to $449/mo, with an enterprise tier at $1,499/mo.
Ahrefs alternative: when it is the right call
Your crawl reports are excellent and your pipeline is empty. Site Audit will not tell you that there are forty plumbers in your city with an expired certificate and no mobile layout.
Capability by capability
Every entry in the Ahrefs column is taken from their own published pricing and feature pages on the date at the foot of this page. Where something is not part of their product, the row says that rather than implying it.
| Capability | SiteAssay | Ahrefs |
|---|---|---|
| Finds businesses that are not already your clients | Search a trade and a city, and every result is audited | You supply the domain |
| Crawl depth on a single site | Enough to score it; not a full-site crawler | Deeper, and built for large sites |
| Backlinks and organic keyword data | Not measured | The reason most people buy it |
| Email deliverability: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, blacklists | Checked on every audit | Not part of the product |
| Security exposure: leaked keys, open paths, TLS | Checked on every audit | Not part of the product |
| Says what it could not measure | A check that fails to run is reported as not run, never as a pass | Issues are reported; unrun checks are not a concept |
| Report a business owner can read | Shareable link and PDF, in your branding, written for a non-technical reader | A dashboard and an export, written for an SEO |
| Outreach drafted from the findings | Drafted from the report, held for a person to approve | Not in scope |
| Priced on | Searches and audits | Seats, projects and credits |
Questions this raises
Is there an Ahrefs alternative that finds the leads as well as auditing them?
That is the gap this product sits in. Ahrefs and every other suite in its category start from a domain you have already chosen. Here you start from a trade and a place, the pipeline finds the businesses, audits each one, ranks them by how much fixable damage there is, and drafts the email. The audit itself is broader but shallower than a full Ahrefs crawl, which is the deliberate trade.
Does SiteAssay check backlinks?
No. Building a link index is a nine-figure data problem and there is no version of it we could do honestly at this price. The methodology page lists exactly what is measured, and backlinks are on the list of things we say out loud that we do not do.
Which is better for a technical SEO audit?
Ahrefs, on crawl depth, if the question is about one site you already have a contract for. This is better when the question is about eighty sites you do not, because the checks run unattended and the output is a ranked list rather than eighty dashboards.
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About these comparisons
Checked against their published pages on .
Product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here for identification only. Every figure in the right-hand column comes from that product's own published pricing and feature pages on the date shown, and may have changed since. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Tell us about a correctionThe fastest way to settle this
Point the free audit at a site you already know is in poor shape, and see whether the report is one you would send to its owner.