The Lite Plan suits freelance online marketers & SEOs who are just getting started with their careers and those who do SEO on their own few websites. The Lite Plan allows access to all Ahrefs tools; however, some data in the reports will be limited. You will also get fewer searches per day/month than you would with the Standard Plan.
The Standard Plan is perfect for SEO consultants, experienced freelancers, and in-house marketers. Choose this plan if you mostly work on multiple projects (up to 10), do keyword research frequently, and build links at scale. With the Standard Plan, you will get a higher number of daily/monthly searches in Ahrefs’ tools, track website rankings in multiple locations and will be able to do SEO audits on larger websites.
A Detailed Comparison
Keywords Explorer
Reports per day
Lite: allows 25 reports per day
Standard: allows 100 reports per day
A report in Keywords Explorer is not limited to just one keyword. You can analyze up to 10,000 keywords in one run, that would still be one report.
Keywords lists
Lite: 5
Standard: 10
Lists are useful for saving the keyword ideas that you'll be discovering during your keyword research.
Unlike the keyword lists stored in the good old Excel or Google sheets, lists in Keywords Explorer will always have the freshest keyword metrics. Besides, you can easily update the Keyword Difficulty, check SERPs, and see position history graph straight from the list.
Within the list all the keyword data will always be fresh and you'll easily update KD & check SERP & position history.
SERP updates per month
Lite: 100
Standard: 1,000
By default, Keywords Explorer shows you cached top search results for the keywords.
For high-volume keywords, we update (and cache) search engine results pages (SERPs) often enough to keep them fresh. But for less popular keywords, we update SERP data less frequently.
Keyword Difficulty and Parent Topic for the keyword are based on the freshest SERP data available.
You can request to get the current top 10 results for any keyword in a given country by clicking the "Update" button.
OR
Rows per report
Lite: 1,000 (20-page report)
Standard: 5,000 (100-page report)
This limit applies to the number of keyword ideas (along with their keyword metrics) you can get (and export) in one run.
However, you are free to apply some filters to get a bunch of amazing keyword suggestions within this limit.
Rows per month
Lite: 200,000
Standard: 500,000
This limit applies to the number of keyword ideas (along with their keyword metrics) you can get during one month.
At the very least, one report will consume 500 “rows per month” as it always pre-loads the first 500 results. This means that you can run at least 400 “ideas” reports on the Lite plan and 1,000 on the Standard during one month.
Export, rows per month
Lite: 25,000
Standard: 100,000
This limit applies to the number of keyword ideas (along with their keyword metrics) you can export to .csv files during one month.
Site Explorer
Backlink indexes
Lite: Live index
Standard: Live, Recent, and Historical
Ahrefs has three backlink indexes: Live, Recent, and Historical.
The Live index only contains links that our crawler found to be “live” during the most recent crawl/recrawl. We instantly remove any “dead” backlinks from the Live index.
The Recent index gives you a more comprehensive view of the backlink profile. It has all “live” links plus the links that were found to be “dead” recently. We keep these links in the Recent index for 90 days to give them a “second chance.” Ahrefs could have attempted to crawl a website while it was in the maintenance mode or had some server issues. Links from these websites will still be stored in the Recent index and can get the “live” status back at the next recrawl.
The Historical index contains all “live” and all “dead” links ever seen by Ahrefs. We started recording data to this index in May 2016.
You can learn more about our backlink indexes here.
Domains per day
Lite: 25
Standard: 100
This number limits the quantity of domains you can analyze each day in Site Explorer. You can, however, analyze different URLs of the same domain; this will count as one domain.
E.g. analyzing
https://ahrefs.com/blog/301-redirects/
counts as one domain.
URLs per day
Lite: 100
Standard: 500
This number limits the quantity of individual URLs you can analyze per day in Site Explorer.
Rows per report
Lite: 10,000
Standard: 30,000
“Rows per report” limits the number of results in every report of the Site Explorer tool.
You can export much more results. See “Export, rows per report” and “Export, rows per month”
Link intersect, rows per report
Lite: 10
Standard: 30,000
Link Intersect is one of the advanced link research features of Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. It helps you to find who links to your competitors but does not link to you. If you’re serious about link-building, you should consider the Standard plan which allows 30k results in this report.
Ranking index
Keyword positions
Lite: Top 20
Standard: Top 100
This limit applies to the ranking position of organic keywords shown in different reports of the Site Explorer tool. With the Lite plan, you will see keywords ranking in the top 20 search results, while the Standard plan will show you keywords ranking in the top 100.
Export, rows per report
Lite: 10,000
Standard: 30,000
This limit applies to the number of organic keywords you can export to a .csv file in one run.
Export, rows per month
Lite: 500K
Standard: 2.5M
This limit applies to the number of organic keywords you can export to a .csv file during one month.
Competing pages / domains
Lite: Top 10
Standard: Top 50
This number limits the size of the “Competing domains” and “Competing pages” report that you can get.
Content gap, rows per report
Lite: 10
Standard: 50
Content Gap is another advanced report in Ahrefs. It helps to reveal search queries where your competitors’ websites are ranking, but yours does not.
Top pages / subfolders / subdomains, rows per report
Lite: 1,000
Standard: 5,000
This number limits the size of the following reports:
- Top pages
- Top folders and
- Top subdomains
These reports reveal which pages or sections of a website get the most organic search traffic to your competitors. This information is invaluable for content planning and topic research.
Site Audit
Projects
Lite: 1
Standard: 10
A project in the Site Audit tool allows you to run automatic, scheduled crawls of a website so that you could keep an eye on its SEO health. Besides, you can compare crawls within a project to see what exactly changed since the last crawl.
On the Lite plan, you are free to delete your existing project and create a new one in order to crawl another website in Site Audit. But in this case, you will lose access to the previous crawls and won't be able to track the website’s SEO health over time.
Crawl limit, pages per month
Lite: 10,000
Standard: 500,000
The maximum number of internal pages of a website that can be crawled per month. We recommend the Standard plan for larger websites.
Content Explorer
Content Explorer is our searchable database of over 1 billion pages of content. Check this video to learn how Ahrefs Content Explorer can help you find guest blogging opportunities and easy keyword targets.
Reports (searches) per day
Lite: 50
Standard: 100
You can use advanced search operators and filters to narrow down the results to the articles written by a specific author, republished articles, and pages from websites that do not link to yours.
Rows per report
Lite: 1,000
Standard: 5,000
Export, rows per month
Lite: 50,000
Standard: 250,000
History graphs
Lite: 30 days
Standard: 6 months
Trend graphs
Lite: First result
Standard: First 5 results
Broken pages
Lite: Not included
Standard: Included
This feature is absolutely unique to Ahrefs. You can find content pages on a given topic that no longer exist. With it, Content Explorer will bring your broken link-building to a whole new level.
Rank Tracker
Tracked keywords
Lite: 500
Standard: 1,500
This number limits the maximum amount of keywords you can track in Rank Tracker across all your projects.
Update frequency
Lite: Every week
Standard: Every 5 days
Locations per website
Lite: 1
Standard: 5
Within one project, you can track keyword ranking in one geographical location with the Lite Plan. The Standard plan allows up to 5 locations in Rank Tracker.
Alerts
Number and frequency
Lite: 5, Monthly
Standard: 15, Weekly
Email Alerts will notify you of new & lost backlinks, web mentions, and changes in keyword rankings.
Batch Analysis
Rows per month
Lite: 25,000
Standard: 100,000
Batch Analysis allows you to pull Ahrefs' backlink metrics for up to 200 individual URLs in one run. These credits are also spent to show data on our SEO Toolbar.
I hope this detailed comparison will help you choose the best pricing plan for you.
If you’re still hesitant, allow us to dispel doubts :) Just use our live chat or drop us a line at support@ahrefs.com.
Related: