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 week
Lite: allows 175 reports per week
Standard: allows 700 reports per week
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: 50
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
Historical data
Lite: last 6 months
Standard: last 24 months
Our full history goes back to 2015 for keywords and 2013 for backlinks.
Domains per week
Lite: 175
Standard: 700
This number limits the quantity of domains you can analyze each week 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 week
Lite: 700
Standard: 3500
This number limits the quantity of individual URLs you can analyze per week 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”
Rows per month
Lite: 3 million
Standard: 6 million.
Backlink Index
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.
Export, rows per report
Lite: 100,000
Standard: 1 million
This limit applies to the number of backlinks you can export to a .csv file in one run.
Export, rows per month
Lite: 5 million
Standard: 25 million
This limit applies to the number of backlinks you can export to a .csv file during one month.
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: 500,000
Standard: 2.5 million
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: 100
Standard: 10,000
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
Crawl credits per month
Lite: 10,000
Standard: 500,000
This is the maximum number of internal HTML pages returning the 200 (OK) HTTP status code that can be crawled per month.
Additional crawl credit
Lite: +$50 per 500,000
Standard: +$50 per 500,000
These are optional add-ons to each plan.
Data retention
Lite: 3 months
Standard: 3 months
This is how long we store crawled data for your projects.
JavaScript rendering
Lite: Included
Standard: Included
That's the ability to crawl and render JavaScript.
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 week
Lite: 350
Standard: 700
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, time period
Lite: up to 6 months
Standard: up to 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
Mobile ranking:
Lite: Included
Standard: Included.
Alerts
Number and frequency
New & lost backlinks
Lite: 5 monthly
Standard: 15 monthly/weekly
New keywords
Lite: 5 monthly
Standard: 15 monthly/weekly
Mentions
Lite: 5 monthly
Standard: 15 monthly/weekly
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.