The pitch: one login, five tools

Most people meet Serpstat while pricing Ahrefs and Semrush and flinching at the total. That is exactly the gap it was built for. Serpstat is a Ukrainian SEO platform that folds keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking, a technical site audit and backlink analysis into a single subscription that starts at $50 a month. Semrush's cheapest plan is $139.95 (checked August 2026); Ahrefs' most popular Lite tier is $129. Serpstat is trying to give a solo SEO 80% of that toolkit for roughly a third of the money.

It is older than most of its rivals give it credit for. Artem Borodatyuk and Oleg Salamakha started it in 2013 inside Netpeak, an Odessa digital-marketing agency that needed keyword and competitor data with a real Ukrainian and CIS database, something the American tools handled badly. It was spun out as a standalone product around 2016 and now claims over 1.1 million registered users and logos like Deloitte, Uber, Shopify and Samsung. The database it sits on is genuinely large: Serpstat's own numbers put it at 1.5 billion domains, 8.6 billion keywords and over 500 billion backlinks across 230 countries.

The dashboard above is the honest summary of what you are buying: every project shows organic keywords by country, a backlink profile, a domain-health score and rank movements on one screen. That consolidation is the whole value proposition. You are not paying five vendors and reconciling five exports.

What the keyword tools actually do

Type a keyword and Serpstat returns the table every SEO recognises: search volume, CPC, a 0–100 keyword-difficulty score, PPC competition and a search-intent tag, with related terms, long-tails and "People Also Ask" questions underneath. Run a domain instead and you get its organic keyword universe, its paid keywords, and the pages that rank: the same summary-then-drill-down flow Ahrefs popularised.

In the major English markets the numbers hold up well against Semrush for volume and difficulty. The intent tags and SERP-feature flags (the little icons for featured snippets, video, AI Overview results) are more useful than the raw volume, because they tell you what kind of page Google actually wants to rank. Keyword clustering, which groups a raw export into thematic topic buckets, is bundled in rather than sold as a separate credit line the way some rivals do it, a real time-saver when you are planning a content hub.

Competitor and gap analysis

This is where Serpstat earns its keep for most buyers. The Keyword Gap tool takes up to three domains and shows you the terms your competitors rank for and you do not, drawn as an overlap diagram over a filterable table. Point it at two rivals and yourself and the "missing" column is a content brief you did not have to write.

The domain-analysis view rounds it out: volume, CPC and difficulty up top, then a ranked list of competitors in organic search with how many keywords you share. It is the fastest part of the product, and for agencies pitching new clients it is often reason enough to keep the subscription.

Site audit and rank tracking

The Site Audit crawls your pages and scores them on an "SDO" health metric out of 100, sorting issues into high, medium, low and informational: broken links, duplicate titles, slow pages, missing tags and redirect chains. You can schedule recrawls and watch the score trend over time, which is the part clients actually understand on a report.

Two honest caveats from how it behaves. The audit is slow on large sites: crawling and scoring several hundred pages is comfortably a coffee break, and it feels sluggish next to a purpose-built crawler like Screaming Frog. And each audit spends from your monthly page allowance, so the "scan 500 pages" you see on the summary is a budget, not a promise of unlimited crawling. Rank tracking sits alongside it, checking positions on mobile and desktop by country and bucketing them into top-3, 4–5, 6–10 and so on. Standard, reliable, nothing exotic.

Where the backlink data thins out

Every all-in-one tool has a weakest module, and for Serpstat it is backlinks. The headline "over 500 billion" sounds competitive, but the index is meaningfully smaller and slower to refresh than Ahrefs, whose whole reputation is built on link data. On a small or mid-size site you will not notice. On a large domain with a fast-moving link profile, Serpstat routinely misses newer links that Ahrefs has already found, and reviewers on SearchAtlas flag the same gap.

The other soft spot is accuracy on the edges. Users report keyword-volume and backlink-count discrepancies against tools wired directly into Google Search Console. Treat Serpstat's numbers as a strong directional signal for research and prioritisation, not as gospel for a client audit where the exact backlink count is the deliverable. If link building is the core of your service, this is the module you will end up supplementing.

Pricing and the query-per-day trap

As of August 2026 Serpstat lists four paid tiers. These are the annual-billing prices; paying monthly costs roughly a quarter more, and there is a 7-day free trial that opens the core tools with no feature walls so you can test before committing.

• Individual ($50/month): 100 queries per day, up to 5 projects, around 500 tracked keywords. The solo starter tier.
• Team ($100/month): 500 queries per day, unlimited projects, roughly 1,500 tracked keywords, and API access. The plan most small agencies actually land on.
• Team x2 ($169/month): the same feature set as Team with the daily and monthly limits doubled.
• Agency ($410/month): the highest limits plus white-label reporting, which is locked to this tier alone.

The number that decides whether Serpstat works for you is not the price. It is the queries-per-day cap. On Individual, 100 lookups a day sounds generous until a single afternoon of real research burns through it and the tool simply stops answering. There is no overage billing to bail you out: hit the ceiling and requests fail until the counter resets. Credits do not roll over month to month either. For an active freelancer, the $50 plan is effectively a maintenance tier, and you will feel pushed toward Team at $100 faster than the pricing page implies.

There is also a crossover where the value argument collapses. The moment a team outgrows Team and jumps to Team x2 at $169, it is paying about $30 a month more than Semrush Pro for a narrower feature set and thinner data. Serpstat is a bargain at the entry and a harder sell at the top.

The catches nobody markets

Beyond the data gaps, three things wear on you with daily use. The interface is dated and can feel clunky, with reports that take a beat longer to load than the polished dashboards at Ahrefs or Semrush. Support is the weaker complaint: response times frequently run past 24 hours, so this is not the tool to lean on when something breaks the day before a client deadline. And the product has been evolving slowly: several core modules look much as they did a couple of years ago, and the AI features that rivals have been racing to ship arrived late and light here.

None of that is disqualifying. It is the texture of a lean, bootstrapped tool that competes on price rather than polish, and you should walk in expecting substance over shine.

Verdict: who it's for, who should skip it

Serpstat is the right call for a solo SEO, content marketer or small agency that needs keyword research, competitor gaps, rank tracking and site audits in one place and cannot justify $130–$140 a month for Ahrefs or Semrush. At $50 to $100 it does 80% of the job for a third of the price, and the competitor-analysis tools in particular are strong enough to win new-client pitches. The 7-day trial costs nothing, so there is no reason not to test it against your own domains before you decide.

Skip it if backlinks are your business: a link-building agency or anyone auditing large, fast-moving sites will keep bumping into the smaller index and the refresh lag, and should pay up for Ahrefs Lite at $129. Skip it, too, if you expect to run heavy daily research on the entry plan: the 100-queries-a-day wall will frustrate you, and the honest comparison at that usage level is Semrush, whose data depth and polish justify the extra spend. Buy Serpstat for value and breadth. Buy the pricier tools for the one thing each does best.

Start a free Serpstat trial and test it on your own site →