I was eating toast over the sink on a Sunday in February when the Ahrefs renewal email landed. $129. I looked at that number for a while, and then I looked at what my two sites had earned in January, which was $412.
I didn’t like that ratio.
I run two small review sites, one about camping stoves and one about trail shoes, alone, out of a spare bedroom in Tacoma. Since 2018 I’ve paid for a backlink tool every single month and never once asked if I needed to. This spring I finally tested it on my own wallet, with two months on a cheaper tool, a month on nothing at all, and an honest look afterwards at what I missed.
The Three Jobs I Need Done
Three jobs. Who links to me, who links to the sites beating me, and which of my links quietly died last week.
That’s the whole list, and it took me years to admit it. My friend Dee sold a much bigger site than mine in 2023, and she put it better than I can. “You’re not buying data,” she said. “You’re buying back the hour you’d spend guessing.”
Keep that line in mind. It’s how I ended up judging all of them.
Two Months On Majestic
At $49.99 a month, Majestic Lite cost less than half of what I’d been paying, so I moved there in March.
The part I liked was Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Within a week, those two side-by-side numbers let me glance at a site and tell worthwhile links from merely plentiful ones. When I need to size up a prospect fast, nothing I’ve used is quicker.
What I didn’t: Lite gives you the Fresh Index only. The Historic Index, the one that goes back years, sits on the Pro plan at $99.99, and at that price the savings start to shrink. The reports were harder for me to read, too. Maybe that’s habit. Six years of staring at one layout will do that, and I exported to a spreadsheet more than I’d have liked.
It does links and nothing else, which for some people is the appeal.
May, With No Paid Tool
May was the free month. Google Search Console gives you a Links report for your own site. Ahrefs also keeps a free tier for sites you’ve verified, capped at roughly a thousand backlinks on screen.
Honestly, for my own two sites that was enough. I could watch new links arrive and old ones drop off.
Then a competitor passed me for a stove roundup I’d held for two years, and I had no way to see why. With free tools you can see your own house. Looking over the fence isn’t included.
In June I Went Back To Ahrefs
So I paid the $129 once more. (There’s a $29 Starter plan, and I looked hard at it. The limits were too tight for the digging I had in mind.)
It took an evening to get a list of 23 sites that linked to two of my competitors and not to me. Nine of them got an email from me. Three added a link. As far as I can tell, one of those was why I’d been passed in May, though with rankings I’ll never be sure about cause and effect.
Could I have built that list in Majestic? Probably, if I had more patience.
Where Semrush Comes In
I won’t pretend, because I didn’t test it this year. At $139 a month to start, you’re paying for much more than links. Keyword research, site audits and rank tracking come with it. I used it through most of 2021 and liked it for everything except deep link work. If links are a small part of your week, it might be the smarter buy. From memory, I can’t rank it fairly.
So Which Is Best?
Ahrefs. It’s the best backlink analytics tool I’ve used if you need to study other people’s links regularly, and my cheaper spring didn’t change my mind.
Something else did change. My assumption was that I needed it twelve months a year, and that was wrong. My link building happens in bursts, maybe three months out of twelve. Paying only for those months costs me $387 a year, and paying all year costs $1,548.
So in July I cancelled again. Search Console covers the quiet months, and there’s a reminder on my phone for September.
Toast is optional.