Semrush vs Moz

Moz's Local FAQ says each physical location needs its own subscription. Semrush's knowledge base says the same in different words: a business with two or more locations buys a limit for each. Neither sells a multi-location bundle on its self-serve page, so the unit to compare is the price of one location.

Moz Local runs $199, $299 or $399 a year per location on Lite, Preferred and Elite. Month to month, the same plans cost $20, $30 and $40. Semrush Local lists Base at $30 and Pro at $60 per location a month, billed annually, which is $360 and $720 a year.

The multiplication does the rest. Listing sync for one location costs $199 on Moz and $720 on Semrush. For ten locations it is $1,990 against $7,200, and for fifty it is $9,950 against $36,000. The ratio stays at 3.6 times throughout, because both prices scale in a straight line.

Both vendors change the terms at some size. Semrush points businesses with 20 or more locations to a quoted Local Business plan. Moz asks anyone with more than 50 to contact its team. Above those points the list price is where a negotiation starts, not where it ends.

Moz Local Lite is a listings product. It publishes your name, address, phone number and hours to Moz's partner network and keeps them consistent. It also monitors reviews on every network Moz supports and runs Local Grid rank maps. It does not reply to reviews or post to social profiles.

Semrush Local Base is a Google Business Profile agent. It audits the profile, writes and publishes posts, uploads photos you supply, and replies to reviews automatically. It carries 375 map grid credits a month. It does not distribute your data to other directories, because listing management starts on Pro.

So the like-for-like comparisons are Lite against Pro for directory sync, a gap of 3.6 times, and Preferred against Pro once review replies matter, a gap of 2.4 times. Moz Preferred, at $299 a year, replies to Google and Facebook reviews, requests new ones, and posts to both. Semrush Pro adds review generation and management across directories.

Nothing at Moz matches Base directly. Moz sells its automation as add-ons: Listings AI at $119 a year, included on Elite, and Reviews AI at $69 a year. If the goal is a profile that stays active without anyone touching it, Semrush's cheapest plan is built for exactly that.

Moz Local's purchase guide is blunt: it is only available for locations in the US, the UK and Canada. Its pricing FAQ says the same. A branch in Dublin, Sydney or Berlin cannot be added to it at any tier.

Semrush's knowledge base lists 61 markets for Listing Management, across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Oceania. It quotes 70 or more directories for US locations and 40 or more elsewhere. For a franchise that crosses a border, that list decides the vendor before price does.

Directory counts are a weak guide within one country. Moz's help centre table lists 109 directories, 98 of them ticked for US locations, and counts each carmaker's navigation system as its own entry. Semrush counts differently. Ask each vendor for the list for your own country and category, and compare names rather than totals.

One more thing to check in Moz's table. Its columns are headed US, CA and GB, yet The Sun, The Mirror and The Scotsman are ticked under CA. That looks like a labelling slip rather than Canadian coverage of British newspapers, and it is a reason to confirm your own country's list with Moz before buying.

Both vendors track map rankings on a grid of points around a location, and both meter it in credits. Moz Local includes 250 Local Grid credits a month per location on every tier, based on Google Maps. Its help centre says the grid size decides how many credits a crawl uses.

Semrush defines the unit precisely: one credit scans one map pin for one keyword. Local Base includes 375 credits a month and Local Pro 1,225. A 7 by 7 grid is 49 pins, so a weekly scan of one keyword uses about 212 credits a month.

On that arithmetic, Moz's 250 credits cover one keyword scanned weekly on a 7 by 7 grid, if Moz also counts one credit per point. Base covers one keyword with room to spare, and Pro covers five. Anyone reporting several keywords per location runs short on the cheaper plans from both vendors.

Semrush also sells the tracker on its own. Its knowledge base lists Map Rank Tracker Basic at $30 a month for one campaign and 4,000 credits, with 1,000 more for $5. That covers 18 keywords scanned weekly on a 7 by 7 grid, for the price of one Local Base location.

Organic local rankings are a separate matter. Moz Pro tracks keywords by city or postal code, each counting against the plan's keyword limit and updated weekly. Semrush's SEO plans track by ZIP code and in local packs, daily, and tracking one site across several locations from one campaign starts on Pro+ at $248.17.

Moz's plan cards start at Standard, $79 a month billed annually. It tracks 300 keywords across three campaigns, updated weekly, and crawls 100,000 pages a week. It also tracks 50 AI prompts weekly across four AI models, which Semrush's $117.33 plan does not do at all.

The limit that shapes Standard is research. It allows 150 keyword queries a month and 50 domain overviews, and the $49 Starter plan allows 75 queries. Medium, at $143 billed annually, raises keyword queries to 5,000 a month, more than 33 times Standard's allowance.

Semrush's SEO plan is built the other way round. It tracks 500 keywords daily across five websites, and its pricing FAQ allows 3,000 requests a day to the analytics reports. It crosses out every AI tracking line on the card; those start on Semrush's Starter plan at $165.17.

So a Semrush vs Moz comparison built from the first card on each page misleads in both directions. For watching a few sites, Moz Standard is about a third cheaper. For daily keyword research, the Moz plan that fits is Medium, which costs about 22% more than Semrush's entry plan.

Past one person, count logins too. Moz includes two users on Medium and three on Large, and sells more at $49 each on any plan. Semrush includes one user on every plan and sells more from $45.

Both vendors answer this in writing, and the answers match. Moz says its partners will not revert listings after cancellation. It tells them the listing is no longer managed, which leaves it open to unwanted updates from data aggregators.

Semrush says it stops distributing and updating your information, and stops monitoring reviews. The data stays in the directories and becomes subject to each publisher's normal data compilation process, so the listing may change over time.

So neither deletes what it published, and neither protects it once you stop paying. In a February 2026 r/localseo thread, a poster managing listings for seven clients on Semrush said each location now cost $50 to $60, and was pricing alternatives. They added that a client's citations lapsing after the client left would not worry them. One reply from someone who had used both said the per-location cost adds up fast.

Moz has one more rule worth knowing. Cancelling a location with immediate effect releases it and cannot be undone, while cancelling on renewal keeps sending updates until the paid period ends. Semrush separates two acts: removing a location from the tool does not stop the charge for it. Only its cancellation form does that.

Before cancelling either, correct the record at the sources that feed the others, starting with the Google Business Profile, and export what you can. What the sync tool maintained is about to become everyone else's to edit.