Semrush vs Serpstat
Semrush
Best for competitor research
The longer keyword list in almost every market it covers, and thirty times the daily lookups at entry, for more than twice the price.
$117.33 / mo
SEO plan, annual billing
Serpstat
Best for SERP crawling on a budget
Nearly twice the Google regions, and three logins plus the API for $100, with smaller daily caps and shorter lists in most big markets.
$50 / mo
Individual, annual billing ($69 monthly)
Start with where you sell, not with the price. Serpstat publishes 230 Google databases, and Semrush's statistics page lists 121 countries. Yet in 113 of the 121 markets both cover, Semrush publishes the longer keyword list, often several times longer.
So the market decides it. In the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy or Brazil, Semrush's research database is roughly four to forty times larger on each vendor's own count. In Ukraine, Czechia, Lithuania, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Bulgaria, Serpstat's is larger. In Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan, only Serpstat has one.
Competitor research partly reverses that. On its own count, Serpstat stores top 100 results for more keywords in 120 of the 121 shared markets, and far more outside the big ones. Semrush says it keeps the higher-volume keywords, and refreshes the most popular as often as daily. More rows against fresher rows is worth testing on a competitor you know.
Then look at a working day. Serpstat's Team plan, $100 a month billed annually, includes three logins, the API and MCP, and allows 500 report searches a day. Semrush's $117.33 SEO plan allows 3,000 a day for one login and no API. A heavy researcher meets Serpstat's cap first; a team that tracks and reports meets Semrush's seat and tier prices first.
In the US the two lists are close in size, 3.96 billion keywords against 3.74 billion, so the choice there is about limits and price. Whichever market you work in, run both trials on a domain whose own Search Console data you hold.
- 01Serpstat publishes 230 Google databases; Semrush's own statistics tables list 121 countries, under a headline of 142.
- 02Semrush's keyword list is longer in 113 of the 121 markets both cover: 3.8 times in the UK, 8.8 in Germany, 42 in Brazil.
- 03Serpstat's list is longer in eight markets, led by Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Czechia and Ukraine, and only Serpstat covers Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
- 04Serpstat's $50 entry plan allows 100 report searches a day; Semrush's $117.33 plan allows 3,000, thirty times as many.
- 05Serpstat's page prices are annual rates that rise 22% to 38% on monthly billing, and cancelling takes 15 days' notice.
Semrush vs Serpstat is usually settled on price, and Serpstat's entry plan does cost less than half of Semrush's. Pages ranking for this comparison add a second claim: that Serpstat is the tool for international work. On the two vendors' own published figures, that is true in a narrower sense than it sounds.
Serpstat does cover more places. It lists 230 Google regional databases against the 121 countries in Semrush's statistics tables. Most of the extra ones are small, though. And in almost every market the two share, Semrush publishes the longer keyword list, often by several times.
So the question that decides this pairing is which markets you work in, and how deep each one has to go. The second question is what a working day looks like, because the two ration different things at similar money. Serpstat includes more people, more tracking and the API. Semrush includes far more report lookups a day.
All prices are the ones a US buyer sees, in dollars, from the two pricing pages on 18 September 2026. Serpstat was read through ScreenshotOne from a US address, and Semrush through Jina Reader, whose page data confirmed US dollars. Both pages open on annual billing, so their headline figures do compare like for like.
The database figures come from each vendor's statistics page, read the same day. Semrush dates its figures 17 September 2026; Serpstat's page carries no date. Neither set is audited, and the two vendors do not count in quite the same way, which the sections below explain.
Semrush vs Serpstat, side by side
Every value in the first block comes from the same record that drives the directory listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are capabilities one side has and the other does not.
The same workload, priced both ways
Six workloads, each priced at the plan that can carry it, on annual billing throughout. Serpstat is cheaper wherever the job is tracking, logins or API access. Semrush is cheaper wherever the job is opening a lot of reports in one day.
US prices in USD, read 18 September 2026 from serpstat.com/pay/ and semrush.com/pricing/, annual billing. Serpstat's daily searches, checks and users come from its plan comparison table. Semrush's daily allowance comes from its pricing FAQ, and its user prices from its knowledge base. Tracking assumes a 31-day month. Semrush publishes no price for API units, so that row is a floor.
These are the prices a US buyer sees. Serpstat showed the same dollar prices to a US and a European connection on the day. Semrush sets its prices by region, so a buyer outside the US may see a different gap between the two. Nothing here is converted from another currency.
Where the pricing page and the invoice come apart
Not a list of limitations, which every comparison already carries. These are the five places where the published price is not the price you end up paying.
- Serpstat
Serpstat's prices on the page are the annual rate
Serpstat's pricing page loads with its annual discount switched on. The $50, $100, $169 and $410 figures are the monthly cost of a year paid up front. Month to month, the same plans cost $69, $129, $209 and $499, which is 22% to 38% more. Its saving label on Team x2 says $484 a year, where the monthly and annual prices differ by $480.
- Serpstat
Cancelling Serpstat takes fifteen days' notice
Serpstat's cancellation terms allow a subscription to be cancelled no later than 15 days before the paid term ends, by email to its support address. On a monthly plan that is roughly the first half of each month. Payments are non-refundable, though Serpstat says it will consider justified requests. If you are only testing, switch off automatic renewal in Settings on the day you pay.
- Both
An extra login adds a person, not more allowance
Both vendors pool usage across an account. Semrush's knowledge base says every user shares the plan's limits, and it charges $45 a month for an extra user on SEO or Starter, $80 on Pro+ and $100 on Advanced. Serpstat's team members draw from the owner's credits. Three people on either plan share one daily allowance, so price the allowance as well as the seats.
- Both
A second market multiplies the tracking bill on both
Each vendor counts a tracked keyword once for every location. On Semrush, every keyword in each target counts towards the plan's limit, and several locations in one campaign start on Pro+ at $248.17. On Serpstat, each region multiplies the checks: 500 keywords in three regions, updated daily, is 46,500 checks a month. Multiply keywords by markets before comparing any plan.
- Semrush
Semrush publishes its limits under plan names it no longer sells
Semrush's pricing FAQ gives the daily report allowance for SEO, Pro+ and Advanced, but not for Starter. Its knowledge base lists results per report and pages to crawl under the retired Pro, Guru and Business names. One pricing article there still shows the old $139.95, $249.95 and $499.95 plans. If Starter is the plan you want, ask for its limits in writing first.
How many markets each one has a database for
Serpstat's statistics page lists 230 Google regional databases, plus one for Bing in the US. Semrush's statistics page gives a headline of 142 geo databases, but its per-country tables list 121 countries. Its knowledge base says over 130 in one article and more than 140 in another, which lists 115 country codes.
Set the two lists side by side and 109 of Serpstat's regions have no Semrush database at all. That is the fact behind the common line that Serpstat is the tool for international work.
Most of those 109 are small. Only 48 hold a million keywords or more, and only two hold ten million: Uzbekistan at 27.9 million and Kyrgyzstan at 12.7 million. The rest include Caribbean and Pacific territories, down to Pitcairn with 7,332 keywords. Semrush's smallest listed database, Botswana, holds 5.4 million.
So the extra coverage is real, and it matters to a small set of buyers. For keyword research in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kenya or Google's results in China, only Serpstat has a database. Semrush's own advice for a missing country is to track rankings there with Position Tracking, which reports positions but not keyword research.
Before comparing anything else, confirm that both tools list a database for every market you report on. Where only one of them does, the decision is already made.
Market by market, whose keyword list is longer
Both vendors publish a keyword count for each country. Semrush's is the database behind its Keyword Magic Tool, 28.9 billion keywords in all. Serpstat's is its keyword database, 8.9 billion in all. Of the 121 markets both cover, Semrush's count is the higher one in 113.
In the big Western markets the gap is wide. Semrush lists 1.86 billion keywords for the UK against Serpstat's 487 million, 3.8 times as many. Germany is 8.8 times, France 9.8, Spain 7.8, Italy 12.1 and Brazil 42. The US is close: 3.96 billion against 3.74 billion.
Serpstat's count is higher in eight markets, and most sit in Central and Eastern Europe or Central Asia. Lithuania is 4.6 times Semrush's figure and Kazakhstan 2.2 times. Belarus and Latvia are about 1.37, Czechia 1.27, Bulgaria 1.18, Ukraine 1.13 and Denmark 1.06.
Two regions that some comparisons credit to Serpstat go the other way on this count. Semrush's list is 9.4 times Serpstat's in Indonesia, 17 in Thailand, 22 in Argentina and 28 in Colombia. A Semrush vs Serpstat comparison that stops at the region count misses all of this.
Two cautions apply. These are self-reported totals, and neither vendor explains how it counts a keyword or removes duplicates. And a longer list is not automatically a better one. It does decide how far a keyword report can go in that market before it runs out of suggestions.
Run the same three seed terms in both trials, in the database you actually work in. Count how many suggestions each returns, and how many of them appear in your own Search Console.
The second count, behind a competitor's keyword report
A competitor's organic keywords report reads from a different, smaller set: the keywords whose top 100 results each vendor stores. Semrush calls this its Domain Analytics database and publishes desktop counts for it. Serpstat calls it keywords in SERPs.
On that count the order reverses. Serpstat lists 300 million US keywords with stored results against Semrush's 155 million on desktop. The UK is 150 million against 24 million, and Germany 73 million against 24 million. Smaller markets show the widest gaps: Ukraine is 286 million against 2 million, Slovakia 8.0 million against about 200,000.
Semrush explains part of the gap itself. Its knowledge base, describing the US database, says it carries the keywords with the most search volume, and drops low-volume ones to make room for more popular ones. In its table, 64 of the 121 countries sit within 6% of 200,000 keywords, and 16 more near two million. That pattern reads to me like a set allocation, though Semrush does not say so.
Freshness pulls the other way. Semrush says its keywords refresh daily, weekly or monthly by popularity, with smaller databases sometimes slower. Serpstat's help centre says its US and UK databases update roughly every one to two weeks, and smaller ones less often. Its Reddit account added in March 2026 that volumes for low-volume keywords can take up to three months.
Neither vendor says whether its two figures count exactly the same thing, and Serpstat does not say whether its figure is desktop only. So read the contrast as more stored rows on one side against faster refreshes on the other.
In a big market, expect Semrush's view of a competitor's high-volume rankings to be fresher. In a smaller one, expect Serpstat to show more of the long tail. Then check both against a site whose Search Console data you hold.
What the lower price leaves out of a working day
The pricing table shows what Serpstat's lower prices leave out. Individual, at $50 a month billed annually, allows 100 searches a day across site, keyword and link analysis. Semrush's SEO plan, at $117.33, allows 3,000 searches a day in its analytics reports.
That is thirty times the daily lookups for 2.35 times the price. Team, at $100, raises Serpstat's allowance to 500 a day, and Team x2, at $169, to 1,000. Only Agency, at $410, passes Semrush's entry figure, with 5,000.
Report depth follows the same pattern. Serpstat shows 2,000 results per report on Individual and 10,000 on Team. Semrush's knowledge base lists 10,000 on its entry tier, then 30,000 and 50,000. Serpstat's backlink reports stop at 10,000 rows on every plan above Individual, Agency included.
So the lower price buys other things. Serpstat's Team plan includes three logins, the API and MCP, none of which Semrush's SEO plan includes, plus 50,000 rank checks a month. What it does not buy is a day of heavy research.
One caution on Serpstat's side. Its help centre, in articles dated July 2026, describes a separate credit pool for each module and counts keyword research per result rather than per search. The pricing page describes one shared daily allowance. I have used the pricing page, because it is the offer you buy.
For a week, note how many reports each person opens a day. Under 100, Serpstat's entry plan holds them. Past 500 for one person, Semrush's entry plan is the cheaper way to buy the lookups.
Position checks you budget, or keywords you name
Semrush sells rank tracking as a list of keywords refreshed daily: 500 on SEO and Starter, 1,500 on Pro+ and 5,000 on Advanced. Serpstat sells a monthly pool of position checks: 10,000 on Individual, 50,000 on Team, 100,000 on Team x2 and 500,000 on Agency.
A Serpstat check is one keyword in one region on one update, and you set the schedule. Updated daily, Individual's 10,000 checks cover about 320 keywords in a 31-day month; weekly, about 2,250. Team's 50,000 cover about 1,600 keywords daily, more than Semrush tracks on Pro+ at $248.17.
The pool bends in a way a keyword count does not. A project that only needs weekly positions can track seven times as many keywords for the same checks. A new client can take a bigger share this month and a smaller one the next.
It also has to be budgeted. Serpstat's changelog says tracking AI Overview visibility costs two checks per keyword and region. Checks reset each billing cycle, and a daily schedule across four regions spends four checks a keyword every day, whether anyone reads the report or not.
Two smaller differences. Semrush's knowledge base says Position Tracking keeps daily results for 60 days, then shows weekly points. And after Google stopped returning 100 results per request in September 2025, Serpstat's chief executive wrote that it would keep top 100 tracking without raising prices.
Keywords, times regions, times updates a month, gives a Serpstat plan size. Keywords times locations gives the Semrush figure. Compare those two numbers, not the headline allowances.
Who makes Serpstat, and what it shipped this year
Serpstat's history page says it began in 2013 as an internal tool at the Netpeak agency in Odesa, Ukraine, and launched as a standalone product in 2015. It has been a core product within FRACTAL since 2021, by its own account, and claims more than 1.1 million users. Semrush has been part of Adobe since 28 April 2026.
Its 2026 changelog is busy, and aimed at automation. Its MCP server began working with ChatGPT in February, and Claude skills followed in March. Full Rank Tracker control through the API arrived in April, with AI Overview brand methods in April and May. An n8n node and sentiment tracking in its LLM Brand Monitor came in July.
The public documentation has not kept pace. The plan comparison says Team includes three users and Agency thirty. A help centre article dated July 2026 says Team allows four additional seats and Agency fourteen. Serpstat's own page comparing itself with Semrush quotes Semrush Guru at $208 a month, a plan Semrush no longer sells.
None of that is a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to confirm seats, limits and the cancellation date in writing before paying for a year, which is also sound advice for Semrush after its change of owner.
Practitioner discussion is thin. Of the seven r/SEO posts naming Serpstat in 2026 that the Arctic Shift archive returned, six came from Serpstat's own account. The one substantive account I found, in a March 2025 thread, came from a team that moved from Semrush to Serpstat over cost and keyword limits, then left after a year as its prices rose.
Pick each one when
Semrush
- You work in the UK, Western Europe, Brazil or India, where its published keyword lists run about four to forty times longer.
- One analyst opens hundreds of reports a day, and lookups matter more to you than extra logins.
- You want a fixed daily keyword list to track rather than a pool of checks to budget.
Serpstat
- Your market is Ukraine, Czechia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, where its database is the larger one or the only one.
- Several people need a login, and the API or MCP, for around $100 a month.
- You track many keywords across regions and would rather budget checks than buy a bigger tier.
How this plays out once it is running
Start the Serpstat vs Semrush decision with a list of the markets you report on. Put each one next to both vendors' counts before you open a trial. A list that includes Uzbekistan ends the comparison. One that is all Western Europe tilts it hard the other way.
A three-person agency in Kyiv with Ukrainian and Czech clients is Serpstat's best case. Both markets have the longer list on Serpstat's side. Team at $100 a month holds all three people, with the API and 50,000 checks. The same three on Semrush's SEO plan cost $207.33 before anyone asks for an API.
A two-person in-house team in Germany points the other way. Semrush lists 8.8 times as many German keywords, and its SEO plan gives the pair 3,000 searches a day to share, for $162.33 with a second login. Serpstat's Team plan costs less, at $100, but 500 searches a day between two researchers is a tight budget.
An agency tracking 300 keywords in each of ten markets shows the tracking gap. On Semrush that is 3,000 tracked keywords, past Pro+'s 1,500, so Advanced at $455.67. On Serpstat, weekly tracking takes about 13,300 checks a month and fits Team at $100. Daily tracking takes 93,000 checks and fits Team x2 at $169.
Semrush vs Serpstat is closest for a single buyer working only in the US. The two US keyword lists are within 6% of each other, so the choice comes down to the working day. Under 100 lookups a day, Serpstat's $50 plan is enough, and up to 500 its $100 Team plan is. Past 500, Semrush's $117.33 plan is the cheaper way to buy them.
The counter-case is a buyer who needs neither depth nor volume, only a handful of checks a week on their own site. Search Console covers that for free, and neither subscription is necessary until the work involves competitors.
What neither Semrush nor Serpstat does
- Neither publishes an audited keyword count. Both statistics pages are self-reported, and neither explains how it removes duplicates or decides that a phrase is a keyword. The per-market figures on this page are the vendors' own, compared as published.
- Neither sees all of a market's searches. In a March 2026 r/SEO thread, a team using Serpstat and Ahrefs found queries with clicks in Search Console that neither tool listed. Most replies said every third-party database misses long-tail and low-volume demand.
- Neither tells you which market to enter. A longer keyword list for Poland or Lithuania shows demand the vendor has recorded. It does not show whether your product sells there, or which terms your buyers actually use.
- Neither carries research across markets. Each regional database stands alone, so a keyword plan built for the UK has to be researched again for Germany, in German, on either tool.
- Neither turns a lookup allowance into a plan. Both sell access to data. Choosing the few keywords that deserve a page, and in which market, is still the work, and it costs the same on both.
Related comparisons
Semrush vs Moz
Both bill local work per location. One syncs listings from its cheapest local plan in three countries, the other from its second plan in 61 markets.
- SEO APIs
- Platform vs platform
SE Ranking vs Semrush
One bundles programmatic access into its cheapest plan. The other sells it on a plan more than four times the price.
- SEO APIs
- Platform vs platform
Ahrefs vs Semrush
One opens the API and history on its cheapest plan, then rations refresh rate, credits and seats. The other rations the features instead.
- SEO APIs
- Platform vs platform
FAQ
Frequently asked
Is Serpstat cheaper than Semrush?
On plan prices, yes. Billed annually, Serpstat runs $50, $100, $169 and $410 a month against Semrush's $117.33, $165.17, $248.17 and $455.67. Set Semrush pricing vs Serpstat pricing against a working day, though, and Serpstat's entry plan allows 100 report searches a day to Semrush's 3,000. For one heavy researcher, Semrush is the cheaper way to buy lookups.How many regional databases does Serpstat have compared with Semrush?
Serpstat's statistics page lists 230 Google regional databases plus one Bing database for the US. Semrush's statistics page headlines 142 geo databases, but its per-country tables list 121 countries. Of Serpstat's regions, 109 have no Semrush database, though only Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan among them hold more than ten million keywords.Is Serpstat better than Semrush for keyword research outside the US?
Only in some markets. On each vendor's own published counts, Semrush's keyword list is longer in 113 of the 121 markets both cover, including the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Brazil. Serpstat's is longer in Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Latvia, Czechia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Denmark, and only Serpstat covers Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.Which Serpstat plan includes the API and MCP?
Team and above. Team costs $100 a month billed annually, or $129 month to month, and includes MCP plus 200,000 API credits a month at one request a second. Team x2 doubles the credits to 400,000. Agency, at $410, carries two million credits at ten requests a second. Individual has neither the API nor MCP.How many users does a Serpstat plan include?
The pricing page says one on Individual, three on Team, six on Team x2 and thirty on Agency. A Serpstat help centre article dated July 2026 says Team allows four additional seats and Agency fourteen, and its comparison page mentions extra members at $29 a month. The pricing page is the offer you buy, so confirm the number in writing.How does Serpstat count rank tracking compared with Semrush?
Serpstat sells a monthly pool of position checks, from 10,000 to 500,000, where one keyword in one region on one update uses one check. Semrush sells a fixed number of keywords refreshed daily: 500, 1,500 or 5,000. At $100, Serpstat's Team plan covers about 1,600 keywords daily, more than Semrush's Pro+ does at $248.17.Can I cancel Serpstat at any time and get a refund?
Serpstat's terms allow cancellation up to 15 days before the paid term ends, by email to support, and say payments are non-refundable, with justified requests considered. Semrush lets you cancel any time through a form while logged in, and refunds only a first annual purchase within seven days. Neither refunds a monthly plan as a matter of course.Is Serpstat's monthly price the one shown on its pricing page?
No. The pricing page opens with its annual discount switched on, so $50, $100, $169 and $410 are monthly rates on a year paid up front. Month to month, the plans cost $69, $129, $209 and $499. Semrush's page also opens on annual billing, where its SEO plan is $117.33 against $139 a month.Who owns Serpstat, and who owns Semrush?
Serpstat says it began in 2013 as an internal tool at the Netpeak agency in Odesa, Ukraine, became a standalone product in 2015, and has been a core product within FRACTAL since 2021. Semrush has been owned by Adobe since 28 April 2026. Neither fact is a reason to avoid either tool, and both are reasons to read the renewal terms.What should a multi-country agency check before choosing between Semrush and Serpstat?
Count your markets first. Choosing Semrush or Serpstat for multi-country work turns on which markets they are: Semrush's lists are longer across most of Western Europe, Serpstat's in parts of Central and Eastern Europe. Then multiply keywords by markets. At 300 keywords in ten markets, Semrush needs Advanced at $455.67, while Serpstat tracks them weekly on Team at $100.