Semrush vs SE Ranking (2026): Free Tier vs Trial
| Tool | Best for | Starting price | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush | free technical site audits without a card, cross-checking AI-search-visibility findings against a second tool | $117.33/mo (entry tier, now called 'SEO', billed annually; $139/mo month-to-month - renamed from 'Pro' since our Aug check, same ballpark price) | Aug 2026 (confirmed firsthand): free, no-signup, no-card tier covered Site Audit (up to 100 pages), AI Visibility, and limited Position Tracking. Sep 27 2026 recheck: semrush.com/siteaudit/ now offers a free '1 page' SEO Checker (its own comparison table lists 'Semrush Site Audit' as the 100-page tool), and that page's 'Try Site Audit' link goes to semrush.com/signup/...&trial=force... (an account-creation page), not to a report. We could not complete a clean logged-out re-test: one attempt hit a shared daily usage cap on the 1-page tool, another used a browser already logged into Semrush from earlier testing. So we can confirm the August entry point has changed shape; we can NOT confirm whether a genuinely free, no-signup, 100-page audit still exists elsewhere on the site - needsVerification. The 7-day trial of paid plans requires a credit card, and its money-back guarantee explicitly excludes month-to-month billing - the same refund-guarantee trap shape found in the Surfer SEO review. |
| SE Ranking | keyword research with real competitor SERP data, baseline technical site audit | not confirmed firsthand - see official pricing page (shown in JPY during our Sep 27 check, ~17,455 JPY/mo for the entry Core plan - same regional-pricing-display pattern seen on Screaming Frog and n8n, not evidence of a real price) | 14-day trial, no credit card required (confirmed firsthand Aug 2026; still 14-day/no-card on the pricing page Sep 27 2026). Signup form rejects Gmail-style addresses and requires a domain-based 'work email' - a personal or business Gmail address will not pass signup. |
Both of these bill themselves as all-in-one SEO suites — site audit, rank tracking, AI visibility — and both
get recommended interchangeably in “best SEO tool” roundups. We ran each against this site’s own live domain,
solostacklab.net, and compared what actually happened. Full writeups: Semrush review
and SE Ranking review.
Quick answer: In our August tests, Semrush’s free audit found a real DNS bug that SE Ranking’s trial audit couldn’t show us (its page-level findings were locked), while SE Ranking’s trial gave us usable keyword research that we couldn’t test on the Semrush side. Semrush’s free route looked different when we rechecked on September 27 (details below), so check what you can reach today before you rely on it.
One honest caveat up front: we tested different access levels for each. Semrush was tested entirely on its free, no-signup tier (Site Audit, AI Visibility, limited Position Tracking) — we deliberately stayed there rather than starting a paid trial. SE Ranking was tested on its 14-day free trial, which unlocks more than Semrush’s free tier does, including Keyword Research. That difference in what we could access shapes some of what follows, and we’ve flagged it inline rather than pretending it’s an apples-to-apples paid-plan comparison.
Getting started: one needs nothing, one needs a fight
Semrush’s free tier needs no signup and no credit card at all — you can point it at a domain and get results immediately. (This was true when we tested in August. See the Sep 27 update in the Semrush review — the no-signup path we used then now leads to either a 1-page checker or an account-signup screen, and we haven’t confirmed the full 100-page audit is still reachable without an account.)
SE Ranking’s 14-day trial also needs no credit card, but the signup form demands a “work email” and
flatly rejected our business Gmail address (solostacklab.tools@gmail.com) with “Use your work email
address (name@company.com) to continue.” We worked around it with a free Cloudflare Email Routing address
on our own domain — a real ten-minute detour if you don’t already have one set up. Onboarding also defaulted
our country/language/currency to Japan/日本語/JPY, which we had to manually correct to match this site’s
actual US/English audience.
If your goal is “run one report right now with zero friction,” Semrush gets you there faster.
Site Audit: in August, the free tool gave more than the trial did
This is the finding that surprised us most, because it runs backwards from what the access-level difference would predict.
Semrush’s completely free Site Audit found a genuine, previously-unknown bug: https://www.solostacklab.net/
had no DNS record at all. Not a redirect, not a 404 — nothing. We confirmed it independently with nslookup
and fixed it the same session. The audit told us exactly which URL had the problem.
(August result. On September 27 we could not confirm that this free, no-signup, 100-page audit is still reachable; see the update in our Semrush review.)
SE Ranking’s 14-day-trial Site Audit gave us a Health Score (86/100) and issue counts by category (“No inbound links: 6,” “Internal links to 3XX redirect pages: 7”) — informative at a glance. But clicking into the Issue Report to see which specific pages had those errors showed every detail row replaced with “Available by subscription” and an “UNLOCK AUDIT” button. Despite being on an active trial, not the free tier, we got zero actual URLs to act on.
Both tools also paywall something: Semrush locks Core Web Vitals behind a paid plan even on its free tier. But for the core “here’s what’s actually broken and where” job, Semrush’s free audit was more useful than SE Ranking’s trial audit, in our own test.
Keyword Research: only tested on one side
SE Ranking’s Keyword Research was the strongest single feature we found in either tool: searching “programmatic seo” returned a Difficulty score (40/100), monthly volume (590), CPC ($3.12), and the actual ranking URLs — specific pages from Reddit, Semrush’s own blog, Zapier, and HubSpot. That’s concrete, usable competitive research.
We can’t make the same claim for Semrush one way or the other — keyword research sits behind a paid plan we didn’t test, since this review stayed in the free tier on purpose. If keyword research is your primary use case, SE Ranking’s trial gives you a real, verified look at that data today; Semrush’s equivalent is untested by us as of this writing.
AI visibility tracking: same 0%, same kind of misleading dashboard tile
Both tools track whether AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews) cite your domain, and both showed 0% presence for solostacklab.net — a useful cross-tool confirmation rather than a one-off number, later also confirmed by NEURONwriter and our own manual ChatGPT check.
Both dashboards also each have their own easy-to-misread stat sitting right next to the real number:
- SE Ranking displays “Sources Presence: 100%” next to the 0% mention/link figures — read quickly, it looks like a visibility win. It isn’t: it means 100% of AI answers had source links to something, not that any source was us.
- Semrush’s Position Tracking widget shows “100% visibility, position 1” for the keyword
solostacklab.net— true of nearly every domain for a search of its own name, not a real ranking achievement, despite the confident framing.
Neither tool is lying, but both need a second look before you screenshot a big percentage as a win.
Quick answers
Is Semrush free? In August we used a free tier with no signup and no card: a 100-page Site Audit, AI Visibility and limited Position Tracking. On September 27 the entry point looked different: a free 1-page SEO checker, and its “Try Site Audit” link led to an account-signup page. Paid plans come with a 7-day trial that asks for a credit card, and the money-back guarantee excludes month-to-month billing.
Is SE Ranking free? What we tested was a 14-day trial with no credit card (its pricing page still said so on September 27). The signup form rejected our Gmail address and required a work email. We tested the trial only, so we can’t say whether a permanent free plan exists.
Which should you use?
- Start with Semrush’s free audit if you can still reach it: the no-signup, 100-page audit we used in August found a real, specific bug, where a paywalled trial from a competing tool surfaced no equivalent detail. As of September 27 we could not confirm that route still exists (see the Semrush review’s update), so check before you plan around it.
- Use SE Ranking’s trial if keyword research is what you actually need right now — its data was specific and immediately usable — but budget time for the Gmail-signup workaround, and don’t expect the Site Audit’s page-level findings without upgrading.
For our own site, the technical checks we run now come from Screaming Frog and Ahrefs Free’s Site Audit (see our roundup of every tool we’ve tested). We used Semrush’s free audit once, in August, and SE Ranking’s trial for keyword research: not a single winner, two different jobs.