SEMrush vs Moz: Why We Dropped Moz After Two Years

As a digital marketing agency, we’ve learned that a tool doesn’t have to be bad for us to stop paying for it. It just must stop being worth the extra line item.

We paid for Moz Pro for two years alongside SEMrush before eventually letting the subscription lapse in 2025. And honestly, it wasn't because Moz suddenly got worse. We didn't leave because a support ticket went unanswered, a feature stopped working, or a renewal email landed at the wrong time. The reason was much simpler: once SEMrush's keyword research and tracking data became good enough for what we needed, it became increasingly difficult to justify paying for a second platform that was covering much of the same ground.

That's the comparison we think people are looking for when they search for Moz Pro vs. SEMrush. Not another enormous feature checklist where one tool gets a tick and the other gets a cross, but a practical answer to a much simpler question: if you already pay for SEMrush, does Moz Pro still earn its place in your SEO stack?

Because features on a pricing page don't tell you that. Actual day-to-day use does.

So rather than treating this as a generic “which SEO tool is better?” comparison, we're looking at it from an SEO agency perspective: where the two platforms overlap, where they genuinely differ, what we found useful in each, and whether adding Moz Pro on top of SEMrush makes financial and operational sense today.

And because pricing can change the answer just as much as features can, we're also looking at the current pricing on both sides not what either platform cost a few years ago, but what you'd actually be committing to now.

How We're Judging This

Same rule we apply to every tool on the stack: the filter is renewal, not a feature checklist, because a checklist rewards whichever vendor wrote the longer list of capabilities, and a renewal decision only rewards whatever you actually opened this month. A tool that survives being reviewed for cancellation every year has proven something a demo can't. Moz didn't survive that review for us. It might for you, the section below on who should keep it isn't a formality.

What Moz Still Does Better

Not nothing. Three things, specifically.

It's the easier tool to hand to someone new. Moz Pro's interface is simpler than SEMrush's, and if you're training a junior hire, or you're a solo operator who touches SEO software twice a week rather than daily, that simplicity is worth real money. SEMrush's depth is only an advantage once you actually use enough of it to justify the time spent learning it.

Domain Authority is still a shorthand people trust, for better or worse. Moz invented the metric, and even though it's a modeled score rather than anything Google confirms using, plenty of clients and link-building partners still ask for it by name, which makes keeping a Moz login active a real, if slightly uncomfortable, requirement for anyone doing outreach where DA gets quoted in emails.

Moz Local is a genuinely separate, useful product if local citations and listing management are part of the job. That's not really a SEMrush-vs-Moz decision at that point and it's a different tool for a different task, and Moz's local product is priced and built for exactly that job on its own.

Where SEMrush Pulls Ahead

More, and faster.

Once you're paying for SEMrush's keyword research, position tracking, and site audit tools, Moz's equivalents are doing a smaller version of jobs you already have covered, and running both just means reconciling two crawlers' different opinions about the same site which costs time without adding a decision you couldn't make from one data source alone.

SEMrush's crawl and keyword database are larger too. This shows up most clearly on mid-size and larger sites, where Moz's crawl limits on its lower tiers become a real constraint faster than SEMrush's do at a comparable price. We hit that wall firsthand on a client site north of 100K pages, where Moz's crawl limit forced an upgrade that SEMrush didn't require at the same tier.

The AI visibility tooling isn't close right now. SEMrush ships AI Overview and LLM-citation tracking inside its base plans; Moz doesn't have an equivalent shipped as of this writing. If tracking how a brand shows up in ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews matters for a client this year, that alone can decide the comparison before pricing even enters the conversation.

SEMrush Vs Moz Pricing, as of September 2026

Moz's annual billing knocks roughly 20% off each tier. SEMrush's discount is similar in shape but calculated per tier rather than as a flat percentage, which is why the two annual numbers above don't scale identically.

The honest read on price: Moz is meaningfully cheaper at every comparable tier, and if budget is the binding constraint rather than feature depth, that's not a small difference. A five-person in-house team watching a monthly SaaS line item will feel the gap between $99 and $199 a lot more than an agency billing the tool back to a client already will.

Who Should Keep Moz Anyway

1. Solo consultants and very small teams where SEMrush's extra depth in PPC, social, and content tooling goes unused. Paying for capability you don't touch is the same mistake in either direction.
2. Anyone doing active link-building outreach where Domain Authority still comes up in partner conversations, whether or not the metric deserves the trust it gets.
3. Teams already deep in Moz's Local product, where switching costs are about citations and listings, not strategy preference.

If none of those describe your situation, the case for running both gets thin fast, and the case for Moz alone over SEMrush alone gets thin faster. Most teams asking this question aren't in that list.

The Numbers, Where They Actually Exist

SEMrush publishes its scale prominently: 43 trillion+ backlinks, 28.8 billion keywords, and 142 geographic databases, all stated directly on its own data page. Moz's link index is actually in the same range - Moz reports roughly 44 to 46 trillion links, a figure independent 2026 reviews (Style Factory, BloggersPassion, ManyTools) consistently corroborate within a narrow band, so the popular claim that Moz keeps its index size vague or wildly inconsistent doesn't hold up on a current check.

The real, defensible gap is the keyword database, not the link index: Moz's keyword database sits at roughly 1.25 billion terms, against SEMrush's 28.8 billion more than a 20x difference. That's the number worth citing if the comparison is “which tool sees more of the keyword landscape,” not backlink count.

Review volume tells a similar, verifiable story. SEMrush carries roughly 3,400 reviews on G2 and 2,300 on Capterra, both around 4.5 to 4.6 stars. Moz Pro shows 608 reviews on G2 at a 4.3-star average, with a few hundred more on Capterra a real gap, but not the order-of-magnitude difference some outdated comparisons suggest. That gap tracks with company size and years in market more than with product quality, but it's also a real signal: fewer active reviewers means fewer people are actively evaluating Moz against alternatives right now, consistent with the smaller, more settled audience the “who should keep Moz anyway” section above describes.

What Only One of Them Does

Moz has one thing worth keeping a login open for on its own: MozBar, a free browser extension that shows Domain Authority, Page Authority, and on-page elements for any page you visit, no Moz Pro subscription required. It's a lighter-weight habit than opening a full platform, and plenty of SEOs who've otherwise moved to SEMrush keep MozBar installed purely for the quick glance. Moz also integrates directly with STAT for enterprise-scale rank tracking, a pairing some larger teams prefer over building that workflow inside SEMrush itself.

SEMrush's list here is longer, which is just the platform-versus-tool difference showing up again. Traffic Analytics estimates any site's traffic from a clickstream panel of 200 million-plus real devices rather than a crawl-based model, the Advertising Research toolkit shows a competitor's actual paid search history, and the Content Marketing toolkit builds SEO-scored content briefs, none of which Moz attempts to build at all.

The Question Neither Tool Answers

Both will tell you a page's rank, its estimated traffic, and its backlink count, down to a decimal point that makes the number feel more certain than it is. Neither will tell you whether that page was the right thing to have built in the first place, or whether the keyword it targets is worth the effort against a competitor with ten years of domain history on the exact same topic. That's a strategy question, and it's the actual work behind most AI search optimization work we run for clients: deciding what's worth ranking for before any tool gets opened.