Profound alternatives

Read Profound's Starter tier before you compare prices, because the number next to it is not the thing being sold: $99/month buys "ChatGPT tracking only", and the second and third engines arrive at Growth for $399/month. Almost everything in this table beats that on engines per dollar. AthenaHQ's Essential is free across five engines, metered by credit, and is where anyone should start, it will tell you whether you have a problem before you buy anything. Otterly.AI's Lite is $29/month across four engines, and is the answer for an agency because Standard and Premium lift the one-workspace cap that actually binds. CiteRank's Solo is $3/mo across three engines for ten questions, built for one founder with one product, and all five engines arrive at $7/mo. Searchable is the one to look at if the real requirement is a single bill for tracking, content production and technical audits rather than measurement alone: Pro is $125/month for 100 tracked prompts per model with 20 articles and 200 site audits, and white-label client reports, API access and Looker Studio arrive at $400/month. Read its engine coverage twice before you buy, though, its plan grid prints all nine engines against every tier under "Select in onboarding", while the prose on the same page scopes Pro to "ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity" and calls Copilot "Available as a custom add-on for enterprise plans". Omnia is worth a look if what you actually lack is someone to act on the report: €79/month buys twenty-five prompts and an agent that drafts the fixes, though only four engines are included by default and Claude, Gemini and Copilot are each "(available on request)". Stay with Profound when the requirement is genuinely enterprise: up to nine answer engines, agents that generate and optimise content, AI-sourced traffic attribution across your domains, SSO/SAML and SOC 2. Nothing smaller here does any of that, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of comparison this page exists to be an alternative to.

Profound raised a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation in February 2026 and reports 700+ enterprise customers. It measures brand presence across answer engines, tracks the sources feeding them, and increasingly reports on agent traffic. If you run a brand team with a budget line for this, it is the safe choice and this page is not for you.

The Starter plan is $99/mo and covers 50 prompts on ChatGPT only, with one seat. The second answer engine is not an add-on, it arrives with the $399/mo Growth plan, which brings three engines and three seats. The reason people search for alternatives is almost always one of those three facts: the price, the single-engine entry tier, or the shape of a product built for a team when you are one person. If the missing engine is what sent you looking, the Perplexity citation tracker comparison covers which tools include it on the plan you would actually buy.

You want the measurement without the workspace. Options, in order of how much you will spend:

• CiteRank, $3-19/mo. Three engines from the entry tier, all five from $7, your own questions, a weekly report with competitor share of voice and the list of pages the engines actually read. The trade is cadence: probes run on a shared, scheduled browser pool, so results land weekly rather than the moment you click. That trade is the price difference.
• Otterly.AI Lite, $29/mo. Fifteen prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, from one of the earliest tools in the category. Fewer questions than we give you and Claude and Gemini cost extra, but it is a real product at a real price and we would rather name it than pretend the cheap tier is ours alone.
• Mangools AI Search Watcher, from $15.60/mo, billed annually. The lowest entry price read here, and an add-on inside the Mangools suite rather than a standalone tool. The figure is what the vendor published on 9 August 2026 and has not been retrievable since, its price panel renders client-side. The wording was "Subscriptions start at $15.60 per month with annual plans", so month-to-month costs more than that; it names ChatGPT and Google AIO but not Perplexity.
• AthenaHQ Essential, free. All five engines, unlimited members, and it costs nothing until the $25 of included credit runs out. It is metered rather than unlimited, so it will not watch a number for you week after week, and competitor benchmarking sits on the $295 Starter tier rather than on Essential, but if you have never checked whether the engines name you, it is the cheapest possible way to find out, and we would rather point you at it than sell you a subscription you may not need yet.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar, from $129/mo (Lite). Only sensible if you already pay for Ahrefs, in which case the marginal cost is nothing. Brand Radar is named on Lite and above, not on the $29 Starter tier, and Lite tracks five AI prompts. The Ahrefs llms.txt generator is free to anyone and is not a reason to buy a plan.

You need seats and per-client workspaces, which is the thing the cheap tier deliberately does not build. Otterly.AI (Standard $189/mo, Premium $489/mo) and AthenaHQ (Starter ~$295/mo) are both shaped for this; AthenaHQ bundles more strategy work into the price. Peec AI ($80/mo for 50 prompts) sits below both and is strong on comparison views, though every Peec tier under Enterprise includes three chosen models rather than all of them, a fourth is an add-on, at $30 to $140/mo depending on the tier.

Omnia (Growth €79/month, Pro €279) is aimed at exactly this reader, its own title calls it "AI Visibility Software for Small Marketing Teams", and it is the only option named on this page that tries to do the work rather than only report it: an agent it calls Omnio drafts the fixes for you to approve. Growth carries twenty-five prompts and Pro a hundred. Read its engine row before you compare the price, because it is the row that decides the comparison: every tier says "Monitor 4 AI engines by default, unlock up to 7", and Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot are each printed "(available on request)". Prices print in euros. Read 31 August 2026.

Check what you own before buying anything. Both Semrush and Ahrefs (Brand Radar) now ship AI visibility reporting inside plans many teams already hold, bundled into the main tiers rather than sold as a separate product. It is rarely as deep as a dedicated tool, and it is free to you today.

• Real-time queries. Enterprise tools probe on demand at high volume. A $3/mo product cannot, and anyone claiming otherwise is either reselling an API you could call yourself or not probing as often as they imply.
• Years of history. A tool that started tracking in 2024 has a time series you cannot buy retroactively. If long-run trend data is the point, that is a real reason to pay more.
• Compliance and seats. SOC 2, SSO, role-based access, procurement paperwork. Genuinely irrelevant to a solo founder, genuinely mandatory inside a large company.

The measurement itself. Asking five answer engines a fixed set of buyer questions and parsing which domains get cited is the same operation at every price point. A browser-based probe reads the surface a buyer actually sees, which is arguably closer to the truth than an API-collected one, model APIs answer differently from the consumer products people use.

Run one free check against whatever you use now and compare the answers directly. That is a better test than any comparison table, including this one.

Starter is $99/month billed yearly and its own feature list says "ChatGPT tracking only", 50 prompts tracked, 1,500 responses monthly and 100 agent credits. Growth is $399/month for "3 Answer Engines tracked", ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, with 100 prompts and 400 agent credits. Enterprise is custom and "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked", adding Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek and Claude. Read off tryprofound.com/pricing on 14 August 2026.

AthenaHQ's Essential tier, and it is not close. It is free, covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude, and allows unlimited members. Two limits to know going in, because a free tier recommended without them is a worse recommendation than none: it is metered, "$25 free credit", "Includes 300 credits", "1 credit = 1 AI response", so it is a trial of five engines rather than a plan that keeps running; and it carries neither Google AI Mode nor competitor tracking, both of which start at Starter, $295/month.

CiteRank's Solo at $3/mo for ten questions across three engines, then Otterly.AI's Lite at $29/month for fifteen prompts across four. Both are cheaper by measuring less rather than by undercutting the same product, Profound's $99/month Starter buys fifty prompts, five times CiteRank's ten, on one engine rather than three. The comparison that means anything is price divided by questions multiplied by engines, and on that measure the cheap end of this market is dense and the expensive end is buying you agents and attribution rather than more measurement.

CiteRank on all three plans from $3/mo, and AthenaHQ from Starter at $295/month, where the page carries "Unlimited competitor tracking, impersonation, and benchmarking", not on its free Essential tier. Otterly.AI names no competitor or share-of-voice feature on Lite, Standard or Premium; all three list an identical core capability set. Profound names none on Starter, Growth or Enterprise either, though its product copy says it analyses "how your brand and competitors appear in AI platforms". That last one is a gap between the marketing page and the pricing page, and this table reports what the pricing page says.