Ahrefs vs. BuzzSumo: An In-Depth Comparison

Although BuzzSumo and Ahrefs have some crossover functionality, they’re really quite different. Let’s take a look:

	BuzzSumo	Ahrefs
Primary Focus	Content marketing & social listening	SEO & organic search optimization
Best for	Content marketers, PR teams, social media managers	SEO professionals, content writers, digital marketers
Content Research	Social shares, trending topics, viral content discovery	High-traffic content, backlink opportunities, SERP analysis
Keyword Research	Basic keyword tool with limited data	Comprehensive keyword explorer with traffic potential
Backlink Analysis	Basic backlink data focused on social shares	Extensive backlink database and analysis tools
Social Media Insights	Deep social listening and engagement metrics	Limited social media features
Site Auditing	No technical SEO audit features	Comprehensive site audit and health monitoring
Rank Tracking	No rank tracking capabilities	Advanced rank tracking with competitor analysis
Brand Monitoring	Social mentions and brand alerts	Brand Radar for web and AI Overview mentions
Starting Price	$159/month (Content Creation plan)	$29/month (Starter plan)

When you’re deciding on the right tool to take your SEO strategy to the next level, it can get overwhelming pretty quickly. There are so many choices out there, and all of them claim to be the best!

Two of the top tools you’ve probably seen around are Ahrefs and BuzzSumo. While they can both help you grow your business or brand, they’re actually pretty different tools.

I’ll take an honest and in-depth look at Ahrefs vs. BuzzSumo to help you decide which one you might want to use. Let’s go.

About BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content research and analysis tool that identifies top-performing content across a few different social media channels. It helps marketers track trends and mentions, analyze competitors, connect with journalists, and find influencers.

BuzzSumo provides data on engagement metrics, backlinks, and content formats to help marketers create strategic content and promote it in all the right places.

So, although it definitely has some feature crossover with popular SEO tools, it’s first and foremost a social listening and content research tool.

BuzzSumo’s Major Features

BuzzSumo is a large toolset with several major tools that can help you nail your content strategy,

keep an eye on what’s trending, and find ways to promote your content.

Content Ideas

The Content Ideas tool helps you generate content ideas by showing you popular questions, headlines, and trends related to your topic. It helps marketers discover what audiences are searching for and engaging with. The tool analyzes search queries, forums, and social data to recommend ideas that improve relevance and traffic.

Just enter a topic (like “SEO tools”) to see a whole dashboard full of data pulled from search results, keyword rankings, and social networks.

My favorite part of the Content Ideas tool is actually this ”Format” section that shows you what type of content ranks in search results. This is super handy for helping you research the audience’s/query’s search intent:

Keyword Research Tool

The next major tool you’ll find in BuzzSumo is the Keyword Tool, which helps you find high-performing keywords by analyzing search trends, monthly volume, and more. It identifies content ideas and keyword opportunities based on real-time data, supporting your SEO strategy by showing you what your audience searches for and how often.

You can also use the Keyword Tool for competitor analysis by entering a domain and seeing what keywords it’s currently ranking for.

I like that you can toggle between related keywords and similar keywords in this report, but it’s otherwise a fairly basic keyword research tool.

For example, a more popular SEO toolset like Semrush (and Ahrefs, which I’ll get to shortly) includes quite a bit more data in the Keyword Magic Tool:

Topic Explorer

BuzzSumo’s Topic Explorer tool finds and suggests related topics, questions, and content ideas around a central keyword. It visualizes topic connections and trends to help you expand your content strategy with more ideas that are related to your keyword.

Topic Explorer is a really helpful tool for building content pillars and topic clusters. These are content “hubs” of sorts, with one main guide covering a topic widely and supporting articles delving into subtopics in more detail.

I love that you can click on “Insights & Content Ideas” at the bottom of one of the idea cards to dive further into a topic, easily gathering more ideas for your topic cluster.

Backlink Analyzer

If you’re using BuzzSumo as an SEO tool, you’ll want to check out the Backlink Analyzer tool for competitor analysis. It’s a lot more focused on social shares than other backlink tools, showing total shares for the top linking pages:

This is awesome for searching out content within your niche that’s doing really well on social media. How can you recreate its success?

BuzzSumo’s Other Features

Those are the four main BuzzSumo tools you’ll use if you’re using it as an SEO tool. The other tools in their dashboard you’ll be able to use include:

• Media Database: Find top, active journalists and influencers on X who cover stories related to your niche
• Influencers: Find influencers in the topic of your choice on X, Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube
• Monitoring: Get alerts for brand mentions, backlinks, keywords, content published by a specific website, and more

Alright, those are BuzzSumo’s major features. Let’s move on to pricing.

BuzzSumo Pricing

BuzzSumo has four different pricing plans that include different features and allow different numbers of users. The Content Creation plan, at the most basic, includes most of the SEO-related reports but excludes the monitoring and media reports.

• Content Creation: $159 per month (paid annually)
• PR & Comms: $239 per month (paid annually)
• Suite: $399 per month (paid annually)
• Enterprise: $999 per month (paid annually)

BuzzSumo Reviews

BuzzSumo has a pretty positive review sentiment across major review sources. It’s got 4.5 stars on both G2 and Capterra, based on a combined 249 reviews.

Many of the reviews mention loving the useful tools BuzzSumo offers, but that the expense is a drawback. This review published on G2 pretty much hits the nail on the head for me:

That’s it for BuzzSumo! Let’s move on to Ahrefs.

About Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO toolset used to analyze content, backlinks, keywords, and websites. It includes tools for site auditing, rank tracking, keyword research, content analysis, and more.

Ahrefs also includes a newer tool called Brand Radar to track whether your brand is appearing in AI Overviews and keep an eye on your competitors in LLMs.

Ahrefs’ Major Features

Ahrefs provides a pretty big dashboard full of reports designed to help businesses and brands nail their SEO and keep an eye on their competition.

Let’s take a look at the major reports you’ll find in Ahrefs.

Site Explorer

The Site Explorer dashboard is an all-in-one SEO dashboard you can use to keep an eye on your site’s major metrics (or your competitor’s). It’ll provide you with metrics and reports like:

• Total organic keywords
• Total organic traffic
• Paid keywords and traffic
• Backlink profile
• Organic keywords
• Top (organic) pages
• Organic competitors
• Backlink referring pages and domains
• Competitor outgoing links

It’s a pretty comprehensive dashboard, and I like how easy it is to switch the time period you’re looking at on many of the report cards. It’s also pretty handy that you can compare time periods when looking at organic pages to see changes over time.

So, although I’m used to finding all of this data in Semrush, I can pretty easily locate it here in Ahrefs, too.

Keywords Explorer

The Ahrefs Keywords Explorer tool helps marketers discover, analyze, and target the right keywords by supplying search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic potential. It also provides data like cost per click (CPC), search engine results page (SERP) overviews, and parent topic insights.

Once you type in a keyword, you’ll see a dashboard of primary keyword metrics. To browse keyword ideas, you can click into an idea list (terms match, questions, also rank for, or also talk about).

In these lists, I like how you can click into other keywords and parent topics to keep delving into related terms that you can use to grow your content strategy continuously.

There are a lot of filters, too, to really drill into the keywords you want to find.

Content Explorer

The Ahrefs Content Explorer tool finds high-performing content by analyzing traffic, backlinks, and social shares across billions of pages. It helps identify trending topics, link-building opportunities, and content gaps. Marketers use it to research ideas and create content that attracts the most possible traffic and backlinks.

It’s similar to the Content Ideas and Backlink Analyzer tools in BuzzSumo, except it ranks popular content by referring domains and organic page traffic rather than social shares.

I prefer this method of ranking popular content, although I can think of situations where social shares would matter more than page backlinks and traffic.

Rank Tracker

The Ahrefs Rank Tracker tool monitors your website’s keyword rankings over time across desktop and mobile search engines. It shows position changes, visibility metrics, and performance by location. Marketers use it to track SEO progress and measure the impact of their optimization efforts.

You can look at your list of keywords and see where they rank, or your list of pages to see where they rank on average and which keywords they’re ranking for.

My favorite feature in the Rank Tracker tool is the ability to organize your keywords by adding them to a specific tag group. Then, you can watch how a specific group is doing related to the others.

Ahrefs’ Other Features

Ahrefs comes with other features that you’ll get as well, depending on the plan that you choose. Here are a few:

• Brand Radar: Track your brand or business’s mentions in AI Overviews, across the web in general, and in search queries.
• AI Content Helper: Paste your article into the editor to get suggestions from AI about how to improve it to get more traffic and visibility.
• Site Audit: Let Ahrefs crawl your website to find technical SEO issues you can fix.

Ahrefs Pricing

Ahrefs has five different pricing plans that include different features and allow different numbers of projects. The Starter plan, at the most basic, includes basic access to three of the top tools: Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and Site Audit.

It also includes a few add-on tools for an additional charge.

• Starter: $29 per month
• Lite: $108 per month (paid annually)
• Standard: $208 per month (paid annually)
• Advanced: $374 per month (paid annually)
• Enterprise: $1,499 per month (annual commitment required)

Ahrefs Reviews

Ahrefs has a total of 561 reviews on G2 with a 4.5-star rating. It also currently holds a 4.7-star rating on Capterra with 578 reviews.

However, I do have to point out that it has a 2-star rating on Trustpilot with 277 reviews.

In general, I think Ahrefs is a helpful tool with a lot of features that anyone in the search marketing industry (and website owners) would find super useful.

I did come across a few reviews similar to this one, where there are some complaints about finding vastly different numbers inside Ahrefs than you find in your Google Search Console reports:

The tool also limits your credit usage to 500 if you’re on the Lite plan, which some reviewers found wasn’t quite enough to really utilize the tools in the way they wanted to for a month.

BuzzSumo vs. Ahrefs Review: Which one wins?

BuzzSumo and Ahrefs honestly aren’t super easy to compare. I like them both for different purposes!

• Is having a thriving social media strategy and creating content that’s shared widely on social media platforms what’s most important to you?
• Do you need to find influencers and keep an eye on media coverage?

If yes, then BuzzSumo is probably the right tool for you.

If you’re more focused on SEO and creating content that gets maximum visibility (but not necessarily shared all over social media), then Ahrefs or another SEO toolset would be the better choice.

If you’d rather use one SEO tool that marries the SEO toolset in Ahrefs and the social media monitoring tools in BuzzSumo, try Semrush.

Want the best of both worlds without paying for two separate tools?

If you'd rather use one platform that combines Ahrefs' powerful SEO capabilities with BuzzSumo's social media monitoring features, try Semrush.

Semrush gives you:

• Comprehensive keyword research (like Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer)
• Backlink analysis and site auditing tools
• Social media management with content scheduling and tracking
• Competitor analysis across both SEO and social channels
• Content gap analysis to find untapped opportunities