SE Ranking and Semrush are often compared as the cheap and the expensive version of the same tool. The two platforms, though, set their limits in different ways, and which one comes out cheaper and more useful depends on your workload. What follows is a comparison for someone working in the Russian market: plans, rank tracking, audits, competitor research, and separately the question that matters more than the rest for Russian search, namely what to do about Yandex.
The short version
- SE Ranking pays off when most of the load is rank tracking and auditing many sites: its plans allow noticeably more tracked keywords and audit pages for a comparable price.
- Semrush is stronger as a research platform, with more tools for competitor analysis, paid search and content in one package.
- Neither vendor names Yandex in its rank tracking descriptions, so for a Yandex project either one will be the second tool.
Vendor prices
Both companies show prices in the visitor's currency. The figures below are in euros, as displayed on their pricing pages on 27 September 2026, for monthly billing.
| Platform | Plan | Price per month | Tracked keywords |
|---|---|---|---|
| SE Ranking | Core | €109 | 2,000 daily |
| Growth | €235 | 5,000 daily | |
 Semrush | SEO | €134 | 500 daily |
| Starter | €190 | 500 daily | |
| Pro+ | €286 | 1,500 daily | |
| Advanced | €526 | 5,000 daily |
Sources: seranking.com/pricing.html and semrush.com/pricing, checked 27 September 2026. Both companies discount annual billing. SE Ranking also has an Enterprise plan priced on request.
Beyond keywords, SE Ranking's page lists 10 projects and 250,000 audit pages a month on Core, and 30 projects and 2,000,000 pages on Growth. Semrush expresses its limit as the number of tracked websites: 5 on SEO and Starter, 15 on Pro+, 40 on Advanced. SE Ranking's trial is 14 days and Semrush's is 7, both without a card, and Semrush also has a free plan with ten reports a day. All of this is from the same two pages on the same date.
The table shows the main difference. For comparable money, SE Ranking gives several times as many tracked keywords. If your work is mostly rank monitoring across many projects, that settles it. If the work is mostly research, the sums come out differently, as below.
How the limits work
The two platforms cap different things, and that decides which one ends up cheaper for you.
SE Ranking's main limits are on tracked keywords, projects and audit pages. Keyword, competitor and backlink research is marked as unlimited on both main plans, with export caps of 50,000 rows on Core and 100,000 on Growth (seranking.com/pricing.html, checked 27 September 2026).
Semrush ties its limits to tracked sites and keywords, while research volume depends on the plan and on add-on toolkits. Check the specific report limits on the pricing page on the day you buy; they change.
A practical way to choose: write down your monthly workload before you look at prices. How many projects, how many tracked keywords per project, how many pages on the sites you need to audit regularly, how many people will work in the account. For an agency with ten clients at two hundred keywords each, that is 2,000 keywords a day, and the difference between the platforms becomes obvious at once. How to budget for tools from your workload is covered in our article on budgeting for SEO tools.
Rank tracking and Yandex
On its Rank Tracker page, SE Ranking names Google, Bing, Yahoo and YouTube on desktop and mobile, plus visibility tracking in AI answers: ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity (seranking.com/rank-tracker.html, checked 27 September 2026). Yandex is not mentioned in that description.
The Semrush knowledge base lists Google, Bing, Baidu, ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode for Position Tracking (semrush.com/kb/32-position-tracking, checked 27 September 2026). No Yandex there either.
Many older reviews describe SE Ranking as a tool that supports Yandex. The vendor's current pages do not show that, so if Yandex tracking is critical for you, test it yourself during the trial before you pay.
That gives a working setup for a Yandex project. A local service tracks Yandex positions, volume comes from Wordstat, and data about your own site comes from Yandex Webmaster and Metrica. The Western platform covers Google, links and competitors. In that setup SE Ranking's advantage in tracked keywords loses some of its point, since most of the monitoring moves to the local service. How optimising for the two engines differs is covered in Yandex and Google.
On update frequency: SE Ranking says it monitors rankings daily. According to its knowledge base, Semrush keeps daily data for 60 days and then shows weekly data points, so a long daily history in Semrush has to be exported in time.
Keyword and competitor research
Semrush is broader here. According to its knowledge base, the SEO toolkit includes Domain Overview, Compare Domains, Organic Rankings, Top Pages, Keyword Gap and Backlink Gap, Keyword Magic Tool and Keyword Strategy Builder, Topic Research and SEO Writing Assistant (semrush.com/kb/806-seo-toolkit, checked 27 September 2026). Beyond organic, Keyword Gap can compare paid and product listing keywords, which helps in niches where competitors live on search ads.
SE Ranking covers the same core tasks: keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink checking and monitoring. On its homepage the vendor claims 188 country databases (seranking.com, checked 27 September 2026). Semrush, according to its knowledge base, has more than 140, including Russia.
The vendors' own database sizes say little about data quality in your particular niche. It is more reliable to test both on your own site during the trials: what share of the queries you know you rank for each one shows, and how far its traffic estimate is from your analytics. That test takes an hour and answers the question better than any table.
If your work is mostly analysing other sites and planning content, the extra Semrush tools justify the price difference. If it is mostly monitoring and auditing your own projects, most of those tools will sit idle. How Semrush compares with Ahrefs on competitor and link research specifically is covered in Semrush vs Ahrefs.
Technical audit
Both platforms have a crawler for auditing your own site, and their sets of checks are similar.
- Semrush Site Audit, according to its knowledge base, runs more than 140 checks, renders JavaScript as an option and can be scheduled daily, weekly or once (kb/31 and kb/539, checked 27 September 2026).
- SE Ranking Website Audit claims more than 115 metrics on its product page, client-side JavaScript rendering, and automatic runs weekly or monthly, or on demand (seranking.com/website-audit.html, checked 27 September 2026).
The difference in the number of checks is barely noticeable in practice: both find the main problems, from status codes to duplicates and canonicals. The limits make more of a difference. SE Ranking's monthly audit page allowance on the base plan is sized for regular crawls of several medium-sized sites. For an agency that audits every client weekly, that often decides the choice.
How to work with the Semrush audit, from setup to the order of fixes, is covered in detail in Semrush Site Audit. For Yandex projects both platforms share the same boundary: why Yandex excluded a page from its index is visible only in Yandex Webmaster.
Client reports and agency work
SE Ranking is clearly aimed at agencies. Its homepage highlights White Label, an SEO report generator, and a lead generator for an agency's website. White Label, however, is an add-on on the pricing page: it comes with the Agency Pack, which according to the same page costs €59 a month extra and is available only on annual billing (seranking.com/pricing.html, checked 27 September 2026).
Semrush lists 5 tracked websites on Starter, the same as on SEO, so for an agency with a dozen clients the real choice starts at Pro+. The cost of extra users and reporting features in Semrush is worth checking on the pricing page on the day you buy.
For an agency, two things usually decide it: how many clients fit into the plan without extra charges, and how much time the monthly report takes. The first you can work out from the table above. The second depends on which numbers you show the client, and that has its own article, on the monthly SEO report.
Payment and access from Russia
Both platforms sell subscriptions in foreign currency. Before you build a workflow on either one, check in practice how you will pay every month and what happens if a payment fails: losing access to a year of ranking history hurts more than any difference in features.
If you need Semrush without a foreign subscription of your own, access can be priced in the calculator on the gbseo.ru homepage. SE Ranking is not in the gbseo.ru catalogue. If Semrush is new to you, start with the first-week plan in our Semrush tutorial for beginners.
Which one suits whom
Set the vendors' claims aside and the choice comes down to a few scenarios.
- An agency with dozens of projects and a focus on Google rank monitoring. SE Ranking: the keyword and audit page limits per unit of price are noticeably higher.
- A specialist who does a lot of competitor analysis, works on content and watches paid search. Semrush: its set of research tools is broader.
- A project that lives on Yandex. A local service for positions and Wordstat for volume come first. The Western platform is a second layer for links and competitors, and here the quality of competitor data matters more than the tracking limit.
- A single company site with no clients. The audit limits and the number of tracked keywords decide it. Test both on your own site during the trials and choose by the result.
Frequently asked questions
Which is cheaper, SE Ranking or Semrush?
On prices as of 27 September 2026, SE Ranking's base plan is cheaper than Semrush's base plan and gives more tracked keywords. For research work, it matters more to compare the set of tools.
Which platform tracks Yandex rankings?
Neither vendor's current description mentions Yandex. If it is critical, test it during the trial and keep a local service for Yandex.
Does SE Ranking have a free trial?
Yes, 14 days without a card, according to SE Ranking's pricing page. Semrush has a 7-day trial and a free plan with a limit on the number of reports.
Can you switch from one platform to the other without losing history?
You can export ranking history and keep it separately, but in the new platform it starts from scratch. It is best to plan the move for the start of a quarter and run both in parallel for a while.
Which should a beginner choose?
The one you will open every day. If the main job is monitoring and audits, SE Ranking is simpler and cheaper. If you need to learn to analyse the market and competitors, Semrush gives you more material for it.