See who links to you and competitors. 4 tools in this list, 2 with a free plan.
How this list is ranked. Tools are ordered by how strongly they are built for this job (as tagged in VERILO’s catalogue), then by editorial score and editor rating. Affiliate relationships and featured status are never inputs.
For anyone who needs to know who links to a site and whether those links are worth having: link builders and digital PR teams, and site owners working out why a competitor outranks them.
How to choose
The index is the product. Each of these tools crawls the web itself, and the size and freshness of that crawl decide what you can see — Ahrefs' backlink index is the one generally regarded as the most complete and the freshest, which is why link-focused teams pay for it.
Then decide whether you are buying one job or a suite. Semrush covers SEO, paid search and content research in one account; SE Ranking leans towards daily rank tracking and client reporting; Moz Pro is the most approachable and carries Domain Authority, the reference metric many teams already quote to each other.
Finally, look at how each tool meters you. These suites limit rows, credits, reports or seats rather than charging by result, so the limit you hit first — not the headline price — decides what the work actually costs.
What to compare
Index size and freshness
A link you cannot see is a link you cannot act on. During a trial, look up a domain whose links you already know and check how much each tool found and how recently.
Lost and broken links
Most link work is maintenance. Check that the tool reports links that disappeared and pages that now 404 with links pointing at them, not only new referring domains.
Filtering and export
Raw link lists are unusable. Judge the filters — anchor text, follow status, traffic, quality score — and whether the export format fits the report you have to produce.
Seats and credits
Every tool here meters something: user seats, rows per report or monthly credits. Price the plan against the limit your work reaches, and count the people who need a login.
Common questions
Which backlink analysis tools have a free plan?
Ahrefs and Semrush have a free plan, with limits on usage, users or features. SE Ranking (14 days) and Moz Pro (7 days) offer a free trial instead.
How much does backlink analysis software cost?
The entry paid plans as each vendor lists them, checked against its pricing page: Ahrefs Starter at $29 a month, Moz Pro Entry-level at $49 a month, SE Ranking Core at $129 a month and Semrush SEO at $139 a month. Some vendors quote the annual-billing rate, and seat minimums, higher tiers and add-ons all change the real cost, so price the plan you actually need.
Is Google Search Console enough for backlink analysis?
It reports the links Google has found to your own site, free, and that is a good start. It does not show a competitor's links, quality metrics, anchor-text breakdowns or when a link disappeared, which is what these tools add.
What is Domain Authority?
Moz's score for how likely a site is to rank, calculated from its own link index. It is a third-party metric rather than a Google signal: useful shorthand when a team already speaks in it, and not comparable with the similar scores other tools publish.