Ahrefs vs. Majestic vs. SEO SpyGlass software review

This review will compare three big names at once, and try to give you a side-by-side comparison of important facts about three powerful backlink checker tools: Ahrefs, Majestic and SEO SpyGlass.

What is the best alternative among popular backlink checkers?

Even if you already have a Majestic or Ahrefs subscription and want to continue it, you should complete your list of tools with SEO SpyGlass. For just a tiny fraction of Ahrefs or Majestic price (!), SEO SpyGlass will let you:

• run core deep analysis of any site's link profile and single out the most attractive links
• segment and sort links for super convenient link management
• compare link profiles of multiple sites to see what links they have in common, and many other factors

For your convenience, we've packed the review into a comparison table. Please check it out and see what is important to you.

	SEO SpyGlass	Ahrefs	Majestic
General backlink checker features
Main benefit	Deep informative link profile analysis and powerful link management	Showing links that point (or pointed in the past) to a website	Showing links that point (or pointed in the past) to a website
Backlink index size	1.6+ trillion URLs crawled (fresh)	Unknown	231+ billion URLs crawled (fresh)
Pricing model	One-time payment	Monthly subscription	Monthly subscription
Find links	Unlimited number of links per report
Link analysis	Very deep, 43 factors analyzed	Basic	Basic
See whether the link is present at the moment	Detailed statuses provided See all statuses here	New/Lost view, broken links view	New/Lost view, Deleted, Redirect statuses
Domain strength report
See unique linking pages without duplicates
Compare links of multiple sites		Basic comparison of overall link counts	Basic comparison of overall link counts
Domain strength report
See unique linking pages without duplicates
Compare links of multiple sites		Basic comparison of overall link counts	Basic comparison of overall link counts
Tag and group links	Detailed comparison of sites' link profiles (you see what links they have in common)
Find contacts of site owner
Import links from other tools for analysis	You can analyze links from other sources and create complete list
Interface languages	EN, ES, DE, RU, NL, FR, PO, SK	EN, RU, JA, CNM	EN
	SEO SpyGlass	Ahrefs	Majestic
Backlink research features
Penalty risk
Linking page URL
Linking page title
ALT in image links
Nofollow
IP address of each linking page		Only cumulative data for all link profile
C-block of each linking page		Only cumulative data for all link profile	Displayed as Subnet in Ref.domain view
Country of each linking page		Only cumulative data for all link profile
TLD of each linking page		Only cumulative data for all link profile
Domain age of each linking page
Page Authority of each linking page			Trust Flow and Citation flow (Majestic's own metrics)
Domain Authority of each linking domain	Domain Authority (industry-standard Moz metric)	Domain Rating (Ahrefs' own metric)	Trust Flow and Citation flow (Majestic's own metrics)
Anchor text of each linking page
Anchor URL of each linking page
Domain PR
Page PR
Total links on the linking page
External links on the linking page
Domain Alexa rank
DMOZ listing
Domain's and page's social signals	Twitter Google+ Facebook LinkedIn Pinterest Delicious StumbleUpon Diigo Social Mention	Twitter Google+ Facebook
Actual traffic coming via link
Is the page indexed in search engines?	Google Yahoo Bing Yandex
Compete rank of domain
Compete traffic of domain
Link management features
	SEO SpyGlass	Ahrefs	Majestic
Check link status (whether the actual link is set fully as expected)	Possible statuses: Yes Yes (Embedded) — the link is actually the URL of embedded video Yes (Nofollow tag) Yes (Restricted from indexing) — linking page is blocked, ex. in robots.txt No (Link missing) No (Site is down) No (Page not found) — 404	Possible statuses: New/Lost 404, Redirect	Possible statuses: Nofollow Deleted, Redirect
Flexible filters for viewing links	You can filter links by any parameter available in the app. Ex., by PageRank, country, source etc.
Grouping links by tag(s)	Besides filtering links, you can set tags (ex. "Important", "Blog", "URL change requested" etc.) to conveniently group links by any category.
	SEO SpyGlass	Ahrefs	Majestic
Price in 1 year	Free: $0 Unlimited time Up to 1,100 links per site Unlimited sites	Lite: $948 (12 mo) Month to month renewal Up to 5M links per month	Silver: $947.88 (12 mo) Month to month renewal Up to 5M links per month
	Professional: $99/year Unlimited links per month Unlimited sites No PDF/.csv reports	Standard: $2,148 (12 mo) Month to month renewal Up to 30M links per month	Gold: $2,039.88 (12 mo) Month to month renewal Up to 25M links per month
	Enterprise: $199/year Unlimited links per month Unlimited sites Unlimited PDF/.csv reports	Plus: $5,988 (12 mo) Month to month renewal Up to 125M links per month	Platinum: $4,799.88 (12 mo) Month to month renewal Up to 100M links per month
Backlink Research Score	37/37	13/37	13/37

So, which one of these three backlink checker tools — SEO SpyGlass, Ahrefs or Majestic — wins the battle?

Ahrefs and Majestic are excellent tools for finding links. However when you need not just a big list of links, but a good understanding of where they can take you, SEO SpyGlass (the tool from SEO PowerSuite) is definitely the winner.

I notice that many people use SEO SpyGlass for link analysis. The problem with many other tools is that they just grab links from their index without checking them for relevancy. As a result, the amount of links reported on is overwhelming but how useful they are without a relevancy check?

SpyGlass is different. It finds relevant links only. It analyzes each link across many factors, including anchor text, Google PR, Alexa rank, number of external links on these pages and lots of other stuff. The tool allows you to update backlink data over time.

So thus I believe SEO SpyGlass offers a more complete analysis.

Just as we mentioned earlier, for just a tiny fraction of Ahrefs or Majestic price (!), SEO SpyGlass offers core deep link analysis, and link management features you won't find anywhere else.

Even if you're already subscribed to Majestic or Ahrefs and want to keep them, get SEO SpyGlass as well (it costs only this small fixed price), and see how much more informed your link management choices can be.