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Profound alternatives

By Advik Jain, Co-founder & CEO · Updated 5 Oct 2026

Profound is built for enterprise analytics, and teams that look past it usually want a published price. We list the alternatives in the order our published scoring rules put them, with Veritas, our product, scored by the same rules.

Otterly.AI homepage
Otterly.AI homepage, 29 September 2026
Scrunch homepage
Scrunch homepage, 29 September 2026
AthenaHQ homepage
AthenaHQ homepage, 29 September 2026

The short answer

Stay with Profound if you need prompt volume data and crawler analytics at enterprise depth. If you mainly need several engines tracked on a budget, these publish their prices.

  • Otterly.AIFor four engines refreshed daily from $29 a month, where Profound is Enterprise after its trial.$29/mo
  • ScrunchFor four engines on Core at $250 a month, nine on Enterprise.$250/mo
  • AthenaHQFor five engines on a free plan, and eleven models on Starter at $295.Free plan
  • VeritasOursFor four engines plus keyword research, site audits and drafts cited to your own documents.$16/mo

How to choose a Profound alternative

Profound no longer sells a paid self-serve plan to brands. A brand gets a free trial of 7 days, with 50 prompts it cannot edit, run daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and after that a custom Enterprise quote. The $99 Agency Growth plan is for agencies only. So the first question is not which tool is best, but whether you need what only Enterprise sells.

Profound’s distinctive pieces are Prompt Volumes, which reports what people actually ask AI systems, Agent Analytics for crawler behaviour, and Agents that draft and publish with human approval. If those are why you are talking to Profound, the tools below replace them in part at best. Scrunch’s real-time feed of AI bot crawls is a counterpart to Agent Analytics, from $250 a month for 125 prompts, and Otterly.AI lists an Agent Analytics feature of its own.

If you want ongoing tracking at a price you can see, Otterly.AI is the cheapest paid route, at $29 a month for 15 prompts refreshed daily with unlimited team members. For the widest engine list without a contract, AthenaHQ tracks five engines free and 11 models on its $295 Starter, and Semrush brings Claude and a full SEO suite from $199.

If the Agents drew you in, decide what kind of content you need. Writesonic rewrites existing pages for GEO and drafts outreach from $99 a month, or $79 billed yearly, though its self-serve plans track the same three engines as Profound’s trial. Frase drafts new articles from $49, capped at 10 a month on Starter. Veritas, our product, builds drafts from your own documents with a numbered citation on each knowledge-based claim, and tracks four engines from $16.

Because the trial’s prompts are fixed, it gives no baseline for the questions your own buyers ask. Write that prompt list before starting any replacement, and keep the wording identical from tool to tool so the trend line survives the comparison.

Profound and 7 alternatives at a glance

Every alternative here publishes a price, from AthenaHQ’s free plan and Otterly.AI’s $29 up to Semrush at $199 and Scrunch at $250; after its trial, Profound quotes brands on request.

ToolBest forFromAI search score
FraseWriters who want tracking attached to a content workflow$49/mo76
Profound
The tool you are comparing against
Enterprise brands that want the deepest AI answer analytics and an agent layer to act on it.Custom73
SemrushTeams that want AI tracking inside a full SEO suite$199/mo73
WritesonicTeams that want prioritised GEO fixes and outreach$99/mo70
VeritasOursMid-market teams that want four engines plus SEO and cited drafts$16/mo66
Otterly.AIBudget monitoring with daily refresh for the whole team$29/mo62
AthenaHQStarting free and paying per AI responseFree plan57
ScrunchBrands that want AI bot traffic insight and control of how AI agents read their site$250/mo51

From is the cheapest published plan that tracks AI answers. The AI search score rates AI visibility and content features by our published rules; it is not a verdict on SEO depth.

Four engines, plus the content that closes the gaps

Veritas tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, then drafts each fix from your own documents with every knowledge-based claim cited.

Start your 7-day free trial See pricing

Why teams look past Profound

  • Brands get a free trial of 7 days, then custom Enterprise pricing.
  • The Trial tracks three engines and 50 fixed prompts.
  • Ongoing tracking and more engines are Enterprise, priced on request.
  • Keyword research, backlinks and technical site audits are not described on its product pages.

For everything Profound does well, read our Profound review.

AI answer tracking

Profound’s own tracking is the hardest to price on this page: the trial runs 50 fixed prompts daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and everything after it is Enterprise. Among the alternatives, Otterly.AI and Frase refresh daily, Semrush tracks 50 prompts a day from Starter across five engines including Claude, and Scrunch includes 125 prompts on Core. Veritas tracks four engines on every plan with a check every two weeks. AthenaHQ meters credits per response and Writesonic publishes no prompt allowance, so neither maps cleanly to a prompt count.

For one marketer tracking 50 prompts, Frase Starter is the cheapest published fit at $588 a year, followed by Otterly.AI at $2,268, Semrush at $2,388 and Scrunch at $3,000. Veritas covers the ten-prompt starter setup for $936 a year but has no plan that reaches 50 prompts.

Which engines each tool covers

On the cheapest plan that tracks AI answers. Most vendors list more engines than that plan includes, so this is what you get at the price shown, not the brochure maximum.

Profound’s trial leaves out Perplexity, which Otterly.AI, AthenaHQ, Scrunch, Semrush and Veritas all include on their cheapest tracking plans. Of those, only Semrush Starter includes Claude as well.

Tool and planChatGPTClaudeGeminiPerplexityAI OverviewsAI ModeCopilot
Frase
Starter
IncludedNot on this planNot on this planNot on this planunclearunclearNot on this plan
Profound
Trial
IncludedNot on this planIncludedNot on this planIncludedNot on this planNot on this plan
Semrush
Starter
IncludedIncludedIncludedIncludedIncludedunclearunclear
Writesonic
Starter
IncludedNot on this planIncludedNot on this planIncludedNot on this planNot on this plan
VeritasOurs
Starter
IncludedNot on this planIncludedIncludedIncludedNot on this planNot on this plan
Otterly.AI
Lite
Includedadd-onadd-onIncludedIncludedadd-onIncluded
AthenaHQ
Essential (free)
IncludedNot on this planIncludedIncludedIncludedNot on this planIncluded
Scrunch
Core
IncludedNot on this planNot on this planIncludedIncludedNot on this planIncluded

A tick is included. Add-on means an extra monthly fee. You choose means the plan lets you pick a limited number of platforms from this list. Unclear means the vendor’s wording does not say.

The plan behind each row, and what changes on higher plans, are on each tool’s review: Frase, Profound, Semrush, Writesonic, Otterly.AI and Veritas.

Veritas’s price covers keyword research and site audits as well as tracking and cited drafting.Start a 7-day trialSee pricing

What tracking costs a yearThe yearly cost of each tool for four team sizes, from published plans

What a year costs

The cheapest published plan that fits each team, over twelve months, with seat fees and required add-ons. Where no published plan fits, the note says why instead of guessing.

ToolGetting started1 seat, 10 tracked prompts, 1 brandOne marketer, one brand1 seat, 50 tracked prompts, 1 brandTeam of five, one brand5 seats, 100 tracked prompts, 1 brandAgency, three brands10 seats, 300 tracked prompts, 3 brands
Otterly.AI$348lowest$2,268$2,268$5,868
Frase$588$588lowest$2,244lowest$5,328lowest
VeritasOurs$936No published fit1No published fit1No published fit1
Semrush$2,388$2,388$7,428No published fit1
Scrunch$3,000$3,000$3,000No published fit1
AthenaHQNo published plan fits any of these setups2
ProfoundNo published plan fits any of these setups3
WritesonicNo published plan fits any of these setups4
  1. 1No published plan tracks the prompts this setup needs; larger volumes are arranged with the vendor.
  2. 2Metered in credits, where one credit is one AI response, so prompt counts are not directly comparable.
  3. 3Brands get a free trial of 7 days, then custom Enterprise pricing, so there is no published price to compare.
  4. 4The vendor does not publish how many prompts each plan tracks, so we cannot say which plan meets this setup.

Bars share one scale across the whole table, so cost growth shows as well as rank. A figure far above the rest is marked off scale.

The plan, seats and add-ons behind every figure are worked through on each tool’s review: Otterly.AI, Frase, Semrush, Profound, Writesonic and Veritas.

Each alternative against Profound

What you gain and what you give up with each, against Profound. Each tool’s full, sourced review is on its own page.

Frase

Best for writers who want tracking attached to a content workflow.

Frase homepage
Full Frase review

Frase is the lowest-cost pick here for teams that used Profound to decide what to write next. Starter is $49 a month, or $39 billed yearly, with 50 prompts tracked daily, and the platform also researches topics, drafts with an AI agent that keeps your brand in context, scores pages for Google and for AI citation, audits the site and publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity, Wix or FraseCMS. Content Guard watches published pages for ranking decay.

What you give up: Starter confirms only ChatGPT and Google AI; Perplexity arrives on the $129 Professional plan, and Claude and Gemini on the $299 Scale plan. Article generation is capped at 10, 40 or 100 a month, and nothing in Frase resembles Prompt Volumes or crawler analytics. It fits writers far better than analysts.

Semrush

Best for teams that want AI tracking inside a full SEO suite.

Semrush homepage
Full Semrush review

Semrush suits a team leaving Profound that also needs classic search data. Its $199 Starter plan tracks 50 prompts a day across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews, which puts Claude at a published price, and AI Brand Sentiment and Prompt Research sit beside a database of over 27.3 billion keywords, backlink analysis, a technical site audit and Content Creation. Profound’s pages describe no keyword, backlink or site audit tools.

What you give up: AI search is one part of a large suite, without Profound’s Agent Analytics for crawlers or Agents that publish after approval. Extra users are paid for, where Profound includes unlimited seats, so a team of five on Pro+ costs $7,428 a year. It is the right move when AI visibility has to sit beside SEO reporting in one account.

Writesonic

Best for teams that want prioritised GEO fixes and outreach.

Writesonic homepage
Full Writesonic review

Writesonic is the self-serve option closest to Profound’s idea of acting on the data. Its Action Center ranks every opportunity by visibility and citation impact, an AI agent rewrites pages for GEO with FAQ blocks and comparison tables, and it finds the Reddit threads, YouTube videos and listicles citing competitors and writes the outreach for you. Starter is $99 a month, or $79 billed yearly, and its free trial needs no card.

What you give up: every self-serve plan tracks the same three engines as Profound’s trial, ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, so Perplexity and Claude need Writesonic’s Enterprise tier just as they need Profound’s. Seats run from one on Starter to three on Growth, at $499 a month or $399 billed yearly, against Profound’s unlimited seats, and Writesonic publishes neither prompt allowances nor a refresh rate. Choose it for fixes and outreach on a single brand.

VeritasOurs

Best for mid-market teams that want four engines plus SEO and cited drafts.

Veritas homepage
Our write-up of Veritas

Start a 7-day trialSee pricing

For a brand that has finished Profound’s trial and wants to keep tracking without a sales call, Veritas publishes its price. Growth, at $78 a month, tracks 10 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, one engine more than the trial, and Business, at $125, raises that to 25 prompts with five users. Where Profound Agents write from a brand kit, Veritas drafts from a knowledge graph of your own documents and leaves out any claim it cannot trace, beside keyword research and a site audit graded for Google and AI crawlers.

What you give up: Veritas is ours, and it is a much smaller instrument than Profound. It re-checks every two weeks rather than daily, tracks 25 prompts at most, and has no prompt volume data, no crawler analytics and no API or MCP server. Choose it if a visible price and checkable content matter more than enterprise depth.

Otterly.AI

Best for budget monitoring with daily refresh for the whole team.

Otterly.AI homepage
Full Otterly.AI review

Otterly.AI is the cheapest way to keep daily tracking once Profound’s trial ends. Lite costs $29 a month for 15 prompts and Standard $189 for 100, both refreshed daily as Profound is, and every plan covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, so Perplexity arrives at the entry price rather than on Enterprise. Team members are unlimited, matching Profound’s unlimited seats, and API and MCP access start on Standard.

What you give up: its AI Prompt Research suggests prompts for a category, but it does not describe volume data on what people ask, which is Profound’s signature module. It writes briefs and audits rather than drafting content the way Profound Agents do, Claude, Gemini and AI Mode are paid add-ons, and Lite’s 15 prompts are thin for a whole category. Switch if steady monitoring is the job; stay if you rely on the agent layer.

AthenaHQ

Best for starting free and paying per AI response.

AthenaHQ homepage

AthenaHQ answers the complaint that Profound’s engine list only opens up on Enterprise. Its free Essential plan covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot with a $25 free credit, and the $295 Starter reaches 11 models, adding Claude, AI Mode, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral. Around the tracking sit sentiment analysis, hallucination detection, a recommendation engine for on-page and off-page actions, and the Athena Citation Engine for finding link sources.

What you give up: usage is metered in credits, one per AI response, so the monthly bill moves with volume, and AthenaHQ publishes no refresh rate where Profound re-checks daily. Its content optimisation agent and templates stop short of Agents that draft and publish through a CMS, and API access costs extra on Starter. The free plan makes it cheap to test before you commit.

Scrunch

Best for brands that want AI bot traffic insight and control of how AI agents read their site.

Scrunch homepage

Scrunch is the alternative closest to Profound’s interest in how AI systems read a site, not only what they say about it. Its real-time feed shows how AI bots crawl your pages and flags the ones they cannot reach, a counterpart to Profound’s Agent Analytics, and Core adds benchmarks by persona, topic and geography. The price is published: $250 a month per brand for 125 prompts, five seats and four engines, with a trial of 7 days that needs a card.

What you give up: Core tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews and Copilot, so Gemini, which Profound’s trial includes, waits for Scrunch Enterprise along with Claude and AI Mode. Scrunch publishes no refresh rate, its content generation is basic and marked coming soon, and AXP is Enterprise-only. It suits brands that want crawler insight at a known monthly cost.

Switching from Profound

  1. 01Export your prompt list and historical visibility data before cancelling.
  2. 02Keep prompts word for word in the new tool; changed wording breaks the trend.
  3. 03Expect different absolute numbers: tools sample answers differently, so compare trends rather than levels across the switch.
  4. 04Run both tools for one cycle to measure the offset between them.
  5. 05Rebuild any Agent workflows as briefs or drafts in the new tool before switching Profound off.

What would change our verdict

  • Profound bringing back a self-serve paid plan for brands, which is the main reason teams look elsewhere.
  • Profound publishing Enterprise prices and credit amounts, so a buyer can size it without a sales call.

Questions people ask

What is the cheapest way to track more than one AI engine?

On prices read 11 September 2026, AthenaHQ’s free Essential plan covers five engines with a $25 free credit, and Otterly.AI’s $29 Lite plan tracks four engines daily. Veritas tracks four engines on every plan, from 5 prompts on Starter at $16, with the content and SEO toolkit included.

Does any alternative match Profound’s engine list?

At self-serve prices, AthenaHQ Starter covers 11 models; Scrunch lists nine engines, but only on Enterprise. Profound lists up to nine on Enterprise; Writesonic lists ten platforms on its Enterprise tier.

Do alternatives create content like Profound Agents?

Some do. Veritas drafts cited content, Writesonic rewrites pages for GEO, Frase drafts with an AI agent, and AthenaHQ offers a content optimisation agent. Otterly.AI and Scrunch focus on monitoring, audits and recommendations.

Head to head

Veritas vs SemrushVeritas vs FraseVeritas vs ProfoundVeritas vs WritesonicVeritas vs Otterly.AIProfound vs Otterly.AI
How we chose4 tests every alternative had to pass
  • Engines at your price. How many of the engines your buyers use are included on the plan you would buy.
  • Refresh and prompt volume. How often answers are re-checked, and how many prompts you can afford to track.
  • What happens after a gap. A report, recommendations, or a draft that closes it.
  • Who can see the data. Seats, unlimited members, and API or MCP access.
How we researched this pageMethod and the update log

How we researched this page

Every fact about another tool comes from that vendor’s own pages, or from a press report where we say so, listed under Sources with the date we read them. Where a vendor does not describe something, we say so rather than guess.

The scores and cost figures on this page are calculated, not assigned. Our full methodology sets out every rule, what each criterion is worth, and where our evidence runs out.

Disclosure. Veritas is our product. It appears on this page because it competes in this category, and we have tried to state its limits as plainly as anyone else’s. If anything here is wrong or out of date, write to support@getveritas.io and we will correct it and note the change in the log.

Update log

  1. 5 October 2026Updated: Veritas Starter now includes AI visibility, tracking 5 prompts across the same four engines, so AI visibility is on every Veritas plan. Earlier versions said it started on Growth.
  2. 29 September 2026Updated the Scrunch figures on this page after re-reading Scrunch’s own pages.
  3. 29 September 2026Updated the Profound figures on this page after re-reading Profound’s own pages.
  4. 29 September 2026Updated the Semrush figures on this page after re-reading Semrush’s own pages.
  5. 29 September 2026Updated: Profound dropped its $99 and $399 plans for brands, so the reasons and picks now set each alternative against a free trial of 7 days, then custom Enterprise pricing. Scrunch’s entry now reflects its $250 Core plan with four engines.
  6. 25 September 2026Veritas pricing updated: Starter added at the entry, and the plans above it renamed Growth and Business and repriced. Marketing Suite was retired on 25 September 2026; its LinkedIn and scheduled publishing moved into Business, and its Local SEO into Growth and Business. Competitor figures were not re-checked.
  7. 22 September 2026Updated: Veritas no longer tracks Claude, so it tracks four AI engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Its engine count, coverage and score changed to match, which can move its place in a ranked list.
  8. 15 September 2026Updated the Semrush figures on this page after re-reading Semrush’s own pages.
  9. 15 September 2026Updated the Frase figures on this page after re-reading Frase’s own pages.
  10. 15 September 2026Rebuilt verdict first: a short verdict with calculated figures, an engine-by-engine coverage grid and yearly cost charts, with full reviews, specs and method folded below. The intro was shortened; no facts were removed.
  11. 12 September 2026Rebuilt as a full review from each vendor’s product pages, documentation and announcements, not only pricing pages, with pros and cons, recent changes, a method section and this log. Corrected: Profound Agents create and publish content. Reviews of Otterly.AI, Scrunch and AthenaHQ expanded from their own pages.
  12. 11 September 2026Published.

Sources

The pages behind this comparison, most recently read 29 September 2026. Each tool’s review dates its own sources.

The same jobs in Veritas, our product

AI visibility toolAEO and GEO toolAI Overview trackerPrompt discoveryAI SEO content writerPlans and pricing

How this page was made. Veritas is our product. Every fact about another tool is checked against that vendor’s own pages, and scores and costs are calculated by our published rules.

Try the one that cites its sources.

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