Profound alternatives

What Profound is, fairly

Profound raised a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation in February 2026 and reports 700+ enterprise customers. It measures brand presence across answer engines, tracks the sources feeding them, and increasingly reports on agent traffic. If you run a brand team with a budget line for this, it is the safe choice and this page is not for you.

The Starter plan is $99/mo and covers 50 prompts on ChatGPT only, with one seat. The second answer engine is not an add-on — it arrives with the $399/mo Growth plan, which brings three engines and three seats. The reason people search for alternatives is almost always one of those three facts: the price, the single-engine entry tier, or the shape of a product built for a team when you are one person. If the missing engine is what sent you looking, the Perplexity citation tracker comparison covers which tools include it on the plan you would actually buy.

If you are a founder tracking one product

You want the measurement without the workspace. Options, in order of how much you will spend:

• CiteRank — $19–49/mo. Five engines from the entry tier, your own questions, a weekly report with competitor share of voice and the list of pages the engines actually read. The trade is cadence: probes run on a shared, scheduled browser pool, so results land weekly rather than the moment you click. That trade is the price difference.
• Otterly.AI Lite — $29/mo. Fifteen prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, from one of the earliest tools in the category. Fewer questions than we give you and Claude and Gemini cost extra, but it is a real product at a real price and we would rather name it than pretend the cheap tier is ours alone.
• Mangools AI Search Watcher — around $15.60/mo. The cheapest ongoing paid plan here, and an add-on inside the Mangools suite rather than a standalone tool.
• AthenaHQ Essential — free. All five engines, unlimited members, and it costs nothing until the $25 of included credit runs out. It is metered rather than unlimited, so it will not watch a number for you week after week — but if you have never checked whether the engines name you, it is the cheapest possible way to find out, and we would rather point you at it than sell you a subscription you may not need yet.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar — from $79/mo (Pro). Only sensible if you already pay for Ahrefs, in which case the marginal cost is nothing and you get an llms.txt generator with it.

If you are an agency with several clients

You need seats and per-client workspaces, which is the thing the cheap tier deliberately does not build. Otterly.AI (Standard $189/mo, Premium $489/mo) and AthenaHQ (Starter ~$295/mo) are both shaped for this; AthenaHQ bundles more strategy work into the price. Peec AI (€85/mo for 50 prompts) sits below both and is strong on comparison views, though every Peec tier under Enterprise caps you at three models.

If you already pay for an SEO suite

Check what you own before buying anything. Both Semrush (AI Toolkit) and Ahrefs (Brand Radar) now ship AI visibility reporting inside plans many teams already hold. It is rarely as deep as a dedicated tool, and it is free to you today.

What you give up going cheaper

• Real-time queries. Enterprise tools probe on demand at high volume. A $19/mo product cannot, and anyone claiming otherwise is either reselling an API you could call yourself or not probing as often as they imply.
• Years of history. A tool that started tracking in 2024 has a time series you cannot buy retroactively. If long-run trend data is the point, that is a real reason to pay more.
• Compliance and seats. SOC 2, SSO, role-based access, procurement paperwork. Genuinely irrelevant to a solo founder, genuinely mandatory inside a large company.

What you do not give up

The measurement itself. Asking five answer engines a fixed set of buyer questions and parsing which domains get cited is the same operation at every price point. A browser-based probe reads the surface a buyer actually sees, which is arguably closer to the truth than an API-collected one — model APIs answer differently from the consumer products people use.

Run one free check against whatever you use now and compare the answers directly. That is a better test than any comparison table, including this one.