Top 10 MarketMuse Alternatives in 2024 at Affordable Price

If you have been using the MarketMuse SEO optimization tool for a while now,

If you’re considering it as an option to maximize your content performance and marketing efforts, you might have already noticed its premium.

The tool provides in-depth competitor content reports, clusters, site-level analysis, and content planning functions to help you interpret your content's performance.

However, the price you pay to access these features can be out of your budget.

If that’s your situation, it's high time to find a similar alternative to MarketMuse.

That’s why in this blog, we will dive deep into the top 10 MarketMuse Alternatives that offer the same features but at a lower cost.

Here are the top 10 MarketMuse alternatives you should look for in 2024

Scalenut
Surfer
Semrush
Content Harmony
Clearscope
GrowthBar
Frase
Dashword
SE Ranking
Page Optimizer Pro

TL;DR

Scalenut - Your one-stop content solution that brings content planning, AI writing, optimizing, publishing, and analyzing under one tab.

Growthbar - User-friendly content marketing platform with AI writer, optimizer, and SEO tools to help you simplify your content marketing activities.

Top 10 MarketMuse Alternatives You Should Try in 2024

Tool name	SEO	Content Optimizer	AI writer	Social media content	Templates	Chrome extension	Training vault	Community support	Free Trial
Scalenut	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Surfer	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	✅	✅	✅	❌
Semrush	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅	✅	❌	✅
Content Harmony	✅	✅	❌	❌	✅	❌	✅	❌	❌
Clearscope	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌	✅	✅	✅
Growthbar	✅	✅	❌	❌	✅	❌	✅	❌	❌
Frase	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌
Dashword	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅	❌	✅
SE Ranking	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅	✅	✅
Page Optimizer Pro	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅	✅	✅

#1 Scalenut

Scalenut is an AI-powered SEO and content marketing platform that helps you plan, create, and optimize your content efforts to drive traffic. This centralized tool helps agencies, content strategists, SEO content writers, and executives create content faster and quicker.

In fact, the tool has helped brands like MIT, Pharmeasy, Creative Labs, Buzet, Decisive Marketer, and many other businesses generate profitable returns from content marketing. Their inbuilt tools include the article writer that creates content in 5 minutes, keyword planner for content strategy and content optimizer for SEO-optimised content.

Read Scalenut Vs. Clearscope for a detailed comparison between the two.

How is Scalenut better than MarketMuse?

These top three features make Scalenut an ideal alternative to MarketMuse.

Content Planning

With the help of Scalenut’s keyword planner tool, you can spot the keywords that can reel your target audience to your website and hook them with engaging content.

Scalenut's Keyword planner to achieve topical authority in your content.

Both Scalenut and MarketMuse provide keywords clusters and planners to find profitable keywords and establish topical authority in your niche. Moreover, Scalenut generates competitor information, like their outlines, writing points, statistics, key terms used, and many more. This guides users to interpret SERP content in depth and outcompete their competitors for a target keyword.

The content planning tool highlights the pains and desires of your target audience with the help of social listening tools. This gives users access to semantic key terms and questions from SERP, Reddit, Quora, and more.

AI-powered content writing

One of the many problems individuals and brands face with AI is the robotic voice. Even though many AI-powered platforms provide an anti-AI filter to eliminate robotic tone, Scalenut has an in-built custom-tone feature. This allows brands to generate content that sounds like their intrinsic brand voice.

Moreover, you can speed up your content creation process with the cruise mode feature. This function allows you to write content in less than 5 minutes after generating an outline and writing points.

The content outline generator also produces an automated outline within seconds based on your keyword intent, competitors' content, and audience awareness level. This drastically reduces the time taken to create a research-backed outline.

As a natural next step, you will get writing points describing what will be covered in each blog section. If you’re creating a content brief for your content team, you can automate the content ideation and structuring tasks, ultimately allowing you to focus on other important matters.

Whereas in MarketMuse, you only get prompt-based writing assistance from ChatGPT. This can slow you down when creating the first draft of the topic.

Optimize your Content

The core reason that Scalenut is the best alternative to pricey SEO tools like Clearscope, MarketMuse, Surfer AI, MarketMuse Clearscope, and others offer most of the features they do but at an affordable cost.

Advanced machine learning and NLP technologies are one of the unique features of Scalenut. With these integrated features, you can get accurate scores to understand your content's optimization level. The accuracy level is equal to the score you generate from MarketMuse or even a popular content editor like Surfer.

You can get suggestions based on keyword density, meta tags, featured snippets, links, URLs, content depth, and many other factors to ensure you meet Google’s 200+ factors to rank higher on the SERP and generate organic traffic.

Apart from long-form content, you have over 50 templates to simplify your writing process. You can quickly create LinkedIn, Facebook, or email content with the help of short-form content tools.

Yet again, MarketMuse is a level down in terms of NLP score or content optimization. It does not yet provide strong NLP scores or additional information to help users outcompete their SERP competitors.

Pros	Cons
If you’re a growing business or individual service provider, using Scalenut’s content planning tool can boost your SEO results in terms of traffic, brand awareness, and conversions.	The advanced feature might overwhelm new SEO professionals and marketers. However, you can always visit the resource hub to upskill yourself.
Templates like AIDA, PAS, email headlines, and product descriptions can be generated with a click using the Chrome Extension.
Scalenut-generated content is backed by solid research, competitor performance factors, and AI-suggested best practices. This allows you to easily outcompete your competitors.
In contrast to other AI tools focusing on quantity, Scalenut aims to generate factually accurate, quality content at scale.
Scalenut is more affordable than MarketMuse. You can get the Scalenut Pro plan for $149 per month, whereas the starting plan of MarketMuse starts at $149 with limited features.

Pricing

Monthly

Essential Plan - $39 per month
Growth Plan - $79 per month
Pro Plan - $149 per month

Yearly

Essential Plan - $20 per month
Growth Plan - $40 per month
Pro Plan - $75 per month

Who can benefit from Scalenut?

SEO strategists who manage a team of writers.
Content heads who are responsible for creating content briefs
Writers who run a small team
Writers who create SEO-based long-form blogs and articles
Marketers who manage social media channels and content editing activities

What do users think about Scalenut?

G2 - 4.7/5 stars
Product Hunt - 5/5 stars
Capterra - 4.8/5 stars

#2 Surfer

Surfer SEO is a content planning and optimization software that allows users to create a basic SEO plan and optimize it to rank higher in Google. Since its launch, the tool has gained credibility and attracted a large following because of its content editor tool.

The core features of Surfer include an SEO content analyzer, keyword research tool, Surfer AI, Grow Flow, and content audit. A few of these tools only come as add-ons to your Surfer plan. That means you have to spend extra bucks to access some of these tools.

How is Surfer better than MarketMuse?

These top three features make Surfer an ideal alternative to MarketMuse.

Content writer

Surfer SEO integrates with Jasper to produce AI-generated content in less than 15 minutes. You can use AI to create a topic idea, generate an outline, set a tone of voice and develop an entire piece of content automatically.

Whereas MarketMuse integrates with ChatGPT to help you create AI-generated copy. You can create an outline from scratch or use the one you built with the MarketMuse outline generator to start drafting your content. In Surfer, you can generate the entire content in one click; however, in MarketMuse, you need to assist ChatGPT at every step to generate content for each section.

Content Editor

The Surfer content editor is one of the most popular yet expensive SEO optimizers. One of the major reasons behind using this pricey content editor is because of its accurate optimization score. The Surfer content editor includes NLP suggestions, competitor content scores, outline generators, and brief creators.

Surfer uses in-built SEO tools to help you create rank-ready content, whereas MarketMuse integrates with ChatGPT to provide highly-subjective suggestions to optimize your content. Besides that, both tools provide you with a list of keywords to use in your content to rank higher.

Keyword Research

The Surfer Keyword Planner groups relevant key terms based on their similarities. This allows users to create content on topics with high demand in their niche. Even though content clusters are an effective way to establish topical authority, there needs to be a full-fledged keyword tool.

Compared to MarketMuse's keyword planner, Surfer SEO ranks a level below. It’s because MarketMuse provides users with a list of keywords, topics, and questions to let users take a cluster-centric approach while choosing a keyword.

Moreover, they also provide additional details like subjective difficulty score, topical authority score, competitive advantage level and linking suggestions to help you choose a profitable keyword. In contrast, Surfer does not have in-depth details like MarketMuse.

However, both tools take a cluster-centric approach. Hence, if you think you may not require such in-depth details, then Surfer SEO can be your ideal alternative.

Grow Flow

The Grow Flow is a unique feature of Surfer AI. This feature aims to hold users accountable and help them improve different aspects of their website for better ranking.

Users will get a list of tasks they need to complete to optimize their website and content for search and learn a thing or two about SEO and content marketing within a short period of time. Considering this, MarketMuse does not have any similar features yet.

Pros	Cons
Multiple language support makes it easier for users worldwide to create and optimize content using Surfer.	The absence of a free trial restricts first-time users' ability to know how the platform can help them.
The Surfer Plagiarism Report helps users detect duplication in AI content or any human-written content to save your site's reputation from Google.	It is an expensive tool that does not fall under individuals' or growing brands' budgets.
Sharable content editor workspaces promote team collaboration.	The Surfer SEO article is not yet worth $29 because of its quality and efficiency.
The audit tools allow you to improve your existing content's performance and refresh it to stay relevant to the period.	Surfer SEO does not provide in-depth competitor reports like MarketMuse.
Surfer AI ties up with Semrush to help users build a robust backlink system.	The add-ons like Grow Flow, content audit, and Surfer AI are too expensive for beginner and intermediate-level users. Moreover, there are tools like Scalenut to replace Surfer at a much more affordable price.
The Grow Flow feature holds users accountable and gamifies the learning and implementation process.

Pricing

Monthly

Essential - $89
Advanced - $179
Max - $299
Enterprise - Custom

Yearly

Essential - $69
Advanced - $149
Max - $249
Enterprise - Custom

Who can benefit from Surfer?

SEO strategists with teams
Agencies
Enterprise

What do users think about Surfer?

G2 - 4.8 / 5 stars
Product Hunt - 4.8 / 5 stars
Capterra - 4.9 / 5 stars

#3 Semrush

Semrush is an end-to-end SEO tool that helps users with keyword research, rank tracking, competitor analysis, local SEO, link building and many more. Comparatively, Semrush has more advanced features than MarketMuse. However, both tools fall under the high-price category.

This tool is ideal for agencies, individual service providers and enterprise-level businesses. If you are an SEO expert, you might require raw data like keywords, content opportunities, organic traffic insights, site audit reports etc., to apply your own SEO process and best practices to rank a webpage higher. In that case, Semrush can be an ideal tool for your workflow.

How is Semrush better than MarketMuse?

These top four features make Semrush a better alternative for MarketMuse.

Keyword Planner

Semrush keyword planner lets you view a list of keywords you can target to generate traffic to your website. Like MarketMuse, you can group keywords, questions and relevant terms to create a cluster-centric content plan.

You can also analyze SERP content insights like referring domains, backlinks, traffic, and keywords. Additionally, this tool allows you to run a site-level analysis to know your competitors' overall traffic volume, position changes, and content performance.

Moreover, you can generate an automatic content cluster in just a click. Hence, Semrush is an ideal alternative to MarketMuse if you need in-depth keyword insights.

Link Building

Semrush backlink analysis tool includes backlink analytics, audit tools, gap analyzer, and link building tool. You can maintain a backlink manager to track all your backlink profiles. Moreover, this tool allows you to find your competitor's backlinks sites and choose backlink prospects who will possibly reply to your requests.

Comparatively, MarketMuse does not have advanced backlink tools. However, in MarketMuse, you can get curated linking suggestions to improve your ranking possibilities and domain authority.

Competitor research ‍

Both platforms provide in-depth competitor information. In Semrush, you can access competitors' traffic insights like sources of traffic, region, audience, bounce rate, visit duration and many more. You can even track your competitor’s position with the Semrush rank tracker.

Content analyzer

This writing assistant is one of many in-built SEO tools offered by Semrush. It's more like an add-on to the brand’s existing tools. Hence, it lacks detailed features like NLP terms, research tools, auto-optimizer, etc. Basically, when you insert your content, the analyzer evaluates it from different aspects like readability, SEO, tone of voice, and originality to give you a content score out of 10.

You will get access to tailor-made suggestions to improve the quality of your content and rank higher for a targeted keyword. Many users report that this tool considers readability as a significant ranking factor above all the other radars.

Pros	Cons
The Semrush writing assistant can integrate with Google Docs and WordPress.	Semrush is as expensive as MarketMuse. However, both platforms provide advanced features.
Specific content suggestions within the editor help users find gaps and opportunities in their content.	Semrush is an advanced SEO tool that provides a content optimization tool as an add-on.
The tool comes with various features like backlinking, local SEO, advertising tools, market analyzer, etc., that can be useful for agencies and enterprise-level businesses.	The absence of an outline generator, a brief creator, and an AI writer are significant drawbacks.
Semrush scheduling and optimizing tools help you manage your social media content calendar.	This tool can be overwhelming for beginners, and the learning curve is also steep.

Pricing

Pro - $129.95 per month
Guru - $249.95 per month
Business - $499.95 per month

Who can benefit from Semrush Writing Assitant?

SEO strategists
Content marketers

What do users think about Semrush Writing Assitant?

G2 - 4.5/5 stars
Capterra - 4.7/5 stars
Product Hunt - 4.5/5 stars

#4 Content Harmony

Content Harmony is a content facilitator built to reduce the manual work that content teams do daily. The core features of this tool include a keyword optimizer, reports, a search intent detector, and content briefs. All these features work together to save you ample time yet provide you with a data-backed content outline.

How is Content Harmony better than MarketMuse?

Here are the core features of Content Harmony that make it a better tool than MarketMuse.

Keyword reports

This keyword report goes one step beyond Surfer competitor analysis and presents detailed information about top-ranking pages. A seed keyword you enter will result in details like intent, topic, outline, questions, sources, competitors, images, and videos. This helps you make data-driven decisions while building your content strategy. This is similar to the keyword insights you get in MarketMuse.

Content Briefs

You’ll have access to numerous templates, keyword research tools, outline generators, competitor analysis, and many other features to generate content briefs. You can easily copy and paste the content brief into a Google Doc without breaking its structure or format. This allows you to share content with your team within minutes.

Content Grader

The Content Optimizer lets you scale how well your content is optimized to stand out in the SERPs. Your content will be scored based on keyword density, word count, readability, and content score. However, Content Harmony does not integrate with ChatGPT or any other AI to provide content scores and suggestions. Despite that, it does an excellent job reviewing your content for on-page SEO factors.

Pros	Cons
Different brief templates allow you to create custom outlines for your content team, depending on your content format.	The credit-based system often confuses new users who are experimenting with the tool.
A neat view of competitor outlines saves you the manual work of going through each page to create a content outline.	Content Harmony is not a full-fledged SEO tool and does not offer advanced features like content inventory, competitor content analysis, site-level analysis, etc.
The shareable workspace link option replaces the numerous versions of Google Docs shared back and forth within teams.	The tool does not have an auto-outline generator like MarketMuse and Scalenut.
The tool is highly focused on helping Content marketers and SEO professionals to reduce the time taken to create content.	The absence of AI is a significant drawback.
Content Harmony is a highly user-friendly tool for beginners in content marketing.	Content Harmony is a content outline generator rather than an SEO tool.

Pricing

The standard plan - $50 per month and goes up to $799 per month.
Enterprise plan - $1000 per month.
The price varies depending on the content's quantity or volume.

Who can benefit from Content Harmony?

SEO strategists
Content marketers
Agencies

What do users think about Content Harmony?

G2 - 4.8 out of 5 stars
Product Hunt - Nil
Capterra - 4.9 out of 5 stars

#5 Clearscope

Clearscope is an SEO-optimization platform that helps businesses create an SEO-driven content marketing plan. This tool provides similar features as MarketMuse, like content editor, SEO reports, real-time content tracker, and more. Clearscope is an ideal tool for businesses trying to produce SEO-friendly content and keep tabs on existing content.

How is Clearscope better than MarketMuse?

Clearscope has only limited features; however, if you're looking for an alternative to MarketMuse content editor and report, Clearscope can be a better choice.

Content Reports

Like MarketMuse’s Content Editor, Clearscope lets you get a detailed report on your written content. Additionally, you can import your published content to the report tab with just a click, ultimately saving you from manual copy-pasting. The content editor will review the content based on factors like readability, keyword density, and length.

However, MarketMuse has ChatGPT integration which helps users to generate subjective feedback from AI. At the same time, Clearscope has yet to have that feature.

Content Inventory

The content inventory system allows businesses to track their overall content performance, like traffic, impressions, content health, and clicks. In addition to that, the Clearscope keyword planner displays monthly searches, competition, and CPC, which will help you decide the profitable keyword you should target for your next content.

In MarketMuse, you can maintain a centralized list of published content and find gaps in your existing content strategy to develop new content ideas. This helps SEO strategists to find non-repetitive content ideas. Whereas, Clearscope’s content inventory system only tracks the clicks, rank and traffic of your published content.

Even though Clearscope does not have all the features that MarketMuse owns, it is an ideal substitute for MarketMuse content inventory and content editor.

Pros	Cons
The Clearscope report allows you to label each piece of content based on different categories, which, in a way, acts as a content management system.	Instead of a specific SEO score, Clearscope provides a letter grade, which some users may find vague.
The keyword importance grade in the content editor helps users to see the necessity of using a particular keyword in the content.	Clearscope outline generators cannot automate the content brief creation process. It only acts as a brainstorming tool to create outlines manually.
The filtering option in the content editor tools enables users to filter keywords based on importance, unused, and heading categories, allowing them to work during different phases of the editing process easily.	The lack of an AI writer, templates, and keyword clustering options limits the tool's ability to help content marketers perform end-to-end SEO.
You can get access to additional research materials from YouTube, Quora, Reddit, and SERP, as well as questions to include in your content.	The credit-based system to generate content reports often acts as a hindrance to users while searching for previous reports and creating new ones.
Their integration with Google Docs and the WordPress Plugin helps users easily include the tool in their workflow.	Sometimes the keywords and other suggestions become irrelevant to what the users try to achieve through content.

Pricing

Essential - $170
Business and enterprise custom

Who can benefit from Clearscope?

SEO strategist who works with different clients,
Content writers
Content managers

What do users think about Clearscope?

G2 - 4.9 / 5 stars
Capterra - 4.9 / stars

#6 Growthbar

GrowthBar is an AI-powered writing and SEO platform highly relevant for individuals who want to simplify their content creation and optimization processes. The tools act as an assistant to guide you through the writing process.

GrowthBar wins over MarketMuse with its robust AI writing tool. Its other core features include an SEO optimizer and keyword research tools. Some add-ons like image suggestions, a meta description writer, and an email writer save you from tedious manual tasks.

How is GrowthBar better than MarketMuse?

Here’s why GrowthBar is the best alternative to MarketMuse.

AI writing tool

GrowthBar has a robust AI writer that can be used to generate long-form content for your website. In addition to that, they also provide you with paragraph rewriter, blog outline generator, meta description generator, and blog topic generator.

The AI writer works in 20+ languages, including Spanish, Danish, Dutch, and many more. The tool helps you fine-tune your existing content by helping you polish different parts of your article, like the intro, meta description, conclusion, and title. It also has 2 minutes blog writer that creates a 1,500-word blog post in 2 minutes.

SEO

Similar to MarketMuse, GrowthBar evaluates your content based on different types of Google ranking factors. However, this writer-centric platform gives you more options, like image inclusion and a drag-and-drop outline creator, to effectively structure your content to outperform your competitor's ranking page.

The keyword research tool gives you a basic idea of the keywords you want to target, like keyword difficulty, CPC, and monthly searches. However, it does not provide in-depth information like personalized difficulty scores, authority level and trends like MarketMuse. You can even optimize your content for local SEO by using location-centric keywords suggested by the Growthbar content editor.

Content Optimizer

GrowthBar's content editor is similar to MarketMuse’s content editor. The content editor tab lets you access details like word count, headers, external links, readability, and keyword suggestions in the content editor tab.

You can find AI suggestions, SERP-based outline suggestions, and people also search headlines, images, and FAQs, making it easy to structure your content for better ranking.

Pros	Cons
With the 2-minute first draft builder, you get a fair copy of the content for your topic.	Even though the tool has a 2-minute first draft writer, if you want to write niche-specific content and address the content gaps in existing SERPs, you need to organize and create an outline manually.
Drag-and-drop images make it easy for users to optimize their content for better readability. This is one of the unique features of GrowthBar.	The tool does not support social media copy, which some users prefer to have in order to create supporting copy for long-form content.
You can find Grammar suggestions that help writers and non-writers improve the flow or quality of the content.	Competitor research tools like heatmaps are absent in GrowthBar. This restricts users from finding low-hanging fruit and outcompeting their competitors.
Options like rephrase, elaborating, giving examples, and writing more allows users to give instructions to the AI with a single click.	The keyword details, like the monthly volume count, are not accurate. You can only get access to an approximate count.
The drag-and-drop outline feature helps users improvise the content as they write it, whereas MarketMuse does not have such AI assistance.	MarketMuse keyword planner is more advanced than the GrowthBar keyword research tool.
Comparatively, GrowthBar offers more SEO-friendly outlines than Clearscope.

Pricing (Yearly)

Standard - $29 per month
Pro - $79 per month
Agency - $129 per month

Who can benefit from GrowthBar?

Individuals who have a blog
SEO content writers
Content managers

What do users think about GrowthBar?

G2 - 4.8 / 5 stars
Product Hunt - 5 / 5 stars
Capterra - 4.8 / 5 stars

#7 Frase

Frase is an AI content generation and optimization tool that helps businesses, agencies, and small teams of writers create content faster. Even though Frase is popular, its core features only include research, outline, writing, and optimization.

This platform can be a go-to solution for anyone who doesn't like to start working on a blog post from scratch. It eliminates the manual process of skimming and summarizing Google's first-page content to create SEO-friendly content.

How is Frase better than MarketMuse?

Here are some key features that make Frase a better content marketing tool than MarketMuse.

AI researcher

Using this tool, you can find all your competitor's details, including their word count, backlinks, ranking position, headers, and image count, to know how to polish your content to be better than your competitors.

However, the Frase AI writer tool needs more human assistance to develop an intent-based outline. Even though Frase has all the necessary features like an outline generator, SERP analyzer, and brief creator, it still does not have a cluster-centric keyword research tool.

AI Writer Tool

The Frase AI writer focuses primarily on building the first draft only after creating a detailed summary for each section of the blog. This feature is quite similar to Scalenut's writing points.

As soon as you generate an outline, Frase AI comes up with a short brief to give you an idea of what will be covered in each section of the blog. This feature can help content heads provide more detailed content briefs and precisely guide their teams.

AI Optimization Tool

The content optimization tool allows users to identify SEO gaps within their content and bridge them using the AI's suggestions.

However, Frase's content optimization tool is a step down compared to Scalenut's or MarketMuse’s SEO optimizer. Both tools have strong NLP parameters and a grading system to help users create rank-ready content.

Apart from the above three features, Frase does not include as many tools as MarketMuse.

Pros	Cons:
The curated list of competitors' headers allows you to manually compile your outline without juggling between tabs.	Unlike Scalenut, this tool doesn’t generate an optimized content draft initially.
You can access add-ons like questions from Quora, Reddit, SERP, stats, and other elements that can improve the quality of your content.	The tone of voice feature is not available as a separate option; you need to include that as an instruction to customize the content to your brand.
You can add instructions to train the AI to follow a specific tone or content angle.	There could be more NLP suggestions and an appealing scoreboard to guide the users.
The heatmap feature in the content optimizer allows users to quickly view the keyword density of each term used in competitors' content.	Lack of templates, one-click content production options, an AI-powered document management system, and social media content generation capabilities are obvious limitations of the tool.
Frase can be a highly useful tool if you're tired of manually conducting competitor research.

Pricing

Solo Plan - $14.99 per month
Basic Plan - $44.99 per month
Team Plan - $114.99 per month

Who can benefit from Frase?

Content writers
Head of a content team
Content manager

What do users think about Frase?

G2 rating - 4.9 / 5 stars
Product hunt rating - 4.8 / stars
Capterra rating - 4.8 / 5 stars

#8 Dashword

Dashword is a content editor and monitoring tool

Dashwood is another SEO optimization software that mainly helps you with creating briefs, optimizing your written content, and monitoring your published works. The tool only has limited features but meets the exact demands of growing businesses.

How is Dashword better than MarketMuse?

Dashword is a minimal app with three core functions. Here are a few reasons why it's the best alternative to MarketMuse.

Content Brief Builder

Dashword's content brief builder is designed in a visually appealing way to save endless scrolling and let users create their outline in a few clicks. Similar to most SEO optimization tools, Dashword has both an AI-based and a SERP-based outline.

Ultimately, you can choose whichever is more relevant to the purpose of your content. You can easily export the ready-to-use outline to your workspace with just a click using their export and share option.

Content Monitoring

With the help of the content monitoring tool, you can find your ranking position, volume you generate, trend frequency, and content score.

Whenever you see content ranking lower in the SERP, you can instantly get an alert or check the status on the SERP position tab and make necessary changes based on suggestions. This feature is similar to the MarketMuse content inventory system.

Additionally, the keyword research tool is quite intuitive to use. As soon as you enter your seed keyword, you'll generate a list of relevant terms that you can target in your next piece of content. Moreover, you'll get access to the monthly search volume count, trend analysis, competition, CPC, and keyword difficulty.

Pros	Cons
The Google Docs add-on is a recent introduction to the tool that fits right into the user's content team's workflow.	Limited SEO features restrict users' ability to attain their full SEO potential.
Minimal user interface that makes it easy for beginners to get used to the tool.	The content monitoring interface could have been much more neat and organized.
The content optimization feature follows the basic rules and works effectively for SEO writers.	The content optimization tool is not backed by strong NLP and machine learning algorithms to meet MarketMuse’s or Scalenut's level of accuracy.
You can access the weekly status of your content's performance in a short report.	Absence of additional content editor tools like readability scores, research sources and citations, and questions from forums are major drawbacks.
You can create a report for each keyword with just a click, simplifying the outline and briefing process significantly.	Competitors' analysis reports can be more detailed to provide in-depth content insights to outcompete competitors.

Pricing

Startup - $99 per month
Business - $349 per month

Who can benefit from Dashword?

SEO content writers
Beginner SEO professionals

What do users think about Dashword?

G2 rating - Nil
Product Hunt rating - 4.6 / 5 stars
Capterra rating - Nil

#9 SE Ranking

SE Ranking is a comprehensive tool for content creation and optimization

SE ranking is an optimization tool built especially for agencies and enterprise-level firms. In addition to the fundamental features, SE Ranking offers options like white-label data sharing, local marketing tools, APIs, and many more. The core goal of the platform is to simplify your existing SEO and content marketing workflow.

How is SE Ranking better than MarketMuse?

SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO tool that has many more functionalities than MarketMuse. Here’s why.

SEO monitoring and research

SE Ranking supports both keyword research and monitoring activities in the most streamlined way possible. The core SEO-related tools of SE Ranking include a rank tracker, website audit, backlink monitor, and on-page SEO checker.

The tools further expand to include keyword suggestion tools, competitive research tools, and SERP checkers. Compared to MarketMuse, this platform offers more detailed research and reports.

Content Marketing

Your end-to-end content creation process can be managed with SE ranking with the help of tools like content brief creator, content generator, and optimizer. You can add up to five keyword variations and example articles to write more brand-centric content.

However, when it comes to competitor analysis, SE ranking falls a level below MarketMuse as it does not provide detailed information like the other tools we reviewed before.

Local marketing

SE Ranking local marketing features help small business owners build their online presence successfully. The tool helps local businesses rank higher for search queries relevant to their specific location. You can even get custom-tailored reports suggesting steps to rank higher in the SERP.

Pros	Cons
AI-powered content creation adds power to the other existing tools and helps users complete their tasks more quickly.	The features can be quite handful for new users, beginner SEO professionals, and writers.
The platform allows you to analyze a website's backlink profile and identify potential opportunities for building high-quality links.	While SE Ranking offers competitive pricing, the pricing structure becomes complex, especially when considering additional features or the number of keywords tracked.
SE Ranking offers white-label reporting, meaning you can brand the reports with your logo and present them to clients. If you're an agency or work with multiple stakeholders, this adds a professional touch to your SEO reports.	The content creation process requires ample input from your end to generate a readable first draft of the content.
Automates lead generation for digital agencies by creating free SEO audits for prospective clients in exchange for their contact information.
Compared to other SEO tools, SE Ranking offers competitive pricing plans, making it more accessible to businesses of various sizes.

Pricing

Essential - $44 per month
Pro - $87 per month
Business - $191 per month

Who can benefit from SE Ranking?

SEO Experts
Content Writers
Content Marketers

What do users think about SE Ranking?

G2 rating - 4.8 / 5 stars
Product Hunt rating - 5 / 5 stars
Capterra - 4.7 / 5 stars.

#10 Page Optimizer Pro

Page Optimizer Pro, aka POP AI, is an SEO-centric AI content generator. It claims to help businesses with content optimization. Unlike many tools, Page Optimizer Pro does not claim to automate all your content-related tasks. The tool is designed to help you improve your current SEO performance with On-page SEO tools.

How is Page Optimizer Pro better than Clearscope?

Here’s why you should consider Page Optimize Pro over MarketMuse.

POP Pro

The POP Pro feature includes content briefs, content prompts, E-E-A-T, and Google entities. POP's unique selling point is providing suggestions that will not result in Google Penalties.

The content brief will help you create a content outline that has a high potential to rank on search engines. They offer you basic features like an optimization score, a target word count, and keywords to use throughout the content.

WatchDog

POP’s WatchDog is a one-of-a-kind feature that helps users track their published content and optimize it if the pages are facing any SEO dips. Usually, many SEO tools have these features, but they rarely provide solutions on how to optimize or fix old content for better performance.

POP’s Watch Dog precisely bridges this gap with a curated list of suggestions to optimize existing pages for better ranking. In POP, you can identify and rectify errors before they affect your blog's position.

POP custom

SEO professionals who have their own optimization process for their workflow can benefit from POP Custom. This feature does not exist in many SEO tools, like MarketMuse, Clearscope, or even Surfer. Along with in-built tools, a few other features like schema, Data comparison, LSI Variations, dashboards, and other high-level features garner the attention of SEO professionals.

Pros	Cons
The content optimizer can be beneficial for SEO content writers who create optimized content for brands and clients.	The content editor only provides basic features like a content score, header suggestions, and a basic document interface.
With the POP Pro tools, you can find target columns for subheads and questions you include in your content.	The NLP parameters are not that advanced for MarketMuse's or Scalenut’s level.
You have more control over whether your outline should be generated based on AI or competitors’ content.	The POP AI generator is merely a content briefing tool. It does not help you create content in a click or even develop the first draft.
Being up-to-date with Google guidelines like E-E-A-T, and Google Entity features allows users to follow SEO best practices.	The lack of a dedicated keyword research tool or content cluster tool restricts POP from being a complete alternative to an AI or an SEO tool.
The Chrome extension lets users edit their preferred workspaces, like Google Docs, WordPress, Shopify, and many more.
The on-page SEO checker compares your page with your competitors and grades your page to show your optimization level. This is more effective than the MarketMuse content editor.

Pricing

Basic plan - $27 per month
Premium plan - $38 per month.
Unlimited plan - $490 per year

Who can benefit from Page Optimizer Pro?

SEO strategist
Content Marketers

What do users think about Page Optimizer Pro?

G2 - 4.9 out of 5 stars
Capterra - 4.7 out of 5 stars

Which tool is best for you?

By now, you will have an idea of the features of each SEO tool. This gives you more clarity about your requirements and what each tool offers.

If you’re a growing brand, you would ideally need an all-in-one content marketing platform that helps with keyword research, AI-powered content creation, and robust optimization features.

If you look at it in-depth, MarketMuse's paid offer starts at $149 per month. On the flip side, Scalenut offers all the features and functionalities that MarketMuse has for just $39 per month. Even Scalenut’s Pro plan only costs $149 per month.

If you want to know how Scalenut can help you streamline your content efforts and drive traffic to your website, feel free to hop on this 7-day free trial to play around with the tool. This will give you an idea if Scalenut can meet your demands.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Best Marketmuse Alternatives and Competitors?

Some of the best MarketMuse Alternatives are Scalenut, Surfer SEO, Clearscope, and Dashword.

What is the best affordable alternative to MarketMuse?

If you're looking for an affordable alternative to MarketMuse, here are our top three recommendations: Scalenut, Dashword, Growthbar, and PageOptimizerPro.

Which alternative to MarketMuse would be the best for my specific needs?

In case you're looking for a robust content editor, keyword cluster, and research tool similar to MarketMuse, Scalenut can meet your demands effectively. It is an AI-powered SEO platform with 5 min content writer, keyword planner, outline creator and SEO content optimizer tools.