Top 10 MarketMuse Alternatives in 2024 at Affordable Price

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

Or

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

1. Scalenut 
2. Surfer 
3. Semrush 
4. Content Harmony
5. Clearscope 
6. GrowthBar
7. Frase 
8. Dashword
9. SE Ranking 
10. Page Optimizer Pro 

TL;DR

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

2. 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

#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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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

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. 

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 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. 

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. 

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.