One is a link index with a suite around it. One is a meter.
netweft is an Ahrefs alternative for teams that want to pay per lookup and keep a stored rank history, and not one for link building. Ahrefs is built around an index it crawls itself, and the subscription buys access to it. netweft buys its data per call from a provider, stores what it fetched as a timestamped observation, and shows you the price of the next call before it makes it. Neither of those is the right answer in general; they are answers to different questions.
Nothing below states Ahrefs's price, counts its features or rates its data. Every statement about it is about the shape of the product, and every statement about netweft is checkable in this site's own rate card.
What a lookup costs
netweft
Priced per operation in credits, and the price is shown before the operation runs. One credit is $0.0001 of raw vendor cost, the reservation is a ceiling, and the settled charge is read off what the vendor actually billed.
Ahrefs
Priced per seat and per plan, with monthly allowances — keyword lookups, tracked keywords, crawled pages — that reset on a cycle. What an individual lookup costs is not a number the interface has to show you, because it is not a number the billing model uses.
What ranking history is
netweft
A rank check is a stored observation: keyword, location, device, position, the URL that held it, and the moment it was taken. History is the list of those rows, and a week where the domain did not rank is stored as a category rather than as a zero or a gap.
Ahrefs
Rank history is a first-class feature in every suite of this kind. What differs is not whether it exists but whether the absence of a ranking is a value you can read back, and whether the number you are shown was observed or derived.
What a machine can read
netweft
The whole HTTP API is described by an OpenAPI 3.1 document, and there is an MCP server at POST /mcp under a scoped API key, so an agent can read a workspace's audits, keywords, rankings and project overview without a person in the loop.
Ahrefs
An HTTP API is normally available on the higher tiers, priced in its own units. An MCP surface, where one exists, is a separate product decision from the API.
Where link data comes from
netweft
Backlinks, referring domains and linked pages are read from DataForSEO, priced per request on the rate card, and cached per workspace. netweft has no crawler of the wider web and does not pretend to.
Ahrefs
A large suite of this kind runs its own web crawl and its own link index, which is the single most expensive thing to build in this category and the reason the seat price is what it is.
What netweft does not do.
- A backlink index of its own — netweft reads a vendor's, it does not crawl the web for links
- Content tooling: briefs, outlines, writing assistants, content gap scoring
- A proprietary authority metric
- Paid-search research and ad copy tooling
- White-label client reporting
Pick Ahrefs when
If the work is link building, or if a proprietary authority score is what a client or a colleague expects on the report, use the tool that owns the index behind it. netweft reads link data through a vendor; a tool that crawls the web itself is answering a question netweft is only relaying.
The other comparisons
- netweft and Semrush A whole marketing platform against five metered capabilities. What is inside each subscription, and the five categories netweft leaves out entirely.
- netweft and Moz Proprietary authority metrics against measured observations with named provenance. What netweft refuses to compute, and why that is sometimes the wrong choice.
- netweft and DataForSEO netweft's own data provider, and the honest case for skipping netweft and calling it directly. What the layer adds, and when it adds nothing.
The part that is ours to prove, we publish.
Every credit price on this site is read at build time from the same module the API reserves against, so the comparison you just read is checkable against the product.
There is no free tier. Three plans from $50 a month, each opening with a free trial.