Compare · measured 21 July 2026
Profound alternatives, compared on published prices.
Profound publishes Starter at $99 a month and Growth at $399 a month billed yearly, with Enterprise quoted on request. Its alternatives run from Otterly Lite at $29 to Peec Advanced at $495. The differences that decide the purchase are not the headline prices — they are what each plan meters, and whether the measurement is connected to anything that fixes the page.
That is a reason to check the numbers, not to skip them. Every tier below was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 21 July 2026, and the method is described at the bottom of this page. The first-party study behind it is published on gregshevchenko.com.
Engines we scan
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Perplexity
- Gemini
- Grok
- DeepSeek
- Kimi
- Google AIO
- Copilot
Published tiers
What each vendor actually publishes.
Read on 21 July 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page. Four of the six published a price our fetcher could read straight from the served HTML. Two rendered the price only in a browser, so a person opened the page and read it.
| Platform | Published tiers, 21 July 2026 | What the entry tier meters | Price read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profound | Starter $99 · Growth $399/mo billed yearly · Enterprise quoted | Starter tracks ChatGPT only and 50 prompts. Growth tracks 3 answer engines and 100 prompts. | HTML |
| Otterly.AI | Lite $29 · Standard $189 · $489 · $1,020 | The base plan tracks four engines. Claude and Gemini are paid add-ons. | browser |
| Peec.AI | Starter $95 · Pro $245 · Advanced $495 | Tiers scale on prompts and competitor tracking. | browser |
| AthenaHQ | Free tier · Starter $295 | Starter covers nine models. | HTML |
| Scrunch AI | Core $250 | Brand-level monitoring across answer engines. | HTML |
| AIVO | Starter $149 · Growth $299 · Scale $549 | Tiers scale on tracked brands and query volume. | HTML |
We publish no self-serve tier in this category, so there is no row for us in this table. Our plans start at $497 a month and cover measurement, production and publishing as one service rather than a dashboard subscription.
The six, one by one
What each one is, and who it actually fits.
Read from each vendor's published pricing page on 21 July 2026. Where a tier is described below, it is the tier the vendor prints, not a quote we obtained.
Profound
The reference point
Starter at $99 tracks ChatGPT only with 50 prompts. Growth at $399 a month billed yearly moves you to three answer engines and 100 prompts. Enterprise is tailored pricing on request, and the pricing page carries a toggle between a brands view and an agencies view. If you are pricing this category, Profound is the number everyone else is measured against — which is why the jump from $99 to $399 matters more than either figure alone.
Otterly.AI
The cheapest way in, with an asterisk
Lite at $29 is the lowest published entry in the set, then Standard at $189, $489, and $1,020. The asterisk is engine coverage: the base plan tracks four engines, and Claude and Gemini are paid add-ons rather than included. If either of those models matters to your category, the effective entry price is not $29. Otterly's pricing page also returned nothing to our fetcher, so this row rests on a person reading it in a browser.
Peec.AI
A conventional three-step ladder
Starter $95, Pro $245, Advanced $495 — the most familiar shape in the set, scaling on prompts and competitor tracking. Like Otterly, Peec renders its prices client-side, so our fetcher saw the page without the numbers and a person read the tiers instead. Nothing about that is a defect; it just means the figures here carry a human reading rather than a machine one.
AthenaHQ
The widest entry coverage
A free tier plus Starter at $295. What makes it interesting against Profound is not the price but the count: Starter covers nine models, where Profound's $99 Starter covers one. If your question is "how many engines do I see for the first cheque", AthenaHQ answers it differently from everyone else on this page.
Scrunch AI
One published number
Core at $250 — the same number on the archived 23 June snapshot and on the live page today. Scrunch publishes the least laddering of the six, which makes it simple to evaluate and hard to grow into: there is no visible step between the published plan and a conversation with sales.
AIVO
The one that did not move
Starter $149, Growth $299, Scale $549 — matching our May figures exactly, to the dollar, across all three tiers. In a category where positioning changes monthly, a price list that holds still for two months is itself a signal about who the product is for.
What we got wrong
We priced this category wrong for two months.
Until 21 July 2026 our internal sheet described Profound's agency pricing as a $399 base plus $399 for each additional client workspace. We used that structure to argue our own stack was cheaper. When we went back to check it against the published page, the per-client ladder was not there — and the Internet Archive capture nearest our May baseline is a JavaScript shell with no prices in it, so we cannot date when it changed or confirm it was ever published in that form. The structure was our construction, not their price list.
We are stating that here because it is the error most likely to have misled someone, and because it ran in our favour: a per-client ladder looks more expensive than a flat tier. Four of the five errors that audit found flattered us. The full list, with the archive links that caught them, is in the research write-up.
If a comparison table tells you a competitor charges per client, ask to see the page that says so. Ours could not produce one.
Why the headline price misleads
Two products at the same price can differ tenfold on the unit that matters.
Three different units hide inside these tiers: engines covered, prompts tracked, and brands monitored. Two products at $295 can differ by a factor of ten on the unit that matters to you.
Profound Starter tracks ChatGPT only. Otterly tracks four engines on its base plan and sells Claude and Gemini as add-ons. AthenaHQ Starter covers nine models. Same shelf, different products.
01 · The self-serve band
$29 to $495, published
Everything a single brand needs to watch its own citations is published and payable by card. Otterly starts at $29, AthenaHQ has a free tier and a $295 Starter, Profound Starter is $99. For one brand and the major English engines, this band is well served.
02 · The quoted band
Every vendor ends in a conversation
Profound's Enterprise tier is tailored pricing on request, and the pattern repeats across the set. Nobody publishes what a second, fifth or tenth client costs. That is not a criticism — it is the shape of the market, and it means agency comparisons cannot be done from pricing pages.
03 · What to ask
Three questions before the demo
What does the entry tier exclude that I will need in month two? What does a second brand cost? And when the score drops, what exactly do I do next — inside your product, or somewhere else?
Where measurement stops
A score is a diagnosis. Nobody buys a diagnosis.
They report where you are cited. Changing the answer means changing pages, evidence and sources — work that happens in a different tool, on a different budget, usually by a different team.
- Measure which answers name you, which cite a competitor, and which cite a source you could displace.
- Decide which gaps are closeable this month rather than which score is lowest.
- Produce the pages and evidence that give an engine something to cite.
- Re-measure the same prompts on the same cadence, so the change is attributable.
Where we differ, and where we do not
Five differences, and one case for buying theirs.
Surface
We read the chat surface, not only the API
Our scanner queries the ChatGPT web interface through a real browser as well as the API. The two return different result sets, and a tool that only reads the API sees the smaller one.
Coverage
Regional answer engines beyond the global nine
Alongside the nine engines everyone lists, we scan the answer engines that dominate specific non-English markets. No platform on this page covers them at any tier.
Loop
The measurement creates the work
A scan ends as a ranked gap list that ContentOS turns into pages, which are published and re-scanned. Measurement, production, approval and re-measurement sit in one system.
Hosting
Self-hosted infrastructure
Client lists and query sets stay on our own infrastructure rather than a vendor cloud. For agencies whose clients ask where the data sits, that is a contractual answer, not a preference.
Scaling
Metered by infrastructure, not by prompt
The platforms on this page meter prompts, engines and tracked brands. Ours scales at infrastructure cost, so adding a query set does not move a line item.
Honesty
Where they are the better buy
If you need a dashboard your team logs into, a self-serve card payment, and nothing beyond the major English engines, a $99 to $295 tier here is a better fit than an operated workspace.
Method and limits
How these numbers were read.
On 21 July 2026 each pricing page was fetched with an HTTP client that runs no JavaScript, and the served text was searched for the visible price. Where the price was in that text we record it as read from HTML. Where the page returned a response with no price in it, a person opened the page in a browser and read the tier. Otterly's pricing page returned no body to the fetcher at all, so its row rests entirely on a browser reading.
We did not audit any of these products. We read their public pricing pages, which prove what a vendor charges and publishes, not what the software does in a client's account. Tiers change: treat every figure here as of 21 July 2026 and re-check before you buy. And we are an interested party — we sell in this category, which is why the method is written down instead of summarised.
The underlying dataset — 21 tools priced twice, with an Internet Archive cross-check that corrected five errors in our own procurement sheet — is published as first-party research on gregshevchenko.com.
Re-check this yourself in an afternoon
You do not need our tooling, and you should not take a vendor comparison — including this one — on trust. Open each shortlisted vendor's pricing page and write down two things: the exact entry price, and the exact sentence describing what that tier covers. Then pull the Internet Archive snapshot of the same page from the date your existing comparison was written, and search it for the same sentence.
If the sentence was already there, the repositioning your source described is a classification error rather than a product change. If the price differs from your notes, your notes were wrong on the day they were written — which is exactly what happened to ours. Budget about twenty minutes per vendor. For a shortlist of five, that is an afternoon, and it is the cheapest due diligence available in this category. If a vendor's tier has moved since we read it, the archive snapshot will show you the change and the date it happened — which is more than any comparison page, ours included, can promise on its own.
FAQ
Profound alternatives — common questions.
What are the alternatives to Profound in 2026?
On 21 July 2026 the published alternatives we read were Otterly.AI from $29 to $1,020, Peec.AI from $95 to $495, AthenaHQ with a free tier plus Starter at $295, Scrunch AI Core at $250, and AIVO from $149 to $549. All six, Profound included, are measurement platforms: they tell you where you are cited and leave the fixing to you.
How much does Profound cost?
Profound's published page on 21 July 2026 showed Starter at $99 a month tracking ChatGPT only with 50 prompts, Growth at $399 a month billed yearly tracking three answer engines with 100 prompts, and Enterprise as tailored pricing on request. The page also carries a toggle between a brands view and an agencies view.
Which AI visibility tool is best for an agency with several clients?
None of the six publishes a per-client price you can add up on the page. Multi-client work sits in the quoted tier for every one of them, so the honest answer is that agency pricing in this category is a conversation, not a published number. Ask each vendor what a second and a tenth client cost before you compare headline tiers.
What is the difference between measuring AI visibility and improving it?
Measurement tells you which answers name you and which cite someone else. Improving it means changing pages, evidence, and sources, then re-measuring to see whether the answer moved. Every platform on this page does the first. The gap between the two is where the work actually lives.
How many answer engines should a tool cover?
Coverage claims are not comparable until you read what the entry tier includes. Profound Starter tracks ChatGPT only; Otterly tracks four engines on its base plan with Claude and Gemini as paid add-ons; AthenaHQ Starter covers nine models. Count engines at the tier you would actually buy, not on the marketing page.
Do you publish a price for this?
Not as a self-serve tier. AI visibility here is part of an operated workspace rather than a dashboard subscription, so the comparison on this page is about what each product meters and what happens after the measurement, not tier against tier. Our published plans start at $497 a month and cover the whole loop.
Get the measurement and the work that follows it.
You arrive to a per-engine citation map of your category, the gaps worth closing first, and an honest read on whether any tier fits — including a competitor's.