Keyword Insights vs MarketMuse

Keyword Insights

Buy it for the clustering engine, which is genuinely better than doing SERP-overlap grouping yourself in a spreadsheet; treat the AI writer as a bonus rather than a reason. Agencies planning content hubs across many sites get the most out of it, solo bloggers publishing four posts a month will burn less money on Surfer or Frase.

Pros

• +SERP-overlap clustering is the core competency and it is fast at scale
• +Public API means clustering can be driven from your own scripts
• +Basic plan ships 10,000 credits, enough for a real clustering job not a demo
• +Discovery pulls from Reddit, Quora and PAA, not just a keyword database

Cons

• −No free tier - entry is a paid $1 trial that ends in pay-as-you-go
• −Basic is single-seat, so any team needs the $99 Professional plan
• −Full agent-written articles cost 1,200 credits, which drains an allowance quickly
• −Volume and difficulty data is thinner than Ahrefs or Semrush

MarketMuse

MarketMuse is the strategy end of content SEO: it is less about polishing one article than about deciding which fifty to write, which twenty to refresh and which ten to merge, scored against your own site rather than a generic keyword list. That planning layer is what Clearscope and Surfer do not really offer, and it is why agencies and in-house teams with a real backlog pay for it. The price is the catch - the paid tiers are quote-only and have been positioned well above the per-article optimizers - and the Free plan is a demo, not a working tier.

Pros

• +Inventory and topic model score opportunities against your site, not a generic difficulty number
• +Nine brief types on the Strategy tier, including cluster and link-structure guidance
• +Optimize grades drafts on depth and expertise instead of keyword counts
• +Operating under Siteimprove since 2024, so vendor continuity is less of a worry than with a small SaaS

Cons

• −No prices on the pricing page; every tier goes through a demo call
• −Free plan is ten queries a month with no inventory or briefs, enough to look but not to work
• −No API or integrations listed on the public pages
• −Single site inventory on every listed tier, so multi-site agencies need to ask about scaling

Is Keyword Insights cheaper than MarketMuse?

Keyword Insights starts at $58/mo. MarketMuse has a free tier; what its paid plans cost is not confirmed by us yet.

Does Keyword Insights or MarketMuse have a free tier?

MarketMuse has a free tier; Keyword Insights has paid plans only.

Which has a public API, Keyword Insights or MarketMuse?

Keyword Insights ships a public API, as of our last verification. A public API for MarketMuse is not confirmed by us — check its developer docs before you plan an integration.