Frase Alternatives: 7 Tools Priced Per Article

Frase's cheapest plan costs $49 a month and gives you ten articles. Not ten thousand words. Ten articles. If you publish twice a week, you hit the wall on day eleven.

The short answer: most people searching for Frase alternatives aren't unhappy with the product — they're unhappy with the unit. Frase bills per article now, so your cost scales with how often you publish. The seven tools below are ranked by what they actually cost per published post, not by sticker price. Every number came from the vendor's own pricing page.

Frase alternatives at a glance#

Here's the whole argument in one table. "Entry plan" means the cheapest paid tier, billed monthly, and "cost per article" divides that price by the units the plan includes.

Two things jump out. Frase is not the most expensive tool on this list — Clearscope and Scalenut both cost more per unit. But Frase is roughly twelve times the per-article cost of Surfer SEO, which sits at the exact same $49 sticker price. Same money, wildly different quantity. If you'd rather not meter posts at all, see what unlimited publishing costs.

Why Frase feels more expensive than you remember#

For years the roundups quoted Frase pricing at about $15 a month. That number is gone. Frase's live pricing page now lists Starter at $49/mo ($39/mo billed yearly) for 1 seat, 10 articles a month and 50 audit pages. Professional is $129/mo ($103 yearly) for 3 seats, 40 articles and 250 audit pages. Scale is $299/mo ($239 yearly) for 5 seats, 100 articles and 1,000 audit pages. Extra seats run $29/mo on the paid tiers.

The price didn't just go up. The billing unit changed. Frase used to meter words, which is a resource you can stretch by writing shorter. It now meters articles, which is a resource you can't stretch at all. One 600-word update and one 3,000-word pillar burn the same credit.

That's why a Frase bill that felt fine last year feels wrong this year: nothing about your workflow changed, but the meter started counting the thing you do most.

How we priced these tools#

Most SEO content optimization tools look identical on a feature checklist, which is how every other Frase alternatives roundup dodges this question. A checklist can't tell you whether a tool is affordable, because "AI writing ✅" costs $9 on one plan and $299 on another.

So we used one metric: what does it cost to get one more post published? The method:

1. Take the cheapest paid plan, billed monthly (no annual discount, no promo).

2. Read the included quantity straight off the vendor's pricing page.

3. Divide.

4. Where a tool meters words instead of articles, assume a 2,000-word post — a realistic length for a ranking blog page.

5. Where the unit isn't an article at all (Clearscope's topic explorations, PageOptimizer Pro's reports), say so instead of pretending it maps cleanly.

Every price here was read from the vendor's own page, not copied from another roundup. If you're building a comparison page yourself, that sourcing discipline is most of the work — we wrote up the full method in our guide to alternatives page SEO.

The 7 best Frase alternatives, ranked by cost per post#

1. Surfer SEO — the best value if you only want optimization#

Surfer's Discovery plan is $49/mo for 120 documents and 10 tracked pages. That's the same money as Frase Starter for twelve times the documents. Standard is $99/mo (360 documents, 50 tracked pages, 3 seats), Pro is $182/mo, and Peace of Mind is $299/mo with unlimited documents and 500 tracked pages.

Pick it if: you want SERP-driven term scoring and you publish a lot. Skip it if: you need more than 10 tracked pages early — that's the limit that pushes people to Standard, and it's a bigger jump than the document count suggests. We broke the whole ladder down in our Surfer SEO alternatives comparison.

2. Quillly — $9/mo, unlimited posts, publishes to your own domain#

Full disclosure: this is our product. Quillly is $9/mo (or $96/yr) for unlimited content across 5 websites, with a 14-day free trial and no card required. Teams is $36/mo ($384/yr) with 4 seats included and $9 per extra seat.

It's also a different shape of tool, and pretending otherwise would make this table useless. Quillly doesn't do Frase-style SERP term scoring. What it does is score every draft against 14+ SEO criteria, then publish it live on your own domain at yourdomain.com/blogs — plus /docs and /changelog — and submit it to 8 search engines. Your AI (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini) writes through the MCP server; Quillly handles the scoring, publishing, sitemap, internal linking and rank tracking. There's also DataForSEO-backed keyword research on a credit system: 100 research credits a month on Pro, 300 on Teams, top-ups from $5.

Try it free for 14 days — no card required.

Pick it if: your bottleneck is getting posts live and indexed, not scoring drafts. Skip it if: you specifically want a term-frequency optimizer sitting next to your editor.

3. NEURONwriter — the cheapest real Frase replacement#

$23/mo (Bronze) buys 25 content analyses across 2 projects. Silver is $45 for 50 analyses and 5 projects; Gold is $69 for 75 and 10 projects. Annual billing knocks about 20% off. Per analysis you're paying roughly $0.92 at every tier, which is unusually honest pricing — you're not punished for starting small.

Pick it if: you want Frase's core job (SERP analysis, NLP terms, content briefs) at a quarter of the price. Skip it if: you need polished collaboration features; the interface is functional rather than pretty.

4. Koala AI — cheapest entry point, metered in words#

Essentials is $9/mo for 15,000 words. Professional is $49/mo for 100,000 words, Boost $99 for 250,000. Annual billing saves 20%. At 2,000 words a post, Essentials covers about seven posts — so roughly $1.20 each, and Professional works out near $0.98.

Pick it if: you want long-form drafting cheaply and you'll handle optimization elsewhere. Skip it if: you want a content brief with SERP term targets; that's not what Koala is for.

5. PageOptimizer Pro — pay once, optimize forever#

Basic is $40/mo for 20 POP credits ($2.00 a report). Unlimited is $72/mo, or $62/mo billed annually at $739/yr, and lifts the report cap entirely. Teams is $143/mo ($119/mo annually) starting at 5 sub-accounts, with extra seats at $12/mo.

The Unlimited tier is the interesting one: at 40 posts a month it's $1.80 a report, at 100 it's $0.72, and it keeps falling. Pick it if: you're an agency running many optimizations on few domains. Skip it if: you publish under ten posts a month — Basic's 20 credits cost more per unit than NEURONwriter's.

6. Clearscope — the enterprise brief, priced like one#

Essentials is $129/mo with unlimited users, 20 monthly topic explorations and 50 tracked prompts. Business is $399/mo with 50 explorations and 300 tracked prompts. Enterprise is custom.

The unlimited-seats model is genuinely generous — a five-person content team pays the same as a solo writer, which inverts almost every other tool here. But 20 explorations for $129 is $6.45 each, so solo writers subsidize a seat count they'll never use. That trade-off is the whole story, and it's why we wrote a separate breakdown of Clearscope alternatives for people publishing alone.

7. Scalenut — check the promo before you commit#

List price is $59/mo (Starter) for 5 articles, $89 (Plus) for 30 articles and up to 4 seats, and $199 (Professional) for 75 articles with unlimited seats. At list, Starter is the most expensive unit on this page: $11.80 an article.

The site is currently running a 60%-off recurring discount with doubled execution limits, which drops Starter to about $24/mo for 10 articles — $2.40 each. That's competitive. It's also a promotion, and promotions end. Pick it if: the discount is live when you subscribe and you'll lock in annual. Skip it if: you're modelling costs twelve months out.

What Frase still does better#

A fair comparison has to say where the incumbent wins, and Frase wins in three places.

Question mining. Frase's aggregation of People Also Ask and forum questions into a brief is still the fastest way to find the questions a page has to answer. Nothing on this list matches it for that specific job.

Audit volume. Starter includes 50 audit pages a month, and Scale includes 1,000. If your work is fixing existing pages rather than shipping new ones, Frase's meter is pointed at the thing you actually do — and the per-article limit stops mattering.

FraseCMS. Frase now hosts and serves content itself, free up to 100,000 monthly page views, then $19/mo to 250,000 and $99/mo to 1 million. That closes the publish gap Frase used to have, and it's a real answer to "where does the post go?"

Frase also runs a 7-day free trial with no credit card, so you can check the meter against your own cadence before paying anything.

Which Frase alternative fits your volume#

The right answer changes at three thresholds, and they're worth knowing before you open a checkout page.

Under 10 posts a month. Frase Starter technically covers you at $49. So does NEURONwriter Bronze at $23 with 25 analyses — more than double the headroom for less than half the price. There's no volume argument for Frase at this tier.

10 to 40 posts a month. This is where Frase's meter bites hardest: you're forced onto Professional at $129 the moment you cross ten. Surfer Discovery covers 120 documents for $49, and unlimited-content platforms stop charging by the post entirely.

Over 40 posts a month. Per-article pricing stops making sense at all. You want a flat fee — PageOptimizer Pro Unlimited at $72, Surfer Peace of Mind at $299, or an unlimited-content plan — because at this volume the meter, not the feature list, is your whole bill.

How to move your Frase workflow without losing your briefs#

Switching tools usually fails for a boring reason: the briefs live inside the old tool. Do this in order and nothing gets stranded.

1. Export first, cancel second. Pull every brief and outline you still reference out of Frase before the subscription lapses. Article credits reset; exports don't come back.

2. Separate the two jobs. Frase does research and optimization. Ask which half you actually use every week — most people use one and pay for both.

3. Rebuild the research half cheaply. NEURONwriter or your own AI keyword research workflow covers it for a fraction of the cost.

4. Fix the publishing half properly. A scored draft sitting in a doc earns nothing. Wire drafting straight into publishing so the post goes live the day it's written — the full pattern is in our guide to publishing a blog with AI.

5. Re-audit what you already have. Before writing anything new, run an on-page SEO audit on your existing pages. Fixing a page that already ranks beats writing a new one that doesn't.

With Quillly the last two steps are one workflow: your AI calls create_content to draft, check_blog_seo to score against the 14+ criteria, and publish_content to push it live on your domain. No copy-paste, no article meter, and nothing to install beyond connecting your assistant.

Ready to stop counting articles? Connect your AI and publish today.

Frequently Asked Questions#

Is Frase still worth it in 2026?#

For audit-heavy work, yes. Starter includes 50 audit pages for $49/mo and Scale includes 1,000, so if you mostly optimize existing content the meter is pointed the right way. For teams shipping more than ten new posts a month, the per-article limit forces a $129 upgrade that cheaper tools don't require.

What is the cheapest Frase alternative?#

Koala AI and Quillly both start at $9/mo, but they solve different halves of the problem — Koala meters 15,000 words, Quillly is unlimited content plus publishing. For a like-for-like replacement of Frase's research and optimization, NEURONwriter at $23/mo for 25 analyses is the cheapest genuine swap.

Why did Frase change from word credits to article credits?#

Frase's current plans meter articles rather than words, which makes costs predictable for the vendor but removes the flexibility writers used to have. A 600-word update now costs the same credit as a 3,000-word pillar page, so short-form publishers absorb the biggest relative price increase.

Does Frase have a free plan?#

Frase runs a 7-day free trial with no credit card required, but there's no permanent free tier. Test it against your real publishing cadence during those seven days — the article limit, not the feature set, is what usually decides whether it fits.

Can I use Frase and a publishing tool together?#

Yes, and many teams do. Frase builds the brief, your AI writes the draft, and a publishing layer scores and ships it to your domain. That split keeps you on Frase's cheapest tier because you're buying research from Frase rather than volume.

Which Frase alternative is best for agencies?#

PageOptimizer Pro Teams at $143/mo covers 5 sub-accounts with unlimited reports, and Clearscope's unlimited-seat model suits larger content teams. Both beat Frase's $29-per-extra-seat pricing once you pass three people.