Frase Review: I Priced the Plans Per Article. Entry Is $4.90 Each.
Frase pricing verified August 2026: $49, $129 and $299 a month for 10, 40 and 100 articles. What the per-article math shows, and where the audit stops.
Frase is a content research and optimization tool that reads the pages already ranking, builds you an outline from them, and scores your draft against both Google and AI answer engines. It now bills by the article.
- Rating: 3.8/5. Still the best value in SERP-driven content briefs, with an entry plan that is tighter than the price suggests.
- The billing unit changed: Plans are metered in AI-Optimized Articles a month: 10 on Starter, 40 on Professional, 100 on Scale.
- Divide before you buy: That works out at $4.90, $3.23 and $2.99 an article at monthly rates. Annual billing takes about 20 percent off each.
- Starter is a one-person plan: One seat, one site, 50 audited pages a month. A second site means Professional at $129, a 2.6x jump.
- The tracked AI engines are tiered: A GEO score is on every plan, but AI Visibility covers ChatGPT and Google AI on Starter. Perplexity arrives at Professional, Claude and Gemini at Scale.
The rest of this review works through every quota, does the one-year and three-year math, reads a 335-review pool, and names who should buy which tier.
Frase repriced around a new unit: not documents, not words, but AI-Optimized Articles per month. That makes the comparison against every other content tool a division problem. This review does the division, then says which tier fits which team. Try CrawlRaven free: 1 site, no credit card →
Frase's entry plan costs $49 a month and includes ten articles. I did that division before I did anything else, because $4.90 an article is a number you can actually argue with a finance team about.
Most content tools sell you words, credits or seats. Frase now sells you finished articles, which is either the most honest unit in the category or the easiest one to run out of.
The verdict up front
Frase scores 3.8 out of 5. The research and briefing engine is still excellent value, and the entry plan is tighter than $49 makes it sound. I score reviewed tools on six criteria:
- Core job performance: how well it does the thing people actually buy it for.
- Pricing transparency: whether you can quote a price without opening a checkout.
- Third-party validation: verified ratings from named platforms, linked below.
- Coverage of AI search: whether the AI-answer half is real or a badge on the pricing page.
- What the entry plan allows: how much of the product the cheapest tier actually gives you.
- Depth as a technical SEO tool: what the audit can and cannot answer.
Frase rated on six criteria
SERP research, outline building and draft scoring against the pages already ranking, which is still the thing Frase does better than anything at this price
Every tier, quota and add-on is printed on the pricing page in dollars, with monthly and annual rates shown side by side
4.8/5 from 335 reviews on Capterra, verified August 2026, though Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice read from one shared pool
A GEO score alongside the SEO score on every plan, though the tracked engines are tiered: ChatGPT and Google AI on Starter, Perplexity at Professional, Claude and Gemini at Scale
One seat, one site, ten articles and fifty audited pages a month, which is a single-operator plan rather than a small-team one
Site Audit reads content quality and gaps across 50 to 1,000 pages a month. It is not a configurable crawler and does not pretend to be
Key Takeaways
- →The unit is the article: 10, 40 and 100 AI-Optimized Articles a month on Starter, Professional and Scale. Divide before you compare.
- →Annual saves about 20 percent: $49 to $39, $129 to $103, $299 to $239. The discount is consistent across all three tiers.
- →Starter is one seat and one site: A second site pushes you to Professional at $129 a month, not to a small incremental add-on.
- →The audit is a content audit: 50 to 1,000 pages a month, looking for gaps and decay. It will not answer a technical crawl question.
- →Starter cannot overspend: It stops at its limits rather than billing you. Pay-as-you-go exists on Professional and Scale and is off by default.
What is Frase?
Frase started as a content research tool: point it at a query, and it reads the pages already ranking so you do not have to open twelve tabs. Everything since has been built on top of that one step.
Today it calls itself the content operating system for AI search, and the platform menu runs to a dozen named modules. The honest grouping is three jobs:
- Research and brief: Frase Answers, Topic Clusters and the SERP extraction underneath both.
- Draft and score: AI Agent, Brand Voice, SEO Optimization and GEO Optimization.
- Publish and watch: FraseCMS, Site Audit, AI Visibility and Content Guard.
- The customer logos: Oracle, Coursera, Under Armour and GitLab appear among twenty named on the homepage.
That third group is the newest and the least mature. The first group is why Frase has kept customers for a decade, and it is still the reason to buy it.
What you get for the money
Ten modules is a lot of surface area, so the useful read is which are load-bearing and which are there for the feature grid:
- SERP research and outlines. The original feature and still the best one. It extracts headings, questions and content structure from ranking pages and turns them into a brief.
- SEO Optimization. A live score against the pages you are competing with, which is the part most directly comparable to Surfer.
- GEO Optimization. A second 0 to 100 score, on the same draft, for how quotable the page is to an answer engine. More on what that measures below.
- AI Visibility. Tracks where you are cited across answer engines, but the engine list is tiered rather than universal. Starter covers ChatGPT and Google AI only.
- Content Guard. Watches published pages for ranking decay on 3, 15 or 50 pages by plan, and Frase says it writes the fix and republishes once you approve it. That cap is small, so pick the pages deliberately.
- FraseCMS. Optional hosting, free to 100,000 monthly page views on a Frase subdomain with a Powered by Frase badge, then $19 and $99 a month for your own domain. Publishing to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity and Wix is included on every plan.
- An MCP server, CLI and API. Frase advertises running it from Claude, Cursor and any MCP tool, which is the same direction our own MCP access went.
The engine tiering on AI Visibility is the detail most reviews miss, and it decides which plan you need if AI citations are the reason you are buying at all:
- Starter: AI Visibility on ChatGPT and Google AI.
- Professional: adds Perplexity, plus AI crawler monitoring.
- Scale: adds Claude and Gemini, for five engines in total.
What the GEO score is actually measuring
Not a ranking prediction. It scores how easy your page is to quote: whether the direct answer sits near the top, whether the relevant entities are present, and whether there are clean citable facts an answer engine can lift without rewriting them.
That is a real and useful thing to measure, and it maps closely to what our own guide to ranking in ChatGPT argues. Three things to know before you trust the number:
- It is scored 0 to 100, shown beside the Google score on the same draft, with 81 given as a Strong example on Frase's own feature page.
- It supports 70-plus languages, per the same page.
- It is a proxy, not an outcome. No tool can see inside an answer engine's selection, so treat the score as a structure check and the citation tracking as the actual evidence.
Frase pricing, verified August 2026
Credit where it is due: the pricing page is unusually clear. Every tier, quota and add-on is printed in dollars, with the monthly and annual rates side by side.
Three plans, priced per article once you divide
Restated in plain text, and verified on frase.io/pricing in August 2026:
- Starter, $49/month or $39 billed yearly. 1 seat, 1 site, 10 articles and 50 audit pages a month, Content Guard on 3 pages, AI Visibility on ChatGPT and Google AI.
- Professional, $129/month or $103 billed yearly. 3 seats, 5 sites, 40 articles and 250 audit pages, Content Guard on 15 pages, a content calendar and internal linking suggestions, AI crawler monitoring, plus Perplexity added to AI Visibility.
- Scale, $299/month or $239 billed yearly. 5 seats, up to 10 domains, 100 articles and 1,000 audit pages, Content Guard on 50 pages, Claude and Gemini added to AI Visibility, and client-ready exportable reports.
- Enterprise, custom. Custom seats and domains, white-label reports, a branded client portal, your own custom domain, SSO and SAML, a dedicated account manager, an SLA and two years of history.
- Extra seats cost $29/month on Professional and Scale.
- The annual discount is stated as 20 percent, which the arithmetic confirms on all three tiers.
- A 7-day free trial runs without a credit card.
One line on that page deserves credit, because almost nobody in this category writes it down:
- Starter cannot generate a surprise bill. Frase states it simply stops at its monthly limits.
- Pay-as-you-go is optional and off by default on Professional and Scale, so overages happen only if you switch them on.
- White-label is Enterprise only. Scale gets exportable client-ready reports, not a branded portal or your own domain.
The number that matters is per article
Because the quota is articles rather than words or credits, the fair comparison against any other content tool is cost per finished article. Here is that division on both billing cycles:
- Starter: $4.90 an article monthly, $3.90 billed yearly.
- Professional: $3.23 an article monthly, $2.58 billed yearly.
- Scale: $2.99 an article monthly, $2.39 billed yearly.
- The pattern: the unit price falls as you climb, so a team already publishing 40 a month pays a third less per article than a solo writer publishing ten.
The trap is the other direction. If you publish four articles a month on Starter, you are paying $12.25 each, and the six unused ones do not roll anywhere.
One year and three years, pre-calculated
Content tools get renewed quietly for years, so the number worth looking at is not the monthly one. All figures below are arithmetic on the verified rates:
| Plan | Year 1 monthly | Year 1 annual | 3 years annual | Saved over 3 years |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $588 | $468 | $1,404 | $360 |
| Professional | $1,548 | $1,236 | $3,708 | $936 |
| Scale | $3,588 | $2,868 | $8,604 | $2,160 |
For contrast on the shape of the bill rather than the feature set, our own model runs the other way:
- One-time rather than monthly. CrawlRaven lifetime licences start at $49 for 3 sites at launch.
- A free plan covers 1 website with no credit card.
- The caveat: Lifetime pricing steps up as licenses sell, so check the pricing page for the current batch. Current price on the pricing page.
- Different job, though. Frase researches and scores the page; it is not the same purchase.
The Site Audit is not a site crawl
This is the one place where the naming will cost someone money, so it gets its own section. Frase sells a module called Site Audit, and it is a content audit.
- The allowance is 50, 250 or 1,000 pages a month by plan, which is a content inventory rather than a crawl budget.
- The job it does is gaps and decay: which published pages are thin, overlapping or losing ground.
- The job it does not do is rendering, redirect chains, canonical conflicts, status-code sweeps or crawl budget.
- The scale mismatch is stark: a 20,000-page store would consume the top plan's entire monthly allowance in a fifth of a single crawl.
None of that is a criticism of the product. It is a criticism of expecting a content tool to replace a technical audit, which it was never built to do.
The thing I keep coming back to Frase for has not changed in years: it reads the SERP properly and turns it into a brief faster than I can do it by hand. That step is worth $49 a month on its own.
What I would not do is buy Starter for a business with more than one site. The single-site cap is the constraint that bites, and it bites at a 2.6 times jump rather than a small upgrade.
Performance in practice
The review pool is large and unusually consistent, which makes the pattern easy to read. The praise and the complaints both land on the same seam:
- The research step is what people love. Reviewers repeatedly describe it as the tool for anyone who looks at the SERP while writing, and credit it with real productivity gains.
- The generated draft needs a real edit. This is the most consistent criticism across the pool, and it matches what E-E-A-T now demands: a coherent draft is not a credible one.
- The interface splits opinion. Some reviewers call it unintuitive and hard to learn; others cite exactly the breadth those reviewers are complaining about as the reason they stay.
- Value is the recurring positive. Reviewers describe it as the cheapest software carrying this feature set, which is a claim the per-article math above broadly supports.
Read that second point as scope guidance rather than a defect. Frase is strongest before the draft exists and weakest when asked to finish one for you.
Setup, interface and the daily workflow
Setup is a login, a site and a query. Nothing to install, no crawl to configure, which is a meaningful difference from every technical tool on this blog:
- The daily loop: query in, SERP read, outline out, draft scored against SEO and GEO, published or exported.
- The good: the research-to-brief path is fast enough to use on every post rather than only on important ones.
- The friction: ten modules in one interface is a lot to learn, and the recurring complaint is exactly that density.
- The publishing: WordPress, Webflow, Sanity and Wix are supported on every plan, so the draft does not have to leave the tool by copy and paste.
- The seat math: 1, 3 and 5 seats by plan, with extras at $29 a month, so an editor and two writers already fills Professional.
Pros and cons
- ✓SERP research and outline generation remain best in class for the price, and they are the step that actually saves hours
- ✓Every price, quota and add-on is published in dollars, with monthly and annual rates side by side
- ✓GEO scoring sits beside the SEO score on every plan, including Starter, rather than being sold as an add-on
- ✓Starter stops at its monthly limits rather than billing an overage, and pay-as-you-go is off by default on the upper tiers
- ✓An MCP server, CLI and API let you drive it from Claude, Cursor or any MCP client
- ✓4.8/5 from 335 reviews on Capterra, verified August 2026, which is a large and consistent pool
- ✓A 7-day free trial with no credit card required
- ✓Publishes directly to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity and Wix on every plan, including Starter
- ✓FraseCMS hosting is genuinely free to 100,000 monthly page views if you want Frase to host as well
- ✗Starter is 1 seat and 1 site, so a second site means Professional at $129 a month, a 2.6x jump
- ✗Unused articles do not roll over, so under-publishing on Starter pushes the effective cost per article well past $4.90
- ✗Site Audit covers 50 to 1,000 pages a month and cannot answer technical crawl questions despite the name
- ✗Content Guard watches only 3 pages on Starter and 15 on Professional, which is a small monitored set
- ✗AI Visibility engines are tiered: Starter tracks ChatGPT and Google AI only, and Claude and Gemini arrive at $299 a month
- ✗White-label reports, a branded client portal and a custom domain are Enterprise only, not Scale
- ✗Generated drafts consistently need real editing, per the review pool, so it is not a hands-off writing tool
- ✗Ten modules in one interface draws steady complaints about density and learning curve
- ✗The plan names and the billing unit both changed recently, so most third-party pricing pages are stale
- ✗FraseCMS hosting above 100,000 page views is a second bill at $19 or $99 a month
Who Frase is best for
Fit here is mostly a volume question, and secondarily a site-count question. Eight buyer profiles against an honest verdict:
Nine buyers, and whether Frase is the right call
Ten articles on Starter is more than that workload needs, and the research and outline step is where the hours actually go
Professional covers 40 articles across 3 seats and 5 sites, which is comfortable headroom rather than a squeeze
A GEO score sits beside the SEO score on the same draft, on every plan including Starter
White-label reports, a branded client portal and your own custom domain are Enterprise only, not Scale
Those two engines are added at Scale. Starter tracks ChatGPT and Google AI, and Professional adds Perplexity
FraseCMS is free to 100,000 monthly page views, then $19 and $99 a month, so the platform bill is a second line item
Site Audit reads 50 to 1,000 pages a month for content quality. It is not a crawler and will not answer a technical question
Reviewers are consistent that the output needs a real edit, and the tool is strongest before the draft rather than after it
Starter is one seat and one site. A second site means Professional at $129 a month, which is a 2.6x jump
Condensed, the three clear buys are:
- Freelance writers publishing two to four posts a month. Starter covers the workload, and the research step is where the hours actually go.
- Small content teams shipping around ten posts a month. Professional gives 40 articles, 3 seats and 5 sites with room to spare.
- Teams that want one score for Google and one for AI answers. Both sit on the same draft, in the base price.
Who should skip it
- Anyone needing a technical crawl. Site Audit is a content audit; a 20,000-page site needs a real crawler.
- Solo operators with several sites. Starter's single-site cap is the constraint, and the fix costs $129 a month.
- Anyone expecting publishable output. The drafts need editing, consistently, per the review pool.
- Agencies that hand clients branded work. Scale caps at 10 domains, and white-label reports, a branded portal and a custom domain are Enterprise only. Our white-label reporting roundup covers tools that include it lower down.
What reviewers say
Third-party ratings, checked in August 2026. One caution first: Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice share a single review pool under three brands, so treat them as one source of 335 reviews rather than three:
- Capterra: 4.8/5 from 335 reviews, with a free trial recorded as available.
- Software Advice: the same 4.8/5 and 335-review pool, listing the starting price at $49 a month.
- G2: Frase's own reviews page cites 4.8/5 from 307-plus reviews. G2 returned a 403 to my fetcher, so that figure is vendor-stated rather than verified here.
“This is an incredible tool for bloggers and copywriters who frequently look at the SERPs while creating well optimized content.”
★★★★★Capterra · Faheem R., Control System Engineer
“I use it to generate well-researched quality content, daily. This works exceptionally well and I am far more productive.”
★★★★★Software Advice · Walter Adamson, Management Consulting
“It felt less intuitive, buggy, and glitchy, especially when compared to its competitors.”
★★★★★Capterra · Kira K., CEO
A 335-review pool holding 4.8 is strong evidence, and the complaints are specific rather than vague. Almost all of them are about the interface or the AI output, not about the research engine.
Frase alternatives, by job
Frase spans research, optimization and AI visibility, so every alternative here beats it on one of those and loses on the others. Match the job to the pick:
- You optimize existing pages against a live SERP: Surfer SEO.
- AI citation tracking is the whole job: Otterly or Profound.
- Generation volume matters more than research: Writesonic.
- You need to decide what to write at all: CrawlRaven, from a one-time $49 at launch.
Surfer: the closest like-for-like
Same category, overlapping workflow, different centre of gravity. Surfer is stronger on on-page scoring and Frase is stronger on the research that comes before it. Our Surfer SEO review prices it out in full, and Surfer SEO alternatives covers the rest of the field.
Otterly and Profound: when AI visibility is the whole job
Frase's AI Visibility module is a feature inside a content tool. If tracking citations across answer engines is the actual reason you are buying, our Otterly review and Profound review cover two tools that do nothing else, and the AI visibility roundup compares the field.
CrawlRaven: deciding what to write before you write it
Full transparency: CrawlRaven is our tool, and it does not write or score drafts. It answers the question Frase assumes you have already answered:
- The join: Google Search Console and GA4 (built-in, one-click OAuth, synced daily) merged with your imported Ahrefs or Semrush keyword lists and a 200-point technical crawl.
- The output: one ranked plan of what to write, what to update and what to fix first, rather than a brief for a page you already chose.
- The overlap to know about: content gaps, decay tracking and cannibalization flags, which is the same territory as Content Guard but across the whole site rather than 3 to 50 watched pages.
- The price: lifetime licences from a one-time $49 at launch, plus a free plan for 1 website with no credit card. Lifetime pricing steps up as licenses sell, so check the pricing page for the current batch. Current price on the pricing page.
The honest pairing: CrawlRaven to pick the page and rank the work, Frase to research and score the page once it is picked. They are adjacent rather than competing.
Frequently asked questions
Basics
- What is Frase? A content research and optimization platform that reads ranking pages, builds briefs, and scores drafts for both Google and AI answer engines.
- Does it publish for me? Yes, to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity and Wix on every plan, or to its own FraseCMS hosting.
- Is the Site Audit a crawler? No. It reads 50 to 1,000 pages a month for content gaps and decay, not technical issues.
Pricing
- What does it cost? $49, $129 and $299 a month, or $39, $103 and $239 billed yearly, verified August 2026.
- What is an article? The billing unit. 10, 40 and 100 a month by tier, which works out at $4.90, $3.23 and $2.99 each.
- Is there a trial? Yes, 7 days, no credit card required.
- What do extra seats cost? $29 a month each on Professional and Scale.
Alternatives
- Closest like-for-like? Surfer SEO, stronger on on-page scoring, weaker on research.
- For AI visibility only? Otterly or Profound.
- For generation volume? Writesonic, which sells output rather than research.
- What decides which page to write? CrawlRaven joins Search Console, GA4, your keyword imports and a 200-point crawl into one ranked plan, from a one-time $49 at launch.
Final verdict: is Frase worth it?
3.8 out of 5. The best SERP-research-to-brief engine at this price, sold in article-sized units that reward publishing consistently and punish buying ahead of your output.
- Buy Starter if you are one person, one site, publishing two to four posts a month and doing the research by hand today.
- Buy Professional if you have an editor and two writers, more than one site, or you will genuinely use more than ten articles a month.
- Skip it if you need a technical crawl, expect publish-ready drafts, or run more than ten client domains.
- Check first how many articles you actually published last quarter, and how many sites you need, because those two numbers pick the tier for you.
If the harder question is which page deserves the next article at all, CrawlRaven answers that one and starts with a free plan for 1 site.
The measurable part of content optimisation does not need a subscription. The free keyword density checker reports term distribution on a live URL, the page word counter separates body copy from chrome, and the readability checker scores what is left.
Sources
- Frase pricing: the stated 20 percent annual discount; Starter at $49/month or $39 billed yearly with 1 seat, 1 site, 10 articles and 50 audit pages each month, Content Guard on 3 pages, and AI Visibility on ChatGPT and Google AI; Professional at $129 or $103 with 3 seats and 5 sites, 40 articles and 250 audit pages, a content calendar and internal linking suggestions, AI crawler monitoring plus Perplexity added to AI Visibility, and Content Guard on 15 pages; Scale at $299 or $239 with 5 seats and up to 10 domains, 100 articles and 1,000 audit pages, Content Guard on 50 pages plus Claude and Gemini added to AI Visibility, and client-ready exportable reports; Enterprise custom with white-label reports, a branded client portal, a custom domain, SSO and SAML, a dedicated account manager, an SLA and two years of history; extra seats at $29/month on the two upper tiers; the 7-day no-card free trial; the stated behaviour that Starter simply stops at its monthly limits while pay-as-you-go on Professional and Scale is optional and off by default; and FraseCMS hosting free to 100,000 monthly page views on a Frase subdomain with a Powered by Frase badge, then $19 for 250,000 and $99 for 1,000,000 on your own domain. Verified August 2026.
- frase.io: the "content operating system for AI search" positioning, the named modules (Frase Answers, SEO Research, Topic Clusters, AI Agent, Brand Voice, SEO Optimization, GEO Optimization, AI Visibility, Site Audit, FraseCMS, Integrations and Content Guard), the MCP server, CLI and API for running Frase from Claude, Cursor and other MCP tools, the 70-plus natively supported languages, and the twenty named customer logos including Oracle, Coursera, Under Armour and GitLab. Note that the homepage names five answer engines for AI Visibility while the pricing page tiers which of them each plan tracks; the pricing page is the one quoted throughout this review. Verified August 2026.
- Frase GEO Content Optimization: the 0 to 100 GEO score shown beside the Google ranking score, the 81/100 "Strong" example, what the score rewards (a direct answer at the top, relevant entities, citable facts), and the 70-plus language support. Verified August 2026.
- Frase on Capterra: 4.8/5 from 335 reviews, free trial recorded as available, and the quoted excerpts from Faheem R. and Kira K. Verified August 2026.
- Frase on Software Advice: the same 4.8/5 and 335-review pool, the $49/month starting price, and the quoted excerpt from Walter Adamson. Verified August 2026.
- Frase reviews page: the vendor-stated G2 figure of 4.8/5 from 307-plus reviews, cited here as vendor-stated because G2 returned a 403 and could not be checked directly. Verified August 2026.
Frequently asked questions
What is Frase?
Frase is a browser-based content research and optimization platform that describes itself as the content operating system for AI search. It pulls the pages currently ranking for your target query, extracts their headings and questions, builds an outline from that research, and then scores your draft against both Google ranking factors and AI answer engines. The named modules on its own site are Frase Answers, SEO Research, Topic Clusters, AI Agent, Brand Voice, SEO Optimization, GEO Optimization, AI Visibility, Site Audit, FraseCMS, Integrations and Content Guard. It publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity and Wix, or hosts pages itself on FraseCMS, and it ships an MCP server, a CLI and an API so it can be driven from Claude, Cursor or another MCP client.
How much does Frase cost?
Verified on frase.io/pricing in August 2026. Starter is $49 a month, or $39 a month billed yearly. Professional is $129 a month, or $103 billed yearly. Scale is $299 a month, or $239 billed yearly. Enterprise is custom-priced and adds white-label reports, a branded client portal, your own custom domain, SSO and SAML, a dedicated account manager, an SLA and two years of history. The annual discount is stated as 20 percent and the arithmetic confirms it on all three tiers. Extra seats on Professional and Scale cost $29 a month each. There is a 7-day free trial that does not ask for a credit card. Starter stops at its monthly limits rather than billing an overage, and pay-as-you-go on Professional and Scale is optional and off by default.
What is an AI-Optimized Article in Frase's pricing?
It is the unit Frase now meters its plans in, and it is the number to divide by before you compare Frase against anything else. Starter includes 10 a month, Professional 40 and Scale 100. At the monthly rates that is $4.90, $3.23 and $2.99 per article. At annual rates it falls to $3.90, $2.58 and $2.39. The older Frase plans were sold in documents per month, so any review still quoting document credits is describing a pricing model Frase no longer runs. Brand Profile crawls and topic-suggestion steps do not draw down the article quota.
What does the Frase entry plan include?
Starter is a single-operator plan and worth reading carefully before you buy it. Verified August 2026, it includes 1 seat, 1 site, 10 AI-Optimized Articles a month, 50 audit pages a month, Content Guard watching 3 pages, SEO and GEO scores, and AI Visibility on ChatGPT and Google AI only. It publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity or Wix, or hosts on FraseCMS. Two constraints catch people. The first is the single site: if you run two blogs, or one client site plus your own, you are on Professional at $129 a month, which is a 2.6 times jump rather than an incremental step. The second is the engine list, because Perplexity arrives at Professional and Claude and Gemini only at Scale.
Does Frase have a free trial or a free plan?
Frase advertises a 7-day free trial with no credit card required, checked on its pricing page in August 2026. Software Advice additionally flags a free version as available, so the two sources disagree on whether a permanently free tier exists and the vendor page is the one I could verify directly. Separately, FraseCMS has a genuinely free hosting tier covering 100,000 monthly page views, served from a Frase subdomain with a small Powered by Frase badge, rising to $19 a month for 250,000 page views on your own domain and $99 a month for 1,000,000. That is hosting rather than a free tier of the optimization platform, and the two should not be confused.
Is Frase's Site Audit a technical SEO crawler?
No, and the name invites the wrong expectation. Frase audits 50 pages a month on Starter, 250 on Professional and 1,000 on Scale, and the job it does is finding content gaps and decay rather than diagnosing rendering, redirect chains, canonical conflicts or crawl budget. A 20,000-page ecommerce site would exhaust the top plan's monthly allowance in a fifth of one crawl. If your question is technical, a dedicated crawler answers it and Frase does not. If your question is which published pages are losing ground, Frase's audit and its Content Guard monitoring are pointed at exactly that.
Is Frase better than Surfer SEO?
They win on different halves of the same workflow. Frase is stronger before the draft exists: the SERP research, the extracted questions and the outline are the reason people have paid for it since 2016, and it is cheaper at the entry tier. Surfer is stronger on the on-page scoring itself, with a denser term model and a more mature editor. Frase's advantage in 2026 is that GEO scoring sits beside the SEO score on every plan rather than being sold as an add-on, though the AI Visibility engine list is tiered and Starter tracks only ChatGPT and Google AI. If you write from scratch, start with Frase. If you optimize existing pages against a live SERP, look at Surfer first.
What is the best Frase alternative?
It depends which part you are replacing. Surfer SEO is the closest like-for-like on content optimization. For AI visibility specifically, Otterly and Profound track citations across answer engines in more depth than a content tool can. Writesonic is the alternative if generation volume matters more than research quality. And if the actual problem is deciding what to write in the first place, CrawlRaven joins Google Search Console, GA4, your imported Ahrefs or Semrush keyword lists and a 200-point technical crawl into one ranked plan of what to write, what to update and what to fix first, from a one-time launch price.
15+ years of growing SaaS websites through SEO | Author, 200-Point Audit Checklist
Aditi has spent 15+ years helping SaaS companies scale organic traffic through technical SEO and content strategy. She is the author of the CrawlRaven 200-Point Audit checklist used by agencies and in-house teams to systematically improve search performance.