Comparison · 6 min read

Profound alternatives for agencies: what a client workspace costs

Profound is the deepest AI visibility tool in this comparison and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is also the only one that prices per client, at $399 a month for each full client workspace, which decides the question for most agencies before any feature does.

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Disclosure

We make Limecube, which competes with Profound. Every figure below came from tryprofound.com/pricing on 17 August 2026, including the feature table under the plan cards and the separate agency tab, not from a review site. For the whole category rather than this one comparison, see the nine-tool roundup.

What Profound is

Unlike Ahrefs or Semrush, Profound is not an SEO suite with an AI feature attached. AI visibility is the entire product. It asks the answer engines questions on a daily schedule, records whether your brand is named and cited, and analyses how you and your competitors appear. It calls them Answer Engines, and answer engine optimisation is the job it exists to do.

One thing to get straight before any price makes sense: Profound’s pricing page has two tabs. For brands sells to a company watching itself. For agencies sells workspaces per client. They are priced on completely different logic, and comparing an agency use case against the $99 brand plan is the commonest mistake in write-ups of this tool. Both are covered below.

What Profound does better

At length, because it is true, and because on AI visibility specifically this is the most capable tool in our roundup.

  • Nine answer engines, including Claude. Its Enterprise tier lists ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Anthropic Claude and Google AI Overviews. Nothing else in this comparison covers DeepSeek or Grok, and almost nothing covers Claude.
  • Agent Analytics. It tracks AI-sourced traffic and attribution across your domains, with integrations for Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, AWS, Google Cloud, Netlify, Vercel and WordPress. That is real engineering aimed at the hardest question in this field, which is whether any of it sent you a human.
  • Prompt Volumes. Data on what people are actually prompting the engines, rather than only how you perform on prompts you thought of. That is a genuinely different dataset and a good reason to buy it.
  • Pitch workspaces. The agency plan includes ten lightweight workspaces a month, each running seven days, to audit a prospect before you have won them. That is a new-business tool rather than a reporting one, which is a smart thing to put in an agency plan.
  • Depth of analysis per prompt. Growth analyses 9,000 responses a month against 100 prompts. It is built to be thorough about a small number of questions, which is the right design for a brand that knows which questions matter.

If AI visibility is the whole job and you want the best instrument for it, buy Profound. The rest of this page is about the case where you are running a client list.

The brand plans

Month-to-month rates. The cards carry a “Billed yearly” toggle, off by default, which gives two months free if you turn it on.

PlanMonthlyEnginesPromptsSeats
Starter$99ChatGPT only501
Growth$399Three1003
EnterpriseCustomUp to nineCustomCustom

The engines column is the one most roundups get wrong. Starter at $99 tracks ChatGPT and nothing else. Growth at $399 adds Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for three. The nine-engine figure that gets quoted next to the entry price is Enterprise, and so is Claude.

Starter and Growth also cover one company, one language and one region. Multiple companies is an Enterprise line item. So the brand plans are not a cheap way into client work, and were never meant to be.

The agency price

This is the number that decides it. On the agency tab, Agency Growth includes ten pitch workspaces a month for prospect audits, and then:

  • Each full client workspace is a $399 a month add-on.
  • Five trial workspaces are $199 a month.
  • Agency mode and consolidated billing are included.
  • Profound does not publish a base price for Agency Growth.
The arithmetic that decides it

Fifteen clients, each needing a full workspace, is fifteen times $399 or about $5,985 a month, plus a base price Profound does not publish. At the same fifteen clients, Limecube Professional is $99 a month.

Those two numbers are not really competing, and it would be dishonest to present them as though they were. $399 per client buys three things at once: nine named answer engines including Claude, DeepSeek and Grok, traffic attribution that tries to prove an AI answer sent you a human, and data on what people are actually prompting.

Others reach parts of that. Peec quotes up to eleven models on its Enterprise tier, so it is not as though Profound is alone on breadth, and Ahrefs runs a prompt database of comparable size. No other tool in this comparison puts all three together, which is what the per-client price is really buying. If your clients are enterprises paying enterprise retainers, that maths works comfortably and the per-client price is a rounding error against the account.

It stops working when your fifteen clients are trades businesses, professional services firms and local retailers on a few thousand a month each. Then $399 a client is most of the retainer, and what those clients need first is not nine-engine depth. It is somebody writing and publishing the pages that get cited at all.

Which to choose

Buy Profound if AI visibility is the job you are being paid for, you need engines nobody else tracks, or you need to prove AI-sourced traffic rather than infer it. On depth it is the best tool in this comparison and no feature list from us changes that.

Buy Profound for the pitch alone if you are an agency winning AEO work. Ten prospect audits a month is a sales tool, and it may pay for itself on one retainer regardless of what you use to deliver.

Look at a cheaper dedicated tracker if you want AI visibility measured but not to this depth. Otterly starts at $29, Peec at $95, SE Visible at $99. The roundup compares all of them, and the pricing page does the arithmetic across the category.

Look at Limecube if you run a list of smaller clients and what you actually need is the work as well as the measurement: keyword research, the topic queue, the drafts, the approval chain and the client report, with AI visibility across six surfaces including Claude included rather than tiered. Fifteen clients on one $99 plan, from $35 a month, with a 7-day trial and no card at signup. We are not as deep on AI visibility as Profound and we are not going to claim we are.

Fix the free things first whichever you choose. If your robots.txt blocks the AI crawlers, no tool on this page can help, because the engines cannot read you in the first place. Controlling AI crawler access takes ten minutes and costs nothing.

Frequently asked questions

  • How much does Profound cost?

    On its brand plans, Starter is $99 a month and Growth $399, both billed monthly, with two months free if you switch to yearly billing. Enterprise is custom. Its agency plans work differently: Agency Growth includes ten pitch workspaces a month, and each full client workspace is a $399 a month add-on. Profound does not publish a base price for Agency Growth.

  • How many AI engines does Profound track?

    It depends entirely on the tier. Starter at $99 tracks ChatGPT only. Growth at $399 tracks three: ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. The nine-engine figure quoted in most roundups is Enterprise, which adds Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek and Anthropic Claude.

  • Does Profound track Claude?

    Yes, on Enterprise. Anthropic Claude is listed among the nine answer engines available on the Enterprise tier, and is not included on Starter or Growth. That makes Profound one of the few tools in this category to cover Claude at all, though not at an advertised price.

  • Can I use Profound for multiple clients?

    Not on the brand plans. "Multiple companies tracked" is listed as an Enterprise feature, and Starter and Growth each cover one company in one language and one region. For client work Profound sells separate agency plans, where a full client workspace is a $399 a month add-on per client.

  • What does Profound cost for an agency with fifteen clients?

    At the published add-on rate, fifteen full client workspaces is fifteen times $399, so about $5,985 a month, plus the Agency Growth base price which is not published. That is priced for agencies whose clients are enterprises. For fifteen smaller accounts, an all-in-one priced per workspace rather than per client is a different order of cost.

  • What is a good Profound alternative?

    It depends on what you need. For depth on AI visibility alone, nothing in this category matches Profound, so the honest alternative is a cheaper tracker with less of it: Otterly from $29, Peec from $95, SE Visible from $99. If you want AI visibility alongside the content work that changes it, across a client list, an all-in-one is the different shape.

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