ReachKit vs Moz Competitive Research

What Moz does better

It answers this query and ReachKit does not. Moz's Competitive Research page invites you to "Enter any domain to see how Moz Pro enhances your competitor website analysis", and Competitive Research is listed among Moz's free tools. If you want competitor data today without paying anything, that is a real offer and ReachKit has no equivalent to put beside it.

The identification step is a genuinely hard problem and Moz built a tool for it. True Competitor returns "a thorough list of your true market competitors based on the SERPs where your site is ranking", scored by two named metrics, Overlap and Rivalry — so the list is derived from where you actually appear rather than from who you think you compete with.

The analysis tools are more specific than a single dashboard. Keyword Gap accepts up to 3 competitors and finds keywords where you rank in the top 20 but a competitor ranks higher, plus keywords competitors rank for where you do not appear at all. Top Competing Content shows "their most visible content and the keywords it's ranking for". Moz Pro Campaigns tracks up to three competitors side-by-side and shows how they rank each week. Domain Overview carries Domain Authority® and Brand Authority™; Link Explorer compares linking root domains, Spam Score and followed link counts.

The underlying data is large and Moz states the sizes: Keyword Explorer runs on a "1.25 billion+ keyword index", Link Explorer on "over 40 trillion links". And the teaching around it is real — the page links a guide with a free downloadable template and a Moz Academy SEO Competitive Analysis Certification described as a "6-part course and exam series".

Where it leaves a solo founder stranded

The free surface is the front door, not the product. The tools that do the actual comparing — True Competitor, Keyword Gap, Top Competing Content, competitor rank tracking — are described on this page as Moz Pro features, reached through "Start my free trial". Moz's competitive-research page states neither a Moz Pro price nor a trial length, so this page quotes neither.

The deeper limit is what the output is. Keyword Gap hands you a list of keywords a competitor beats you on; it does not say which one to write on Tuesday, or whether winning it is worth more than fixing the page you already have. Overlap and Rivalry rank competitors against each other, not the work against your week. Deciding stays with you — which is fine if you have the hours and the training, and is exactly the hour a solo founder does not have.

There is also a scope difference worth naming rather than scoring. Moz measures your standing in search: authority, links, rankings, competitor overlap. It does not read your page's HTML and tell you the meta description is missing.

What ReachKit does differently

The competitor half of ReachKit is a paid feature. On the paid plan you approve up to 5 competitors drawn from a ranked pool that is usually 20 or more long, and no competitor data is ever fetched before you approve it. Each proposal states its own basis in the form "shares 4 of your searches · ranks for 1,200 keywords", so the reason a domain is on your list is on the row with it.

What ReachKit does with competitors is different from what Moz does. Moz reports the gap; ReachKit prices it. Competitor rows feed the target ladder and the weekly action plan, so the output is an ordered list of work with the evidence cited inline, one task surfaced per day — not a keyword table to interpret.

The free tier is honest about its scope: 8 on-page signals measured from your live HTML, a 0–100 Discoverability Score combining those signals by geometric mean with your raw search footprint, and a ≤5-row teaser of the queries you already rank for. No competitor rows and no fix list — fixes are a paid artifact. The free on-page checker at reachkit.app/tools/on-page-check needs no account and no email, at 30 checks per hour.

The paid plan is where competitors appear, and the next weekly scan re-measures the site so a score gain is attributed to the on-page fix you shipped. €29.50/month, the 50% launch price, locked for life, normally €59.

Who should pick which

Pick Moz if free is the requirement. That is the whole query, Moz answers it and ReachKit does not, and no amount of framing changes that. Pick Moz too if you want authority and link metrics, if you want up to 3 competitors in a keyword gap report, or if you want to learn competitive analysis as a skill — the certification and the guide are on the same page.

Pick ReachKit if you have already seen the gap report and the problem is that nothing happened next. ReachKit's competitor data is narrower — 5 approved domains, no backlink graph, no Domain Authority — and its output is an ordered week of work rather than a table. If you would rather pay €29.50 a month than spend the evening deciding which of 40 keywords to act on, that is the trade this page is offering.