Comparing AI Rankly and AthenaHQ?

They publish 3,600 credits a month on Starter and a calculator that converts credits to prompts: prompts x locations x credits per response x days x 4.33. One credit is one AI response. Tracking three engines daily works out at about 39 prompts; five engines at about 23; all ten models at four. At their default Monday/Wednesday/Friday cadence the three-engine figure rises to roughly 92. It is a budget rather than a cap, extra credits can be bought through checkout, though the unit price isn't published.

Yes, substantially, at the entry tier. AI Rankly Starter is $99/mo for 100 prompts tracked daily across three engines. AthenaHQ Starter is $295/mo, and the same three engines running daily fit about 39 prompts inside their credit allowance, roughly $7.56 per tracked prompt against $0.99. They do offer a free tier that we don't match, and their annual billing brings Starter to $245.

Ten engines on their entry plan, including Claude, Grok, Copilot, DeepSeek and Meta AI, the first two are Enterprise lines here and the rest we don't track at all. They have a genuine free tier, a public credit calculator, self-serve API and MCP add-ons, unlimited competitors, ChatGPT Ads tracking with an advertiser leaderboard, and SOC 2 Type II on a public trust centre. Their outreach tooling is also a match for ours, with contact enrichment and drafted emails.

Both companies' cheapest paid plan: AI Rankly Starter at $99 a month against AthenaHQ Starter at $295, with their credit allowance converted at three engines running daily, because three engines is exactly what our Starter covers. That is the like-for-like reading their own calculator supports: 3,600 credits, one credit per AI response, about 39 prompts. If you want five engines the comparison moves up a tier on our side, to Professional at $349 for 300 prompts daily, and stays on their Starter budget, which fits about 23 prompts once five engines are running.

On AI Rankly, no: every tracked prompt re-runs daily on every engine in the plan, on all three tiers, and the price does not move with the cadence. On AthenaHQ the cadence spends the budget, because a credit is an AI response. Their default schedule is Monday, Wednesday and Friday, running daily consumes credits about 2.3 times faster, and more credits can be bought at checkout though the unit price is not published. Worth saying plainly: daily gives you a longer, consistently measured series, not a claim that a single day's movement is significant.

Seats are a tie and competitors are theirs. AthenaHQ place no limit on competitors and include unlimited seats, on the free tier as well as on Starter. AI Rankly also has unlimited seats on every plan, with Owner, Admin and Member roles and no per-user charge, but competitor tracking is capped: five on Starter, ten on Professional, and a custom number on Enterprise. If you benchmark against a long tail of rivals rather than a shortlist, that cap is a genuine reason to prefer them, so count your list before choosing.

AI Rankly exports to CSV, Excel and JSON on every plan and ships an MCP server on every plan; the REST API, the CLI and the Looker Studio connector start on Professional at $349, so the $99 Starter compared here means exports and MCP rather than a REST API. On AthenaHQ both the API and MCP are self-serve paid add-ons on top of the $295 plan, which at least means no sales call to buy them. If programmatic access is part of the requirement, price it into both columns rather than reading it off the sticker.

Three days on the plan you are considering, running its real engines against your own brand rather than a demo account, with the prompts and competitors you configure carrying over if you stay. After that you pay monthly or annually in advance and can cancel any time from account settings, with access running to the end of the period you have paid for. Fees are not refundable for partial periods or unused prompts. AthenaHQ's equivalent is their free tier, 300 credits and five engines at no cost, which is about one prompt tracked daily but does let you look before paying.