Frase vs Surfer

Not interested in the typical product comparison? Skip to “Why Frase“

You’re probably looking for a platform that can streamline your SEO content creation process–from content brief, to writing, to optimization. Both Frase and SurferSEO can provide you with those features and workflows.

Here are a few common reasons why our customers chose Frase over Surfer:

Lower Cost and the Power of Unlimited

Frase is much more cost-effective. This matters both to self-employed practitioners on a tight budget and larger teams needing to scale.

Frase’s Basic plan offers 30 document credits for $45/mo. You have to pay Surfer $119/mo to get that tier. That’s more than twice the price.

FraseSurfer
PlanBasicPro
Document Credits3030
Monthly Subscription$45$119
Cost per Document$1.5$3.9

Frase’s Team plan offers unlimited document credits for $115/mo. Surfer doesn’t offer an unlimited plan, but you can pay $239/mo for 70 credits.

FraseSurfer
PlanTeamBusiness
Document CreditsUnlimited70
Monthly Subscription$119$239
Cost per DocumentInfinitely scalable$3.4

Fully Featured AI Writer

AI is now good enough to truly add value to the writer by expanding content, rewriting paragraphs, summarizing information, and more.

With the AI Writer, you can:

A. Generate New Content

– Generate full drafts out of an outline

– Use templates to generate content in any format (blog intro, product descriptions, etc)

B. Rewrite Existing Content

– Rewrite your content or your competitors’ content

C. Expand on Existing Content

– Use the AI Writer to continue your train of thought or write your next paragraph for you

Surfer does not provide an AI Writer as part of their offering. You can use Surfer inside Jarvis (a separate AI writer tool), but that will cost you double the price as you have to pay for 2 different tools.

On the other hand, Frase provides an AI Writer natively as part of the core offering. Because Frase uses in-house AI technology, we can provide this feature at a much lower cost than competition.

More Expansive Research

While Frase has evolved to become a popular SEO-focused tool, it was originally conceived as a more general research tool. For this reason, the Frase editor is packed with research-oriented features, such as:

  • Access full text from the SERP, also broken down by sections
  • Automatically cluster topics, and expand into related topics
  • Research questions from Quora, Reddit, and People Also Ask
  • Research topics from Wikipedia via concept map visualization
  • Research news and related sources
  • And more

Most of our competitors, including Surfer, are not that heavy into research features. Oftentimes, it is not enough to simply recommend topics for SEO – you actually need to dig deeper into what those topics mean, and how they are used. Frase looks beyond SEO-driven recommendations, and provides a wider research toolset.

But it’s not just about features

Let’s be honest: product comparison pages like this are usually biased. When bloggers create them, they just favor the option with the best affiliate commissions. When vendors create them, their tool undoubtedly wins. Yet, people will still ask us: how’s Frase better than SurferSEO?

We believe customers not just buy features, but also buy brands they can trust and invest in long-term. So instead of trying of going too hard comparing both tools side-by-side, here are a few reasons as of why we believe you will love working with us:

Frase was founded in Boston back in 2016 when AI and NLP technologies were scarce and open-source libraries barely existed. We had no choice but to create our own technology.

Fast forward five years, AI and NLP are quickly becoming democratized. It is easier than ever to build a Frase competitor using third-party APIs. Yet, we believe owning our technology is one of Frase’s biggest competitive advantages.

While everyone uses Google and IBM Watson to do topic analysis, we developed our own Named Entity Recognition system. While everyone uses GPT-3 for content generation, we developed our own AI model. And the list goes on. 

Why does this matter to our customers? By developing our own technology, we can:

  • Provide more affordable prices: since we don’t pay third-party APIs, we have more flexibility around pricing.
  • Provide more custom features: we are able to continuously fine-tune our models and features to fit our customers’ needs. 
  • Be a more sustainable company: we are building to be the best company long-term, we don’t believe in technology shortcuts.

Marketers are increasingly using AI-powered content writers to speed up content creation, including long-form. However, AI-generated content usually lacks the breadth and depth that SEO-optimized content requires. For this reason, marketers end up having to combine AI writers with SEO optimization tools.

However, using SurferSEO in tandem with another AI copywriting tool is not ideal for obvious reasons:

  • You end up paying double in subscription fees
  • Your productivity suffers due to the back and forth

Frase is a unique solution because it aims to offer the best from both worlds: a robust combination of SEO optimization and AI writing. This translates into significant cost savings, and gains in productivity.

While we serve SEOs and analytical minds, we will always strive to build a tool to support the creative process. We don’t necessarily believe in the data-driven tactics behind “creating SEO content”, but rather in empowering marketers to become more creative and strategic.

And most of this creativity gets funneled through the Frase Editor. Instead of building complex dashboards and reports, Frase tries to centralize most functionality in a word processor. We like to think of Frase as a next-generation Microsoft Word – built for SEOs and marketers.

There are a lot of layers to a successful content marketing operation: the in-house marketing team, the agency, the freelance writers, etc. At Frase, we don’t want to only serve the larger teams and corporations, but we also aim to be accessible to the smaller stakeholders. Whether you are a Fortune 100 company, or a 1-person agency, we believe in self-service and flexible pricing.

In addition, we believe in the importance of unlimited. Most AI and SEO tools will not be able to provide customers with unlimited usage due to their reliance on third-party APIs. At Frase, our Team Plan provides unlimited usage at only $114/mo. This is a big deal for any customer who truly needs to scale content operations without breaking the bank.

And beyond all of that…the main reason you should consider Frase is because we take care of our customers:

→ G2: 143 reviews with 4.8 rating (source)

→ Capterra: 296 reviews with 4.8 rating (source)

→ Appsumo: the biggest launch in Appsumo’s history (source)

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