Otterly AI vs Profound vs Peec AI: Who Actually Publishes a Price

1Otterly vs Profound vs Peec AI: the short answer

All three measure roughly the same thing: how often AI answer engines name your brand for the questions your buyers ask, and how that trends against competitors. They are close substitutes on capability. They are not close substitutes on transparency, and right now that is the axis that separates them.

• Cheapest published way in: Otterly Lite at $29 a month. Fifteen prompts is narrow, and Claude is not included.
• Best budget certainty at mid-size: Profound. Two published tiers and a custom Enterprise plan you can forecast against without a sales call.
• Largest advertised allowance: Peec AI, at 350 prompts on the tier it shows. You will have to ask what it costs.
• Cheapest per prompt at volume: Otterly Premium, at $1.22 against Profound Growth’s $3.99 — before add-on engines.

2The prompt-economics table

Every tool in this category meters on tracked prompts rather than seats, which makes prompt allowance the real unit of cost. Here is what each vendor publishes on its own page. Blank cells are the finding, not an omission.

Sources: each vendor’s own pricing page, fetched July 27, 2026 with a proxy renderer because all three are JavaScript-gated — otterly.ai/pricing, tryprofound.com/pricing, peec.ai/pricing. Per-prompt figures are ours, calculated from the published plan price and allowance, before any add-on engines. Prices in this category move constantly; re-check before you buy.

The pattern worth naming: allowance and price move independently, and the two published ladders disagree about what a prompt is worth. At the entry tier Otterly and Profound are within five cents of each other per prompt. At the next step up they diverge by more than three times, because Profound doubles the allowance for four times the money while Otterly quadruples it for two and a half times the money. Which of those is better value depends entirely on how many questions you actually need tracked, so work that out before comparing entry prices at all.

3Who publishes a price, and why it matters

We fetched the pricing page of every vendor named across this cluster. Seven of ten render a readable figure, though two of them do not render it where you would look: Ahrefs keeps Brand Radar’s numbers in the pricing page’s plan data rather than on the product page, and Rankscale prices in euros inside an embedded plan object, so a scan for dollar signs finds nothing at all.

4The add-on line that moves the bill more than the tier

Otterly is the only vendor of the three that publishes what extra engines cost, which makes it the only place you can see how large this line item really is. Its plans include four engines. Claude, Google Gemini and Google AI Mode are extra, priced per tier.

Claude runs two to three times the Gemini or AI Mode rate at every tier. In practice that means an Otterly Lite plan doubles from $29 to $58 the moment your buyers research in Claude, and a Premium plan goes from $489 to $928. Two further details from the same page: extra prompts are not sold on Lite at all, and a Standard plan can add up to 300 extra prompts before it is moved to Premium.

None of this is a criticism of Otterly. It is the opposite: Otterly is the only vendor here whose final bill you can compute before you sign up. The uncomfortable implication is for the rest of the field. If the one company that discloses its add-on rates charges this much for a second-tier engine, assume the vendors that disclose nothing have a comparable line waiting in the quote, and ask which engines are included rather than supported.

5The question that matters more than any of these prices

Before you pick on price, ask each vendor how it handles retrieval mode, because it determines what the score means. An AI engine can answer from what the model absorbed during training, or from what it fetched from the web seconds ago. Those are different measurements with different half-lives.

You do not have to take a competitor’s word for the distinction. HubSpot documents it plainly on its own AEO Grader page, describing how the tool runs pre-set queries: ChatGPT and Gemini pull from training data; Perplexity pulls from live search. A retrieval-on score reflects whichever pages currently rank, so it moves fast and can vanish just as fast. A retrieval-off score reflects whether the model itself associates your brand with the category, which is slow to build and durable. A single blended number averages the two.

Three questions to put to whichever vendor you shortlist: do you label which retrieval mode produced each measurement, do you record the model version, and what does the chart do when a run fails? A tool that silently logs an API failure as a zero will show you a collapse that never happened.

6A dedicated comparison for each tool

This page is the summary. Each tool has a longer teardown with its own verified pricing, the specific reasons teams leave it, and the alternatives that actually fit that gap.

• Otterly alternatives — the only vendor whose full bill is computable in advance, and what the add-on ladder does to the $29 headline.
• Profound alternatives — what you give up on price transparency when you leave the vendor with the clearest published ladder.
• Peec AI alternatives — 350 prompts advertised, no price rendered, and the planted-review problem in the threads that rank for this query.
• Scrunch alternatives — 125 prompts and 4 LLMs at entry against 9 on Enterprise. The engine-coverage cliff is the story.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar alternatives — an add-on to a suite you may not want, and how suite-attached economics compare to standalone.
• HubSpot AEO alternatives — $45 to $50 verified, but 25 prompts across 3 engines, still in beta.
• Rankscale alternatives — 11 engines from €99, but priced in euros and metered at roughly 0.25 credits per engine per prompt.
• AthenaHQ alternatives — a genuinely free tier with Claude included, then a jump straight to $295 with nothing in between.
• Profound vs Peec AI — the strict two-way version of this comparison, for anyone weighing only those two.

For the category as a whole, including the free manual method that replaces a paid tool below roughly twenty prompts, see the best AI brand visibility tools in 2026.

7How to choose between them

Frequently asked questions