Marketing

We gave Ahrefs the superlative of Best Overall because it’s a comprehensive, all-in-one tool. It can help with rank monitoring, competitor research, backlink analysis, keyword research and more.

That being said, we struggled to assess the user experience of Ahrefs because there isn’t a free plan or free trial. It does have a set of free tools, called the Webmaster Tools, which helps with basic SEO tasks, such as identifying broken links. After signing up for these tools, we found them to be similar to Google’s free tools (more on these later). As we have used Google’s tools in the past, Ahrefs tools were easy to learn. However, these tools are just the tip of the iceberg of what Ahrefs offers, so we didn’t get to conduct a full assessment.

Upon looking at Textline’s prices, we were concerned that it was two or three times more expensive than the other providers on our list. However, after testing the platform, we now understand that it provides many more features than the others, putting its higher price tag into perspective.

Textline has a few unique features that we enjoyed testing. For one, it has a universal inbox. You can use this inbox to have two-way text conversations with customers. However, it can also pull in direct messages (DMs) from your social media accounts so that you can see and answer them all in one place. We also liked that you can customize the text messages. For example, you can greet the recipient with their name to make it more personalized.