Paid Tools Vs Free Tools – Which one is Better?
In this blog post, we’re going to discuss which tools are better: free tools or paid tools? Before going ahead in this post and explaining you. Let me answer this question first. Paid tools are better than Free tools and I have a long list of reasons that supports my statement. Even the majority of experienced & new marketers favors this statement.
Let me explain to you:
Why paid tools are better than free tools?
Think, why most of the popular software or tools are paid? Because they provide most of the data and information required. They have a nice UI, they’re easy to work with, etc. Many new marketers seek for free tools in their initial journey.
Most of the people in digital marketing space said, use free tools, free tools are effective. But here is a hard truth, every famous digital marketer use paid tools. Reasons will be known to know as you’ll walk further to this blog post. [I do not mean that you can’t drive results with free tools, but how effectively you’re doing matter.]
I met a number of new digital marketers and what they told me is, “we face a lot of problems in using free tools…“
A few reasons that I heard the most are:
- Free tools provide less or limited information
- Free tools are hard to find
- Free tools are hard to use
- Free tools are not that trustable
- Sometimes provided data by free tools are not correct
- Free tools have limited features
- Ads is a problem with most of the free tools
and much more.
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Let me explain all these statements mentioned above, one-by-one.
1. Free tools provide less or limited information
I totally agreed with this statement. I’ve not seen any free tool that provides accurate and complete information.
Let’s try to find out the backlinks of a random webpage. Here is a webpage ‘Digital Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide‘.
Sharing with you some screenshots from different tools [both paid and free] where we’d have backlinks of this webpage.
Case 1: Backlinks from ahrefs.com
Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool that has a number of features. It is a paid tool basically, but it allows you to check out the top 100 backlinks of a webpage for free. In order to explore the complete list of backlinks, you need to buy a subscription.
Now, think if you’re in the process of building backlinks then definitely you’ll need this complete list. Only 100 backlinks are not going to help you.
You can see, this tool is showing us that the selected webpage is having 7455 backlinks in total. Let’s try another popular tool.
Case 2: Backlinks from Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a free SEO tool, the screenshot is showing the number of backlinks of the same webpage. You can see, the number of backlinks here is less than the number of backlinks (1009 only) shown by Ahrefs.
Case 3: Backlinks from Small SEO Tools
Again the number of backlinks with this free tool is different and less in comparison of paid tool Ahrefs.
Three different tools and three different results for a given webpage. You can see the backlinks provided by free tools are less in number which means less opportunity for building backlinks and analyzing a webpage. It’s for the tools which are popular worldwide among digital marketers.
You can now understand the cases for less popular software.
You may also observe that free tools have a number of Ads which makes your working process gradual.
2. Free tools are hard to find
Now you know a limitation of free tools, here is the second most common problem with free tools. Free tools are hard to find. What most of the people usually do to find tools? Either they’ll perform the Google search directly or they’ll walk through a blog post talking about the list of specific tools.
Let’s consider an example, again, I want to check the backlinks for a webpage, now I need a tool that can help me to find out the backlinks. What I’ll do, I’ll perform a Google search with a phrase like ‘Free backlink checker‘. So, I did! Here is the screenshot what Google has returned to me as a result.
The very first result is an Ad, the second result belongs to Ahrefs which is a paid tool.
As mentioned, the third result is smallseotools.com which we have already discussed above, it’ll also jump you to Ahrefs when you’ll use it to explore the whole list of backlinks.
The fourth result is similar to the third one. Checking these four results have already wasted my time. Similarly, the rest of the results on this page is not worthy.
Now, it comes the second way, walking through a blog post which will be talking about the list of specific tools. It might be possible that you’d be able to find some good tool with this method because already someone has performed their research. But at the same time, many blog posts will be of promotional type.
The third drawback of free tools is:
3. Free tools are hard to use
What makes free tools are and annoying to use? It’s too many Ads. Also, they are comparatively slower than paid tools, the page speed will be gradual. One more thing is that most of the free tools ask to sign up before showing the result. It covers one more statement that “Ads is a problem with most of the free tools”.
The UI of free tools is also not good enough (except for some tools) which makes it hard to use them.
4. Free tools are not trustable
As you’ve already seen in the images above, the information provided by the free tools varies with tool-to-tool. So, it can be said that you can’t trust free tools easily.
This point also covers the next statement that ‘sometimes information provided by the free tools may be incorrect’.
The fifth most common limitation of free tools that many marketers believe is:
5. Free tools come with limited features
It’s a common problem with free tools that they come up with limited features. If one tool is helping you for keyword research then it’ll not help you in finding backlinks. If one free tool is helping you for competitor analysis, then it won’t help you for backlinks.
On the other hand, paid tools usually come with a wide range of features. With paid tools, you’re not required to bookmark a number of websites. Only two of three selective paid tools are more than enough for most of your tasks.
You know the limitations of the paid tools now, you probably have the understanding of advantages for paid tools also. Let me highlight some key points on:
Advantages of paid tools over free tools
Here are some advantes of paid tools over free tools:
- Paid tools provide most of the required information.
- Paid tools come with a number of features.
- Paid tools are easy to use. Because paid tools are popular and their tutorials to use could be easily found on the Internet.
- Paid tools are comparatively faster and one of the major reasons is, paid tools are Ad-free.
- Paid tools could be trusted (not all). For example, Ahrefs could be trusted for backlinks because they have the second-best crawler after Google. I simply mean that paid tools invest in themselves to make them better.
Final words to conclude
With this blog post, we can conclude that paid tools are really better and worthy to use than free tools. Free tools are time-consuming, provide less information, are not easy to use. On the other hand, paid tools have numerous features, they are easy to use, a lot of information and tutorials are available for paid tools because they are popular.
The great thing about paid tools is they come up with a number of features all at one place with easy to use UI, also ad-free. On the other hand paid tools shows too many ads makes it hard to use the tool, using a free tool with ads is a hassle. Ads slow down your working process.
You can’t take a decision on behalf of a single tool, either it’s paid or free. You always need to be smart. I’ll always recommend you to go with paid tools. Paid tools save your time, efforts, and energy. You should utilize your time, energy, and efforts in some other innovative task.
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