AthenaHQ vs Profound vs Peec AI: Two Publish Prices, One Sells by Quote

Here's the fact that should decide how you read the rest of this article: of these three AI visibility tools, two publish a price and one doesn't. AthenaHQ shows real numbers: Essential is free, Starter is $295/mo on monthly billing, with nothing published in between. Peec AI publishes four tiers, Starter $95, Pro $245, Advanced $495 and a custom Enterprise, plus separate agency plans at $245, $495 and $795 a month, even though several roundups report none. Profound is the outlier: a free trial, then custom Enterprise quotes, with no base price, though its agency toggle does list add-ons such as a client workspace at +$399/mo.

That's not a footnote to work around before the "real" comparison. It is the comparison. A reader shopping this category needs a plan for all three outcomes: a credit price with a gap in it, a published ladder you have to load in a browser to see, and a sales call with no anchor. This article gives you that plan, explains what AthenaHQ's free tier buys and doesn't, is honest about where a side-by-side price table has limits, and names five alternatives, Rankscale, Otterly, HubSpot AEO, Trakkr, and Semrush, that give you a number today. For the wider category, see our AEO tools roundup, which prices all twelve monitoring platforms against a real workload rather than a headline rate.

TL;DR

What Each Tool Actually Is

Treat these as three different kinds of purchase before comparing a single feature. One feature grid for all three hides the real decision: what job you're actually hiring software to do.

AthenaHQ and Peec AI are the same kind of product: software you run yourself to see where you stand. Profound used to be that too. It isn't anymore. Its homepage now leads with "Meet your AI Marketer: Research, write, report, and collaborate with a superintelligent teammate who knows your brand," and the citation data it collects now feeds an agent rather than standing alone as a chart you read in a weekly meeting. Reviewing Profound purely on tracking features, the way older coverage still does, means reviewing a product that no longer exists in that form.

Pricing, As Published

Notice what's actually in that table. AthenaHQ and Peec AI have a number in nearly every cell. Profound has one number (the trial's prompt and platform count), a set of agency add-ons, and the rest resolves to "ask sales." That asymmetry, not a feature count, is the real story here: two vendors let you budget before a call, and one makes you take the meeting first.

AthenaHQ's Free Tier Is the Most Actionable Thing in This Comparison

Of the three, AthenaHQ's Essential plan is the only one that lets you measure your own baseline today, for nothing, before you've committed a dollar or a sales call to the category. That's worth being precise about, because "free" sells itself and the fine print is where a reader gets surprised later.

Here's exactly what you get: a one-time $25 credit grant, equal to 300 credits, no card required, and unlimited seats from day one. Unlimited seats on a free tier is unusual here; Peec AI matches it on paid tiers, but nothing else gives it away for $0. AthenaHQ's paid Starter tier prices out to roughly $0.08 per credit ($295 for 3,600 credits on monthly billing), and the free grant works out to the same rate, so the unit price doesn't change between free and paid. What changes is the volume.

AthenaHQ does state the credit-to-check conversion: its plans page says "1 credit = 1 AI response." That makes the free grant easy to size. One run of 50 prompts across 4 engines is 200 responses, so 300 free credits covers one run and a half, enough to see your baseline once but not to track anything over time. Starter's 3,600 credits cover about 18 of those runs a month, roughly every other day, and not daily. What AthenaHQ doesn't publish is a price for extra credits ("contact us"), so a daily, high-volume program can't be priced from the page. Rankscale, a competing tool, makes a similar statement (1,200 credits cover up to 4,800 tracked engine answers at its 0.25-credit rate), though its credits are weighted per engine. Our AthenaHQ alternatives guide goes deeper on this credit math against the four alternatives that publish a price in the $20 to $100 gap AthenaHQ's own ladder skips entirely.

None of that makes the free tier a bad deal. It makes it a real, usable test, with one catch you should expect going in rather than discover halfway through your first month: the grant is one-time.

Credits, Prompts, and Quotes: What a Price Table Can and Can't Show

Every comparison in this category wants to end in a clean table: three columns, one price row, done. Two of these three can be put in one, but not in the same unit, and the third can't be priced at all.

That's the honest shape of this category: one credit price with a stated conversion rate, one prompt-and-project ladder that only shows in a browser, and one product with no base price anywhere. Forcing all three into a single price-per-prompt row would still invent precision, because a credit, a prompt on a project, and an agent seat are different units. What you can compare instead is product shape: what each tool does, who it's built for, and what to ask before the opaque vendor gives you a figure.

Profound's Pivot: Agent vs Tracker, Not Tracker vs Tracker vs Tracker

The most important thing to get right here is that this isn't really a three-way comparison of the same kind of product. AthenaHQ and Peec AI are trackers. Profound is an agent. Judging it purely on "how many platforms does it track" is the same category error as judging a bookkeeper's software against an outsourced accountant: one gives you data to read, the other does work and hands you an output.

Profound's standout feature makes the point concretely. Its FactCheck Agent traces a false or outdated claim about your brand back to the publisher repeating it, drafts a correction, and tracks whether that correction actually gets updated. Neither AthenaHQ nor Peec AI traces a claim to its publisher or drafts a correction. AthenaHQ's Oracle discrepancy detection flags when an AI answer states something wrong about you, and Peec AI checks ChatGPT's claims against facts you set, but both stop at detection and neither drafts a fix. That's a genuinely different job, and it's why a side-by-side feature grid undersells Profound on tracking depth while missing what it's actually for.

Use this table to self-identify before booking any demo:

Our LLM citation tracking tools guide digs further into this citation-versus-mention distinction, and our AI brand monitoring roundup covers the correction angle Profound's FactCheck Agent competes on against Goodie's similar Brand Command feature.

How to Buy When One of Three Won't Show You a Base Price

This is the part most comparisons skip, and the most useful thing here if you're evaluating Profound, or planning an Enterprise conversation with any of the three.

Once you have a figure from Profound, normalize before comparing: reduce every quote to cost per tracked prompt per month (if a vendor won't state the volume, you can't do this math, which is informative on its own), ask for the quote itemized rather than bundled, and ask Profound whether the AI Marketer's drafting work counts against your allowance separately from tracking. Use AthenaHQ's $295 Starter tier as your anchor, not your ceiling: if a quote lands well above it, make the rep explain why. A quote in hand from a vendor that does publish a price, Rankscale at $20 or Otterly at $29, gives you real leverage even if you never use it. Profound vs Peec AI works through the same exercise for the two-way case, converting Peec AI's ladder to cost per tracked prompt and listing nine questions for the call.

Engines, Seats, and Agency Fit

Whether AthenaHQ's platform breadth matters depends on where your buyers actually ask questions: a team whose customers mostly use Gemini and ChatGPT gets less value from Claude and Grok coverage than one selling into a more technical base. If your shape is an agency running several client brands, Peec AI is the only one built around that from day one, price aside; AthenaHQ's unlimited seats help a single team collaborate but don't solve multi-client billing.

A Different Purchase: Placement Services Aren't Ranked Here

Everything above is software you run yourself to measure where you already stand. A separate category of vendor sells placement instead: you pay a service to get your brand mentioned on a third-party page AI assistants already cite, rather than tracking your own visibility. Noble and Anchorial both work this way, and neither belongs ranked against AthenaHQ, Profound, or Peec AI; you'd be comparing a subscription you run yourself to a service that buys you coverage on pages you don't own.

The case for paying for placement rests on one claim: that most of what AI assistants cite comes from third-party pages rather than a brand's own site. Noble states 85% on its own homepage with no linked study or sample size, a marketing claim, not a measurement. DerivateX, an agency that sells citation placement work, publishes a disclosed methodology finding 88.4% across 233 recommendations in 40 B2B SaaS categories, more useful because the method is visible, but DerivateX also has a direct commercial interest in that finding. We found no measurement of this from a party with nothing to sell. If placement is what you actually want, see our AI citation placement services guide and the dedicated Noble vs Anchorial comparison instead of treating either as a substitute for the three tools above.

The Alternatives That Do Publish a Price

If what you need this week is a number for a budget, five tools in this category will give you one without a demo call.

Semrush's own pages disagree on three things as of 5 October 2026: the pricing page advertises a seven-day free trial while the knowledge-base article for this toolkit says it doesn't offer one, the pricing page prices extra users from $45 while the knowledge base says each teammate needs a $99 license, and the pricing page says $99 is billed annually while the knowledge base says "$99 per month." Ask sales rather than assume. HubSpot AEO's missing Google AI Overviews coverage matters more than it looks if your buyers lean on Google's AI results specifically. Against this group, AthenaHQ's free tier still wins on cost and Starter beats all five on raw platform count, but it doesn't win on predictability between $0 and $295: Rankscale, Trakkr, and Semrush all land in the exact band AthenaHQ's ladder skips. Our AthenaHQ alternatives guide runs the full math against all 11 priced competitors, not just these five.

When Each Is the Right Call

AthenaHQ fits a team that wants to start measuring real AI visibility today, for nothing, before committing a dollar or a sales call. Unlimited seats and 11+ platform coverage make the free tier genuinely useful against a field where Profound and Conductor publish no base price until you talk to someone. The trade-off: nothing sits between that free tier and $295 a month, and while the 1-credit-per-response rate is clear, extra credits are quote-only. Need a predictable number at $50 or $100 instead? Rankscale, HubSpot AEO, or Trakkr get you there faster.

Profound fits a team that has already decided it wants an agent doing research, drafting, and correction work against its visibility data, not a chart to read, and that has the patience for a custom Enterprise negotiation over a self-serve checkout. The FactCheck Agent is genuinely different from anything AthenaHQ or Peec AI offers. The limitation: there's no entry point past the free trial at any size, so a team that wants to try ongoing tracking for a month can't do that with Profound, and every number you'd eventually pay is negotiated, not compared in advance.

Peec AI fits an agency or marketing team already managing several brands that wants unlimited seats and centralized billing from the first tier, with a live signup button on three of its four plans, published agency pricing, plus multi-country tracking as a named feature rather than something to ask about. The limitation is its model rules: you pick 3 engines on a self-serve plan, Perplexity is a paid add-on, and Claude is Enterprise-only on brand plans, so confirm Claude or Grok coverage directly if you need it.

Decision Framework

What to Do Next

Before you book a demo with Profound or start a signup flow with Peec AI or AthenaHQ, write down your real workload: how many prompts a month you'd track, which engines matter to your buyers, how many brands you're managing, and whether SSO is a requirement. Take that list, plus AthenaHQ's published $295 Starter tier as an anchor, into any sales conversation instead of walking in with just the vendor's pitch deck. Run AthenaHQ's free Essential tier for a couple of weeks first regardless of which tool you end up on; watching how fast 300 credits move will teach you more than any pricing page can.

If you're still sorting out whether a tracking subscription or a paid placement service solves your actual problem, our guide to paying for AI citations walks through that distinction. And if you haven't yet set a baseline for what "good" visibility looks like in your category, how to measure AI visibility is the right next read before any of these three gets a cent of your budget.

If your shortlist doesn't match this trio, pick the head-to-head that does: Profound vs Scrunch vs Goodie swaps AthenaHQ and Peec AI for two vendors that publish prices and act on what they find, Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit vs Profound vs HubSpot AEO swaps them for a per-domain toolkit from Semrush (now part of Adobe) and HubSpot's standalone beta, and Peec AI vs Otterly vs Rankscale drops Profound and AthenaHQ to compare Peec AI with two other self-serve trackers. For the field around each vendor, see Profound alternatives and Peec AI alternatives.