Majestic SEO alternative: what you gain and lose by switching metrics
Swapping tools means swapping yardsticks. Before you move a spreadsheet of Trust Flow scores to another index, it helps to know which of your old conclusions will survive.
LinkBuildingStat research team ·
Side by side, as far as we can state it
Left column: what we know of our own API from the product reference. Right column: what to check on your Majestic account before you decide.
Topic
LinkBuildingStat
Check on your side
Score
DR, 0-100, own metric, log of referring domains
What Trust Flow and Citation Flow mean for your reports
Index
Own crawler, 181,132,097 domains, refreshed about monthly
How often your current plan says its index updates
Access
REST API, JSON, CORS open, free tier with no key
Whether you use the API or only the web interface
Price
Prepaid, $0.0001 per credit, no subscription
Your monthly plan divided by lookups you really run
Unit of billing
One call, up to 1,000 rows
How your plan counts rows or analysis units
Why the scores will not line up
They are different animals. Our DR uses one input, the number of referring domains, passed through a logarithm, so it grows slowly and cannot be inflated by a pile of links from one site.
Majestic's flow metrics are built from its own graph and weigh the quality of neighbours, which is a different philosophy, and we are not going to describe its internals beyond that. If your reports rank rivals by Trust Flow, expect some of those ranks to reorder when you switch, and treat that as information about the metric rather than about the rivals.
So rerun your last benchmark with both columns for one month. Keep the old score, add ours, and read the correlation by eye before you retire anything.
A parallel run, in four steps
01
Pick twenty domains you already know well
Include some you trust and some you consider weak. A known set lets you judge the new column by sanity, not by faith.
02
Pull DR for all of them
The bulk_dr action takes up to 2,000 domains per call for 1 credit, so the whole experiment costs a hundredth of a cent.
03
Rank both ways
Sort once by your current score and once by DR. Note which five domains moved the most.
04
Explain every big mover
Open refdomains for each. Often the story is a handful of links from one network, which a log scale of referring domains will not reward.
On the free side
People search for a majestic seo free alternative expecting a clone of the whole product, much as people comparing the Ahrefs API expect a mirror image. What is free here is narrower: the domain, overview, stats and suggest actions. They size a profile and need no key, which is enough for a sanity check before you pay for anything.
Do not switch yet if any of these is true
Your clients are used to Trust Flow in a monthly PDF and would ask why it vanished
You rely on historic indexes that our monthly refresh does not replace
You need topical categories for every link, which this API does not list
Your contract names a specific vendor's score as a deliverable
Our reading
A cheap second column, not a drop-in clone
Use us as an independent size-of-profile measure alongside whatever you run today. Retire the old tool only after a month of agreement you have checked by eye.
DR here equals round(100 x log(ref_domains+1) / log(2x10^7))