Frase is a capable all-in-one: it mines questions, builds briefs, drafts with AI, and scores your content against the SERP, and with Frase 2.0 it added GEO optimization for AI search engines too. But "all-in-one" is also the reason people look for alternatives. It can be more tool than you need, more manual than you want, or priced above what a single-site founder wants to spend. Here are the alternatives worth a look, grouped by what you're actually trying to replace.
We build one of the tools below (WriteGap), so treat that section with appropriate skepticism. The rest is a fair read of the category.
First, what are you replacing Frase for?
Frase does four jobs. Most people who want an alternative only care about one or two of them:
- Research + briefs — question mining and SERP-based outlines.
- AI writing — turning a brief into a draft.
- Content optimization — scoring a draft against top-ranking pages.
- GEO — optimizing for AI answers.
Pick your alternative based on the job, not the brand.
If you mainly want content optimization
Surfer SEO is the most common switch. Its Content Editor and 0–100 Content Score are cleaner and more mature than Frase's optimization side, and it starts around the same entry price. If your real use of Frase was "score my draft against the SERP," Surfer does that better. See our full WriteGap vs Surfer breakdown for where Surfer fits.
Scalenut and Clearscope are the other two names here. Scalenut is the value option (starts around $59/month) and bundles research with optimization. Clearscope is the premium pick (around $129/month) favored by content teams that care most about term coverage and reporting.
If you mainly want AI drafts that rank
Koala is the budget favorite — around $9/month, and its whole pitch is "AI articles that actually rank": pick a keyword and article type, get a SERP-aware long-form draft. Writesonic packs the widest per-article SEO feature set (schema, FAQs, internal links, GEO tracking) starting cheap. We compare these in depth in our roundup of the best AI SEO writing tools.
The catch with all of them, Frase included: they'll happily draft whatever keyword you feed them. None decides which keyword is worth writing about. That's a separate job.
If your real problem is "what do I even write?"
This is where WriteGap fits, and it's a genuinely different tool from Frase rather than a cheaper clone. Frase is on-demand: you open it, you give it a keyword, you drive the workflow. WriteGap is scheduled and decides for you — every Monday it pulls your Google Search Console data and competitors' rankings, finds the gaps worth targeting, and generates the brief and draft automatically.
The honest trade-off: WriteGap has no live optimization editor and no Content Score. It won't grade your draft term by term the way Frase or Surfer will. What it replaces isn't Frase's editor — it's the weekly manual loop of figuring out what to write and starting from a blank page.
Side by side
| Tool | Best at | Rough entry price |
|---|---|---|
| Frase | All-in-one research + brief + write + optimize | ~$45/mo |
| Surfer SEO | Content optimization (Content Score) | ~$49/mo |
| Scalenut | Research + optimization on a budget | ~$59/mo |
| Clearscope | Premium term-coverage optimization | ~$129/mo |
| Koala | Cheap SERP-aware AI drafts | ~$9/mo |
| WriteGap | Deciding what to write + drafting it, weekly | Single-site pricing |
Prices are 2026 entry rates and change often — verify before buying.
Which to pick
- Want a cleaner optimization editor? Surfer, or Clearscope if budget is no object.
- Want cheap AI drafts on demand? Koala or Writesonic.
- Want research + optimization in one budget tool? Scalenut.
- Want the whole thing to run itself and tell you what to write? WriteGap.
Frase is a good product; most people leave it not because it's bad but because they were paying for four jobs and only needed one. Figure out which of the four you actually use, then pick the tool that does that one job best for your budget.