Comparison
AthenaHQ alternatives, compared honestly
AthenaHQ publishes Free (Essential), then $295/mo (Starter). We publish $99 for ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. This page sets the rest of both lists side by side, including the rows where they win — every figure read from their own pages on August 10, 2026.
- No account to compare
- Every figure sourced
- Read August 10, 2026
First, what AthenaHQ is good at
The most generous free plan in the category by a distance — a real free tier with five assistants and 300 responses, not a countdown — and the only entry tier that meters responses instead of capping prompts, so you can track as many questions as you like and spend the budget where it matters. Unlimited seats with role-based access make it the natural pick for a larger marketing team.
AthenaHQ's free plan is the most useful thing about it: five assistants and 300 responses, permanently, with no card. Very few vendors here let you see the product working on your own brand before a purchase order exists.
The step up is the part to plan for. Starter is $295 a month — the second-highest published entry price in this comparison — and the extra models beyond the eight named are “available upon request”, which means unpriced. The credit model is genuinely flexible, but it also means your monthly cost is a function of how many answers you generate rather than a flat allowance.
You can read all of that on their own pricing page, which is where the figures below came from.
AthenaHQ and Mentionify,
on what each one publishes
Not a feature checklist — the rows a buyer argues about after the first invoice. What AthenaHQ meters at the entry price: No prompt cap — topics are unlimited. The meter is credits, where one credit is one AI response: 3,600 a month on Starter, 300 on the free plan.
| AthenaHQ | Mentionify | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | Free (Essential), then $295/mo (Starter). | Free (Snapshot), then $99/mo (Micro). Top published tier $1,499/mo, plus a custom builder. |
| Buy without a sales call | Yes. Enterprise is sales-led. | Yes, by card on Stripe's hosted checkout. No sales call exists to have. |
| Free access | A genuine free plan — Essential, 300 credits, plus $25 of free credit — and an email-gated homepage audit. | A free plan with no card — 20 credits a month — and a no-account checker that runs one question against Gemini for a work email. |
| Assistants at the entry price | The free plan names five: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude. Starter names eight, adding Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot and Grok. | Three: ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, on every paid plan including the $99 one. |
| Full coverage, and what it costs | Those eight, with further models “available upon request” and unpriced. | Those three, and no others. We do not measure Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek or Meta AI — the pipeline asks the three assistants directly and there is no page-scraping path in it. |
| What the entry price meters | No prompt cap — topics are unlimited. The meter is credits, where one credit is one AI response: 3,600 a month on Starter, 300 on the free plan. | A credit bucket, not a prompt cap: 350 credits a month on the entry plan, spent as you choose. One check is one topic on one assistant — Gemini 1 credit, ChatGPT 2, Claude 3. |
| Seats | Unlimited, with role-based access. | Unlimited, free. Projects and tracked competitors are unlimited too. |
| Shows the whole answer | Yes — the raw response text per answer. CSV export is paid-only. | Yes — the complete answer text for every run, exportable to XLSX with the rest of the dataset. |
| Shows cited sources | Yes — a sources page by domain and by page, with citation share and first-seen dates. | Yes — every cited domain and page, per assistant, with the searches the model actually ran. |
| Competitor tracking | Yes — unlimited, auto-discovered, with historical backfill. | Yes, unlimited — and each competitor's domain is verified by fetching the site and requiring the page to name the company before it can key a row. |
| Term | Monthly or annual, badged “(17% off)”. No minimum term is published. | Monthly or annual (−15%), self-serve cancel, and a full refund within 14 days if no credits were spent. |
| Top published tier | Custom, under a master service agreement. | $1,499/mo, published. |
Where the AthenaHQ figures come from. Read on August 10, 2026 from their own public pages — pricing, product and help centre — never from a review site or from anyone’s comparison page, ours included. A cell reading “not published” is something AthenaHQ does not state anywhere, and we have not signed up for their product, so every claim about how it behaves is their own description of it. Check a price before you rely on it. Sources: the free Essential tier, the $295 Starter price and the credit meter.
What $295 actually buys,
on both sides.
Their free plan is better than ours. Their paid plan costs three times more than ours.
AthenaHQ — Essential free, then Starter $295/mo
- The free tier is real and permanent: 300 credits, five assistants named — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude — plus $25 of free credit and no card.
- Starter is $295/mo, the second-highest published entry price in this comparison.
- It meters responses rather than capping prompts: 3,600 credits a month, one credit per AI response, and topics are unlimited.
- Eight assistants at Starter. Anything beyond those eight is “available upon request”, which means unpriced.
- Unlimited seats with role-based access, and competitor tracking with historical backfill.
Mentionify — Snapshot free, then Micro $99/mo
- Our free plan is 20 credits a month, plus a no-account checker that runs one question against Gemini for a work email. That is a much smaller free tier than theirs.
- Micro is $99/mo — three assistants, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
- 350 credits a month, metered the same way theirs is: one credit is one topic on one assistant, weighted 1 / 2 / 3. Topics are unlimited here too.
- About 13 questions a week on all three assistants, or roughly 27 a week on Gemini and ChatGPT.
- Unlimited seats, and every competitor domain verified against the live web before it can key a row.
Where this lands against us. On free plans this is not a contest and we will not pretend otherwise: 300 responses across five assistants beats 20 credits by a distance, and if you are still working out whether this category is worth paying for, use theirs. Both of us meter responses rather than capping prompts, which makes the paid step unusually easy to compare — and the comparison does not flatter us. $295 for 3,600 responses is about 8 cents each; $99 for 350 credits is about 28 cents for a Gemini response and three times that for a Claude one. Per response they are roughly three and a half times cheaper than we are. What $99 buys is not a cheaper meter, it is the smallest ticket in this comparison that has ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude on it at all.
Who should buy AthenaHQ,
and who should buy us.
Buy AthenaHQ if
- Anyone not ready to pay yet. The most generous free tier in this category, permanent rather than a countdown, and it takes no card.
- Larger marketing teams that need role-based access rather than a shared login.
- Programmes tracking a lot of topics at once — the meter counts responses, so a wide topic list costs nothing until it is run.
Buy Mentionify if
- Buyers at the paid step who would rather pay $99 for the three assistants their buyers open than $295 for eight.
- Anyone who wants to spend the difference on frequency: at a third of the price, the same budget asks the same question far more often.
- Teams that want every competitor on the board proved — the domain is fetched and the page has to name the company before the row exists.
Where we are different
If the free plan is doing what you need, stay on it — we would say the same about ours. The comparison only starts at the paid step, and there it is $295 against $99, for three assistants instead of eight. That trade is worth it only if the three you care about are ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude and you would rather spend the difference on frequency than on surfaces. What you also get here is the arithmetic: every score breaks into five named dimensions, competitor domains are verified by fetching the site and requiring the page to name the company, and the whole answer is on screen.
Wider than AthenaHQ and us? The ten-tool comparison is ordered by entry price. Deeper? The methodology and the score.
AthenaHQ questions
What is the best AthenaHQ alternative?
That depends on which part of AthenaHQ you are replacing. The most generous free plan in the category by a distance — a real free tier with five assistants and 300 responses, not a countdown — and the only entry tier that meters responses instead of capping prompts, so you can track as many questions as you like and spend the budget where it matters. Unlimited seats with role-based access make it the natural pick for a larger marketing team. Their entry tier is Free (Essential), then $295/mo (Starter). against our $99, and the table below sets the rest of their published terms beside ours. If neither shape fits, the ten-tool comparison covers the category — several of them are cheaper than both of us.
How much does AthenaHQ cost?
Free (Essential), then $295/mo (Starter). Yes. Enterprise is sales-led. Read on August 10, 2026 from their own pricing page; check it before you rely on it, as this category reprices often.
Which AI assistants does AthenaHQ cover?
At the entry price: The free plan names five: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude. Starter names eight, adding Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot and Grok. Their full published coverage: Those eight, with further models “available upon request” and unpriced. Read those two sentences as one question — what is on the tier you would actually buy, rather than what is on the homepage.
Does Mentionify do everything AthenaHQ does?
No. AthenaHQ's published coverage is: Those eight, with further models “available upon request” and unpriced. Ours is three assistants and nothing else. If the surfaces on their list are where your buyers are, pick them — the table above is where you should be able to see that. Our trade is depth over breadth, and the “AthenaHQ and Mentionify” rows above are the specific form it takes against them.
Can I try Mentionify and AthenaHQ before deciding?
Ours is the form on this page — a buyer question and a work email, no account, and you get the answer, the score, the rival list and every cited source. On their side: A genuine free plan — Essential, 300 credits, plus $25 of free credit — and an email-gated homepage audit. Yes. Enterprise is sales-led. Run the same question through both and compare what each one shows you, because one real answer about your own brand settles more than any feature table, including the one above.
AthenaHQ or us?
Ask the question yourself.
Ask Gemini one real buyer question and see who it names. Whatever you end up deciding about AthenaHQ, this costs nothing and needs no account.
One check per visitor per day. The full version explains every field it returns, and our pricing is what tracking it daily costs.
A check tells you today.
Tracking tells you which way.
Daily runs across ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, and the movement between them — the one thing a single answer can never show you.