Alternative · researched 26 July 2026

A Profound alternative for teams that bill per project

Profound is the category leader and it is a serious product. It is also priced for teams who have made AI visibility a standing budget line. If you run client work per project rather than per month, the economics never quite fit. Here is the honest comparison — including when you should stay with Profound.

Sailiently in one minute

Sailiently answers one question — does AI recommend you? — and then helps you change the answer. The AI Visibility Tracker measures your buyers’ real questions across six engines and tells you where you are cited, mentioned, absent, or where nobody owns the answer yet. Citation Radar shows the open web those answers are drawn from. The GEO Optimization tools then audit the competitor pages that won, and draft the page that beats them. Re-run and see what moved.

What sets it apart against Profound and the rest of the category: it is pay-per-use — $1 = 1 credit, no subscription, a quiet month costs nothing — and it ends in a fix, not a dashboard. Every score is reproducible: paste any URL, including a rival’s, and check it yourself.

AI Visibility TrackerCitation RadarGEO Optimization15 free credits, no card

What Profound costs, and what that buys

Profound's own pricing page is demo-led, so figures below come from dated third-party sources rather than a live checkout. Treat them as reported, and confirm in a demo.

PlanReported priceNotes
Starterreported ~$99/moChatGPT only, around 50 tracked prompts (multiple reviews, May–June 2026).
Growthreported ~$399/moAbout 100 prompts across three answer engines, single brand workspace.
Lite / Standardreported ~$499/mo3 seats, unlimited domains, 24,000 responses analysed monthly (Arvow, May 2026).
EnterprisecustomThird-party reviews in 2026 place enterprise deployments from roughly $2,000 to $5,000+ per month.

Sources disagree, which is itself worth knowing: one 2026 review notes Profound does not publish official pricing and routes buyers to a demo. Verify before you budget.

Where the gap usually shows up

The engine you need is usually one tier up

Reviewers repeatedly note the entry plan tracks ChatGPT only — the moment you want Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews you are on the higher tier. Sailiently measures across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode with no tier to climb.

Prompt quotas price the experiment

Tracked-prompt limits mean you ration what you ask. With pay-per-use you decide what a question is worth, job by job.

Monitoring is the product

Profound's strength is intelligence and reporting depth. Turning that into a changed page is still your job — Sailiently's audit hands you a ranked fix list and the rewrite hands you a draft.

What Sailiently does instead

Why Sailiently

Six engines, no tier to climb, and a fix at the end

  • All six engines in every job. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode — not ChatGPT on the entry plan and the rest one tier up.
  • No prompt quota rationing your questions. You decide what a question is worth, job by job, rather than budgeting against a monthly allowance.
  • A full site pass costs about $85, once. Not $399 every month, whether you used it or not.
  • The deliverable is the work, not the dashboard. An impact-ranked fix list and a publish-ready draft grounded in your own content.

Start with the Tracker

Every question the AI Visibility Tracker measures comes back as one of four states: It runs across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, over multiple passes, because a single query is noisy.

CITED  MENTIONED  ABSENT  OPEN  

A ten-prompt, six-engine run is 15 credits; thirty prompts is 35, or 45 with the LLM Mentions add-on, which shows the domains AI keeps drawing on across your whole category — including sites you would never have thought to check. That is what turns outreach into something targeted rather than guesswork.

Then fix what it found

Sailiently is pay-per-use. There is no monthly fee and nothing to cancel. You run a job, it costs credits, and the output is work you can hand to a client — measured across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode.

JobCostWhat you get back
Site CheckFreeCrawler-by-crawler access matrix — can AI engines reach you at all.
AI Visibility run15–45 creditsYour buyers' questions across six engines, multi-pass. 10 prompts × 6 engines is 15; 30 prompts is 35, or 45 with the LLM Mentions add-on.
URL Audit5 creditsPer-engine readability score for one page, with the evidence behind every factor and a ranked fix list.
Gap Analysis5 creditsBenchmarks your page against named competitor pages, gap by gap.
Page Rewrite10 creditsA publish-ready draft grounded strictly in your own content. Never auto-published.
Audit + Rewrite together12 creditsThe pair, priced below buying them separately.
Citation Radar5–20 creditsCitations or Mentions 5 each; Rankings or AI Overviews 10 each; Citations + Rankings 15; All-in-One 20.

$1 = 1 credit. Volume bundles: 100 credits for $85 · 250 credits for $175 · 500 credits for $350 · 1,000 credits for $700. A seven-page site pass is 7 × 12 = 84 credits ($84 at list), so the 100-credit bundle at $85 covers it with credits to spare. Every account starts with 15 free credits and no card.

Where Profound is genuinely stronger

We would rather you buy the right tool than buy ours. These are real advantages:

Who should switch, and who should stay

Switch if…

You run client work per project, you want the fix rather than the dashboard, and a four-figure monthly commitment is not something your billing model supports.

Stay if…

You are an in-house team at a large brand with a standing AI-visibility budget, you need daily tracking across hundreds of prompts, or you need enterprise procurement, SSO and a named account manager.

Don’t take our word for it — reproduce it

Every signal we measure is a checkable fact: crawler access, structured data, server-rendered content, sitemap declaration. Paste any URL — ours, theirs, or a client’s — and reproduce the result. A Site Check is free and needs no card.

What we do not claim

Frequently asked questions

Is Sailiently a direct replacement for Profound?

Not in every case, and we say so above. Profound is stronger on the points listed in the section above. Sailiently replaces it well if you want per-project economics and a fix list rather than a monitoring dashboard.

How much does Sailiently cost?

There is no subscription. $1 = 1 credit. A URL audit is 5 credits, a gap analysis 5, a page rewrite 10. A seven-page site pass is 7 × 12 = 84 credits ($84 at list), so the 100-credit bundle at $85 covers it with credits to spare. Every account starts with 15 free credits and no card.

Which AI engines do you measure?

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. All six are included; there are no per-engine add-ons.

Do you guarantee I will get cited?

No, and you should be wary of any tool that does. Citation depends on factors beyond your page, including off-domain authority we do not measure. We report what is measurable and hand you the highest-impact fixes.

Do credits expire?

Credits are bought as bundles and drawn down as you run jobs. There is no monthly fee underneath them, so there is nothing to cancel if you go a month without a project.

Try it on the page you were going to audit anyway

Run a free Site Check, then spend 5 credits on a URL Audit and compare the output to what Profound gives you.

Start free — 15 creditsSee how it compares
About this comparison. Everything stated here about Profound is drawn from that company’s own public pages and from dated third-party reviews and round-ups, gathered on the date shown at the top of this page. We have not purchased or independently tested every plan described. Pricing, packaging, engine coverage and features in this category change frequently, and figures are reported rather than verified by us. Always check the vendor’s own live pricing page before making a decision — the date on this page tells you when we looked, not that the information is still current. We correct errors promptly: if anything here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will fix it. No liability is accepted for errors or omissions, or for decisions taken on the basis of this page. Details of Sailiently’s own pricing and behaviour are accurate as at the same date and can be verified on our pricing page.