Key takeaways
- The cheapest sticker price is not the cheapest useful plan. Otterly's $29 Lite plan has 15 prompts. Rankscale's $99 Pro is the first tier we could confirm with all major engines. Peec starts at $95 for 50 prompts.
- ZipTie has the most honest pricing model: roughly one cent per prompt per engine check, with seats, projects and competitors never billed.
- Otterly is the easiest to start with, Peec is the cleanest for teams, Rankscale has the broadest engine list, and ZipTie suits people who want to tune cost to the prompt.
- Several numbers in popular roundups (Peec at ~EUR 85, ZipTie at $69, Rankscale at $20) are out of date or depend on a configurator. Check each vendor's pricing page before buying.
- All four are monitors. None of them writes and publishes content for you.
Why the prices in roundups don't match
I went through the official pricing pages for all four tools, and the gap between what roundups say and what vendors list is bigger than I expected. Peec used to be quoted at about EUR 85 and now shows USD. ZipTie gets quoted as $69 or $42.75 depending on which article you read, and its own page says the price depends on a configurator. Rankscale is usually quoted at $20, but the plans we could see start at $99 for Pro.
So treat every price below as a snapshot of the vendors' own pages, and confirm before you pay. Prompt count matters more than the headline number anyway, because a tracker that covers 15 prompts is a demo, not a program.
The four tools at a glance
| Tool | Entry plan | Prompts or usage | Engines on entry plan | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | Lite, $29/mo | 15 prompts | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot | Solo marketers validating the category |
| Peec AI | Starter, $95/mo | 50 prompts | 3 models of your choice from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini, Naver AI | In-house teams, multi-language work |
| ZipTie | Starter from $25.65/mo | About $0.01 per prompt per engine check | Up to 7 engines, all priced the same | Technical SEOs who want control |
| Rankscale | Pro, $99/mo ($84 yearly) | 1,200 credits, up to 4,800 answers | ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral, Claude, Copilot | Engine breadth |
Otterly.AI: cheapest way in, but watch the prompt cap
Otterly is the one most budget roundups put first, and for good reason. Lite is $29 a month, tracking is daily on every plan, and team members are unlimited. Core engines are ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Claude, AI Mode and Gemini are paid add-ons, so the real price climbs if you need them.
Lite also bundles more than you would expect at that price: sentiment, citation tracking, a query fan-out tool, a prompt research tool, a GEO audit and a crawlability audit. The interface is approachable for non-technical people, which counts for a lot when you need to show a boss something on day two.
The catch is the prompt count. Lite gives you 15. Standard gives you 100 for $189 a month, Premium gives 400 for $489, and extra prompts cost $99 per 100 on those tiers. Annual billing is 15% off. API and MCP access only arrive at Standard.
So Otterly is great for answering "is this category worth paying for?" and awkward once the answer is yes.
Peec AI: clean team pricing, fewer engines per plan
Peec is the most conventional of the four. Starter is $95 a month with 50 prompts, 3 models of your choice, daily tracking, one project, one country and unlimited users. Pro is $245 for 150 prompts, 2 projects and 3 countries. Advanced is $495 for 350 prompts and 5 projects, with multi-country support and a Looker Studio integration.
Unlimited competitors, languages and team users on every plan is the real selling point. If you have a marketing team of eight who all want a login, Peec does not punish you for it. Brand context, prompt volume scores from 1 to 5, an ads library, Local GEO and AI Shopping with SKU-level tracking also come on every plan.
The limits are worth knowing. You pick three models, not all of them. Models listed for Starter through Advanced are ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI. Perplexity shows up only in the Enterprise column on the page we read, so verify that if Perplexity matters to you. Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and others are Enterprise API models.
Peec also leans on monitoring rather than fixing things. Our catalog describes it as AI search monitoring without the optimization, which matches how it behaves.
ZipTie: pay per check, not per plan
ZipTie comes from the team behind Onely and is well regarded for Google AI Overviews tracking. Its pricing is the oddest of the four, in a good way. You build a plan in a configurator, and a check costs about a cent per prompt per engine. Run all seven engines and it drops to about $0.0087 per check.
The seven engines are ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Copilot, Bing AI Overview and Gemini. Every engine costs the same, so there are no add-on engines to trip over. Seats, projects, competitors, exports, client reports and Search Console are never billed.
ZipTie's own worked examples help here:
- 1,000 monthly prompts costs about $61 a month.
- An agency with 10 clients at 50 weekly prompts each costs about $130.72 a month.
- An in-house brand with 50 daily, 300 weekly and 1,000 monthly prompts on all 7 engines costs $230.95 a month, or $184.76 paid yearly.
Cadence can be daily, weekly or every 30 days, and prompt slots pool across the workspace. That flexibility is a real advantage: you can check your ten money prompts daily and the long tail monthly. Add-ons are priced separately. UGC Impact Analysis adds 80%, Content Generation is $20 a month per context, and API plus MCP is $10 a month on paid plans.
The 7-day trial needs no card, but paid plans are non-refundable. Also note that AI Overviews and Bing AI Overview checks capture the top 10 organic results at no extra cost, which is handy if you want AI and classic results side by side.
The downside is that a configurator takes effort. If you want to sign up and have a dashboard in five minutes, Otterly is smoother.
Rankscale: the most engines, the least intuitive billing
Rankscale sells credits rather than seats or prompts. Pro is $99 a month ($84 yearly) with 1,200 credits, up to 4,800 answers, 10 brand dashboards and 50 page audits. Pro+ is $229 with 3,000 credits and REST API access. Growth is $385 with 5,500 credits and white-label options, and Enterprise is $780 with 12,000 credits.
Pro and above cover ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral, Claude and Copilot, with Meta Muse Spark support announced. Roundups claim 17 or more engines, and Rankscale tends to win on international coverage. Scheduling runs from hourly to monthly, and credits roll over up to 2x on Pro and Pro+ and up to 3x on Growth and Enterprise.
About that $20 figure. A cheaper Essentials tier exists in the comparison table, yearly billing only, and it drops sentiment analysis, custom dashboards, local results, shopping analysis and AI visits. We could not confirm its price or prompt limits, so I would not plan around it. Also, some numbers in the page's own comparison table look garbled, so ignore those.
Search terms are unlimited, but running them burns credits, which means you manage a budget instead of a prompt list. Some people like that. Others find it annoying.
Head-to-head on what actually matters
| Question | Otterly.AI | Peec AI | ZipTie | Rankscale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cheapest realistic plan | $29 (15 prompts) | $95 (50 prompts) | About $26+, usage-based | $99 (1,200 credits) |
| Model of billing | Flat plus engine add-ons | Flat, 3 models chosen | Per check | Credit pool |
| Seats | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Varies by plan |
| Daily tracking | Yes, all plans | Yes | Optional cadence | Hourly to monthly |
| Claude coverage | Paid add-on | Enterprise API | Not listed | Pro and up |
| API or MCP | Standard and up | Enterprise | $10/mo add-on | Pro+ (REST API) |
| Free trial | See vendor | See vendor | 7 days, no card | 7 days reported |
Which one to pick
- One brand, tiny budget, want to learn: Otterly Lite. Accept that 15 prompts is a pilot.
- Team of several, mostly Google surfaces, multiple languages: Peec Starter or Pro.
- Technical SEO who wants to tune cost per prompt, or an agency with many clients: ZipTie.
- Need Claude, DeepSeek, Mistral and the rest in one view: Rankscale Pro.
If you cover more than one client or run hundreds of prompts, ZipTie's math tends to beat the others. If you cover one brand and 50 prompts across a few engines, Peec and Rankscale cost about the same and you are choosing on interface.
Two things these trackers won't tell you
First, AI answers are noisy. Promptwatch's data shows ChatGPT averaged about 2.15 searches per response in early December and about 1.84 by early March, then dropped to 1.0 in April, per Promptwatch's ChatGPT query fanout data. Citation counts vary by engine too: according to Promptwatch's average sources per response report, ChatGPT cites about 5 sources per web-search answer while Google AI Overviews and Perplexity cite about 10. Copilot swung from under 2 to nearly 17 before settling. Read trend lines, not single days, and don't compare raw citation counts across engines.
Second, all four are monitors. They tell you where you are invisible. They do not plan, write and publish the pages that fix it. If you want that loop closed, look at platforms like Promptwatch, which pairs prompt tracking with IP-verified AI crawler logs, a content gap analysis and a Content Agent that publishes to Webflow, Framer or WordPress. It costs more than the cheapest plans here (Essential is $95 a month, Business $579), so it is a different purchase, but it is the next step when you outgrow pure monitoring.
For a wider shortlist, the directories at ai-rank-tools.com and bestgeosoftware.com list dozens more trackers.
What I would do
Start with ZipTie's no-card trial or Otterly Lite for a week or two, using the 15 to 25 prompts that matter most. Check whether the numbers move in ways you can explain. Then pick the tool whose billing model matches your prompt list: flat for small and steady, per-check for large and uneven, credits only if you really need the engine spread.
And read the pricing page on the day you buy. These four have changed their plans enough in the past year that any roundup, including this one, goes stale quickly.