Frase and MarketMuse both help you plan and improve content, but they sell it differently: Frase lists every plan and price on its site, from $39 a month up to $239, and that plan includes drafting, scoring and publishing. MarketMuse gives you a free plan to try the idea, then routes Optimize, Research and Strategy through a sales demo with no public number attached. DeepSmith answers a similar question a different way: it also publishes its prices, and it uses the same visibility data that tells you what to write to schedule the finished article too, so nothing sits waiting on a brief.
If you're comparing Frase vs MarketMuse pricing, the real decision is less about which tool is "better" and more about how you want to buy and what you want at the end of the process. Frase is a self-serve platform that researches, scores, drafts and publishes content, with public pricing on every tier. MarketMuse is a planning and optimization tool built around a personalized difficulty score for your own site, and its paid plans are quoted through a demo. DeepSmith takes a third path: published pricing like Frase, but a planning-to-production loop closer to what MarketMuse promises.
Frase vs MarketMuse: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI-visibility gaps, competitor coverage analysis and finished, publish-ready articles from one published-price plan, starting at $99 a month.
- Choose Frase if you want research, drafting, SEO and GEO scoring, and CMS publishing on one self-serve plan with a public price, starting at $39 a month billed yearly.
- Choose MarketMuse if you want deep, site-specific topic and difficulty scoring with detailed content briefs, and you're comfortable getting a quote before you see a number.
Whichever way you lean on Frase or MarketMuse, the table below lays the two out side by side against DeepSmith's own published plans.
Frase vs MarketMuse at a glance
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Frase | MarketMuse |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99 | $49 | $0 (Free) |
| Entry price (annual, per month) | $80 | $39 | $0 (Free) |
| Free trial or free plan | 7-day trial | 7-day trial, no card | Free plan, 10 queries/month |
| Articles or briefs at entry tier | 20 articles | 10 articles, 50 audit pages | No briefs on Free; 5 briefs on Optimize |
| Generates full long-form articles | Yes | Yes | Partial, outline plus section expansion |
| Scores a draft against top content | - | Yes, SEO and GEO scores | Yes, topic-model Content Score |
| Produces content briefs | Partial | Yes | Yes |
| Suggests or inserts internal links | Yes | Yes, Professional and up | Yes, suggestions only |
| Publishes directly to a CMS | Yes | Yes, WordPress, Webflow, Sanity, Wix, FraseCMS | No, copy and paste |
| Writes and publishes on a schedule | Yes | Yes | No |
| Tracks brand mentions in AI answers | Yes | Yes, narrower at entry tier | Not listed |
| Public API | Yes, read-only | Yes, all plans | Not listed |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes, all plans | Not listed |
| Security certifications | SOC 2, GDPR, ISO | SOC 2 Type II (claim) | Not listed |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.6/5 on G2 |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Frase in brief
Frase describes itself as the content operating system for AI search, and the pricing page backs that up: one self-serve plan covers research, drafting, SEO and GEO scoring, site audits, CMS publishing, decay monitoring and AI visibility tracking together. Starter runs $39 a month billed yearly (or $49 month to month) for a single site, 10 articles and 50 audit pages a month. Professional and Scale add more domains, seats, articles and AI-visibility engines, up to Claude and Gemini on Scale at $239 a month yearly. A 7-day trial needs no credit card.
The standout is breadth at one public price: a single plan does the research, the writing, the scoring and the publishing, with a REST API and MCP server included on every tier. The real limitation shows up in AI visibility, where Starter only tracks ChatGPT and Google AI, and you need Scale or Enterprise for the full five-engine set. Reviewers on G2 and Capterra rate Frase 4.8/5 and consistently praise the speed of its research and briefs. The recurring complaints are about uneven AI writing quality on some drafts, editor friction, and mixed support experiences reported on Trustpilot, where the score sits lower at 3.5/5.
MarketMuse in brief
MarketMuse is built around an automated, regularly updated inventory of your own site, scored with its own metrics: Personalized Difficulty, Topic Authority and a Content Score measured against a topic model built from hundreds to thousands of pages. On top of that inventory sits keyword and SERP research, Heatmap competitor gap analysis, nine types of content brief, and the Optimize editor, where an AI assistant expands an outline section by section rather than writing a full draft in one pass.
The standout is how personalized the scoring is: difficulty and content-score numbers are calculated against your own site's authority, not a generic industry average, which is the product's most consistently documented differentiator. The real limitation is that MarketMuse says plainly it does not write content for its customers, and publishing means copying finished text out of the editor and pasting it into WordPress or another CMS by hand. Pricing compounds the gap: only the Free plan (one user, 10 queries a month) has a public number, while Optimize, Research and Strategy all route to a demo. Reviewers rate MarketMuse well on TrustRadius and on G2, 4.6/5 from 216 reviews, and praise its keyword and topic analysis and its competitive heatmaps; the recurring complaint theme is price and affordability, which is harder to weigh when the price itself isn't published.
DeepSmith: the alternative that plans and produces at a published price
Frase and MarketMuse both leave a version of the same gap: Frase's content-opportunity research works inside your own account, not across a mapped set of competitor sites, and MarketMuse stops short of finished, published articles by its own description. DeepSmith closes both at once, and does it on a published price rather than a quote.
Content Map turns your site and unlimited competitor sites into one shared topic taxonomy, so a coverage gap or an untapped topic is a measurement against real competitor pages, not a single-site inventory score. Opportunity Agents read that data plus your AI-visibility results and return content ideas with the evidence attached, the specific competitor page winning citations, the tracked prompt it's cited for, so a marketer can defend the backlog instead of guessing at it.
From there, Autowrite is the difference that matters most against both vendors here: schedule an idea once, with the persona, voice, content type and link targets set, and the article writes itself and lands ready for review, or goes straight to Produced Content for one-click publishing to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful. That's a full loop from competitor gap to published article, not a brief or an outline waiting on a writer.
Pricing is public the way Frase's is: Pro starts at $99 a month ($80 billed yearly) for 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts and ChatGPT visibility tracking, with a 7-day trial and no long-term contract. DeepSmith's plans don't include a topic-model difficulty score like MarketMuse's; its Content Map answers the same "what should we write" question from competitor coverage and AI-visibility gaps instead, and Opportunity Agents turn that straight into a scheduled article.
Pricing: public tiers vs a sales quote
Frase wins this axis outright against MarketMuse. Every Frase plan has a number attached: $39, $103 or $239 a month billed yearly, or $49 to $299 month to month, plus a quoted Enterprise tier. MarketMuse only publishes one number, $0 for its Free plan; Optimize, Research and Strategy all read "Book a demo" with no monthly or annual figure on the page. For a buyer trying to budget in advance, that's a meaningful difference: Frase or MarketMuse pricing is not a symmetric comparison once you're past the entry tier.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith prices the same way Frase does, four published tiers from $99 to $399 a month, or $80 to $299 billed yearly, plus a quoted Enterprise plan for custom limits. A 7-day trial gives real data and real drafts before anyone pays, and there are no long-term contracts or cancellation fees on any self-serve tier.
Content briefs and full-article generation
MarketMuse produces the more detailed brief of the two. It offers nine typed content brief formats (article, comparison, FAQ collection, guide, how-to, listicle, local, news or event, product review) with customizable tone, point of view and proof-statement inputs, though Optimize and Research are limited to article briefs and only Strategy unlocks the full set. Frase's brief is a single structured format (headings, sections, keywords, sources) that feeds directly into a full draft the Writer produces in one pass, in the account's stored brand voice, across 16 content types. MarketMuse says outright it does not write content for customers; its AI assistant expands an outline section by section rather than generating a finished article.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith skips the separate brief step. An Opportunity Agent's idea already carries its evidence into planning, and the Writer researches, drafts and links a publish-ready article from it in one run, with a cover image and metadata included, on the persona, voice and content type stored in Deep IQ.
Content scoring and topic modeling
Both tools score a draft, but on different logic. Frase runs a live SEO score against the pages ranking for the target query, plus a separate GEO score judged against a content-type rubric, on every plan. MarketMuse's Content Score measures how much of its topic model a draft covers, calculated from a personalized difficulty figure specific to your site's own authority, which the vendor positions as more accurate than scoring against a generic industry benchmark. Neither claim is independently verified; both are documented, described methods rather than results a reader can reproduce.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith builds AEO formatting into the writing pipeline itself, citation-ready structure, a clear answer near the top, and headings that match how AI engines parse a page, rather than scoring a finished draft after the fact.
Publishing and internal linking
Frase publishes directly to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity or Wix, or to its own hosted FraseCMS, on every plan, and adds internal-link suggestions from Professional up. MarketMuse has no direct CMS connection: the documented workflow is a "Copy for Publishing" button and a paste into WordPress or HubSpot by hand, and its own site states plainly that MarketMuse does not act like or replace a CMS. Internal-link suggestions exist through Connect, gated to the Strategy plan.
What DeepSmith does: Every DeepSmith article carries internal links placed automatically from the Content Map's shared taxonomy, with no manual cross-referencing, and publishes in one action to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or through your own webhooks.
From insight to action
Frase tracks AI visibility on every plan, daily, though the engine set narrows sharply at the entry tier: Starter covers only ChatGPT and Google AI, and Claude and Gemini need Scale at $239 a month yearly. MarketMuse doesn't track AI-answer visibility at all; the capability isn't described anywhere on its current site, and the only mention of AI search comes from a parent-company press release about a future combined offering. For a reader trying to close the loop from "where are we losing visibility" to "what do we publish next," Frase gets partway there on its own; MarketMuse leaves that step to a different tool entirely.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks mention rate, citation rate and share of voice across up to ten AI engines depending on plan, and every Opportunity Agent reads that same data to return ideas that carry their evidence, the exact competitor page and tracked prompt behind each one, straight into Autowrite for scheduled, hands-off publishing. Nothing sits between the gap and the finished article.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits a team that wants competitor-level content gaps, AI-visibility tracking and finished, publish-ready articles from one published-price plan, without a separate step for briefs or manual publishing.
- Frase fits a solo user, small in-house team or agency that wants research, drafting, scoring and CMS publishing bundled into one self-serve, public-priced plan and is comfortable with narrower AI-visibility coverage at the entry tier.
- MarketMuse fits an SEO or content team that wants the deepest site-specific topic and difficulty scoring and detailed, typed briefs, and is willing to go through a sales conversation to see a price.
Try DeepSmith free for 7 days and see how competitor-level content gaps turn into scheduled, publish-ready articles, no credit card and no long-term contract: start a free trial.
