Frase is a self-serve SEO and AI-search content tool with public pricing from $39 a month billed yearly. Writer is an enterprise AI platform built around governance and brand rules, and most of its pricing is not public. Frase suits teams that want research, scoring and publishing at a clear price, and Writer suits large organizations that want governed AI work across departments. DeepSmith offers certified security and brand grounding on self-serve plans from $99 a month, with AI visibility tracking and publish-ready articles included.
Frase vs Writer AI is really a question about how much platform an SEO content program needs. If your team publishes articles to rank on Google and get cited in AI answers, Frase is built for that job from the first page. Writer is built for a wider job, which is governed AI work across a large company, and SEO is one thing it can do instead of the thing it was made for. That changes what each one costs, how long it takes to start, and what you get for the money. DeepSmith is a third route for teams that want governance-grade trust without an enterprise sale.
Frase vs Writer: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want brand-grounded, publish-ready SEO and AEO articles with AI visibility tracking and SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified security on a self-serve plan from $99 a month, with a 7-day free trial.
- Choose Frase if you want keyword research, SERP-based content scoring and publishing in one self-serve tool, starting at $39 a month billed yearly.
- Choose Writer if you are a large organization that needs governed AI agents, deep security controls and brand enforcement across many teams, and you are fine buying through sales.
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Frase | Writer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly billing) | $99/mo (Pro) | $49/mo (Starter) | Not listed |
| Entry price (annual billing) | $80/mo | $39/mo | Not listed |
| Articles at entry tier | 20 per month | 10 per month | Credit-metered, amount not listed |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days, no card | 14 days, no card |
| Keyword research with volume and difficulty | - | Yes | Partial, through a Semrush connector |
| SERP-based content scoring | - | Yes | Not listed |
| Brand voice and knowledge grounding | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Internal linking | Yes | Yes, Professional and up | Partial, legacy editor only |
| Scheduled publishing | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| AI visibility tracking | Yes | Yes, up to five engines by plan | Partial, a playbook use case |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Yes | Yes, no WordPress connector |
| API and MCP server | Yes, read-only | Yes | Yes |
| Security certifications | SOC 2, GDPR, ISO | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, 27701 and 42001, GDPR |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.8/5 | 4.4/5 |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Frase
Frase is an SEO and AI-search content platform that covers research, briefs, drafting, scoring, publishing and monitoring in one product. It was founded in 2016 and acquired by Copysmith in 2022. It is built for content marketers, small in-house teams and agencies, from solo users on Starter at $39 a month billed yearly up to multi-site agencies on Scale at $239.
The standout is the research and optimization loop. Frase reads the pages ranking for a query, builds a structured brief, and scores a draft live against those pages, with a separate GEO score for AI answers. It publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity and Wix, watches published pages for decay, and tracks AI visibility daily on every plan. Reviewers give it 4.8/5 on G2 from 310 reviews, checked in September 2026. It also holds 4.8/5 on Capterra from 335 reviews.
The limits are in writing quality and plan gating. Reviewers report occasional irrelevant or inaccurate AI writing, editor lag and mixed support experiences, and Trustpilot rates it 3.5/5 from 63 reviews. Starter tracks only ChatGPT and Google AI, Claude and Gemini need Scale, and internal linking suggestions, the content calendar and user roles start at Professional. Our Frase review goes through the product in more detail. Much of the product was rebuilt in 2026, so there is little long-run evidence on the newer features.
Writer
Writer is an enterprise AI platform. Its Writer Agent, Playbooks and graph-based Knowledge Graph let large organizations hand multi-step work to an agent that draws on company data and brand rules under IT governance. It was founded in 2020 and is based in San Francisco. Content work covers briefs, long-form and short-form copy, derivative assets and translation, and the vendor lists 73 languages. It is aimed at large organizations led by marketing and revenue teams, and it fits less well as a self-serve SEO writing tool for small teams.
The standout is governance. Writer reports SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, 27701 and 42001 certifications, SAML SSO and SCIM on Enterprise, exportable audit logs, and voice profiles tied to style guides and banned terms. Reviewers praise its brand and style consistency. In Writer AI vs Frase, the review scores also differ, since G2 shows 4.4/5 from 130 reviews. TrustRadius rates it 5.7/10 from 27 ratings, so the picture depends on which site you read.
The limits matter for an SEO program. The documented SEO toolset is thin: there is no own keyword database, SERP analysis or SERP-based scoring, and keyword data comes through a Semrush connector. Pricing is largely not public, since the plans page shows no Starter seat price and Enterprise is quote only and credit-metered. There is no dedicated AI visibility tracker. If Jasper is also on your list, the Jasper vs Writer AI comparison covers that pair. Reviewers describe generic output that needs editing and a learning curve.
DeepSmith: the alternative that pairs brand governance with self-serve pricing
An SEO content program with brand and security requirements sits in a gap between these two. Frase gives you the SEO workflow at a public price, but its brand controls stop at voice profiles and a stored Brand Hub, and SSO is held for Enterprise. Writer gives you governance depth, but the SEO work is mostly something you build yourself from agents and a Semrush connector, and the price comes through a sales conversation.
DeepSmith is an AI search analytics and content production platform in one. It is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified, and every article is grounded in Deep IQ, which stores your company positioning with the claims to make and avoid, your products, buyer personas, brand voice, content types and visual guidelines. Each run is set against those records, so product facts and voice come from the same stored context every time. Keyword coverage, heading structure, schema markup, internal linking and metadata are built into the writing pipeline, and AEO formatting is native. DeepSmith's plans don't include a keyword volume and difficulty database, so the writing starts from the topics and gaps its own tracking and Content Map surface.
AI Visibility tracks mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, sentiment and trend, and shows which of your pages AI cites and which competitor pages win citations. Engine coverage in AI Visibility rises by plan: Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten engines.
Opportunity Agents return content ideas with the data point that justifies each one. The Writer turns a planned idea into a finished article with internal and external links, a cover image and publish-ready metadata, and Autowrite can run that on a schedule with no one in the app. You can review in Produced Content and publish to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful.
Plans are published. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed annually) with 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts and 5 seats. Grow is $199 ($160) with 40 articles and 100 prompts, Scale is $399 ($299) with 90 articles and 200 prompts, and Enterprise is custom. The full plans and pricing page lists the limits on each tier. The longer DeepSmith vs Frase comparison covers the Frase side in depth, and DeepSmith vs Writer does the same for Writer. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract, and DeepSmith is rated 4.8/5 on G2.
Pricing and buying process
On price, Frase vs Writer AI is not a close call, because Frase is the clearer buy. Its monthly prices are $49 for Starter, $129 for Professional and $299 for Scale, or $39, $103 and $239 a month billed yearly, with Enterprise quoted. Starter gives 10 articles and 50 tracked prompts a month, Professional gives 40 articles and 200 prompts, and Scale gives 100 articles and 500 prompts. Pay-as-you-go overage is off by default and costs $5 per extra article on Professional. The 7-day trial needs no card and caps use at 5 articles.
Writer's plans page shows a Starter tier for up to 5 users with a 14-day trial, but no seat price and no credit amount. Credits are the unit of use across the Agent, playbooks and the API, and Enterprise sets a credit package by contract. Writer also publishes metered model rates, such as $2 per million input tokens and $8 per million output tokens for Palmyra X6, which are separate from what a plan includes. You will need a sales conversation to learn what a team would pay.
What DeepSmith does: It publishes its prices, so you can plan the spend before you talk to anyone. Pro, Grow and Scale each name their article, prompt and seat counts, and the 7-day trial gives you real data and real drafts before you pay. Tracking and writing sit on the same plan.
SEO research and content scoring
On Frase vs Writer for SEO content, Frase wins this axis clearly. Its research flow gives keyword volume, difficulty and intent, reads the pages ranking for a query, and flags topics competitors cover that you do not. The editor scores a draft live against the ranking pages, and Content Opportunities combines Search Console data, competitor gaps and decaying pages into one ranked list. The source of its keyword data is not stated.
Writer does not document that toolset. It has no own keyword database, and the Semrush connector, which needs a Semrush account, pulls in keyword data and search metrics. No analysis of top-ranking pages is described, and its content score checks a draft against the company's writing rules such as grammar, style and terms, not against ranking content. If you are weighing a dedicated scoring tool instead, Surfer SEO vs Writer looks at that pairing. Writer does have prebuilt agents for content briefs, meta titles and SEO content refresh.
Brand governance and security
Writer wins this axis. It reports SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, 27701 and 42001, HIPAA BAA on Enterprise, SAML SSO and SCIM, audit logs that export to Splunk or Datadog, and customer-managed encryption keys. It says customer inputs are not used to train its models and describes a 99.9% monthly availability commitment for qualifying deployments. Starter does not include SSO, audit logs or the SOC 2 report.
Frase claims SOC 2 Type II attestation and GDPR compliance, with the report available on request and a trust center that sits with its parent company, Copysmith. SSO and SAML are Enterprise only. Its research did not verify ISO 27001 or data residency choices. For brand control it offers voice profiles from samples, preferred and banned terms, and a Brand Hub that stores company, audience and value proposition.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified, and Deep IQ holds your positioning, claims to make and avoid, products, personas and voice as structured records that shape each draft. The enterprise AI SEO software checklist is a useful way to score any vendor on this axis. Our guide on how to ground AI content in brand voice and product facts covers the stored-context side in more depth. Both are worth a read before you shortlist.
AI search visibility
Frase is the stronger tracker of the two. It checks prompts daily with alerts, records cited URLs and share of voice against chosen competitors, classifies prompts by buying stage and supports 40 or more countries. Starter covers 50 prompts on ChatGPT and Google AI, Professional adds Perplexity and 200 prompts, and Scale adds Claude and Gemini and 500 prompts. Frase does not say whether answers come from official APIs or consumer interfaces, or how many runs it samples per prompt.
Writer has no dedicated tracker. Its marketing page lists scheduled visibility monitoring of mentions, citations and sentiment across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity as a use case you build with agents and playbooks. Engines per plan, prompt volumes, cadence and collection method are not documented.
What DeepSmith does: AI Visibility is a built-in module with per-prompt mention and citation rates, answer history, page-level citation attribution and a competitor leaderboard. The same data feeds the content ideas, so the tracking decides what gets written next.
Workflow automation and publishing
This one is close, with different strengths. Writer is better at building custom multi-step work. Playbooks run on schedule or event triggers with step approvals, Starter allows 5 playbooks and up to 3 scheduled routines, and Enterprise removes those caps. Its CMS connectors cover Webflow, Adobe Experience Manager and Contentful, with no WordPress connector listed. A scheduled write-and-publish run is possible but you compose it from parts, and the vendor does not describe it as a turnkey feature.
Frase is more direct for scheduled SEO publishing. Its Agent runs the research, draft, score and publish sequence from plain-language requests, can write up to 10 articles in one batch, and publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity and Wix. The content calendar starts at Professional. Every content type starts in review, and you switch on autonomy per type.
From insight to action
Frase has the more complete loop of the two. Content Opportunities ranks what to write, the editor scores the draft, publishing goes to the CMS, and Content Monitoring watches every page on the domain. Content Guard drafts fixes for decaying pages and republishes them on approval. Writer can reach similar outcomes, but the gap analysis and refresh scans are agent or playbook work that your team builds, since there is no built-in decay detection.
What DeepSmith does: The loop starts with what AI engines say about you. AI Visibility and the Content Map show where you are invisible or behind, Opportunity Agents turn those gaps into ideas with the evidence attached, and New Ideas, Planned Content and Produced Content carry each one to a published article. The Writer and Autowrite handle the drafting in your stored voice, and Repurpose writes the social posts for each finished article. You can see this on the Content Studio side of the platform. It is the same data from the first question to the published page.
Which should you choose
Choosing Frase or Writer AI comes down to company size, who signs the contract and how much of the work is SEO.
- DeepSmith fits marketing and content teams, and agencies, who want to see where they are missing in AI answers and publish on-brand articles to close those gaps, with certified security and a published price. It is the broadest fit when you need both governance and a self-serve start.
- Frase fits solo marketers, small in-house teams and agencies who want SERP research, SEO and GEO scoring and CMS publishing in one tool at a public price from $39 a month billed yearly.
- Writer fits large organizations where IT governs AI use, brand rules must hold across many teams, and the work reaches beyond SEO content into campaigns, sales prep and analysis.
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