Profound and Scalenut sit at opposite ends of the market. Scalenut is a low-cost AI SEO writing suite with basic AI tracking, with plans from $59 a month. Profound is a sales-led enterprise platform with deep AI answer analytics and credit-based content agents, and no public price for paid plans. DeepSmith sits between them on public plans, with tracking and publish-ready, researched articles in one platform, Autowrite producing them on a schedule, from $99 a month and a clear path to Enterprise.
If you are weighing Profound vs Scalenut, you are probably really choosing between two ways of buying: a cheap suite you can sign up for today, or an enterprise package you get through a sales call. The two tools do different jobs, so the price gap is only part of it. Scalenut mainly helps you plan and write SEO content, and Profound mainly shows you how AI engines talk about your brand. DeepSmith covers both jobs on plans with public prices, which is why it appears throughout this comparison.
Profound vs Scalenut: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI tracking and finished, on-brand articles on one self-serve plan, from $99 a month, with Autowrite writing on a schedule and Enterprise available when you outgrow the public tiers.
- Choose Profound if you are an enterprise or mid-market team that wants the deepest AI answer analytics, up to nine engines, and agents that act on the data, and you are fine buying through a sales call on credit-based pricing.
- Choose Scalenut if you are a small team or founder who wants keyword clusters, AI drafting, content scoring and basic AI tracking for $59 a month or less, written in English.
Profound vs Scalenut side by side
| DeepSmith | Profound | Scalenut | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | No public price for paid plans | $59/mo (Starter) |
| Annual price (per month) | $80/mo | Custom | $24/mo (limited annual offer) |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days | 7 days (monthly plans) |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | Custom on Enterprise (Trial: 50) | 10 |
| Engines at entry tier | ChatGPT | Up to 9 on Enterprise (Trial: 3) | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 9 (Enterprise) | 3 (Professional) |
| Articles at entry tier | 20 a month | Credit-based, no article count | 5 GEO articles a month |
| Long-form article generation | Yes | Yes, drafts with an approval step | Yes |
| Writes on a schedule | Yes (Autowrite) | Not listed | Partial, publishing only |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Yes | Yes, Plus and up |
| Public API | Yes, read-only | Yes, Enterprise only | No |
| Security certifications | SOC 2, GDPR, ISO | SOC 2 Type II | Not listed |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.5/5 on G2 | 4.7/5 on G2 |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Profound
Profound is an AI marketing platform that tracks how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and other engines mention and cite a brand, and then uses agents to research, draft and publish content from that data. It was founded in 2024 in New York and has raised $334.5 million, most recently a $180 million Series D announced in September 2026. It is built for enterprise and mid-market marketing, SEO and content teams, and for agencies.
The standout is depth. Profound reports visibility, rank, share of voice, URL-level citations, sentiment and query fan-outs, and its Agent Analytics reads server logs to show which AI crawlers visit your site. Its pricing page shows only two plans, a free seven-day Trial on three engines and a custom Enterprise package with up to nine. Profound says agent runs consume credits, and the public pages don't give a credit price or an Enterprise dollar figure.
That is also the main limitation for a buyer on a budget. You can't see what a paid plan costs without talking to sales, and reviewers describe the product as expensive. The G2 rating is 4.5/5 from 1,130 reviews as of September 29, 2026, and reviewers praise the citation analytics and competitor benchmarking. Some also mention a learning curve. TrustRadius shows 8.5/10, from only 13 reviews.
Scalenut
Scalenut is an AI SEO writing and optimization suite based in Gurugram, India, founded in 2020. It started as an AI writer and now also sells weekly AI answer tracking and an optional managed GEO service, the VIP Service, with a strategist, writers and AI agents. It is built for small and mid-size content teams, founders and agencies that publish English SEO content.
The standout is how much sits inside a low monthly price. Starter is $59 a month, Plus is $89 and Professional is $199. The plans cover keyword clusters, the Cruise Mode article writer, a content optimizer with a GEO score, internal linking and WordPress or Shopify publishing, and every plan tracks ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. G2 shows 4.7/5 from 315 reviews. Capterra shows 4.8/5 from 397 reviews, and both were checked September 30, 2026.
The limits are real, though. Tracking is narrow and weekly on standard plans, with 10 prompts on Starter, and Perplexity needs Professional. Scalenut has no public API, the self-serve product is documented as English only, and no security certifications are published. Reviewers report drafts that need editing, and Trustpilot shows 3.2/5 from 159 reviews, with some customers describing renewal and refund problems.
DeepSmith: the alternative with public plans and enterprise depth
Most of the gap between these two tools comes from how they are sold. Scalenut gives you a public price and a writing suite, with tracking that stays basic. Profound gives you deep analytics and agents, but the price and the credit allowance come out of a sales conversation. A team that wants both the data and the finished content, at a price it can read before it talks to anyone, has to choose which half to give up.
DeepSmith is built to avoid that choice. It is an AI search analytics and content production platform in one, so the same data that shows where you are missing from AI answers feeds the content that closes those gaps. Tracking covers mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, sentiment and the pages AI actually cites, with a competitor leaderboard beside it. Opportunity Agents turn that data into content ideas, and every idea carries the data point that justifies it, so you can defend the backlog instead of guessing at it.
From there the Writer turns a planned idea into a finished article that is researched, linked internally and externally, and comes with a cover image and publish-ready metadata. Deep IQ keeps your company, product, persona and brand voice context in one place, so every article is grounded in it without a new brief each time. Autowrite takes this a step further. You set an article up at planning time and it writes itself on the scheduled date and lands in Produced Content, where you review it and publish to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks.
The figures to look at on the plans are these. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed annually) with 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts and 5 seats. Grow is $199 ($160 annually) with 40 articles and 100 prompts, and Scale is $399 ($299 annually) with 90 articles and 200 prompts. Engine coverage rises by tier, from ChatGPT on Pro to Perplexity on Grow and Gemini on Scale, and Enterprise covers all ten engines with expert onboarding and a dedicated account manager. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract. DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified and rated 4.8/5 on G2.
Profound vs Scalenut pricing and value
Scalenut wins on price clarity, and Profound is the harder one to cost. Scalenut publishes three plans at $59, $89 and $199 a month, plus a limited annual offer that brings the monthly equivalent down to $24, $36 and $80. Those allowances are small at the bottom: Starter includes 5 GEO articles a month on monthly billing, and the plan grid shows no internal linking, content audit or CMS publishing on it. Scalenut also lists a separate AI Visibility price block with different prices, and the relationship between the two lists is not explained on its site, so it is worth confirming at checkout which list applies to you.
Profound's pricing page offers a free Trial and a custom Enterprise package. Profound says agent usage is metered in credits, that higher credit thresholds require an Enterprise package, and overage billing is optional with no published rate. That makes the monthly cost hard to forecast before you sign. On a Profound vs Scalenut pricing check, one tool has a price list and the other has a quote.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes its prices and states what each plan includes: Pro, Grow and Scale at $99, $199 and $399 a month, with articles, prompts, seats and engines listed for each. The article allowance is a number you can plan around, and Enterprise is there with custom limits when you need more. A 7-day trial lets you see real data and real drafts before paying.
AI tracking depth and engine coverage
Profound wins this one clearly. Its Enterprise package tracks up to nine engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search. It runs each tracked prompt daily by default and keeps all-time answer history on Enterprise. It adds URL-level citations, sentiment themes, query fan-outs and prompt demand data from consumer panels. Seven of the nine engines, plus API access, are Enterprise only, so the full coverage depends on that sales-led package.
Scalenut tracks ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews on every plan, with Perplexity on Professional. Data refreshes weekly, and a daily refresh is an upgrade with no published price. Scalenut doesn't publish how it collects answers or how long it keeps them. For a team that wants a first view of AI visibility alongside its writing tool, that is a reasonable start, and for a team that treats AI visibility as a core channel it is thin.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks ten engines, with coverage rising from ChatGPT on Pro to Perplexity on Grow, Gemini on Scale, and all ten on Enterprise. Each tracked prompt carries its own mention and citation rate and full answer history, and the Pages view shows which of your own pages AI cites and the prompts driving those citations.
Writing and content production
Scalenut has the more complete self-serve writing tool, and Profound has the better-grounded drafts. Scalenut's Cruise Mode walks a keyword through context, title and outline to a first draft in about five minutes, and the editor scores it against the top-ranking pages. Reviewers like how approachable it is, and they also report repetitive drafts and occasional wrong sources. Scalenut's pages don't describe a bulk article run or writing on a schedule.
Profound's agents research what AI engines cite for a topic, draft to that structure, and publish approved drafts to CMSs including WordPress, Sanity, Contentful and Webflow. Drafts are described as ready for human review and sit behind an approval step. Profound also advertises publish-ready content in minutes, and its pages leave unclear whether the review step is mandatory.
What DeepSmith does: The Writer produces a finished article, not a draft to rescue, with SEO and AEO structure, internal and external links, a cover image and metadata built in. Autowrite runs it on a schedule, and Planned Content lets you schedule ideas one at a time or in bulk. Every article draws on the same stored Deep IQ context.
Access, security and compliance
Profound wins here. It documents SOC 2 Type II, SAML and OIDC single sign-on, SCIM, role-based access, a REST API at 600 requests per hour per key, CSV and JSON exports, and an MCP server. The API and SSO are Enterprise only, and the API docs say access is on request.
Scalenut's help center says it does not currently offer an API, no MCP server is mentioned, and no SOC 2, ISO 27001 or SSO statement appears on its public pages. Its privacy policy was last updated in November 2020. If a security review is part of your buying process, Scalenut gives you little to hand to it.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified. Its REST API and 23-tool MCP server give read-only access to visibility data, the Content Map, the content library and Deep IQ assets, at 120 requests per minute per workspace, and webhooks notify your own systems when content or agent runs change status.
From insight to action
Profound is ahead of Scalenut here. Its agents start from the AI visibility data, so a gap in citations can lead to a brief, a draft and a CMS update, and its Citation Decay feature flags pages that are losing citations and can hand them to an agent. Scalenut can show prompt gaps against competitors and recommends actions, but its writing tools start from keywords and the SERP, so the link between the two halves is looser.
The cost of that link is where the two differ. In Profound each step spends credits, and the number that matters most for your budget is not public. In Scalenut the steps sit inside plan limits that are low on the cheap tiers.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith runs the whole loop in one place. Tracking finds the prompts where you are missing, the Content Map shows the topics where competitors publish more than you, and Opportunity Agents return ideas with the evidence attached. Those ideas move through New Ideas and Planned Content to the Writer or Autowrite, then to Produced Content for review and publishing, and Repurpose and the Apps Library turn each article into posts for LinkedIn, X and email.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits most marketing teams that want tracking and finished articles together without a sales cycle: a content lead who needs more output from the same team, an agency running several clients, or a team that wants to start at $99 a month and move to Enterprise later.
- Profound fits an enterprise or mid-market team with a larger budget that wants the deepest answer analytics, crawler analytics and many engines, and that is comfortable with credit-based agent pricing and a custom contract. Between the two, it is the better pick when tracking depth drives the decision.
- Scalenut fits a founder or small team that writes English SEO content and wants clusters, drafting, scoring and basic AI tracking at the lowest published price. Between the two, it is the better pick when budget and writing come first.
If you are still comparing Scalenut vs Profound and want a third option that tracks and writes on public plans, you can start a free DeepSmith trial at app.deepsmith.ai and see your own tracking data and first drafts before you pay.
