Profound vs Peec AI (2026): Pricing, Engines and Which to Pick

These two come up together more than any other pair in AI visibility software, and for a reason: Profound is the tool everyone evaluates first, and Peec AI is the tool people recommend when the Profound quote lands badly. They measure roughly the same thing — how often assistants mention your brand, where you rank in the answer, and which sources those answers cite — and they arrive at very different prices for very different shapes of buyer.

This page compares them on the things that actually decide it: what each plan costs, how many engines you get for that, how many prompts, how many seats, and what happens after the dashboard shows you a gap. Disclosure: we make Sightivo, a competing product, and the section that compares us is labelled. Everything else comes from both vendors' published plans and documentation and from public user reviews — we have not run either on a paid plan.

TL;DR: Peec is cheaper to start, gives you unlimited seats and lets you pick three models; Profound measures more deeply, has the largest prompt dataset in the category, and charges $399/mo for the three-engine plan most buyers actually want. Choose Peec if you are an agency or a mid-market team who needs clean, shareable analytics on a predictable bill. Choose Profound if you are an enterprise brand team who will use citation depth and real prompt volumes, and has the content and PR capacity to act on them. Neither does the acting.

The Short Answer

• Pick Peec AI if you need unlimited users on the plan, a clean dashboard a client can read without training, daily refreshes and an entry price under $100 — and you can live with tracking three models.
• Pick Profound if engine breadth, citation depth, real prompt-volume research, SSO and SOC 2 are requirements, and $399/mo (or an Enterprise conversation) is inside your budget.
• Pick neither if what you actually need is for something to change after the score comes back. Both are measurement tools; the fixing is yours.

Profound vs Peec AI Side by Side

Prices below are the annual-billing rates each vendor publishes. We last checked both pricing pages directly for our Profound review and Peec AI review in August 2026 and re-checked them against independent pricing trackers in September 2026; monthly billing is higher on both, and this market reprices often enough that you should confirm before you sign.

Price: Peec Wins the Entry, and It Is Not Close

The headline numbers look similar — $99 against about $80 — but they buy very different things.

Profound's $99 Starter is a ChatGPT-only plan with 50 prompts and one seat. Peec's ~$80 Starter is 50 prompts across three models you choose, with unlimited users. For the same money, Peec gives you two more engines and the whole team.

The gap widens in the middle. To add Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to Profound you move to Growth at $399/mo — a four-fold jump for two engines and fifty more prompts. Peec's equivalent step is Pro at about $205/mo, which buys 150 prompts and a second project but not a fourth model. Model count on Peec is fixed at three until Enterprise, no matter how much you spend: Advanced at about $420/mo is Profound Growth money for a tool that still watches three models.

So the honest framing is not "Peec is cheaper." It is:

1. Below $250/mo, Peec is better value and it is not a close call — more engines, more seats, a real no-card trial.
2. Above $400/mo, you are choosing between two ceilings. Profound Growth gives three fixed engines and deeper analysis; Peec Advanced gives three chosen models, 350 prompts and five projects.
3. Full coverage is a sales call on both. Nine engines on Profound and eleven models on Peec are Enterprise features with no published price.

Engines: Three Chosen Beats One Fixed

Peec's self-serve tiers let you pick three from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini. Extra models are sold per tier as add-ons — reviewers record roughly $35/mo on Starter rising to about $165/mo on Advanced — and Claude only arrives at Enterprise, alongside the wider model list.

Profound's ladder is fixed rather than chosen: ChatGPT at $99, plus Perplexity and Google AI Overviews at $399, up to nine engines at Enterprise.

Which is better depends entirely on your category, and it is worth ten minutes of thought before you pay for either. If your buyers are consumers researching in Google, AI Overviews is the surface that matters and Profound makes you pay $399 to see it. If you sell to developers or technical buyers, Claude matters, and neither tool will show it to you without an Enterprise contract. That is a genuine shared blind spot in the two most-compared products in the category.

Depth: Profound Measures More, and It Shows

Where Profound earns its price is after the mention rate.

• Citation analysis is the deepest in the category — not just which domains are cited, but the structure of the answer they were cited into.
• Conversation Explorer shows real prompt volumes rather than prompts you guessed at, drawn from a dataset Profound puts at 1.9 billion prompts. Nothing at Peec's price tier answers "is anyone actually asking this?"
• Agent Analytics reports which AI crawlers hit which pages, across unlimited domains on every tier.
• Enterprise plumbing — SSO, SOC 2 documentation, multi-company workspaces — clears procurement at companies where that is the blocker.

Peec's answer is narrower and, for a lot of teams, sufficient: mention rate and position per prompt per model, sentiment, competitor benchmarking, and a sources view showing which URLs each answer cited, all refreshed daily and laid out well enough that a client can read it unaided. G2 has it at 4.9 out of 5 from 12 reviews — a small base, but a consistent one. Profound carries far more social proof, with roughly 1,100 G2 reviews at 4.5–4.6.

What Users Complain About

The complaints are as informative as the feature lists, and they do not overlap much.

Profound: price escalation, data that overwhelms without prioritising, dashboards that slow down on large prompt sets, and export limits. Independent reviewers are consistent that it is overkill for solo operators, early-stage startups and most agencies, and that under about $2,000/mo you are probably not the customer it is built for.

Peec: the three-model cap on every self-serve tier, 50 prompts running out fast on Starter, and multi-country plus the Looker Studio connector sitting up at Advanced — which is where most agencies actually need them.

Both attract the same underlying complaint in different words: it tells us what is happening, not what to do.

What Neither One Does

Both tools stop at the report. Peec shows you which pages ChatGPT cited instead of you; Profound shows you the same thing in more detail and, on Workflows, drafts a limited number of articles for your own site. Neither finds the person who wrote the roundup that got cited, or helps you get into it.

That gap is bigger than it sounds, because most of the citations you are missing are not on your site at all. Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands found branded web mentions correlate roughly three times more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks do, and a large share of ChatGPT's citations land on "best of" list pages — third-party pages you cannot rewrite in either tool.

Profound vs Peec vs Sightivo

We make Sightivo, so weigh this section accordingly.

The honest summary: Profound is the better instrument and Peec is the better-priced dashboard, and both assume you have people ready to act on what they find. We built Sightivo for the case where you do not — where the finding needs to turn into this week's work. Our cons, stated plainly: three engines rather than nine, prompt volumes sized for one brand rather than a portfolio, and no white-label reporting, which is exactly why agencies keep choosing Peec over us for client reporting.

Which Should You Choose?

Choose Peec AI if:

• You are an agency putting dashboards in front of clients, and unlimited seats plus a readable interface is the requirement.
• Your budget is under $250/mo and you want more than one engine for it.
• Three models covers your category honestly — check that it does before you decide it does.
• You want to test properly first: seven days, no card.

Choose Profound if:

• You need Google AI Overviews and Perplexity and ChatGPT in one view, and $399/mo is affordable.
• Real prompt volumes would change what you work on, rather than being interesting.
• Procurement needs SSO and SOC 2.
• You have writers and a PR function waiting for direction — the depth is wasted otherwise.

Choose neither if: your problem is that the listicle ChatGPT quotes has nine competitors in it and not you. No amount of measurement resolution fixes that; someone has to go and get you into the listicle.

Common Questions

Is Peec AI cheaper than Profound?

Yes, at the entry level and by more than the headline suggests. Peec's Starter is about $80/mo billed annually for 50 prompts across three models you choose, with unlimited users. Profound's Starter is $99/mo billed annually for 50 prompts on ChatGPT alone, with one seat. To match Peec's three-engine coverage on Profound you need Growth at $399/mo. Prices as published by both vendors, checked August 2026.

Profound vs Peec: which is better for agencies?

Peec, in most cases. Unlimited seats on every plan means you can put a dashboard in front of a client, an account manager and a founder without a per-seat conversation, and the interface is readable without training. The caveats are that multi-country tracking and the Looker Studio connector only appear on Advanced at about $420/mo, and that neither tool does white-label reporting on a self-serve plan. Profound's multi-company workspaces are Enterprise-only, which prices most agencies out.

Does Profound or Peec track Claude?

Neither does on a self-serve plan. Profound covers up to nine engines including Claude only on Enterprise; Peec adds Claude Sonnet 4 and a wider model list only on Enterprise. If Claude matters to your category — and it does for most technical and developer-facing products — that is a shared gap you should price into the decision.

How many prompts do I actually need?

More than the entry plans give you. Fifty prompts is one product, one buyer persona and one market, before you benchmark a single competitor. Write your prompt list out properly before choosing a tier: five real buyer questions, times a few phrasings, times the competitors you want compared, and both Starter plans are spent. That maths is what pushes teams from Peec Starter to Pro, and from Profound Starter to Growth.

Can I try both before paying?

Peec offers a seven-day free trial with no credit card. Profound offers a free trial on its self-serve plans. Running the same prompt set through both for a week is the only reliable way to compare them, because the numbers each reports depend on which engines it queried and how often.

What are the alternatives to Profound and Peec?

Otterly AI at $29/mo if you want the cheapest credible multi-engine dashboard; Scrunch AI if you have hit the model and prompt caps and want six engines on every plan; Athena HQ for a free multi-engine tier; Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit if you already live in Semrush; SE Ranking if you would rather bolt AI tracking onto an SEO suite. We compare the field on price, coverage and action layer in best AI visibility tools and best AEO tools, and tool-by-tool in Profound alternatives and Peec AI alternatives.

Key Takeaways

• Under $250/mo Peec is clearly better value: three chosen models and unlimited seats for about $80, against ChatGPT alone and one seat for $99.
• Profound's three-engine plan is $399/mo. That step, not the entry price, is where most comparisons are actually decided.
• Peec's three-model cap never lifts on self-serve, however much you spend; Profound's engine list expands only by moving up a fixed ladder.
• Neither tracks Claude without an Enterprise contract.
• Profound measures deeper — citations, real prompt volumes, crawler analytics — and both stop at telling you. The citations you are missing usually sit on pages you do not own.

If you would rather your AI visibility tool handed you the next page to write and the next person to email, see how Sightivo works — or check what ChatGPT says about your brand for free first.