AthenaHQ alternative: ShownInAI vs AthenaHQ

The short answer

Choose AthenaHQ if you are a marketing team that wants to run AI search as an ongoing channel, you have someone to work the platform every week, and you want broad coverage across 11 AI models with unlimited prompts and competitors. You can start on the free Essential tier, and Starter costs $295 a month.

Choose ShownInAI if you are a founder, a small SaaS team or a local business without a content person, and what you actually need is the comparison, alternatives and answer pages that AI search quotes. ShownInAI costs $9 for the first month and $29 a month after that. It checks 10 real buyer questions, shows who AI names instead of you and which sources it trusts, writes 3 publish-ready pages straight away and 3 more every month. If AI answers still do not name you within 60 days, you get everything back.

Over a year, AthenaHQ Starter costs $3,540 at the monthly price, or roughly $2,940 with the 17% annual discount (our arithmetic from the discount shown on the page). ShownInAI Starter costs $328 for the year ($9 plus 11 months at $29).

AthenaHQ pricing in 2026

AthenaHQ's pricing page shows three plans and a monthly or annual switch, with annual billing 17% off. Essential is free and includes $25 of free credit, which the page says is 300 credits, across 5 AI engines, with unlimited users, prompt and response analysis, sources and competitor insights, content recommendations and the Athena AI agent.

Starter is $295 a month and is labelled as best for self-guided SMBs. It includes 3,600 credits a month, where 1 credit equals 1 AI response, visibility across 11 models (more on request), unlimited topics and prompts, unlimited competitors, country-level support, integrations, CSV export, on-page and off-page actions, a content optimisation agent and self-learning content improvement. API access and extra credits are optional paid add-ons billed on top of Starter; the page asks you to contact them for add-on prices, so we do not quote one.

Enterprise is custom priced and labelled for enterprises and agencies. It adds a custom credit allocation, a knowledge base with claim review, discrepancy detection, the Athena Citation Engine, persona targeting, multi-region and multi-language support, the Athena Recommendation Engine, SAML and OIDC single sign-on, audit logs, executive dashboards with BI tool support (Tableau, Power BI, Looker), white-glove setup, a dedicated Slack channel, a 2-hour SLA and a certified GEO/SEO specialist.

What 3,600 credits actually buys

Because AthenaHQ counts every AI response as one credit, the number of questions you can track depends on how many models you check and how often. These are our own sums from the published numbers, not AthenaHQ figures:

• 50 buyer questions checked once on all 11 models uses 550 credits, so 3,600 credits covers about 6 full rounds a month, roughly one every five days.
• 50 questions checked on 5 models uses 250 credits per round, about 14 rounds a month.
• 10 questions checked daily on 11 models would need about 3,300 credits a month, close to the whole Starter allowance.
• The free Essential tier's 300 credits covers about 6 questions on 5 engines checked 10 times, enough to look around, not to track a category.

ShownInAI pricing in 2026

ShownInAI's Starter plan is $9 for the first month and then $29 a month. It includes a scan of 10 unbranded buyer questions ("best [category]", "[competitor] alternatives", "X vs Y"), the list of competitors AI names instead of you and the sources it cites, 3 publish-ready pages written straight after payment, 3 new pages every month from a fresh check, tracking every 14 days with email alerts and the 60-day money-back guarantee.

The Agency plan is $99 a month for up to 10 client sites, each with 10 buyer questions rechecked every two weeks, a client dashboard, white-label PDF reports with your logo, before-and-after proof and an embeddable lead-generation scanner. If you only want to know where you stand today, the $49 AI Visibility Report is a one-time purchase with no subscription.

What AthenaHQ does better

• A free tier. You can sign up for Essential at no cost and look at real responses before paying anything. ShownInAI has no free plan.
• Far more measurement. Unlimited prompts and competitors across 11 models on Starter, against 10 buyer questions per brand on ShownInAI. If you need steady share-of-voice numbers across many topics, AthenaHQ has much more data.
• Unlimited users. A whole marketing team can work in one account.
• Platform features. Country-level support, integrations, on-page and off-page actions and, on Enterprise, persona targeting, BI dashboards, SSO and a dedicated specialist.
• Third-party recognition. The pricing page shows G2 High Performer (Spring 2026) badges in answer engine optimization; ShownInAI has no review-site badges yet.

What ShownInAI does better

• It writes the pages for you, every month. AthenaHQ gives content recommendations and a content optimisation agent that your team runs. ShownInAI writes 3 finished pages straight after payment and 3 new ones every month, with FAQ schema, ready to paste into your site.
• One flat price, no credit maths. $29 a month covers the checks and the writing. You never have to decide how many models or how often you can afford to check.
• It costs about a tenth as much. $29 a month against $295 a month, and $9 to start. The $99 Agency plan for 10 client sites is about a third of the price of AthenaHQ Starter for a single account.
• It is built for people with no time. There is no platform to learn. You enter your website address, read who AI recommends instead of you, and publish the pages.
• It puts money on the result: named by AI within 60 days or a full refund, and a refund of the $9 first month if it is not useful within 7 days.

Why written pages matter more than more data

We ran unbranded buyer questions through AI search for 50 software brands. 39 of the 50 were never named in any answer to their own category's buyer questions, and all 30 brands that had launched in the previous month scored 0.

In 33 of those 50 cases, the most cited source was a competitor's own website: its comparison pages, alternatives pages, docs and help centre. Review sites were the top source for only 6 of 50 brands. The pages that decide who gets recommended are mostly pages companies wrote about themselves and their rivals.

So if you are not named at all yet, more responses per month mostly confirms the same zero. What changes the answer is publishing honest comparison and alternatives pages of your own. On AthenaHQ that writing is work your team does with the platform's help; on ShownInAI it is the main thing you are paying for.

Which one fits you

1. 01Solo founder or seed-stage SaaS with no content person: ShownInAI Starter. $9 to start, pages written for you, money back if it does not work.
2. 02Curious but not ready to pay: AthenaHQ's free Essential tier, or ShownInAI's $49 one-time report if you want a scored answer and a fix list rather than raw responses.
3. 03Marketing team at a growth-stage company with budget for $295 a month and someone to run the platform: AthenaHQ Starter.
4. 04Enterprise or multi-brand group that needs SSO, BI dashboards and persona targeting: AthenaHQ Enterprise. ShownInAI does not compete at that scale.
5. 05Agency with many small clients: ShownInAI Agency at $99 a month for 10 white-labelled sites. Agencies with a few large clients that want deep data may prefer AthenaHQ Enterprise.

Can you use both?

Yes. A team could keep AthenaHQ's free Essential tier, or Starter, for broad monitoring and use ShownInAI to get three new pages written every month for $29. Most small companies only need one, and the deciding question is the same as with every tool in this category: do you need more data, or do you need the pages written?

How to switch from AthenaHQ to ShownInAI

1. 01Export your prompts and results to CSV and note the competitors and sources AthenaHQ shows being cited instead of you.
2. 02Start ShownInAI for $9 with your website address. The scan runs straight after payment and takes about a minute.
3. 03Compare our competitors and sources with what you saw in AthenaHQ. They are usually similar, because both tools read real AI answers.
4. 04Publish the 3 pages we write on your own site and link to them from your pricing page, docs or blog.
5. 05Drop back to AthenaHQ's free tier or cancel at the end of your billing period if you no longer need its monitoring.

Other AthenaHQ alternatives

If you mainly want cheaper tracking rather than pages written, look at OtterlyAI (from $29 a month), LLMrefs ($79 a month for 500 prompts), Peec AI (from $95 a month) and Scrunch (Core at $250 a month). We compare each one-to-one: /compare/otterly-ai-alternative, /compare/peec-ai-alternative, /compare/scrunch-ai-alternative, and every tool side by side in /compare/best-ai-visibility-tool-for-saas and /compare/best-ai-visibility-tool-for-agencies. Those prices were read from each vendor's own page between 27 and 28 October 2026.

How we checked these facts

AthenaHQ's plans, prices, credits and features on this page come from AthenaHQ's own public pricing page, read on 29 October 2026. Annual prices are not shown as figures in the page text we read, only the 17% discount, so the annual year cost above is our own calculation. Prices change, so check the source before you buy. ShownInAI's numbers come from our own pricing page, and the 50-brand figures come from our own scan data set. If anything here about AthenaHQ is wrong or out of date, email [email protected] and we will correct it.