Both track the same category. The separation is at the bottom of the funnel: AthenaHQ starts near enterprise pricing, which rules it out for teams testing whether AI visibility matters to them at all.
That is the honest headline, and it is narrower than it sounds. AthenaHQ’s free tier is genuinely more generous than ours, and its credit model is the clearest pricing unit anyone in this category publishes.
What do they cost?
| Rivarise | AthenaHQ | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Permanent. 1 engine, 3 prompts a week, 1 domain | Permanent. $25 of credit, 300 credits, 5 models |
| Entry paid tier | $69/mo | $295/mo |
| Engines at entry paid | 4 | 9 models |
| Volume at entry paid | 50 prompts a day | 3,600 credits a month |
| Top self-serve tier | $349/mo Business, all 9 engines, 80 prompts a day | Enterprise, custom |
| Pricing unit | Prompts, with a published run count | Credits, where 1 credit is 1 AI response |
| Requery frequency | 5 runs per prompt per engine per day, published | Credit-metered, so you choose it |
The $69 against $295 comparison is real and it is also the least interesting row, because the two products are priced for different moments. Ours is priced for a team finding out whether this matters. Theirs is priced for a team that has decided it does.
Where is AthenaHQ genuinely better?
Three places, and the first one is a straightforward loss for us.
Their Essential plan covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude. Our free plan covers one engine. If you want a wide free look, take theirs.
One credit is one AI response. That is the most honest description of the underlying cost anybody in this category publishes, and it makes over-buying hard.
Content recommendations, optimisation agents and on-page actions are in the product. We measure and tell you what to fix; we do not do the fixing.
Their enterprise tier also carries SAML and OIDC SSO, an organisation activity audit log, and multi-region support. We ship SSO on Agency at $1,299, so the comparison there depends entirely on what else you need alongside it.
Where is Rivarise better?
Ours is $69. Theirs is $295. If your first paid month has to survive a budget conversation, that difference decides it.
Five runs per prompt per engine per day, stated. With credits you decide the run count, which is flexible and means two customers’ numbers are not comparable.
A prompt allowance is a fixed monthly number. A credit budget is a number you can exhaust in week three by tracking more engines than you planned.
The run-frequency point is the one we would defend hardest, and it is not really about them. Answers vary between identical runs, so a citation figure is only meaningful with a stated run count behind it. A credit model can produce excellent measurement if you spend the credits on repetition, and a poor one if you spend them on breadth instead. That choice is yours to get right rather than the vendor’s.
How do the engine counts actually compare?
Close, with the difference at the extremes rather than in the middle.
| Tier | Rivarise | AthenaHQ |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 engine | 5 models |
| Entry paid | 4 engines at $69 | 9 models at $295 |
| Mid | 6 at $149, 9 at $349 | Not published between Starter and Enterprise |
| Top self-serve | 9 at $349 | Enterprise, custom, additional models on request |
Two rows are worth reading carefully, and neither of them flatters us. Their free tier beats our free tier, clearly. And at full coverage they are cheaper: their Starter is $295 for nine models, ours is $349 for nine engines. The gap that runs our way is the entry price, $69 against $295, which is the difference between finding out whether this matters and committing to it.
Which should you choose?
How should you actually run the evaluation?
Both products have a free tier, which makes this unusually easy and removes most of the reason to take either vendor’s word for anything.
Write your prompt set first, before you open either dashboard, and write it in the language your buyers use rather than your category page’s. Then run the same prompts through both free tiers for two weeks without changing anything. You will learn more from that fortnight than from any comparison page, including this one.
What to watch for is not which tool reports a higher number. It is whether the two agree, and where they diverge, why. Different engine coverage and different run frequencies produce different figures from identical reality, and understanding that difference is the actual skill being bought here.
One caution about free tiers generally. Ours limits you to one engine, so a fortnight on it tells you about ChatGPT and nothing else. Theirs gives five models but a finite credit pool, so a fortnight of heavy use may exhaust it. Plan the test around both constraints rather than discovering them halfway through.
What do both of us fail to do?
Neither product closes the attribution gap, because nothing can. An answer that names you and sends no click is invisible in your analytics, and a buyer who reads about you today and arrives directly in a fortnight cannot be joined back to that answer. Any vendor in this category claiming otherwise is inferring rather than measuring.
Neither of us does the third-party evidence work either. Both tools will show you that your competitors are cited across review platforms and comparison articles while you are not. Getting into those sources is a quarter of somebody’s actual job, and no dashboard shortens it.
Does either cover the engines your buyers use?
Both cover the ones with documented retrieval, and neither can tell you much about the ones without it.
The engines that publish how they work are the live-search family and Google’s surfaces. OpenAI documents the crawler behind ChatGPT’s search features and keeps it separate from its training crawler; Perplexity documents the same split; and Google states that AI Overviews and AI Mode carry “no additional requirements” beyond ordinary Search eligibility.
Both products track those. Where we differ is at the edges: our Business tier reaches all nine engines including Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI, and AthenaHQ lists additional models as available on request rather than as a published tier. If your buyers are somewhere unusual, ask both of us directly rather than reading a pricing page.
What do people usually ask about the two?
If you are still working out whether you need either, the twelve-tool comparison covers the wider category with every published price dated and linked, and the no-budget audit will tell you what you would be buying before you buy it.