Clearscope vs Frase: 2 SEO Tools 2026 (Free Template)

A content grader is software that scores a draft against a keyword SERP so an editor can see which terms, questions, and entities are still missing before publish. It is not a CMS, it is not a rank tracker, and it is not a guarantee that the URL will land in the top 10. Clearscope and Frase are the two graders in this comparison. US Tech Automations sits above them as the ticket layer that blocks a row when the grade, the unique fact, and the human sign-off have not all passed.

TL;DR: Buy Clearscope if the team wants topic reports, prompt tracking, a 14-day trial, and a printed Essentials dollar. Buy Frase if the team wants an entry SERP-research seat with a published yearly price under $50. Do not treat either score as a rank forecast. A Zapier, Make, or n8n scenario can POST the grade into a sheet and retry on 5xx; the buyer still owns the threshold, the idempotent page id, and who is allowed to flip post_status.

Who this is for

This page is for in-house SEO leads, content ops managers, and agencies who already ship briefs into a CMS and need a grader in the brief-to-publish loop — not a second writing app.

Red flags: Skip both paid graders if you can edit a handful of URLs by hand and already know the SERP terms. Skip Clearscope if you need a crawl of tens of thousands of SKUs or a listings network — it is a topic-and-prompt seat, not a site audit engine. Skip Frase if you will treat a content score as a traffic forecast or if you need an AI-visibility tracker as the system of record.

What a content grader actually measures

Clearscope's public pricing, as summarized in the 2026 AI-visibility roundup and on the vendor page, sells Essentials and Business with unlimited users, a 14-day free trial, and no contract on the monthly plans. Essentials: $129/month according to Clearscope (2026). Essentials includes 20 AI Tracked Topics, 20 monthly Topic Explorations, 20 monthly AI Drafts, and 50 Content Inventory pages in the Zapier roundup of the same seat; the vendor page also prints Business at a higher cap. Business: $399/month according to Clearscope (2026). Those dollars buy topic reports and prompt tracking. They do not buy a promise that an optimized draft will outrank the incumbent.

Frase's public pricing page, retrieved for this batch on 2026-09-04, prints an entry plan at $39/mo billed yearly ($49/mo month-to-month). Frase yearly entry: $39/mo according to Frase (2026). Content Raptor, fetched HTTP 200 in the same batch window, also lists Frase starting at $49/month — print both, do not split the difference. ToolVerdict tested Frase on 2026-08-18 and used term precision@30 of 0.12 as a substitute measure because Frase publishes no term list. That is a coverage proxy, not a ranking coefficient.

The independent Clearscope check sits on the same tester. Cheapest paid plan: $129/mo according to ToolVerdict (2026), from a 3-keyword pilot dated 2026-08-20. Pilot date: 2026-08-20 according to ToolVerdict (2026). A three-keyword pilot is not a 200-URL correlation study. Treat it as a price confirmation plus a reminder that the sample is small.

20 AI Tracked Topics according to Zapier (2026) on the Clearscope Essentials seat in the AI-visibility roundup. That is a prompt-and-inventory cap, not a crawl budget.

Employment demand around this job is not a vendor ranking. Marketing-manager jobs: +8% (2023–33) according to BLS (2023). More marketing managers does not mean more of them should buy a grader; it means the seat has to survive a budget conversation with a person whose title is already on the BLS list.

COMPARISON earn rate: 17.8% according to US Tech Automations first-party mix-config (2026), on 12,514 live pages counted 2026-08-24, versus a 12.2% site base, with 941 COMPARISON pages in the denominator. That is why this page is a comparison with proprietary operating numbers in the matrix, not a third grader. This industry is not in the vertical earn-rate table (financial 17.2, logistics 14.6, general_smb 13.8, saas 13.8, accounting 9.5, insurance 8.0, healthcare 8.7, mortgage 5.8). Mix-config default: 10 according to the same first-party mix-config extract (2026). The 10 is a neutral default, not a vertical earn rate.

If the team already compared Clearscope against the ticket layer, keep that thread on Clearscope vs the platform layer. SaaS editors who arrived from a Surfer tab should stay on Surfer vs Clearscope for SaaS and come back here for the Frase seat. Teams who also need an AI-answer tracker rather than a grader should start from Profound vs Rankability instead of forcing either product in this pair to become a citation monitor.

Dated prices and what the seats buy

Print only what vendor pages and the dated roundups showed. Where a cell is not on those pages, it reads "contact vendor."

Source: Clearscope, Frase, Zapier AI-visibility roundup, and ToolVerdict tests dated 2026-08-18 / 2026-08-20. USTA has no public list price on this page.

Annualize only the printed monthly figures. Do not invent a discount that the page did not show.

Weighted criteria for SEO teams

Weights are an editorial scoring model for this page, not a vendor rank and not a traffic forecast.

Feature matrix with operating numbers

The last column is first-party operating data from the 12,514-page corpus counted 2026-08-24. It is not a feature of Clearscope or Frase.

Clearscope profile

Best fit. An SEO team that already has writers, a CMS, and a brief template, and that wants a letter grade plus a topic report before the editor signs. Essentials is the seat most teams will recognize: $129/month, 14-day trial, unlimited users, 20 explorations and 20 drafts per month in the Zapier extract.

Limitations. The inventory cap on Essentials is 50 Content Inventory pages in that same extract. A programmatic catalog that ships hundreds of near-duplicate URLs will burn the cap as a tracker, not as a writer. Clearscope is not a PBX, not a listings network, and not a log-file crawler. The 3-keyword ToolVerdict pilot confirmed the $129 floor; it did not prove that a Clearscope A-grade predicts position.

Implementation. Editors usually paste into the Content Inventory or open the Google Docs add-on, watch the grade move, and export the term list into the brief. A proposed ticket layer can subscribe to the CMS post_status change, refuse publish when the unique-fact checkbox is empty, and open a retry only on 5xx from Zapier, Make, or n8n. Prerequisites: a stable page id, a named reviewer, and a retention rule for the grade snapshot. Human review is the last step, not a toast message.

Primary evidence. Clearscope pricing and product pages; Zapier AI-visibility roundup fetched HTTP 200 on 2026-09-04; ToolVerdict 2026-08-20 pilot.

Frase profile

Best fit. A team that wants SERP research, an outline, and a draft in one tab, and that can live with a $39/mo yearly entry dollar. Agencies that already compared Frase against a SaaS Surfer seat should not clone that workflow here without re-checking the term-list gap.

Limitations. Frase publishes no term list. ToolVerdict therefore substituted term precision@30 of 0.12 on 2026-08-18. That is a coverage stand-in. It is not "Frase is 12% as good as the SERP." Higher Frase tiers were not in the batch extract, so they stay "contact vendor" rather than a guessed SKU. Frase is not an AI-citation monitor; if that is the job, read the Profound vs Rankability page linked above instead of stretching this seat.

Implementation. Typical loop: research the SERP inside Frase, generate the outline, draft, paste into WordPress or Webflow, then let a scenario POST a "research complete" flag. The buyer must design idempotency (one Frase document id per URL), escalation (who rewrites when precision@30 would have failed), access control (who can buy more documents), and retention (how long the SERP snapshot lives). Zapier, Make, and n8n can keep run histories, retries, error branches, and audit evidence when those are configured. They do not invent a unique fact.

Primary evidence. Frase pricing retrieved 2026-09-04; ToolVerdict 2026-08-18 test; Content Raptor $49/month listing in the same batch window.

The 14-day brief-to-publish loop

Worked example: a 36-URL SaaS docs site publishing 36 comparison pages in 14 days, targeting one head query each, with a $129 Clearscope Essentials seat plus a $39/mo Frase yearly seat ($168/month combined printed cash). The editor generates the outline in Frase, pastes the draft into Clearscope until the on-screen grade leaves the red band, then still rejects 9 of 36 rows because the unique proof point (a dated changelog, a named integration, a screenshot of a real settings pane) was a template token. A Make scenario retries the CMS webhook twice on 5xx and writes the run id into the sheet. US Tech Automations is proposed only as the gate that refuses to set WordPress post_status to publish until the unique-fact checkbox, the grade snapshot, and the named reviewer are all present. The 14-day SLA, the 36 page ids, and the 9 failures stay owned by the team. This is a design, not a live deployment.

Common mistakes

Chasing a letter grade on two near-duplicate programmatic pages that share a SERP term list. Paying for Essentials and Business at the same time without a cap on which URLs consume the 20 explorations. Treating ToolVerdict's 3-keyword Clearscope pilot as a rank study. Blending Frase's $39 yearly and $49 monthly into a fake "about $44" average. Wiring Zapier to auto-publish on grade change with no human in the loop. Buying both graders plus an AI-visibility tracker and still having no owner for post_status.

When NOT to use US Tech Automations. If the only job is one topic report a month, the Clearscope 14-day trial is enough. If Frase already sits in the brief and a senior editor already refuses thin pages by hand, adding a ticket layer is overhead. If a Zapier or n8n scenario already posts the grade, retries 5xx, and a human already flips the CMS, keep that system of record — the orchestrator is for teams that need a named gate across many URLs, not a second login for a single blog.

The homepage is the company root; the comparison above is the product decision. If the gap is the gate, not the grader, the printed next step is pricing.

Key Takeaways

• Clearscope Essentials prints $129/month with a 14-day trial; Business prints $399/month; both claims are vendor-page dollars from 2026, not a rank forecast.

• Frase's entry plan prints $39/mo yearly and $49/mo month-to-month (2026-09-04); Content Raptor also lists $49/month — print both.

• ToolVerdict's Clearscope check was a 3-keyword pilot on 2026-08-20; Frase's 2026-08-18 run used precision@30 of 0.12 because no term list is published.

• COMPARISON pages earned 17.8% vs a 12.2% base on 12,514 live pages counted 2026-08-24; seo_automation is not in the vertical table, so the mix-config default stays 10.

• A grader does not flip post_status. Zapier, Make, or n8n can retry and log; a human still owns the unique fact.

• Skip both seats if you can edit the URLs by hand; skip the ticket layer if one editor already gates every URL.

Questions SEO teams ask about Clearscope vs Frase

Is Clearscope cheaper than Frase in 2026?

No. Frase's printed yearly entry is $39/mo and Clearscope Essentials is $129/mo, both dated in this batch. The $90 gap buys topic reports, prompt tracking, and a 14-day trial on Clearscope, not a better Google position. If the only need is SERP research plus a draft, Frase's entry dollar is the lower printed cash. If the need is a topic inventory with unlimited users, Clearscope is the seat that prints those caps.

Does a Clearscope grade or a Frase score predict rank?

Neither vendor publishes a rank-correlation coefficient on the pages cited here. ToolVerdict's Clearscope work was a 3-keyword price-and-pilot check, and its Frase work used a substitute precision@30 of 0.12. Treat the on-screen grade as a coverage checklist. Rank is a separate measurement in Search Console, not a letter in the editor.

Clearscope or Frase for SEO teams that already use Zapier?

Either seat can sit behind a Zapier, Make, or n8n scenario that stores run history, retries 5xx, and branches on error. The buyer must still design idempotency, escalation, access controls, retention, and who is allowed to publish. The scenario does not replace a unique fact. A proposed US Tech Automations design would add a ticket that refuses post_status=publish until those checks pass; that is a configuration with a human review point, not a claim that the grader is obsolete.

Can I run both graders on the same URL?

Yes, and the printed stack is $168/month if you combine Clearscope Essentials with Frase yearly. The failure mode is two scores that both pass while the page is still a template clone. Use one grader as the coverage check and spend the second seat on a different job (outline vs inventory), or drop the second seat.

What does "unlimited users" on Clearscope actually include?

The vendor page states unlimited users on every plan, including Essentials at $129/month. It does not uncap Topic Explorations (20/month on Essentials in the Zapier extract) or Content Inventory pages (50). Users are not explorations. Budget the cap that will actually fire, not the seat count.

When is a DIY sheet better than either paid grader?

When the URL set is small enough that an editor can paste the SERP titles into a sheet, check the missing questions by hand, and publish. Paid graders earn their keep when the same checklist would otherwise be rewritten from memory on every brief. They do not earn their keep as a substitute for a person who has read the page.