Loomaly and OpenSEO
What OpenSEO does, what Loomaly does, and when you'd use one, the other or both. Facts checked against OpenSEO's own repository on September 24, 2026.
OpenSEO is an open-source (MIT) SEO research tool that describes itself as an alternative to Semrush and Ahrefs. Loomaly is one MCP for all of your SEO: it finds what's wrong on every page, ranks what to fix first, hands the fix to your coding assistant and checks again once it's live — plus optional paid rankings, AI mentions, competitors and backlinks on a monthly data budget. They answer overlapping questions; many teams would use both.
What follows about OpenSEO comes from its README, docs and source as of September 24, 2026. If something here is out of date, tell us at support@loomaly.com.
Side by side
| OpenSEO | Loomaly | |
|---|---|---|
| Main question | What should we rank for, and how are we doing against competitors? | What is wrong on our site, what do we fix first, and is it fixed? |
| Keyword research, rank tracking, backlinks, competitor data | Yes, through DataForSEO (your key) | Yes on paid plans, through Loomaly's monthly data budget (check / visibility) |
| Site audit | Crawls up to 50 pages on the free tier, up to 10,000 paid or self-hosted; optional Lighthouse on up to 10 pages | Rule checks and an AI judgment on every page it finds, unlimited; a real-browser speed test on representative pages of each template |
| Tracking fixes | Lists previous audits | Every problem is open, fixed or ignored; check (target: fix) closes or reopens it |
| What AI crawlers see | AI visibility (brand mentions) through DataForSEO | Whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others get your content; plus paid AI-mention checks on paid plans |
| Health score | — | Five dimensions with published weights; see How the health score works |
| Coding assistants | MCP server; Claude Code and Cursor plugins | MCP 2.0 with twelve intent tools (status → todo → fix / send_to_dev → check target: fix); plugins for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor; see MCP |
| Data source and cost | Your own DataForSEO key, pay per request; hosted at $10/month plus 28% on DataForSEO requests | No third-party key to manage; plans from $0 (Free, $0 data budget) to $199 with $3–$35/mo data budget; see Plans |
| Self-hosting | Yes (Docker or Cloudflare) | No, hosted only |
When to use which
- Deep keyword research and building a DataForSEO-powered stack yourself: OpenSEO.
- Keeping every page of your own site healthy, fixing in the repo, and proving the fix: Loomaly.
- Light rankings / AI / competitors / backlinks without running your own DataForSEO account: Loomaly paid plans.
- A client-rendered site: Loomaly tells apart pages that are empty for every crawler from pages pre-rendered for search engines only.
Using both
OpenSEO can still drive keyword strategy; Loomaly keeps those pages indexable, fast and readable, confirms each fix, and can refresh paid visibility from chat. Both have MCP servers, so one assistant session can use both.