The best ASO tools in 2026: an honest comparison

Every “best ASO tools” list currently ranking on Google was written by a company that sells one of the tools, and every one of them puts its own product first. That is not the real problem. The real problem is that the prices are wrong. Three of the top-ranking lists still quote AppTweak at $69 per month (it is $79), AppFollow at $111 (it is not), and Appfigures at $29 (it starts at $9.99). Two of them still recommend data.ai, a product that stopped existing in 2024.

So here is the disclosure up front: we build AppBoard, which is one of the tools below. We have listed it where it honestly fits and said plainly what it does not do. Every price in the table was read off the vendor's own pricing page in August 2026, and anything we could not verify at the source is marked as unverified rather than guessed.

The five jobs an ASO tool has to do

Before comparing products, be clear about which of these you actually do every week. Most teams need two or three of them, and paying for a platform that does all five is the most common way to overspend.

1. Keyword research and rank tracking - finding phrases worth targeting and watching your position move.
2. Metadata editing and publishing - actually changing the title, subtitle, keyword field and description, per language, without living inside two separate consoles.
3. Creative production - screenshots, feature graphics and preview videos at the exact sizes each store demands.
4. Review monitoring and replies - reading and answering reviews across both stores in one inbox.
5. Market intelligence - competitor downloads, revenue estimates and category trends. This is the most expensive category by far and the one most small teams do not need.

Prices, checked in August 2026

Entry price is the number vendors advertise. The quota is the number that decides what you will actually pay six months in, because the entry tier almost always caps you at 500 tracked keywords.

Two honest caveats about that table. AppFollow's pricing page did not render for us, so the $179 and $599 figures come from three third-party sources rather than the vendor, and we have marked them accordingly. Sensor Tower publishes nothing at all; the figures you see quoted elsewhere, anywhere from $500 per month to $150,000 per year, are other people's estimates and none of them are sourced. If you need Sensor Tower, you are going to a sales call.

What each tool is genuinely best at

AppTweak

The deepest keyword dataset on both stores, covering more than 100 countries, with a reporting studio that agencies lean on for client decks. It is the default choice when keyword data quality is the thing you are buying. The Essential tier at 500 keywords is tight for anything beyond a single app in a couple of markets, so budget for $249.

App Radar

The one big platform that lets you edit and publish metadata in the same place you track it, which removes a genuinely annoying copy-and-paste loop between a dashboard and two consoles. Pricing is in euros and the trial requires a card.

Appfigures

The cheapest credible entry into paid ASO, and the only mainstream tool that puts revenue, downloads and keyword ranks on the same dashboard. The tier ladder is long, which is good if you grow slowly and annoying if you need one feature that sits three tiers up.

Mobile Action

Strongest when your organic and paid strategies are linked, because its Apple Ads campaign management is free up to $10,000 in monthly ad spend. If you run Apple Search Ads at all, this changes the maths.

ASODesk and ASOMobile

Both sit in the $59 entry bracket with good review-reply tooling and generous keyword quotas relative to price. ASOMobile has the most usable free tier of any paid vendor: 20 keywords, 2 apps, 100 replies, no card required. Both are a sensible middle ground if AppTweak is too expensive and Appfigures is too thin.

AppFollow

Built around review management first and keyword tracking second. If you have a large portfolio and a support team answering reviews, its reply automation is the reason to buy it, not its ASO data.

Sensor Tower

Market intelligence, not day-to-day ASO. You buy Sensor Tower to know what a competitor earned last quarter, not to fix your subtitle. If your job is shipping a listing next week, this is the wrong product.

SplitMetrics

Store listing A/B testing at scale. The Starter tier is free with no time limit, which makes it worth having in the stack even if you never buy the $500 per month App Intelligence add-on.

Astro

A native macOS app for iOS-only developers, $9 per month billed annually, unlimited keywords, 60 or more countries. If you ship on the App Store only and you live on a Mac, this is the best value in the whole list.

Launch Shots and Mokbi

Both attack the creative half of ASO: screenshots, store copy and publishing to both stores. Launch Shots has a free tier that gives you one publish credit per month with no watermark. Mokbi is free forever for the editor itself and charges from 29.99 euros per month once you want to publish. Neither does keyword research, and neither pretends to.

AppBoard

We built AppBoard for the case none of the above covers cheaply: editing and publishing the same listing to both stores, per language, with a change history you can diff and roll back like code. It includes a free browser-based screenshot editor that exports at exact store dimensions, review management, and AI drafting that runs on your own OpenRouter key. It is free while in beta and source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License, so you can self-host it.

Where it is not the right pick: it does not sell competitor download or revenue estimates, and its keyword data is not a substitute for AppTweak's if market-level keyword volume is the thing you are paying for. If your ASO job is mostly research, buy a research tool.

Tools that no longer exist

Check any comparison article against this list before trusting the rest of it.

• data.ai (formerly App Annie) was acquired by Sensor Tower in March 2024 and retired as a brand.
• StoreMaven no longer operates as an independent product, though its research is still widely cited.
• Checkaso appears to be gone; the domain no longer resolves. Prices for it still circulate.

The free stack that actually works

You can run competent ASO for a first app without paying anyone. The pieces exist, they are just scattered:

• App Store Connect for impressions, product page views, conversion rate and Product Page Optimization tests.
• Google Play Console for acquisition reports and Store Listing Experiments.
• Apple Ads Search Match as a keyword discovery source: run a small campaign and read which search terms Apple matched you to. This is real Apple data, not a model.
• Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends for directional demand and seasonality.
• A free editor for the visuals, and a free tier of one tracker for rank history.

The gap in that stack is history and speed, not capability. Consoles show you today; they do not show you what your rank did over the last ninety days. That is the moment a paid tracker starts earning its price. Our keyword research workflow for apps walks through doing this without a $300 subscription.

The quota trap

Advertised entry prices are almost meaningless because of one number: the keyword quota. A realistic tracking list for one app in five markets is roughly 100 keywords per market, so 500 keywords. That is exactly the cap on AppTweak Essential, App Radar Essentials and ASOMobile Indie. Add a second app or a sixth market and you are on the next tier, which is three to four times the price, not twenty percent more.

Before you buy, count your real list: apps, multiplied by markets, multiplied by keywords per market. Then price the tier that number lands in, not the tier on the pricing page hero. Also check whether the vendor requires an annual commitment, because several of the mid-market platforms do, and whether renewal pricing is fixed.

Which one should you buy

Before you subscribe, do this

Run one trial at a time and give it a specific job. Pick three keywords you already rank for and check whether the tool's reported position matches what you see searching manually on a clean device in that storefront. If a vendor's ranks disagree with reality on keywords you can verify by hand, its volume estimates on keywords you cannot verify are not worth paying for either.

Then check the boring part: can you export your keyword list, and does the tool cover the specific fields each store gives you? The character limits and field structures differ more than people expect, which we broke down field by field in App Store vs Google Play metadata. A tool that models only Apple's keyword field will not help much on Google Play, where there is no keyword field at all.

Frequently asked questions

If you want to see what listing management looks like without a subscription, AppBoard is free while it is in beta and you can check the planned pricing before you invest any time in it.