The Simpler Profound Alternative
Everything you check in Profound, sampled up to 4× as often, at a price you can see and pay by card today. No sales call, no credit packs, and nothing held back for Enterprise.
Overview. Your AI visibility and share of voice at a glance.
Used by 200+ brands to optimize their AI visibility
Everything you check in Profound, without the rest.
Teams switch to Elmo when the tool they bought for a weekly visibility number turns into a suite, a sales process, and a credit balance.
No bloat
Profound grew into a suite: content generation, shopping tracking, crawler analytics. Elmo does one job, AI visibility, and every screen is about it.
Not complicated
Are we showing up, who is beating us, what changed, and what to fix. Every view answers one of those in seconds, so checking in daily is not a chore.
More data for the price
From the $99/mo Basic plan, Elmo asks every prompt 4× a day. AI answers vary run to run, so more samples means numbers you can trust.
Fully self-serve
Pick a plan, pay by card, and start tracking. There is no demo to book, no procurement cycle, and no sales rep between you and your data.
No paywall maze
No credit packs to top up and no API held back for Enterprise. Each plan is a number of brands, prompts, and platforms, and the rest of the product comes with it.
- Get started
Try it on your own brand
Plans start at $29/mo. You can be tracking your Profound prompt set in minutes.
Elmo and Profound, side by side.
How the two compare on the things that decide what you pay and how quickly you get going.
| Feature | Elmo | Profound |
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | Sign up and pay by card, from $29/mo | 7-day trial, then a call with sales |
| Published pricing | Every plan, on the pricing page | Enterprise is custom-quoted |
| How often answers are checked | Up to 4× daily | Daily |
| API and MCP access | Every plan | API on Enterprise only |
| Usage credits | None. Plans are priced by prompts and platforms | Credit allotments, more via sales |
| Unlimited seats | Every plan | Yes |
| Open source and self-hostable | MIT-licensed, self-host free | Closed, hosted only |
Profound details are from its public pricing page as of October 2026 and may have changed since.
Loved by marketers. Recommended by AI.
“It’s a mature, open‑source, self‑hosted AEO/AI visibility tracker.”
ChatGPT
“Simple and much more cost effective than Profound.”
Nolan
Speakeasy
“Elmo is the open-source pick: you self-host it for free and track how every major AI answer engine mentions and cites your brand.”
Claude
“We were looking for an affordable way to track our visibility in AI search, and Elmo was a great fit. They were incredibly responsive and quickly added the integration we needed.”
James W.
TradeSites
“The best open-source alternative to the AI visibility platform Profound is Elmo.”
Gemini
“We're an AEO consultancy, so we turned Elmo on ourselves before any client. It's the tool I trust to tell us the truth about our own AI visibility, and it was tracking within the hour.”
Viveka D.
AISearch Global
“The biggest thing for me is seeing how our brand shows up in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews all in one dashboard. Before this I was literally typing prompts by hand to check.”
Borys M.
Backlink Agency
“Elmo has been fantastic to use for tracking AI visibility of my sports management platform RecordRanks. I highly recommend it, I think it's genuinely worth it!”
Deni M.
RecordRanks
“Elmo is the best open-source alternative to Profound for most users.”
Perplexity
Switch in an afternoon.
Bring the prompts you already track, and Elmo starts checking them up to 4× a day across the engines you pick.
1Create an account
Sign up and choose a plan. No call, no contract, cancel any time.
2Paste your prompt list
Copy the prompts you track in Profound and paste them in, one per line. Duplicates are skipped for you.
3Add your competitors
Name the rivals you benchmark against, and Elmo tracks their share of voice and citations next to yours.
Every answer engine your buyers use.
Elmo both scrapes what real users see in popular AI search tools and captures all other models with direct API calls and OpenRouter.
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Gemini
- Perplexity
- AI Overviews
- AI Mode
- Copilot
- Grok
- DeepSeek
- Mistral
- Qwen
- OpenRouter LLMs
Simple, self-serve pricing.
Most teams coming from Profound choose Pro: 150 prompts across 4 AI platforms, checked 4× daily, for $299/mo. Unlimited seats on every plan.
- 1 brand, 50 prompts
- ChatGPT only
- Answers checked 1× daily
- No premium models
- 1 brand, 50 prompts
- Any 4 AI platforms
- Answers checked 4× daily
- No premium models
- 2 brands, 150 prompts
- Any 4 AI platforms
- Answers checked 4× daily
- 20 premium prompts 1× daily
- 5 brands, 350 prompts
- Any 4 AI platforms
- Answers checked 4× daily
- 30 premium prompts 1× daily
Self-hosted
The same product on your own servers. Unlimited prompts, every model, full source.
Custom
More brands, custom prompt limits, higher sampling rates, and any models.
White label
Offer AI visibility tracking to your clients under your own brand, domain, and SSO.
Self-host for free.
Open Source
MIT-licensed and runs on Docker.
Own Your Data
Everything is stored in Postgres.
Track Anything
BYOK to track any AI model.
Frequently asked questions
Something we didn't cover? Ask the maintainers directly on Discord.
Do I need to talk to sales to use Elmo?
No. Every Elmo Cloud plan is self-serve: sign up, pay by card, and start tracking. Plans start at $29/mo, and you can change or cancel from the billing page. A tour is available if you want one, but it is never required.
Can I bring my prompts over from Profound?
Yes. Paste your existing prompt list into Elmo, one prompt per line, and it is tracked from then on. Your Profound history stays in Profound, so most teams run both for a short overlap before cancelling.
Is Elmo's data comparable to Profound's?
Both track how AI engines answer your buyers' prompts. Elmo checks each prompt up to 4× a day rather than once, which smooths out the run-to-run variation in AI answers, and every metric is computed by open-source code you can read.
Which Elmo plan matches a Profound setup?
Most teams coming from Profound choose Pro: 150 prompts across 4 AI platforms, checked 4× daily, with premium grounded models included, for $299/mo. Larger programs can step up to Business or self-host Elmo for free.
Start winning AI search today.
Start tracking your brand in minutes. Plans start at $29/mo.
- Self-serve
- Unlimited seats
- API and MCP access
Want a walkthrough first? Book a 30-minute tour.