Profound vs Peec AI: prices, engines and the math behind the choice

What do Profound and Peec AI each do?

Profound and Peec AI both run a fixed list of prompts through AI answer engines every day and report how often your brand is mentioned, where it ranks among competitors, what tone the answer takes, and which pages the engines cited. That shared core is where the overlap ends. Profound has grown into an "AI marketing" platform with agents that write and publish, prompt-volume data, crawler analytics and shopping placement. Peec has stayed closer to analytics and reporting, adding actions, an agent and brand-perception checks on top of the tracking.

Profound was founded in August 2024 in New York by James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs, according to its own information page, which also lists offices in San Francisco, Boston, London and Buenos Aires. Its Series C, $96 million at a valuation of $1 billion, closed on 24 February 2026, when it said it served more than 700 enterprises and over 10 percent of the Fortune 500, then a $180 million Series D at $1.8 billion on 15 September 2026, with Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins leading together. The Series D release says Profound now serves over 1,000 enterprise brands and 16% of the Fortune 500, and names Comcast, Walmart, Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB and Figma among them. Its information page puts total funding at more than $300 million.

Peec AI is a Berlin company that announced a $21 million Series A on 18 November 2025, led by Singular with Antler, Combination VC, identity.vc and S20, after a seed round led by 20VC in July 2025. At the time it reported 1,300 or more brands and agencies onboarded since February 2025, $4 million or more in annual recurring revenue within ten months, and plans to open a New York office and hire more than 40 people. Its homepage and pricing page now say "Trusted by 3500+ brands and agencies". The scale gap is real: Profound has raised roughly ten times as much money and sells to procurement teams, while Peec sells self-serve plans by credit card.

That gap shapes the two products more than any single feature does. Profound's roadmap goes where enterprise budgets go: agents, compliance paperwork, conversation data. Peec's roadmap goes where self-serve users complain: more models, more flexible prompt allocation, cheaper pitching for agencies. If you keep that in mind, most of the plan details below stop looking random.

How do Profound and Peec AI prices compare?

Peec AI publishes every brand and agency price; Profound publishes one. We read both pricing pages in a normal browser rather than through a fetch tool, because vendor pages sometimes serve stale copy to bots, and the figures below are what a buyer in the United States sees.

Peec AI plans

Peec's pricing page lists three self-serve plans and an Enterprise tier. Every self-serve plan includes unlimited users, daily tracking and three models of your choice. The variable is the prompt count.

The "monthly AI answers" column is Peec's own arithmetic, shown on the pricing page as prompts multiplied by active models and tracking frequency. Its FAQ gives the example of 25 prompts on 3 models for 30 days producing 2,250 answers. Annual billing takes 15% off. Prices can display in euros for European visitors, which is why you will see €85 or €89 Starter figures on other sites; the dollar figures above are the US list.

The three included models come from a list of six: Gemini, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Naver AI, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. Perplexity and Claude are not on it. A fourth model is an add-on: the page shows $30, $70 and $140 a month on Starter, Pro and Advanced with annual billing, each tagged with a "Save $60", "Save $180" or "Save $300" note, which puts the monthly-billed add-on at $35, $85 and $165. The add-on list is ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini, so Perplexity can be bought on any plan while Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral, Qwen and Meta's model sit on Enterprise only.

Enterprise is annual billing only. It adds API access, single sign-on, daily or weekly tracking, unlimited projects and, in Peec's words, "Up to 13 LLM models tracked". The Enterprise column lists ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini, Naver AI, Claude Sonnet 4, GPT 5 Search, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral, Meta Spark and Perplexity, with several marked as API-based collection.

Profound plans

Profound's pricing page has a brands tab with two columns, Trial and Enterprise, and neither carries a monthly price.

The $399 figure comes from Profound's 11 November 2025 announcement of the self-serve Agency Growth plan, not from the pricing page, which describes the agency plan without a number. The pricing page FAQ confirms the plan's 400 credits a month per client workspace and says the credits pay for agent runs, with "simpler agents with fewer steps" using fewer credits. Overage can be billed or paused, your choice.

Two things on Profound's page matter more than the missing number. First, the trial prompts are fixed: "Trial plan users receive a recommended prompt set based on their industry and cannot customize their prompts." Second, the FAQ says setup is "Instant" and that both plans include unlimited seats, so the walls are engines and data access, not headcount. On the trial, data history, exports and API are all listed as "None".

If you have read other comparisons, you may expect a Profound Starter at $99 and a Growth plan at $399 with three engines. Those plans do not appear on the pricing page now. Peec's own comparison page and the April 2026 Profound article still describe them, which is a good reminder to check the live page before quoting either vendor in a budget request.

Agency pricing side by side

Agencies are where the two pricing models diverge most. Peec sells a pool of credits across client projects on its agency pricing page; Profound sells a workspace per client.

Peec's credit is defined in its agency docs as one prompt on one model for one day, so 30 credits track one prompt on one model for a month, and weekly tracking uses a third of the credits. That is how 10,000 credits become about 111 prompts: 10,000 divided by 3 models and 30 days is 111. Profound's help center describes pitch workspaces as short evaluations that typically expire after about 30 days, extendable with a credit, and says data appears 24 to 48 hours after a workspace is created or new prompts are added.

Run the numbers for a three-client agency. Peec Essential costs $245 and covers three client projects. Three Profound client workspaces cost $1,197. At ten clients, Peec Growth is $495 against $3,990. The Profound workspace does include Perplexity, which Peec's Essential and Growth tiers do not, and it comes with Profound's agents. Whether that is worth roughly five to eight times the price is a question about what your clients are paying you for, not about the tools.

Which AI engines does each tool track?

Peec covers more engines on an entry plan; Profound covers more engines in total, but only once you are on Enterprise. The table reads Peec's self-serve list, Peec's add-on and Enterprise lists, Profound's trial and Profound's Enterprise plan as each vendor states them.

Profound's pricing page caps Enterprise at "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked". Its changelog entry for the Claude launch, dated 25 August 2025, said Profound "now tracks ten answer engines" and listed ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek and Claude, with Claude available to Enterprise customers by request. Which nine land in your contract is part of the sales conversation, so write the list into the order form.

Peec's engine story is simpler and tighter. You get three from six, Perplexity costs extra, and the long tail (Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral, Qwen, Meta) is Enterprise only, or available to agencies on the Scale tier. Peec's changelog shows the model list moving fast: its October 2026 release notes add Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5, Grok 4.6 and Meta Muse Spark alongside new OpenAI models, and the September 2026 release improved Google AI Overviews capture, including AI Mode citations.

Does the Claude gap matter? For B2B brands, increasingly. Goodie's AI search traffic report, published 21 May 2026 from a panel of mostly B2B brands, found Claude's share of AI referrals climbing to 18.5% in March to April 2026 from 1.4% in the May to August 2025 wave. ChatGPT's share fell over the same span from 89.1% to 62.6%; Gemini's rose to 10.6% from 2.4%, and Perplexity's to 7.3% from 3.1%. If a fifth of your AI-sourced visits come from Claude, a tracker that only reaches Claude on an Enterprise contract leaves a fifth of the picture dark. Neither tool solves that on a credit card today, which is a point against both rather than for either.

How often does each tool refresh its data?

Both run daily by default. Peec's docs say accepted prompts "start running immediately, on the regular 24-hour cycle" and that active prompts "run daily"; Enterprise and the agency Scale tier can switch to weekly, which stretches credits three times further. Profound's pricing FAQ says the trial runs its 50 prompts "daily for 7 days" and that Enterprise "includes ongoing daily tracking". For agency workspaces, Profound's help center says data generation typically takes 24 to 48 hours after a workspace is created or prompts are uploaded by CSV.

Daily matters more than it sounds. Answers from AI engines change between runs, so a weekly snapshot cannot tell a real shift from noise; our guide to measuring AI visibility explains why mention rate over many runs is the metric to watch. Both vendors agree on this in practice, which is why neither sells a monthly-refresh plan. Where they differ is that Peec shows you the run count in the price (prompts x models x 30), and Profound asks you to trust the plan.

What does each tool cost per 1,000 AI answers?

Price per prompt flatters whichever vendor includes fewer engines, so we normalise on answers: one prompt, on one engine, on one day. The worked example below is hypothetical. It assumes a B2B software team tracking 150 buyer prompts and wanting ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity, every day, for a month.

For the example team, Peec Pro with Perplexity added is $330 a month on monthly billing, or $275 if paid annually, and it delivers 18,000 answers: 150 prompts, 4 models, 30 days. The closest Profound figure anyone can compute from a published price is the agency workspace, at $44.33 per 1,000 answers, roughly 2.4 times Peec Pro's rate. The Profound Enterprise number for the same brief could land anywhere, which is exactly why the trial, which cannot run your prompts, is a weak basis for the decision.

One caution on this math. Peec counts a model, not an engine mode, so Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode are two picks. Profound's trial bundles AI Overviews with ChatGPT and Gemini and leaves out AI Mode. If AI Mode is central for you (Google said at I/O 2026 it had passed 1 billion monthly users), Peec gives you it on Starter and Profound gives you it on Enterprise. Our AI visibility tool pricing research runs the same per-answer math across eleven vendors if you want the wider field.

Where does each tool go deeper?

Feature lists on both sites are long, so this table keeps to the capabilities that change what a team can do, with the plan each vendor attaches to it.

Read the agents row carefully, because it is where the vendors most want you to look. Profound's pitch is that analytics without execution is half a product, and its agents draft, publish and report on credits. Peec's October 2026 release answers with an agent that carries memory, reads uploaded files and connects to other tools over MCP, plus actions where, in Peec's words, "Nothing changes without your approval." The honest difference is timing and price. Profound's agents were already the centre of its comparison pages by April 2026 and are metered in credits; Peec's agent with memory and skills arrived in October 2026 inside the plan you already pay for.

The crawler row cuts the other way. Peec puts crawlability audits, crawl insights and AI referral tracking on every self-serve plan, with "4.5M bot visits" of log capacity on Starter rising to 31.5M on Advanced. Profound's Agent Analytics is Enterprise-only according to its help center. If you want to see which AI bots hit which pages without a sales call, that is a Peec feature.

What the vendors' own comparison pages get wrong

Both companies publish a page about the other, and both pages are out of date in ways that would mislead a buyer. Peec's "Peec AI vs Profound" page, bylined 5 January 2026, prices Peec in euros (€89 Starter, €199 Pro) that do not match its own US pricing page, and describes a Profound Starter at $99 for ChatGPT only and a Growth plan at $399 with three engines. Neither Profound plan is on Profound's pricing page now. The page also says Peec's self-serve engines include Perplexity, which the current pricing page lists as an add-on.

Profound's "Profound vs Peec" page says Peec tracks three engines "out of the box" and names Perplexity as one of them, again putting Perplexity in Peec's base list where Peec's own pricing page does not. Its longer April 2026 article states no prices at all and leans on Peec's missing SOC 2 and absent content workflows, both fair points, while describing features launched in July and September 2026 under an April date. Profound also claims "2B+ real user prompts" on that page and "700M+" on the vs page; its own information page says "hundreds of millions", and we use that lower, vendor-stated wording.

Third-party comparisons are only slightly better. The most thorough we found, SE Visible's 9 October 2026 piece, gets Peec's US prices right and notes that there is "no self-serve tier between" Profound's trial and Enterprise, but it is written by a competitor and quotes a $99 Profound agency base price we could not find on Profound's own pages. Our own AI Overview citation study found that for "X vs Y" software queries, the two vendors named in the query took just 34 of 233 citations (14.6%), which is a long way of saying that Google's AI leans on third parties for comparisons like this one. Treat every vendor page as a claim, then open the pricing page.

Pick Profound if, pick Peec AI if

The decision usually comes down to four questions: who signs the contract, how many engines you need on day one, whether you want the tool to act or to report, and whether you can live without a price before a sales call.

Pick Profound if

Your security team will ask for a SOC 2 report and SSO through OIDC; you need Perplexity, Claude and Copilot together without buying add-ons; you want prompt-volume data from a conversation panel; you have the people to run agents that draft and publish; or your agency clients expect the Profound name on the report.

Pick Peec AI if

You want to track your own prompts within an hour, on a budget between $95 and $495 a month; three models (including Google AI Mode) cover your buyers; you want crawler logs and AI referral data without an enterprise contract; or you run an agency with up to 25 clients and want free pitch projects and one invoice.

Pick neither yet if

Claude is your biggest AI referrer and you cannot pay enterprise prices. Both tools gate Claude behind their top tier. Check our Profound alternatives for tools that list Claude lower down, and our Peec AI alternatives for the budget end.

Mid-market teams rarely regret choosing Peec, because the switch to Profound later is a procurement decision rather than a data migration: your prompt set is a spreadsheet, and both tools import one. Enterprise teams that start on Profound rarely move to Peec, not because Peec cannot do the tracking, but because the SOC 2 gap stops the conversation at security review. Peec's own comparison page concedes that gap; ask Peec whether an audit is in progress and get the answer in writing.

How to run a fair trial of both

A fair trial means both tools see the same prompts, the same days and the same engines, and you score them on what they report rather than on the demo. Profound's fixed trial prompts make that harder, so the plan below works around them.

1. Write 50 buyer prompts first. Pull them from sales call notes, support tickets and the "People also ask" boxes for your category. Phrase them the way a buyer types, such as "best expense management software for a 200-person company", and tag each with intent. Peec's prompt-intent classification will do this for you after import; do it yourself anyway so you can compare like with like.
2. Load them into Peec on the free trial. Choose ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Gemini as the three models, because those are the three Profound's trial runs. Let it run for the full trial period so you have several days of answers.
3. Start Profound's trial the same day. You cannot change its 50 prompts, so instead export the list it chose and mark which of your 50 it overlaps with. Expect partial overlap at best; the gaps show you what Profound thinks your category is, which is useful on its own.
4. Compare the overlapping prompts only. For each prompt both tools ran, note mention rate, average position, sentiment and the top three cited domains per engine. Differences in mention rate of a few points are noise; differences in which domains are cited are the signal, because that is the list of pages you need to be on. Our guide on how AI engines choose sources explains what to do with that list.
5. Price the real program before the demo. Count your prompts, pick your engines and multiply by 30. Take that answer count into the Profound sales call and ask for a quote per 1,000 answers so it can sit next to Peec's $15 to $21.
6. Check the exits. Peec's pricing FAQ says prompt volume can be adjusted at any time and that plans upgrade or adjust to usage. Profound Enterprise is a negotiated contract; ask about term length and about data export if you leave, since history and exports are Enterprise features.

If you are an agency, the trial is cheaper still. Peec's pitch projects are free and run for 7 days with 25 to 75 prompts depending on tier. Profound's Agency Growth plan includes 10 pitch workspaces a month, but it is a paid plan, so you are evaluating the pitching workflow, not getting the tool free.

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