Profound vs Peec AI: they are not the same product.

These two get filed together and compared on price, and price is the wrong axis. Profound opens at $99/month and buys you one engine. Peec AI opens at $95/month and buys you three, with unlimited seats. That single difference inverts the cheapness question depending on what you are trying to watch — and it is not even the biggest difference between them. This page works through four axes: the door, the engine, the seat, and what happens after the tool tells you something. Every figure is imported from a dataset we date and re-verify (August 2026).

Two products, two shapes

Profound. Enterprise AI-visibility platform with an agentic content layer (Agents, Aim), sold demo-first to large brands. The published self-serve ladder runs $99 and $399, and almost everything the platform is known for — the agent surface, the workflows, panel-scale query data, the wide engine pool — sits in a quote-only Enterprise tier that third parties report in the thousands per month plus setup fees.

Peec AI. Berlin-based AI-search analytics platform for marketing teams and SEO agencies; daily prompt tracking with per-engine add-on pricing. Three published rungs at $95, $245, and $495, roughly 15% off annually, unlimited seats on every paid plan, and a separate agency track on a credit meter.

Read those two paragraphs again and the pattern is clear: one is an enterprise platform with a self-serve front door, the other is a self-serve platform with an enterprise ceiling. That is why buyers who trial both usually find the decision resolves faster than the spreadsheet suggested.

Axis one: the door

Axis two: what an engine costs

Both vendors meter engines; they meter them differently, and this is where most of the real money is.

Profound: $99 buys ChatGPT only; $399 buys 3 engines. Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek, and Google AI Mode all require a custom enterprise contract.

Peec AI: Every self-serve plan includes 3 engines chosen from ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot; Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Mistral are paid add-ons or Enterprise-only. And beyond the included three, Each additional engine beyond the included 3 is a monthly add-on priced by tier: +$35 (Starter), +$85 (Pro), +$165 (Advanced) per model.

That last caveat is not a hedge, it is the point. A Peec Starter at three engines gives you 50 prompts; a Profound Growth at three engines gives you 100 prompts across roughly 9,000 monthly responses. Comparing those two cells on engine count alone would flatter Peec in a way the products do not support. The honest summary is narrower: Peec is materially cheaper per engine at the entry and middle of the market; Profound is the only one of the two that sells engine breadth at all above six, and it sells it on a call.

Axis three: what a seat costs

Peec AI includes unlimited seats on every paid plan. Profound meters them — one seat on Starter, three on Growth. For a solo operator this is nothing. For an in-house team with six stakeholders who each want to look at a dashboard, or an agency with account managers, it is one of the largest practical differences on this page and it never appears in a feature comparison because it is not a feature.

Axis four: what happens after the finding

Every tool in this category produces the same artifact — a list of questions where you are not mentioned, and some sense of who is. The axis buyers underweight is what the product does next.

The honest reading: Profound is the only one of the two with a real content-execution layer, and the self-serve buyer largely cannot reach it — the agent surface, Workflows, and the Aim orchestrator are enterprise-gated. Peec does not have one and says so. So for a buyer at $99–$495/month, the practical answer is the same from both: the work is yours.

Where both sit in the market

The published band for tools in this category is $29–495/month. Peec's Advanced tier defines the top of it, Peec's lower rungs and Profound's Growth sit across the middle and upper middle, and Profound's Starter near the bottom. Nothing on this page suggests either is mispriced for what it is; they are priced for different buyers, and the mistake is choosing between them on sticker rather than on which buyer you are.

The short version

• Watching ChatGPT only, tightest budget: Profound Starter at $99.
• Watching three engines, small team: Peec AI Starter at $95 — roughly $32 per engine against $133 at Profound Growth (our arithmetic).
• Serious prompt volume on three engines: Profound Growth at $399, or Peec AI Pro at $245 — compare prompt allowances, not stickers.
• Many stakeholders: Peec AI, for the seat policy.
• Agency, white-labelled: a sales call at either.
• Engine breadth beyond six, procurement requirements: Profound Enterprise, and budget for Third parties report real contracts at $2,000–5,000+/mo plus one-time setup fees of $2,500–15,000.

Where to go next

• Profound pricing and Peec AI pricing — the single-vendor teardowns, with the conflicts and the stale prices.
• Profound alternatives and Peec AI alternatives — the fit pages, including when to stay put.
• AI visibility tool pricing — the whole band, every vendor, one table.
• Best AEO software — the stage-matrix listicle: who monitors, who diagnoses, who executes.