ASO tools compared: seven platforms and who each one is for

Seven platforms get called ASO tools. Four of them cost under $60 a month for one app. One has no public price at all and third-party procurement data puts its floor near $29,500 a year. The bigger split is not price: it is whether the tool ever touches your own listing, or only reports on everyone else's.

Prices and features below were checked in September 2026 against each vendor's own pages. They move.

The short version

Tool	Cheapest paid	Free tier	Writes to your listing?	Primarily
Appfigures	$9.99/mo	Yes, analytics and reviews	Review replies only	Your own revenue analytics
MobileAction	$15/mo ASO Lite	Apple Ads only	No	Ads and competitor creative
Asodesk	$59/mo	Yes, 1 app	Metadata to App Store Connect	Rule-based automation
AppFollow	Published, tiered	Yes, 2 apps	Reviews only	Multi-store review management
App Radar (SplitMetrics)	EUR 69/mo	No	Metadata to both stores	ASO plus A/B testing
AppTweak	$79/mo annual	No	Reviews, iOS keyword field	Keyword intelligence
Sensor Tower	Not published	Effectively no	No	Market estimates

AppFollow publishes prices, but its own blog, its cost article and G2 quote three different entry figures, so the number is not printed here. Check the live page.

Three different products wear the same name

Market intelligence estimates downloads, revenue and keyword ranks for apps you do not own. Sensor Tower is the purest example: it has no review management, no metadata editing, nothing that writes to a store. Its job is telling you about competitors, and it is very good at that. MobileAction's paid data products sit here too.

Keyword and creative research tells you which terms to target and what competitors are running. AppTweak is the deepest of these, with over a decade of proprietary volume and ranking history behind it.

Store operations does work on your listing. This is the smallest group. On the evidence of their own product pages, only Asodesk and App Radar publish metadata to the stores, and only SplitMetrics Optimize runs real A/B tests on creative.

Most people shopping for an "ASO tool" want the third thing and buy the first.

What each one is genuinely best at

Appfigures is the cheapest honest entry on this list and the only one with a landing page aimed at indie developers. Its real strength is financial: downloads, revenue, subscriptions and ad spend reconciled across stores and networks, with API access from the $9.99 tier. It replies to reviews and translates them, but its pages describe no AI-generated replies and no auto-reply rules.

MobileAction has the cheapest keyword tracking at $15 a month, and a genuinely free Apple Ads tier that manages up to $10,000 of monthly spend. Its centre of gravity is advertising: bid automation running live against real money, plus an archive of millions of competitor ad creatives. InMobi acquired it in May 2026; nothing has been announced about the self-serve tiers since.

Asodesk has the strongest free tier of the seven: one app, 200 keywords, 100 replies a month. Its automation is rule-based rather than AI, which sounds like a weakness and is not. A rule fires identically every time, it can require approval before sending, and StoreConsole keeps metadata version history back to your first release with one-click rollback. For teams that need an audit trail, that is the point.

AppFollow aggregates more review sources into one queue than anyone here: App Store, Google Play, Mac App Store, Microsoft Store, Samsung Galaxy Store, Huawei AppGallery, Trustpilot and Steam, routed into Zendesk, Salesforce or Slack. Its automation agents poll every ten minutes. Its ASO side is monitoring, not publishing. Worth knowing before you buy: AI replies sit above the entry tier, and AI rephrase and translate are Enterprise-only.

SplitMetrics owns the one thing no amount of model quality substitutes for. Optimize runs statistically valid A/B tests with real users in a sandbox, so you can learn which icon converts before it touches your live listing. App Radar, now part of the group, edits and publishes metadata across localizations to both stores. Essentials caps review replies at 50 a month.

AppTweak has the deepest keyword data here, built on years of collected history, and revised its volume estimate model in August 2026. It launched four AI agents in March 2026 and added AI Visibility, which tracks how apps surface inside ChatGPT. Its review replies are suggestion-first: GPT-4 drafts three variants and you edit before sending. Since 2026 it can also read and optimize your live iOS keyword field.

Sensor Tower is not really in this comparison and belongs in it anyway, because people put it on the shortlist. It absorbed data.ai in 2024 and sells cross-market estimates for apps, web and ads. There is no published price. Vendr's procurement data, drawn from 40 anonymised purchases and updated February 2026, puts the median at $75,000 a year. A solo developer cannot buy it, and would have no use for it if they could.

What none of them do

Two gaps show up across all seven, on the evidence of their own marketing pages.

Nobody manages prices or territories. Not one of the seven describes checking whether your price is wrong in a given country, or proposing a tier change when exchange rates move.

Nobody runs submission checks. None of them describes validating a submission before you send it: missing demo credentials, an unreachable privacy policy, review notes that say nothing, declarations left blank. The tools monitor what happened after you shipped.

Both of those are negative findings from product pages rather than a product audit. A feature can exist and go undocumented. But seven vendors all failing to market something they had would be strange.

Where Uprate fits, and where it does not

Uprate runs five agents on your listing: reviews answered in your voice in 29 languages across both stores, submission blockers caught with the exact field and the fix, pricing watched across 178 markets, listing copy drafted from the build you ship, and the icon and store set produced as a draft. There is a free tier with one app, and paid plans start at $29 a month. The MCP server and both mobile SDKs are open source under MIT.

Nothing goes live until you approve it.

Now the part a comparison page is worthless without.

AppTweak beats us on keyword data, and it is not close. Historical panel data cannot be generated on demand. It has to have been collected, and they have been collecting it for over a decade.

SplitMetrics beats us on proof. We can propose a better icon. They can tell you, with real traffic, which icon converts. Those are different claims and theirs is stronger.

Reporting is not fixing

Every tool above will tell you something. The question is what happens after it does.

A keyword report says your subtitle is weak. Someone still has to rewrite it, ship it inside a version, and check again next month. An alert says a one star review landed overnight. Someone still has to answer it, in the reviewer's language. A dashboard says your rating slipped in Japan. Nothing says your price there has been wrong since the exchange rate moved, because none of these tools look.

That gap is where the hours go, and better reporting does not close it.

Uprate closes it instead of describing it. The review agent writes the reply. The submission agent names the field and the fix before you submit. The pricing agent covers 178 markets. The listing agent drafts the copy from the build you ship. The assets agent produces the store set. You approve, it ships, and the next release starts from where the last one finished rather than from scratch.

So the split is not which tool is best. It is which problem you actually have.

You want to know something. Market size, a competitor's revenue, years of keyword history. That is an intelligence product, it is a separate purchase, and this page is not pretending otherwise.

You want the work done. Metadata drifting, prices wrong in countries you have never opened, submissions coming back for something you could have caught, screenshots a year old. That is store operations. It is the gap the seven above leave open, and it is the one Uprate was built to run.

One question worth answering before you buy anything: over the last month, how many hours went into finding out, and how many into fixing? Most people are surprised by the ratio.