Storelift Start measuring

StoreliftCompare › Sonar vs Storelift

Sonar vs Storelift

Sonar is the closest tool to Storelift on audience, and on both price and the limits table it wins. Annual billing puts it at $12.42/month — below Storelift Pro at $18 billed yearly — for ten apps and 2,500 keywords. Hiding that would be the wrong way to run this page, so here it is first.

Updated:

Where Sonar is bigger

Sonar IndieStorelift Pro
Price$23.25/mo · $12.42 billed yearly$20/mo · $18 billed yearly
Apps105
Keywords2,500150 per app
HistoryUnlimited1 year
APIEvery plan, 1,000 req/dayStudio tier
Free tierNone — 7-day trialPermanent
Read from each vendor's own pricing page in August 2026. Sonar's blog still quotes an older "$19/month flat, unlimited" offer that its pricing page no longer matches; the pricing page is the one to trust.

If your decision is keywords-per-dollar, stop here and pick Sonar. It is a good tool built by people solving the same problem, it ships quickly, and its API is on every plan rather than the top one.

Where the two disagree: what a demand number is

Ask Sonar's public endpoint about a Turkish keyword and it answers honestly about its own source. For rüya tabiri ("dream interpretation") in August 2026 it returned a popularity of 5 — the floor of the scale — labelled popularity_source: apple. The same call for dream interpretation in the US also returned 5.

That isn't a flaw in Sonar. It is the whole category reading Apple's advertising popularity score, which collapsed in September 2025 and only exists in the 91 countries where Apple Ads operates. Sonar even ships a fallback field to compensate — and in Turkish it returned 5 as well.

Storelift shows no volume column at all. Demand comes from App Store autocomplete: does the store suggest the term, and with how many variants. It is a smaller claim with no number attached, and it works in all 128 storefronts we measure.

Where the two agree, independently

Both tools compute keyword difficulty the same way without having copied each other: the rating counts of the apps already ranking, plus how many of them put the term in their title. Sonar returns a difficulty_breakdown with title matches and the strength of the top three; Storelift publishes its formula on screen and calls the same idea "the wall".

Convergence like that is a good sign for both. It also means difficulty is not a reason to choose between them — the free tier and the demand source are.

Frequently asked

Is Sonar cheaper than Storelift?

On annual billing Sonar is cheaper — $12.42 against $18 — and its plan carries far higher limits. Storelift costs less only at zero: its free tier tracks rank and has no end date. So the answer depends on whether you need 2,500 keywords or a measurement that keeps running without a card.

Does Storelift have an MCP server like Sonar?

Yes, on the Studio tier, but Sonar's is considerably larger: its hosted endpoint lists 47 tools including write operations and screenshot rendering, against five read-only tools in ours. If MCP coverage is your deciding factor, Sonar is ahead.

Why does Storelift not show search volume?

Because the number the category sells comes from Apple's advertising console, which collapsed in September 2025 and does not exist in roughly half of App Store markets. We would rather show a smaller signal that survives than a large one that doesn't.

See this for your own app

Paste your store link, add your keywords. Rank, the apps above you and demand are measured every night.

Start free →

Read next

Sources