Sonar vs Storelift

01Where the plans differ

Storelift Pro is priced so the free tier never expires: you can measure a real app, in a real storefront, before any card is entered. What the $20 buys is daily rank across App Store and Google Play, the apps ranking above you on each keyword, and the arithmetic behind every derived number.

02Where 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's demand signal comes from App Store autocomplete rather than the ad console: does the store suggest the term, and with how many variants. Where Apple's own score exists we turn it into a monthly volume band with the basis printed; the autocomplete signal itself works in all 175 storefronts we measure, which the ad score does not.

03Where 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".

It also means difficulty is not what separates them — the free tier and the demand source are.

04What changes if you switch from Sonar

The two measure the same person's app; the differences are in the free plan, the demand source and what is kept:

• The free plan has no end date: 1 app, 25 keywords in each of 2 storefronts, measured every day.
• Demand is read from store autocomplete in every storefront measured — including markets without Apple's ad popularity score, which exists in the 91 countries where Apple Ads runs, against an App Store in 175. See autocomplete demand signal.
• Each of 175 storefronts is its own row: the same keyword in Turkey and in Germany is two measurements, not one market.
• History: 30 days on the free plan, 6 months on Pro ($20/mo) and 1 year on Studio ($60/mo).
• A night that could not be measured is drawn as a gap, not a zero: ranked, not in the list and not measured stay three separate states.

Rank history does not move between tools — no vendor exports it in a shape another imports. The day you add the app, its history starts and fills in with every nightly run; copy the keyword list you already track, per country, as the starting set.

05When Sonar is the better pick

• You need 10 apps and 2,500 keywords on one plan (Indie, $29/mo or $24.17 billed yearly).
• You want an MCP server with 52 hosted tools, including write operations.
• You want API, CLI and MCP on the same plan, and a 7-day trial is enough to decide.

If what you need is daily keyword rank on both stores and who ranks above you, Storelift does that from $0, and Pro is $20/mo. Where another tool fits better, Storelift alternatives says which.

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