AthenaHQ vs Profound

AthenaHQ and Profound both measure how your brand appears in answers from AI engines such as ChatGPT and Gemini. They are aimed at similar buyers, so the decision usually comes down to three questions: how you want to start, which engines you need, and how you want to get the data out. If Google AI Mode is your main concern, our roundup of AI Mode tracking tools covers the options built around it.

This comparison draws on each vendor's public pricing page as we read it on 23 October 2026, plus our own compare pages for AthenaHQ and Profound. Vendors change their products often, so confirm details with them before you buy. We have left out competitor prices on purpose, because they change and are best read on each vendor's own pricing page.

The two tools in brief

AthenaHQ offers a free Essential plan, a self-serve Starter plan and a custom Enterprise plan. Its pricing page describes unlimited topics, prompts and competitors on Starter, along with content recommendations and optimization agents alongside the monitoring.

Profound offers a free Trial and a custom Enterprise plan reached through "Get a Demo". Beyond answer tracking it sells Agent Analytics, which tracks AI-sourced traffic and attribution across your domains, and an AI Marketer product for research, writing and reporting.

How you get started

AthenaHQ's free Essential plan covers five engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. That makes it a reasonable way to see real output before you commit to anything.

Profound's Trial is free for seven days. It runs a recommended set of 50 prompts that cannot be customised, on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. It includes five Prompt Volumes searches, and it has no API, no exports and no history. It is a look at the product rather than a working setup, and moving beyond it means booking a demo.

If you want to test with your own prompts and keep the results, AthenaHQ's entry point fits better. If you only want a short look at Profound's interface, its trial does that.

Engine coverage

AthenaHQ's Starter plan covers 11 engines, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral.

Profound's Enterprise plan tracks up to nine engines. Its pricing page lists ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Anthropic Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search as the available set.

Both lists are long. What matters is whether the engines your customers actually use are on the plan you can afford, so check that before comparing counts.

Prompt data and research

Profound's Prompt Volumes feature shows what people are prompting AI engines. According to Profound, it draws on consumer panels in the US, UK, Canada, Germany and France. If you work outside those markets, ask how well it covers yours.

AthenaHQ's pricing page lists a prompt volume estimation and analysis feature as well, shown as numerical searches on AI platforms for your brand in the last month.

Getting data out

On AthenaHQ, Starter includes data export to CSV. API access is an add-on billed on top of the subscription, so budget for it if you plan to build reports or feed a warehouse.

On Profound, exports in CSV and JSON, API access and full history are part of Enterprise. None of them are available on the Trial.

Where Pineprompt fits

Pineprompt takes a narrower path than either. It tracks your prompts every day on six live AI platforms: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Copilot. Grok and Perplexity are temporarily unavailable. Reports cover mentions, position, sentiment, citations, competitors and share of voice.

For data access, MCP is included on all plans, and the API and Looker Studio connector are on Professional and Business. Plans start from $99/mo, and you can read the full list on the pricing page. Pineprompt does not have a free trial.

If you need AthenaHQ Starter's 11 engines, or Profound's traffic analytics and AI Marketer, Pineprompt is not a substitute. If daily tracking on six platforms with open data access covers your needs, you can sign up at pineprompt.com/app.

How to choose

• Want to test with your own prompts at no cost: AthenaHQ's Essential plan.
• Need the widest engine list on a self-serve plan: AthenaHQ's Starter plan.
• Need traffic attribution and an AI marketing agent, and are happy to book a demo: Profound.
• Need exports and an API: Profound Enterprise, or AthenaHQ Starter with the API add-on.

Whichever you shortlist, run the same set of prompts through each and compare the results before you commit.