Compare Lighthouse Local vs. Alhena

Read Alhena's pricing page as two tables stacked on one card. The top table sizes each plan by conversation credits for its AI shopping and support agents, 25 conversations on Free, 200 on Essentials, 550 on Growth and 1,200 on Scale, with overage at $1.20 a credit. The bottom table, headed AI Visibility, is the part this page is about. It gives Free 5 tracked questions on one engine as a one-time snapshot, Essentials 25 questions refreshed monthly, Growth 75 refreshed weekly and Scale 150 refreshed weekly, all on its five engines, with 10 to 25 competitor benchmarks and 5 to 50 content optimisation credits. The prices are $199, $499 and $999 a month, billed annually and charged upfront. For a store that already wants the support agent, the visibility module rides along.

The question for any vendor is what the price actually buys and how often it's refreshed. If you only want to know whether the assistants recommend you, the first paid tier here is $2,388 a year for 25 questions read once a month, and the visibility questions share the bill with a conversation allowance.

Lighthouse Local sizes each plan by a monthly allowance of AI answer checks, shown on the pricing cards above, and nothing else is bundled in. Every plan gets a weekly sweep over every question and daily checks on the ones you mark, across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI, so the refresh you get isn't a function of which tier you can afford.

Alhena's angle is the product, not the brand. Its AI Visibility page describes tracking at SKU level, which products the assistants recommend, whether the product card showed pricing and ratings, whether it was positioned as premium or best value, and whether the answer named the SKU or only the brand. It flags products with strong on-site performance but low AI visibility, and the whole thing is built around a catalog connected from Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Salesforce Commerce Cloud. For a brand with a few hundred SKUs and a shopping query to win, that's a sharper lens than a brand mention count.

The question that follows is where each question is pointed. Its getting-started doc has one language and region setting per brand, pre-filled by auto-detection, and nothing on the pages we read describes a city, a service area, a branch or a Google Business Profile. So a question about a product is asked from one market, which fits a store that asks every question from one market and leaves out a business whose customers stand in three towns.

Lighthouse Local points each question at a city and service area, or at a country, on every plan, so a gap in one town shows up as that town. The ranked fix list says what to change for that place, and the same tracker serves a national or SaaS brand that would rather ask its questions nationwide.

Alhena's recommendations tab is its most concrete feature. For a product or page it lists unanswered questions, each with a Generate FAQ button that writes the answer and can publish it straight to a Shopify product page or copy out as HTML or JSON-LD, content ideas with an outline and the competitor pages behind them, and off-site opportunities, bloggers, Reddit threads and YouTube channels ranked by domain rating, with a draft pitch email or comment one click away. Those drafts spend content optimisation credits, 5 a month on Essentials up to 50 on Scale. Above that, the Enterprise plan lists a fully managed AI visibility program, with no further detail published.

The question to ask is who does the work the catalog can't. An outreach email still needs sending, a Reddit comment still needs an account, and a listing, a citation or a Google Business Profile still needs someone with the login. On the agency side, Alhena's pricing and docs publish no client workspaces, white-label reports, agency plan or partner pricing on the pages we read.

Lighthouse Local hands every plan a ranked fix list in plain English, and if nobody on your side wants that job, our specialists make the fixes, including on-page changes, Google Business Profile management and local citations, each one waiting for your approval. For agencies, every client's dashboard carries your brand through a white-label dashboard with unlimited client reports, and our self-serve agency plans carry a published price. If your fixes live inside a Shopify catalog and you'd rather publish them yourself, Alhena was built for that.