Storelift › Compare › Sonar vs Storelift
Sonar vs Storelift
Sonar is the closest tool to Storelift on price and audience, and on the limits table it wins. Annual billing puts it at $12.42/month — the same money as Storelift Pro — for ten apps and 2,500 keywords. Hiding that would be the wrong way to run this page, so here it is first.
Where Sonar is bigger
| Sonar Indie | Storelift Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $23.25/mo · $12.42 billed yearly | $12/mo · $10 billed yearly |
| Apps | 10 | 5 |
| Keywords | 2,500 | 150 per app |
| History | Unlimited | 1 year |
| API | Every plan, 1,000 req/day | Studio tier |
| Free tier | None — 7-day trial | Permanent |
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.
When Sonar is the right choice
- You track hundreds or thousands of keywords and the limit is the binding constraint.
- You want an API on the entry plan, or a CLI.
- You want download and revenue estimates alongside rank — Storelift deliberately doesn't show them.
- You want store screenshots generated and exported from the same tool.
Pick Storelift when you want a measurement that keeps running without a card on file, want to see which of Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini recommends your app, or want every number on screen to say where it came from and what happened on a day it couldn't be measured.
Frequently asked
Is Sonar cheaper than Storelift?
On annual billing they are within cents of each other — $12.42 against $12 — and Sonar's plan carries far higher limits. Storelift is cheaper only in the sense that its free tier has no end date, so the answer depends on whether you need 2,500 keywords or a measurement that keeps running at zero cost.
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
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