You have an app, no budget for a $79-a-month subscription, and a search results page full of lists promising "search volume" and "keyword difficulty" for free. Before choosing between them, it is worth knowing one thing about all of them: every ASO tool outside Apple reads the same public data, and the three numbers you most want — impressions, conversion rate and how often a term is searched — are not in it. A free tool and a paid one differ in what they do with the public data, not in what they can see.
Appstro publishes this list and its own tools appear in it; every third-party claim below comes from that vendor's own pricing or product page, fetched on 9 September 2026, and where a page did not settle something the table says so.
Three kinds of data, and who can read each
An ASO tool's whole world is one of three things.
Public listing data. Apple's public lookup and search endpoints, and the product page itself, expose an app's name, description, price, in-app purchase names and prices, screenshots, rating count and average, chart positions, and where it ranks for any query you type. Anyone can read these, so any tool can — this is the layer every free tool is built on. It has gaps that matter: the keyword field, subtitle and promotional text are not in the public API at all — verified here against Apple's endpoints, the keys do not exist — so any tool showing a rival's keyword field is showing a guess. And the reviews Apple publishes on a product page are a selection, not a sample: ten per storefront, and across nine large US apps exactly one of ninety fell below four stars.
Estimates. Downloads and revenue are not public. Third parties model them, and the honest ones round coarsely — measured here over the live US top-100 free chart, 100 apps returned 24 distinct download values — and return floors like < 5k for small apps. A floor is not a measurement, and a tool that divides by one has invented a denominator. "Search volume" belongs in this layer too, except that no vendor has a source to model it from: Apple publishes no per-term figure, anywhere.
Your own account. Impressions, product page views, conversion rate and the search-versus-browse split exist only in App Store Connect, for apps you own. Apple's App Store search page says so directly: "Use App Analytics in App Store Connect to monitor key metrics such as impressions, conversion rate, downloads, and more." Its metric definitions reference defines conversion rate as "Total downloads and pre-orders divided by unique device impressions" and notes the metrics are "Available once you have at least five first-time downloads or pre-orders for your app." No third party can see any of it for an app that is not theirs.
One consequence worth stating plainly: the nearest thing Apple publishes to search volume is inside Apple Ads, not App Store Connect. Its glossary defines search popularity as "A relative indicator of an Apple Ads keyword's popularity", "displayed as numbers from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most popular". Five buckets, relative, and only inside an Apple Ads account. That is the ceiling on what anyone can know about demand for a term.
The free options, by job
Prices are as each vendor's pricing page displayed them on 9 September 2026, on monthly billing where the page offered a toggle. "Trial" means a paid plan with a free window, which is not a free tool.
| Job | On Appstro (free, no account) | From Apple (free, your own apps) | Third parties, per their own pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keyword research | Keyword research expands Apple's autocomplete and scores difficulty from the live top 10. No volume figure — a term Apple never suggests returns null, not a guess. | Apple Ads keyword suggestions with search popularity 1–5, inside an Apple Ads account. | AppTweak's free tools page states no registration is required for its Keyword Suggest, Keyword Shuffle, Keyword Density Counter and Top Charts tools. Its plans start at $79/month after a 7-day trial. |
| Rank checking | Keyword rank checker for any app, any term, 175+ storefronts. Daily tracking needs a free account. | None for organic rank — Apple's metric definitions list impressions and downloads, no position. | Appfigures: "Use Appfigures for free with our Starter plan"; its feature matrix marks keyword rank tracking as free. Connect is $9.99/month with 25 keywords, Monitor $44.99 with 100 and daily updates. Astro (Mac app): $9/month billed annually as $108, no trial advertised. |
| Competitor and listing analysis | App Store keyword tool and keyword gap from live results; pricing analysis reads rivals' IAP price points off the product page. | Peer group benchmarks in App Analytics — your app against a group; Apple says individual values within it stay private. | Sensor Tower: homepage offers "Sign Up for Free"; pricing page says "We customize pricing plans for each customer". What the free account includes: not confirmed on either page. MobileAction: ASO Intelligence Lite $15/month after a 7-day trial that asks for billing details; its $0 plan is the ad-campaign product, not ASO. |
| Review analysis | Worldwide reviews sweeps rating count and average across 58 storefronts; the per-storefront review page shows the ten Apple publishes. | Ratings and reviews for your own apps, in App Store Connect. | App Radar: no free plan, 7-day trial with a card, Essentials €58–69/month depending on billing. Astro lists review tracking in its paid plan. |
| Creative | Screenshot teardown, icon teardown, screenshot designer at Apple's exact pixel sizes, A/B test calculator. | Product Page Optimization: up to three treatments, 90 days, Apple's own 90% confidence bar. The only place a creative change is measured. | Not confirmed: no vendor page fetched offered a free creative tool. |
| Launch planning | Launch timeline, where to launch, campaign link builder. | Campaign links in App Store Connect — a campaign appears after five first-time downloads from separate users. | Not confirmed. |
Two things the table cannot show. Every Appstro tool above reads Apple's public endpoints and never estimates a number it cannot measure — a storefront that failed to load reports as failed, not as zero. And the Apple column is the only one where "impressions" and "conversion" appear at all, because it is the only one that can see them.
What the free tools refuse to say
The useful part of a free tool is often the number it declines to print. A few refusals worth knowing about, each because the alternative was measured and found to mislead.
No volume. Appstro's keyword tools score traffic from a term's position in Apple's autocomplete, on the reading that Apple orders those suggestions by popularity. Apple does not document that ordering, so the score is ordinal — good for ranking terms against each other in one scan, meaningless across two, and never a count of searches.
No rating from the published reviews. Telegram's US page publishes ten reviews averaging 4.8 against a real 4.01 over 277,674 ratings. Any sentiment score computed over the ten is a score over Apple's selection, so the review page leads with the real average from the lookup endpoint and labels the histogram as the page's own reviews.
No worldwide rating. Rating counts are per storefront — ChatGPT reads roughly 8.9 million ratings in the US and 1.4 million in Germany — so a tool that shows one number for an app has either picked a storefront or summed them, and should say which.
No rival ad performance. Nothing public exposes another advertiser's Apple Ads bids, spend, taps or conversion. Apple's search terms report covers the searches that showed your ads. Any tool showing a competitor's "ASA spend" has modelled it from something else.
No rank promise. Apple names the factors in search — "text relevance" across title, subtitle, keywords and category, plus "user behavior" — and never their weights. No tool on this list, free or paid, can say that an edit will move a position, and none of the Appstro tools claim it.
A workflow that costs nothing
The free tools cover the loop end to end if you accept that the measurement step belongs to Apple.
- Build the candidate list from Apple's own data. Start with autocomplete-expanded terms in keyword research, then read the same terms in Apple Ads' keyword suggestions if you have an account, where the 1–5 popularity indicator is the only demand signal Apple publishes.
- Check where you stand. The rank checker for the terms already in your name, subtitle and keyword field, in the storefronts where your ratings actually are — worldwide reviews tells you which those are.
- Fix the fields against Apple's caps. The listing kit validates every field against the limits App Store Connect enforces, including the keyword field's two conflicting sizes — "100 bytes" on one Apple page, "100 characters" on another.
- Compare the creative, then test it where it can be measured. The screenshot teardown puts your set beside the ten apps ranking for a term; a change goes into a Product Page Optimization test, sized with the calculator, because App Store Connect is the only place conversion is visible.
- Read the result in App Analytics, not in a tool. Impressions, product page views and conversion by source type are in your account and nowhere else. A rank that moved is an observation; whether the listing change caused it is an attribution the tools cannot make.
The third-party trials fit at step one, if at all: seven days is enough to compare a vendor's difficulty score with what the live top 10 shows, and too short to build a rank history.
What this list cannot tell you
- Not which tool's estimates are closest to the truth. Downloads and revenue are private; no public dataset exists to score a vendor's model against, and any accuracy figure is the vendor's own.
- Not search volume, from anyone. If a tool prints one, it has been modelled, and Apple's five-bucket popularity indicator is the only first-party signal that exists.
- Not what a free tier includes beyond what its pricing page states. Sensor Tower offers a free sign-up and prices by quote; what that account shows was not confirmed and is not claimed here.
- Not whether any of it improves ranking. Apple names factors, not weights. Every tool here measures; none of them moves the number.
- Not App Store Connect itself. The impressions, conversion and source-type figures that decide whether a change worked are in your account and cannot be read from outside it, by this site or by anyone.
Every Appstro tool named above is on the tools hub, grouped the same way as the table, with the ones that need an account or an AI key labelled as such.