Pings vs Otterly.ai — honest comparison from the founder
Two AI visibility trackers, very different opening plays. Here's exactly where Otterly is stronger, where Pings is stronger, and who should pick which.
I built Pings because I wanted an AI visibility tracker that cost less than my gym membership and told me exactly what to do after it scanned my brand. Otterly.ai already existed when I started. Here is an honest write-up of where each tool wins.
Price
This is the obvious gap, so let us get it out of the way. Otterly starts at $189/month for their Standard plan. Pings starts at $29/month for Starter. For most bootstrappers, agencies, and small teams, that gap alone decides it.
If you are running enterprise marketing for a Fortune 500 brand, $189/month is nothing — and Otterly's feature surface justifies it. If you are launching a SaaS product or running a small ecommerce store, $29 lets you actually try the thing.
Signup friction
Otterly wants you to sign up and book a demo before you see anything. Pings runs a free scan with zero signup. You type your brand name on the homepage and get a full visibility breakdown in under a minute.
We made that choice because the #1 objection is always "I don't know if this is worth $29". The fastest way to answer that is to show you the product first.
Platforms monitored
Both tools check the major AI search engines. Pings covers five out of the box:
- Perplexity
- ChatGPT
- Gemini
- Claude
- DeepSeek
Otterly covers Perplexity, ChatGPT and Google AI Overview. We added Claude and DeepSeek early because those are the engines that developer-facing products increasingly get asked about.
Recommendations
This is where the two tools diverge philosophically.
Otterly gives you a visibility score and a dashboard of where you are mentioned. You figure out what to do about it. Pings gives you a score and three to five specific actions, like "publish a comparison page between you and Competitor X" or "get listed in this specific roundup article".
Both approaches have trade-offs. Otterly's dashboard is cleaner and gives you raw facts. Pings optimises for "what do I do Monday morning", which means some of our recommendations are opinions you might disagree with. That is the point.
Who should pick which
Pick Otterly if
- You are an enterprise brand with a dedicated marketing team.
- You need granular historical data, team seats, custom dashboards, and Slack/Teams integrations.
- Budget is not a constraint.
Pick Pings if
- You are a SaaS founder, indie hacker, or small ecommerce owner.
- You want to run a free scan before committing to anything.
- You want specific recommendations tied to what AI actually said about your brand, not generic SEO advice.
- You want to pay $29/month, not $189.
What I would fix about Pings
In the interest of honesty: our scan takes 40 to 60 seconds because we query five engines sequentially with retries to avoid rate limits. Otterly is faster because they query fewer platforms in parallel. We are working on it.
We also do not yet offer the dedicated team workspaces that Otterly has. If you need five people sharing a brand, we are not there yet.
Run a free scan
The real test of any AI visibility tool is whether the scan result feels useful. Try Pings on your brand in under a minute, no signup required. If the recommendations feel generic, tell us — we ship fixes weekly.