Linkody vs BacklinkManager: Which link-building CRM is better for you?24 min read

Linkody vs BacklinkManager.io: which of them is a better fit for your SEO agency?

The article will hopefully help you decide by dissecting the strengths and weaknesses of each tool – for use cases such as link monitoring and client reporting.

To give you an objective and complete picture, I took both tools for a spin, looking at their capabilities in the areas SEO agencies are most interested in when choosing a link building tool:

• Backlink analysis
• Backlink reporting
• Client, partner, and vendor management
• Link monitoring

Let’s get started.

TL;DR – BacklinkManager.io vs Linkody – which is better for an SEO agency?

The two tools have a different focus – Linkody is primarily a link evaluation and monitoring tool, while BacklinkManager is a link reporting and CRM tool with a link crawler and quality evaluation features.

Feature Category	BacklinkManager	Linkody
Primary Focus	Comprehensive link-building CRM with client/partner management	Backlink analysis and monitoring
Backlink Monitoring	Crawls backlinks every 24 hours, alerts via email, task assignment for lost links	Crawls backlinks every 24 hours, alerts via email, limited by domain count in plans
Backlink Reporting	Fully customizable, visual reports with easy sharing	Basic, non-customizable PDF reports with backlink lists
Link Analysis	Basic, with focus on individual link assessment	Extensive, with detailed backlink profile insights and competitor tracking
Client Management	Dedicated CRM features with customizable client dashboards	Manage clients by adding domains; limited flexibility
Partnership Management	Comprehensive partnership dashboards with native chat integration	Tagging system for partners; manual balance tracking
Vendor Management	Labels and partnership dashboards for vendor management	Tags for vendor management
Pricing Plans	Free plan for 250 links, paid plans start at $49/month	Starts at €10.50/month for 500 links, free 30-day trial

 

• • BacklinkManager.io is a specialized CRM for link-building that combines backlink monitoring with client and partner relationship management features.
  • BacklinkManager offers a free plan that allows you to track 250 links. Linkody offers a 30-day free trial, and its pricing plans start at €10.30/month.
  • Linkody is a comprehensive backlink monitoring tool that crawls, analyzes, and helps manage your website’s inbound links.
  • BacklinkManager provides a useful Backlink Evaluator tool for assessing individual links, essential for link-builders.
  • Linkody offers more backlink analysis features, which could be useful for optimizing your website’s backlink profile. However, they’re no match for a comprehensive SEO suite like Ahrefs or Semrush.
  • With BacklinkManager, you can create custom and easy-to-share dashboards and reports.
  • Linkody allows you to generate a PDF report with a selection of metrics and charts from the Dashboard and Profile tabs, but there’s no way to customize it. The report from the Links view can be customized, but it only includes a list of backlinks with no visuals or breakdowns, which makes it hard to interpret.
  • BacklinkManager offers dedicated client management features, including unlimited client profiles and dashboards.
  • In Linkody, you can manage clients only by adding their domains. Each plan caps the number of domains, and you can only manage up to 100 domains in the top plan.
  • BacklinkManager provides a comprehensive partnership dashboard with balance tracking and communication tools, while Linkody’s link-building partnership management relies on tags.
  • To manage link vendors in BacklinkManager, you can use labels or add them as partners for streamlined collaboration. Linkody manages link-building vendors only through tags.
  • Both tools crawl the links every 24 hours and send you email reports notifying you about changes. In BacklinkManager, all links that change status appear in the Tasks dashboards, where you can track their progress, for example, when your team members are chasing the vendor.
  • To see if BacklinkManager is a good fit for your agency, try it out for free. Or book a demo, and we’ll talk you through the relevant features.

What is BacklinkManager

BacklinkManager is the first dedicated link-building CRM. It caters to SEO agencies, marketing teams, and freelance link builders. It enables you not only to monitor backlinks but also to manage relationships with your clients, partners, or vendors.

Here’s an overview of its key features:

• Link monitoring: BacklinkManager’s crawler checks the status of your backlinks once a day, and you get notified about changes by email.
• Quality assessment: You can assess the quality of your backlinks using Ahrefs and MOZ metrics (DA, PA, DR), and there’s a checklist to guide the process.
• Client CRM: It allows you to manage client inventory and associated backlinks.
• Partnership and vendor management: You can set targets and keep a tally of the backlinks built by individual link exchange partners and link vendors.
• Reporting: The platform enables you to generate detailed, fully customizable reports and dashboards to track the performance of your campaigns.
• Task management: Once you add a link to the system, you can monitor its status from a Kanban board.
• Collaboration: The chat functionality enables team members and partners to communicate without leaving the app.

What is Linkody

Linkody is a link management and monitoring tool for website owners, marketers, and SEO professionals. It helps you track, analyze, and manage the backlinks pointing to your websites.

Its key features include:

• Backlink monitoring: The tool automatically crawls the backlinks pointing to your domain every 24 hours and sends you notifications about status changes.
• Link analysis: It uses MOZ metrics to help you evaluate the backlinks pointing to your site. You can also see if the referring domain is indexed by Google and its rel attribute (dofollow/nofollow).
• Competitor analysis: You can track competitor backlinks to see how actively they’re building links, find link prospects, and understand what kinds of content attract the most backlinks.
• Backlink profile reports: Linkody allows you to create reports to evaluate the health of your backlink profile and the effectiveness of your link-building efforts.
• Disavow tool: If you’ve received a Google penalty or are at risk of getting one, you can use Linkody to create the disavow file, which you can then upload to the Google Disavow tool to get rid of spammy backlinks.
• Integrations: Linkody integrates with Google Analytics and Ahrefs to automatically import your links.

Linkody vs. BacklinkManager: Pricing

You now have a basic idea of what each tool offers. Before we dive into the details, let’s get the pricing out of the way. To make sure they fit your budget and because I make a couple of references to the plans later in the text.

BacklinkManager pricing

BacklinkManager has a simpler pricing structure based on 3 plans:

• Free: allows 3 users to track 250 links and set 50 targets.
• Pro: $49/month, allows 15 users to track 2,500 links and set 100 targets, and comes with priority support.
• Enterprise: $500/month, allows 30 users to track 50,000 links and set 10,000 targets. Comes with white label reporting.

Linkody pricing

Linkody offers 5 pricing plans:

• Webmaster: starts at €10.50/month, allows 1 user to track 500 links across 2 domains.
• Advanced: starts at €17.20/month, allows 1 user to track 2,000 links across 5 domains.
• Pro: starts at €34.40/month, allows 3 users to track 5,000 links across 20 domains.
• Agency: starts at €68.20/month, allows 5 users to track 20,000 links across 50 domains.
• Agency XL: starts at €104.20/month, allows 10 users to track 50,000 links across 100 domains.

There’s a free 30-day no-credit-card trial.

Linkody vs. BacklinkManager: Which is better for backlink analysis?

Backlink analysis assesses the health of your backlink profile and its impact on your SEO performance. So that you can optimize your link-building efforts.

Let’s look at the backlink analysis features that Linkody and BacklinkManager offer.

BacklinkManager for backlink analysis

BacklinkManager wasn’t designed primarily for backlink profile optimization, but for link-building management. However, it offers you pretty much everything you need to evaluate individual links. Thanks to that, you can quickly check on a link added by a vendor or partner.

When you add links to your database. you get their DA and PA and can see if they’re indexed by Google.

There’s more: A dedicated Backlink Evaluator.

When you run a search on the backlink, the tool tells you if:

• The page allows search engines to follow links.
• It’s blocked from crawling.
• It’s indexable and indexed in Google.

You also get the number of outbound links. The more of them, the less link juice the link passes and the higher the risk you’re dealing with a website that is selling links.

You also get a checklist for a qualitative assessment. Such evaluation is more reliable than relying on metrics: DA can easily be elevated and even legit websites can get a high spam score.

Linkody for backlink analysis

Linkody is primarily a link analysis tool rather than a CRM, so it offers more backlink analysis features than BacklinkManager.

To start backlink analysis of your domain, you add it to your Linkody profile, and the tool can automatically search for links pointing to your site. You can also link it to your Google Analytics account to import the data from there.

In the same way, you add your competitors’ domains.

Once you set up your domain, you can analyze your backlink profile from 3 views:

• Dashboard
• Profile
• Links

In the Dashboard view, you get an overview of your top metrics and basic backlink data:

• Mozrank
• Domain Authority
• Spam score
• Total backlink count
• Trust and Citation Flow (Majestic’s proprietary metrics)
• New & Lost Backlinks,
• Latest discovered links
• Latest competitors links
• Latest changes of status
• Link summary status

The Profile view gives you much more detailed insights into your backlink profile:

• Top anchors and anchor terms (you can expand them to view full reports)
• Moz metric distribution (Mozrank, PA, DA)
• Spam Score distribution
• Google Index distribution
• Text/Image distribution
• Top TLD
• IP Geolocation
• Most linked pages
• Rel attribute distribution
• Class C IP distribution
• Domain distribution

You can also run a side-by-side comparison with one of your competitors.

To assess the quality of individual links, head to the Links tab.

Linkody allows you to customize the table columns. The available columns include:

• Date added
• Landing page
• IP
• TLD
• EFL
• Cost
• Last live date
• Google Index
• Spam score
• Anchor
• Rel attribute
• Moz DA & PA
• Status
• Expiring date
• Ranking

When you hover over the link you’re interested in, a magnifying glass icon appears. Clicking on it gives you more detailed insights into the link.

What about link prospect evaluation?

You add the link manually, mark it as Candidate, and wait about 5 minutes to get the DA and Spam score data. You can do it faster with free Ahrefs or Moz tools. Or Linkody’s free Website Authority Checker and Backlink Checker.

One final point:

With Linkody, you can add dodgy links to the disavow list directly from the Backlinks view and then export the entire list in the Disavow view.

Overall, Linkody offers more backlink analysis features than BM. However, it’s no match for dedicated SEO suites like Ahrefs or Semrush. If you don’t have access to either, this will do. If you do, this is redundant.

Linkody vs. BacklinkManager: Which is better for backlink reporting?

Whether you’re an agency, a freelancer, or an in-house team, the stakeholders require regular updates on the progress of the link-building campaigns.

Let’s see what reporting features Linkody and BacklinkManager have to offer.

BacklinkManager for backlink reporting

BacklinkManager’s reporting features are more powerful than Linkody’s.

For 3 reasons: reports are fully customizable, easier to digest thanks to visuals, and a breeze to share.

When creating the report, you can filter the displayed backlinks by:

• Status (Dofollow, 404, Nofollow, Pending, 500)
• Time period
• Labels
• Targets
• Team members
• Partnerships
• Clients

Such customization gives you granular insights into the performance of your link-building efforts.

For example, you can generate dedicated reports for individual team members for quarterly performance reviews.

The report consists of a scoreboard with the total link count and their average DR, a pie chart with a status breakdown (DoFollow/NoFollow/Not Found/Not Responding), and a link list.

Below, you can also filter the links by domain.

Once you create the report, you and your teammates can access it or edit it whenever you need to. You can also share it with external stakeholders by sending them the report URL. Even if they don’t have a BacklinkManager account.

Linkody for backlink reporting

Let’s be honest: Linkody lacks reporting capabilities.

As mentioned, you can get insights into the domain performance metrics and backlink profile in the Dashboard and Profile view.

You can also download a PDF report, which offers a selection of data and charts from the two. Unfortunately, the report cannot be customized.

If you want to report on links you’ve built, you can do it through the Links view.

As mentioned, you can customize the table by adding and removing columns and filtering the data. There’s also a search feature.

Once you set the filters, you can export all the links as a .csv file or generate a PDF report. However, there’s no way to save the view, so you have to set the filters from scratch whenever you want to see it again.

The report itself, while customizable, is very basic. All you get is a list of all the backlinks and a breakdown into dofollow/nofollow backlinks without any visualizations.

Linkody vs BacklinkManager: Which is better for partner, vendor, and client management?

With the backlink analysis and reporting features covered, let’s tackle the CRM features, which we need for 3 different use cases:

• Client management
• Link-building partnerships
• Vendor management

BacklinkManager for client management

Built with link-building agencies in mind, BacklinkManager offers decent client management functionalities.

Clicking on Clients in the sidebar menu takes you to your client inventory. That’s where you add them individually or import them as a group.

Clicking on the client gives you an overview of their profile, and you can analyze their links more closely from the Backlinks tab.

The Dashboards tab is what makes BacklinkManager stand out.

Basically, you can tailor a dashboard for each individual client by filtering them by status, defining the table columns, and choosing one of the 5 widgets:

• Total links
• Backlinks by status
• Backlinks over time
• Average DR
• Average DA

Like the reports, you can send the dashboard URL to share it with clients.

Linkody for client management

Linkody doesn’t offer client management features as such.

However, you can still use it for this use case because by adding multiple domains, one for every client.

This isn’t very flexible:

As mentioned, the Agency XL plan allows you to monitor up to 100 domains and 50,000 links. What if you’re an XXL agency with a bigger client base?

The way around this would be setting up a separate Linkody account for each client, but this would be a logistical nightmare, and it would reduce reporting options. For example, you wouldn’t be able to view all the links built for different clients by one team member.

BacklinkManager for link-building partnerships

Managing link-building partnerships is where BacklinkManager outperforms Linkody, hands down.

First, it offers a dedicated Partnerships inventory with an overview of all partners, the links built, and the targets met.

The best part?

The scoreboard with the tally of all the links you’ve built, their status, and the partnership balance. So you know exactly if they owe you any links. And if they do, you can give them a nudge using the native chat functionality without leaving the product. For smoother collaboration.

As the links don’t have to point to your domain, BacklinkManager is a flexible platform that allows you to track more complex relationships with ease. Like, ABC exchanges or guest posting arrangements where you don’t build links directly for your partners but for their partners.

Linkody for link-building partnerships

Linkody doesn’t have a specific feature for managing link-building relationships like link exchanges, but you can work around this using tags.

Simply create a tag with your partner’s name and use it to tag all backlinks they’ve provided.

To view all links from a partner, filter them by their tag.

This works just fine, but only one way. There’s no way to track the backlinks you’ve built for your partners unless you add their domain to your Linkody account. And you have to calculate the partnership balance manually.

BacklinkManager for link-building vendors

Let’s face it: not all vendors deliver on their promises. The links never materialize, disappear within a few months, or change to nofollow. The worst part is that often, you may not even realize that your precious links are gone. Hence the need for a link vendor management tool.

BacklinkManager enables backlink vendor management in two ways.

You can label each vendor and use the labels to filter the reports and dashboards, just like you did in Linkody to manage partners.

But there’s a better way: inviting them to BacklinkManager as partners and using the Partnership dashboards to manage the relationships and links they provide.

The main benefit of the latter?

You don’t have to add the backlinks yourself. The vendor does it.

Linkody for managing link-building vendors

As you may suspect, the only way to manage vendors in Linkody is through tags. Like your partners.

Again, it’s good enough but a far cry from what BacklinkManager’s Partnerships dashboard allow you.

Linkody vs. BacklinkManager: Which is better for backlink monitoring?

Did you know that about 7-8% of backlinks disappear every year? This is expensive and if you’re building backlinks for clients, it can cause irreparable reputation damage to your business.

So, it’s vital to have a robust tool for tracking your backlinks and detecting changes in their status.

Could Linkody or BacklinkManager be the tool?

BacklinkManager for link monitoring

To monitor backlinks with BacklinkManager, you add them manually or import them from a spreadsheet.

BacklinkManager crawls your links every 24 hours and sends you an email notification about changes and updates. So that you don’t miss any lost or new links, status changes, or messages from collaborators.

You can also view the changes in the NoFollow/Not Found/Unreachable tabs in the Backlinks view.

Lost links are also automatically added to the Tasks dashboard, where you can assign them as tasks to your link builders and track their progress. This replaces the need for a 3rd party project management tool, which would add unnecessary friction to your workflow.

Linkody for backlink monitoring

If you’re using Linkody to manage the links you’ve built for your client, it’s best to disable the automatic link detection option and add them manually. Otherwise, the tool is going to pick up all new links, even if you didn’t build them.

The process is straightforward, but as mentioned, you have to add the domain to Linkody. And the number of domains you can add is limited across the different pricing plans. So, to monitor 51 links for 51 different sites, you need the highest Agency XL plan. In BacklinkManager, this would be covered in the Free plan.

Just like BacklinkManager, Linkody crawls your backlinks automatically every 24 hours, and you can manually re-check the status of individual backlinks from the Links view.

What happens when the status changes?

Linkody can notify you by email. These could either be daily or weekly notifications, and you can choose to receive them only when the link status changes.

You can also view all status changes in the Changelog dashboard.

Final words: Which tool is better for SEO agencies?

Despite some similarities, Linkody and BacklinkManager are two different tools.

If you want a tool for managing your backlink profile, for example, because you don’t have an Ahrefs subscription, Linkody is a better choice.

BacklinkManager, on the other hand, is a better solution for SEO agencies managing relationships with clients, partners, and vendors. It makes it easier to organize and track their links through highly customizable and easy-to-share dashboards and reports. BacklinkManager is also a better choice for link monitoring.

Still not sure which tool suits your needs better? It costs nothing to try them out yourself. Why not start testing BacklinkManager by signing up for its free plan?