Note (September 2026): This list has been rechecked. Tweroid no longer appears to be available, ContentKing is now part of Conductor, and two statistics from 2019 could not be re-verified, so they are now labeled as dated.
The best content marketing tools cover each stage of the workflow: Semrush and AlsoAsked for research, Grammarly and Hemingway for editing, Evernote and Trello for planning, Mailchimp for email distribution, and Conductor Monitoring (formerly ContentKing) for site health. Most offer a free plan or trial, so teams can test before paying.
Key Takeaways
- No single content marketing tool does everything; most teams combine a research tool, a writing and editing tool, a planning board and an email platform.
- Several tools on this list have changed hands: Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush on April 28, 2026, Conductor acquired ContentKing in 2022, and Intuit has owned Mailchimp since November 2021.
- Free plans are more limited than they used to be. As of September 2026, Evernote Free allows 50 notes and one notebook, and Mailchimp Free allows 250 contacts.
- Tweroid, a Twitter posting-time tool featured in earlier versions of this list, no longer appears to be available.
- Guest-post marketplaces and link-building services carry a Google policy risk: Google’s spam policies treat links bought for ranking purposes as link spam.
For businesses, content marketing is one of the proven ways of connecting with customers. Moreover, it helps the majority of brands stay competitive in today’s cut-throat commercial ecosystem. Content marketing today has significantly evolved, what was done in the past is not what is being done now.

Over the past decade, content marketing has immensely grown due to changes in customer preferences, the increased competition among brands, and the ever changing face of technology.
A widely quoted industry report from around 2019 claimed that 95 percent of B2C companies used content marketing at some level. This page could not trace that figure to a current primary source, so treat it as a dated claim rather than a current statistic. The same report said content creation was the area of content marketing that received the most spending.
With that said, as far as content marketing goes, there are several tools available today to help. Let’s look at some of them.
Best Content Marketing Tools for 2026
Ready to give your content strategy a boost? Use these tools.
SEMrush
It is an excellent tool that helps with SEO, content, and social media marketing. With SEMrush, business leaders can look out for various keywords, web traffic, analytics, and topics.
Moreover, users can gauge the quality of their content against the high-ranking ones. For that reason, Semrush is a strong choice for keeping up with better-ranked competitors. Semrush became a wholly owned subsidiary of Adobe when Adobe’s $1.9 billion acquisition closed on April 28, 2026, and the platform now also tracks brand visibility in AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini. As of September 2026, Semrush’s pricing page lists a limited free plan (one demo project and 10 reports per day), a seven-day free trial, and paid plans starting at $139 a month when billed monthly.
Collaborator.Pro
Collaborator is a Direct Content Marketing Marketplace for advertisers who are looking for trusted platforms to share their news and stories and publishers who want to monetize their website or Telegram channel by accepting guest posts and press releases or posts. Advertisers can filter listed sites by metrics such as domain rating, monthly traffic, audience geography and price. As of September 2026, Collaborator’s homepage lists 45,109 websites and 3,281 Telegram channels and refers to more than 70 filtering parameters. Buyers should know that Google’s spam policies treat guest posts whose links are paid for and pass ranking credit as link spam, unless the links are qualified with a nofollow attribute.
Also Asked
It is a tool that allows you to analyze the “People Also Ask” results on Google and how they relate to each other. With it, users can find out about more answers that will be generated on Google, depending on the ones they click on. It provides a visual map showing how each level of questions leads to the next. As of September 2026, AlsoAsked offers a small number of free monthly searches to non-registered users, and its paid plans start at $12 a month for 100 credits, according to its pricing page.
Grammarly
Content marketing is only effective if you have excellent content. With Grammarly, you can check the grammar, spelling, readability, and punctuation of your content before you post it on the internet for everyone to see.
It comes in free and paid packages, with the subscription plan offering more comprehensive functions. As of September 2026, Grammarly’s free plan covers grammar and spelling corrections and a monthly allowance of AI prompts, while paid plans add full-sentence rewrites, tone adjustment and plagiarism detection. Grammarly’s parent company renamed itself Superhuman in October 2025, but the writing assistant is still sold under the Grammarly name. These include checks for passive/ active voice, synonym suggestions, among other useful features.
Evernote
Evernote is an excellent note-taking application that enables you to keep track of any ideas that get into your brain. If you are a person who always has several ideas floating into your head but tend to forget them fast, then this app will come in handy. You can create posts and move them to your content management system later.
Also, it allows you to make notes on the articles you want to create for your blog. Evernote also lets users share notes with other people, which helps teams develop ideas together. Evernote has been owned by the Italian company Bending Spoons since November 2022, and its free tier is now much smaller: as of September 2026, Evernote’s plan comparison lists 50 notes, one notebook, one device and 1 GB of storage on the free plan, with larger limits on the paid Starter and Advanced plans.
Brandcitations
Brandcitations is client-oriented link building service to boost your site ranking. They produce natural SEO backlinks and link building strategies since 2013. Brandcitations says its service is multilingual, with posting in English, German, Spanish, French, Polish and Italian, and its site lists fixed-price link packages as of September 2026. Before buying any link-building service, note that Google’s spam policies class buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam, unless the links are qualified with a nofollow attribute.
Trello
Trello is an excellent content marketing tool that helps you to organize and update your content. Moreover, it also works as a messaging app only in a limited sense: Trello, owned by Atlassian since 2017, is a visual project-management board rather than a chat app, but it lets a team work on shared boards without long email threads.
Thus, it enables you to share ideas and collaborate remotely on team projects. You can create boards, lists, and cards on this tool to help you identify anything, from advertisements to editorial calendars. As of September 2026, Trello’s free plan allows up to 10 collaborators and 10 boards per Workspace, and the Standard plan costs $5 per user per month billed annually ($6 billed monthly), according to Trello’s pricing page.

Tweroid
If you regularly post content about your brand online, you will find Tweroid very useful. Tweroid was an analytical tool built to help users maximize their reach on Twitter, which was rebranded as X on July 23, 2023. As of September 2026, the tweroid.com domain hosts an unrelated blog, so the tool no longer appears to be available; the description below is kept for reference. It analyzed when a user’s Twitter followers were online by looking at their tweets and then suggested the best time to post, so that a message reached the maximum number of people.
The idea behind it still holds: once you know when your audience is most active, schedule posts for those peak hours. To use the tool, people signed in with a Twitter account to give Tweroid access to their follower list. The tool then generated a report and sent the analysis by email or direct message.
PRNEWS.IO
PRNEWS.io is a marketplace for buying placements of press releases and articles on online publications. Google’s spam policies treat advertorials and press releases whose paid links pass ranking credit as link spam, so links in placements like these should carry a nofollow attribute. The PRNEWS.io site returned an access error when checked in September 2026, so its current catalog could not be confirmed. Create your online newsroom for PR distribution, sponsored posts, stories, native ads, and branded content on top tier publications all over the world.
MailChimp
Email marketing is one of the most important aspects of content marketing. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 87% of B2C marketers use email as an organic content distribution channel. That is a 2019 figure, and the linked Content Marketing Institute page no longer shows the original research, so treat it as dated.
If you want to start or optimize your email marketing strategy, MailChimp is a wonderful tool that will help you do that. With Mailchimp, which Intuit has owned since November 1, 2021, users can build a mailing list and send email campaigns to it. As of September 2026, Mailchimp’s free plan allows up to 250 contacts and 500 email sends a month (250 a day), while paid plans add features such as A/B testing, scheduling and automation flows.
Plus, you can also analyze how your emails perform. Moreover, MailChimp provides an array of other services in addition to email marketing.
Hemingway
One of the hardest things in content creation is evaluation, whether your content is clear and readable. Even very experienced content writers need to check the quality of their work.
By running your content on the Hemingway app, you can detect common mistakes, as well as complicated and lengthy sentence structures, adverb overuse, and passive phrases. Apart from showing you errors and the readability of your text, it also allows you to edit and format your content right there. The paid Hemingway Editor Plus tier adds grammar checks and tone adjustment and, as of September 2026, offers a two-week trial with no credit card required. For a balanced view of what readability grades can and cannot tell you, see this guide on whether readability scores are reliable.
Content King
Content King app suite is terrific for auditing and tracking SEO content. It analyzes your website content around the clock and gives you actionable insights. Reports are stored on the cloud for quick and easy access. If something malfunctions, you get an immediate alert so that you can fix it on time. Conductor acquired ContentKing in 2022, and the old contentkingapp.com address now redirects to Conductor’s website monitoring product, called Conductor Monitoring, which offers a three-week free trial as of September 2026.
Word Count Tool
Word Count tool is as straightforward as it sounds – it helps you count words as well as characters in an article or piece of text. However, it also does much more than that. It also enables you to gauge your content’s readability so that you can know if it is appropriate for your audience.
And perhaps the most useful feature this tool offers to content marketers is keyword density analysis. It tells you how many times you have repeated keywords and phrases in your writing. For a quick count of words, characters, sentences and paragraphs, you can also use the free Justwebworld word counter.
Final Words
Content is key to engaging with your audience. And many top-performing brands have robust content marketing strategies. Today, it is not so difficult to create engaging content.
Several tools and technologies are available now to help you with everything – content- creation, optimization, distribution, analysis, etc. Explore this list of fantastic tools and applications to boost content engagement for your brand and grow your business.
Content Marketing Tools Compared
The table below summarizes what each tool on this list is for, what can be used without paying, and whether it is still available. Plan details were checked on each tool’s official site in September 2026 and change often, so confirm current terms before subscribing.
| Tool | Main job | Free option (as of September 2026) | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush | SEO, keyword, competitor and AI-search visibility research | Limited free plan; 7-day trial of paid plans | Active; owned by Adobe since April 2026 |
| Collaborator.pro | Marketplace for guest posts and Telegram placements | No; each placement is priced by the site | Active; Google link-spam rules apply |
| AlsoAsked | People Also Ask question research | Limited free searches without an account | Active; paid plans from $12 a month |
| Grammarly | Grammar, spelling and tone | Free plan | Active; parent company now called Superhuman |
| Evernote | Idea capture and notes | 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device | Active; owned by Bending Spoons |
| Brandcitations | Link-building service | No; fixed-price packages | Active; Google link-spam rules apply |
| Trello | Editorial calendar and task boards | Up to 10 collaborators and 10 boards per Workspace | Active; owned by Atlassian |
| Tweroid | Best time to post on Twitter (now X) | Not applicable | No longer appears to be available |
| PRNEWS.io | Paid placements on publications | No | Could not be confirmed (site returned an access error) |
| Mailchimp | Email marketing | 250 contacts, 500 sends a month | Active; owned by Intuit |
| Hemingway Editor | Readability and sentence clarity | Free web tools; two-week trial of Plus | Active |
| ContentKing | Continuous website and SEO monitoring | Three-week Conductor trial | Now Conductor Monitoring |
| Word counter | Word, character, sentence and paragraph counts | Free | Active |
How Do You Choose the Right Content Marketing Tools?
The right content marketing tools are the ones that remove a real bottleneck in your workflow. Start by mapping how a piece of content moves from idea to published and measured, then pick one tool per stage instead of buying overlapping suites.
- Research: find topics and questions people search for. Semrush covers keyword and competitor research, and AlsoAsked shows how People Also Ask questions branch. For no-cost options, see this list of free keyword research tools.
- Planning: keep ideas and deadlines in one place. Evernote suits idea capture, and Trello suits an editorial calendar that several people update. A year-long content strategy gives those boards something to organize.
- Writing and editing: Grammarly catches grammar and spelling problems, and Hemingway flags long sentences, adverbs and passive voice. The text and writing tools on this site add free utilities such as a word counter and text cleaner.
- Distribution: Mailchimp sends content to an email list you own, which is not subject to social media algorithm changes. These email marketing strategies help turn a list into regular readers.
- Monitoring: Conductor Monitoring (formerly ContentKing) watches a site around the clock and alerts you when pages break or SEO settings change.
What Content Marketing Tools Does a Small Team Need?
A small team can run a working content program on free plans alone. A practical starting set is a free Trello board for the editorial calendar, the free Grammarly plan and Hemingway’s free web tools for editing, a free word counter for length checks, and Mailchimp’s free plan for a first email list of up to 250 contacts (as of September 2026).
Paid research tools such as Semrush become worth considering when a team publishes regularly and needs keyword data, rank tracking or competitor analysis at scale. Free trials make it possible to test that value before committing to a subscription.
Paid Guest Posts, Link Building and Google’s Spam Policies
Three services on this list, Collaborator.pro, Brandcitations and PRNEWS.io, sell placements or links rather than helping you create content. According to Google Search Central’s spam policies, buying or selling links for ranking purposes is link spam, and so are advertorials, guest posts or press releases where payment is received for links that pass ranking credit.
Google’s policies also state that such links are not a violation when they are qualified with a nofollow attribute (or Google’s equivalent attribute for paid links). In practice, placements bought on these platforms can still deliver referral traffic and brand exposure, but they should not be relied on to pass search ranking value.
Common Mistakes When Choosing Content Marketing Tools
- Buying a suite before defining a process. A tool cannot fix a workflow that nobody has written down.
- Relying on old reviews. Ownership, plans and even availability change: Tweroid disappeared, ContentKing was renamed, and Evernote’s free plan shrank to 50 notes.
- Ignoring free-plan limits. Contact caps, note caps and collaborator caps often force an upgrade sooner than expected, so check them against your team size.
- Treating editing tools as editors. Grammar and readability checkers flag patterns; they do not check facts, and readability scores are only a rough guide.
- Buying links without checking the risk. Paid links that pass ranking credit breach Google’s spam policies.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a content marketing tool?
A content marketing tool is software that helps plan, create, edit, distribute or measure content such as articles, emails and social posts. Examples include Semrush for research, Grammarly for editing, Trello for planning and Mailchimp for email distribution.
Are there free content marketing tools?
Yes. As of September 2026, Trello, Grammarly, Evernote, Mailchimp and Semrush all offer free plans with limits, Hemingway offers free web tools, and AlsoAsked allows a small number of free searches. Free tiers are smaller than they used to be, so check the limits before relying on one.
Is Semrush owned by Adobe?
Yes. Adobe announced a $1.9 billion deal to acquire Semrush on November 19, 2025, and the acquisition closed on April 28, 2026, making Semrush a wholly owned subsidiary of Adobe. The Semrush platform continues to operate under its own name.
What happened to ContentKing?
Conductor acquired ContentKing in 2022. As of September 2026, the contentkingapp.com address redirects to Conductor’s website monitoring product, Conductor Monitoring, which provides round-the-clock SEO monitoring and alerts.
Does Tweroid still work?
Tweroid no longer appears to be available. When checked in September 2026, the tweroid.com domain hosted an unrelated blog. Twitter itself was rebranded as X on July 23, 2023.
Does Google allow paid guest posts?
Google’s spam policies treat paid guest posts, advertorials and press releases as link spam when their links pass ranking credit. The same policies say such links are acceptable when they are qualified with a nofollow attribute.
1 Comment
Nice article, thank you for posting it! As a copywriter, I can’t imagine my work without using Grammarly. Trello is an amazing tool that helps to improve the management of the processes. I would like to check out other tools from your list as well. I am sure they will help!