Citenza vs LLM Pulse: how many engines do you actually need

What each plan includes

LLM Pulse includes ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Gemini on every plan. Broad coverage, no surprises so far.

Claude, Copilot, Grok and DeepSeek are paid add-ons. And a third group — Alexa for Shopping, Walmart Sparky, Naver AI, Baidu AI and Brave AI — is available only by talking to sales.

Citenza includes five engines on every tier with no add-ons: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview. It does not reach Baidu or Naver, and that is a real limitation if you sell in Korea or China.

The entry price, and what it hides

LLM Pulse starts at €49 per month across Starter, Growth, Scale, Scale+ and Scale++ tiers, with weekly or daily cadence depending on the plan. It offers a fourteen-day trial on some weekly plans and does not cap team members.

Citenza starts at €6 per month ex-VAT across nine tiers reaching €449, with cadence set by the plan just as there.

Comparing those two numbers head on — 49 against 6 — is eye-catching and incomplete, because they are not measuring the same thing: the LLM Pulse entry plan already carries five engines at a given cadence, while the Citenza entry tier is designed for measuring little.

How to decide without overpaying

Before comparing plans, answer three questions about your own case. They apply to either tool.

• Which engines do your customers actually use? Not the ones in the news: the ones your buyer uses. In consulting, software and law firms Claude shows up often; in ecommerce Google's box weighs more. Paying for Grok or DeepSeek because they are on a list is spend with no decision behind it.
• Do you sell outside Europe and the US? If your market is Korea or China, Naver and Baidu are not optional, and Citenza does not reach them. That is the clearest reason to pick LLM Pulse.
• Who is going to read the report? If these are figures for a committee or a client, somebody will ask out of how many answers each percentage was computed and by what method. That question gets answered before it is asked, or it gets answered badly.

Two method choices worth comparing

Both tools give you a visibility score, share of voice, citations and sentiment. The names match; what sits underneath does not always.

The first difference is fidelity. Measuring a model's API is not the same as using its chat app: they do not share memory, personalisation, or always the same internal routing. Citenza labels each figure with the method behind it — API without search, API with search, or observed SERP — and shows it next to the number rather than in a footnote. It is the most important limitation in this entire category and it affects every tool equally; the difference is which ones say so.

The second is the denominator. An aggregate score is convenient for a headline and poor for deciding: it moves up and down without telling you why. Citenza publishes the weights behind its score and shows the raw count next to each percentage, so it can be audited instead of believed.

When to pick which

LLM Pulse is the pick if you need genuinely wide coverage — Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek — or if you sell into markets where Naver or Baidu dominate. Citenza does neither, and there is no spinning that.

Citenza is the pick if the engines that matter to you are the five it already includes, if you want Claude without paying extra, if you are starting small and would rather not commit €49 a month to find out whether this is useful, or if you need to pull the data out over an API or MCP into your own dashboards.

And if what worries you is defending the figures in front of someone who knows what to ask, check which one lets you open the number: the denominator, the method and the raw count. That is the difference you feel in the third meeting, not in the demo.