Frase Review 2024: How Good Is This AI Writer & Optimization Tool?

Welcome to our Frase review.

Frase is one of the best content optimization & AI writing tools we’ve tested. Its unique feature set makes it well-suited to content creators, entrepreneurs, and marketers. It’s also a great fit for teams.

But don’t just take our word for it.

In this review, we’ll be exploring all the features Frase has to offer and giving you a first-hand look at the UI. We’ll even test out its AI tools and share screenshots of the output so you can see for yourself what Frase is capable of.

Plus, we’ll also be discussing pros and cons, pricing, and much more.

By the end of this post, you’ll have all the information you need to come to your own conclusions about whether or not it’s a good fit for your needs.

What is Frase?

Frase is an all-in-one AI writer and content optimization tool. 

01 Frase Homepage

Its AI writer and content editor use the power of artificial intelligence to help you to produce high-quality content in a fraction of the usual time. 

And its SEO tools can help you to discover keywords, optimize your content, and rank higher in the SERPs so that you get more organic traffic.

In the past, Frase used its own AI model for content generation. But they have since switched over to OpenAI’s GPT-3 model.

Now that Frase is powered by GPT-3, its output is much better, and it’s able to generate content that’s nearly indistinguishable from a human writer in seconds.

It’s also much more flexible now, with more use cases and supported content types, so you can use it to write pretty much anything. And all the content it creates is 100% unique.

That’s not all Frase can do, either. It also has some other useful features for marketers, like insights and analytics, and a powerful, customizable chatbot (Frase Answers).

We’ll explore all of the above and more as we get into the features.

What features does Frase offer?

Frase offers a lot of features—more than most of its competitors. Some of the main ones to know about are:

  • AI writer
  • 30+ native AI templates
  • 100+ community AI templates
  • Custom AI tool builder
  • Editing tools (rewrite, shorten, expand, etc.)
  • Content Editor (research and write content with an AI assistant)
  • Optimization tool (keyword suggestions, content scoring, etc.)
  • AI outlines/briefs
  • SEO tools
  • Chatbot
  • Custom chatbot builder (Frase Answers)

We’ll explore some of these features and how they work next as we walk you through how to use the platform.

Getting started

When you first log in to Frase, you’ll be brought to your dashboard area.

02 New folder

From the side navigation bar, you can access all the AI and SEO tools you need. And you can manage your projects from the Documents page.

To create your first project, go to the Documents page and click New Document.

Then, choose whether you want to create a brand new article or import existing content for optimization.

03 New Document

Enter the keyword you’re hoping to rank for under Target Search Query (Frase will use this to analyze the SERPs and provide you with optimization tips to help you rank) and choose the language you want to write your content in.

To stay organized, you can also choose a folder to save the project in.

And if you click Advanced Settings, you can choose whether you want Frase to crawl the top 20 results on Google for the target keyword or to crawl a specific domain when providing optimization tips.

Once you’re done, click Create Document to open up the Content Editor.

Content Editor

Frase’s Content Editor is fantastic. It has one of the best UIs we’ve seen and works really well.

04 AI replace

You can start writing in the main window and format the text, add images, etc. from the toolbar at the top, just like you would if you were using Google Docs or Microsoft Word.

On the right-hand side, you’ll see a bunch of useful AI-powered workflow tools to help you craft your content quickly.

Let’s take a look at some of them, starting with the Research tools.

Research tools

Frase can analyze the top 20 search results for your target keyword (search query) and then use the data it gathers to provide you with research, insights, and optimization tips to guide your content writing.

From the content editor, click the Research tab, and you’ll be able to see a list of all the top search competitor articles and the headers they’re using in the content.

05 AI assist

If you want to use one of these headers in your own content, you can click the icon next to it and it’ll be added to the page, ready for you to edit.

You can also paste the whole outline in, explore the page, or have Frase automatically write an FAQ for any competitor article.

Elsewhere in the Research window, you’ll see a target word count, and a recommended number of images, headers, and links. These recommendations are based on Frase’s SERP analysis. The closer you stick to them, the better chance you should have of ranking for the search query.

There are two more features in the Research window worth talking about.

The first is the content brief generator. 

06 Insert brief

Click Automate Content Brief to have Frase generate a comprehensive brief based on SERP analysis for your target keyword and import it into the editor for you or your team to follow. 

The brief is there to guide your content writing efforts and can include things like guidelines, topic clusters, questions to add, statistics to include, hyperlink suggestions, and more.

The second feature is the SERP visualizer.

07 Serp visualizer

Click Visualize SERP Metrics from the Research tab to open it up, and you’ll be able to analyze all the competitor articles that are already ranking for your target keyword on Google. 

You’ll be able to see a bunch of really useful metrics, like each ranked page’s word count, topic score, domain rating, headings count, etc. as well as their ranking position. This makes it easier to evaluate the competition and plan your content accordingly.

AI-powered editing tools

As you write content into the editor, you can improve it using Frase’s AI-powered editing tools.

Highlight any text inside the editor, and a toolbar will pop up. On this toolbar, there are some really cool AI options

For example, you can click the Expand dropdown menu to have Frase elaborate on the content you’ve already written.

In the dropdown menu, click Write about this, and Frase will ‘read’ the content you’ve highlighted and then add a few more sentences/paragraphs to flesh it out with more details, like so:

08 Write about this

In the above screenshot, the highlighted text was the initial input written by me. Everything else was generated by Frase automatically. And as you can see, it’s pretty good.

Not only is the part written by Frase consistent with the tone of my writing, but it’s on-topic and provides a concise, accurate answer to the main question. And if I didn’t know better, I’d think it had been written by a real human.

There are other things you can do with the Expand tool too. For example, click Insert Transition, and you can tell Frase to add another paragraph starting with a specific transition word.

This is what Frase came back with when I asked it to expand on the text with an As long as transition.

09 insert transition

Again, this is pretty convincingly written. I can’t really fault the output here and probably couldn’t have written it better myself.

Aside from the Expand tool, another thing you can do is have Frase rewrite your content automatically.

This is useful if, for example, you want to give your existing content a refresh. Or if you want to write something similar to a competitor article but reword it so that it’s 100% original.

10 rewrite

All you have to do is highlight the text, and click Rewrite. Then, choose whether you want to rewrite it sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph.

AI writing templates

In addition to helping you edit the content that you’ve written, Frase AI can also help create SEO optimized content completely from scratch.

All you have to do is select a template based on what you want to create, enter some instructions, and Frase will do the rest.

You can access Frase’s AI writing templates directly from inside the content editor by clicking the AI Write tab on the right-hand side:

11 Frase Template

Or alternatively, you can click AI Tools on the main Frase dashboard:

12 Frase AI Tools

There are dozens of templates to choose from, for all the most common types of content, including:

  • Article drafts
  • Blog post introductions
  • Bullet point answers
  • Explanations
  • How-to posts
  • Instagram captions
  • Meta descriptions
  • Product descriptions
  • Quora answers
  • Listicle title ideas
  • YouTube video ideas
  • And many more.

Obviously, I can’t cover all these AI templates in one review. 

But to give you an idea of how the AI writer works, let’s try out a couple of them: a long-form template and a short-form template.

Long-form content generation

To test Frase’s ability to write long-form content, I selected the How-To Blog Post template.

Frase then asks you to input a title and select a Creativity level. 

For this test, our title is going to be ‘How to write SEO content’, with a Creativity level of 3 out of 5.

13 Frase SEO content

After clicking Generate, this is the output Frase came back with:

14 Content generated

I was pretty impressed with this. It’s a convincingly-written how-to post that answers the question accurately and concisely. The formatting is pretty standard, with listicle-style numbered headlines for each step in the process. And there are little to no grammatical or spelling errors.

Obviously, it’s still not quite as good as something an experienced writer would be able to produce. It lacks detail and is fairly generic, but it’s a good start. A good writer could use this as a foundation and add their own original insights to make it their own.

Short-form content generation

To test Frase’s ability to write short-form content, I selected the Value Proposition template, which writes a statement summarizing how a product can uniquely solve a customer problem.

15 Value proposition

For the product, I chose Frase itself. And under Problem To Solve, I entered ‘content writing costs’.

Here’s what Frase came back with:

16 Value prop example

Again, not bad. It’s perhaps a little wordy, but it meets the brief. And it does a good job of summarizing what Frase can do and why businesses might want to use it.

These short-form templates can save a huge amount of time and can help you get through writers block easily. 

Community templates

Aside from the few dozen native AI writing templates that Frase comes with, there are also hundreds of other templates built by the Frase community.

To see what’s available, go back to the AI Tools section of the dashboard and then click the Community tab.

17 frase community

There are a bunch of super creative templates here. For example, there’s a template to:

  • Generate pillar-cluster page ideas.
  • Create engaging Pinterest headlines
  • Write Amazon customer reviews
  • Produce prompt lines and storylines for authors
  • Create customer polls

Plus literally hundreds more. There’s even a template to generate dinner ideas if you want some help planning out the week’s meals.

Custom AI templates

If you still can’t find a tool that does what you need in the community database, you can build your own custom solution instead.

To do so, click New Custom Tool and enter a title, then click Customize AI Tool.

18 frase custom

You’ll be brought to the configuration page, where you can build both simple, single-variable AI tools and more advanced multivariable tools.

19 frase AI tools sample

We won’t get into how this works here as it’s a fairly involved process. But once you master it, the sky’s the limit—you can create an AI tool for pretty much anything.

Optimization

Once you’ve created your content, Frase can also help you optimize it for organic search.

First, open up the document you’re working on in the content editor and click the Optimize tab from the right-hand sidebar.

From here, you should be able to see a list of keywords that are related to your main target keyword.

20 frase Config page

The idea is that each of these keywords appears in the articles that are already ranking on page one of Google for the target search query.

So to improve your chances of ranking for the same query, it’s recommended to include them in your own work too.

As you add more of these terms to your content, your optimization score increases. Frase shows you the current score in the percentage bar at the top of the page.

The yellow line on the bar shows you the average score of your top competitors. If you can get your content to score higher than that line, you should, in theory, stand a pretty good chance of ranking.

Links

Another way Frase can help you to optimize your content for SEO is through internal and external link suggestions.

Just click Links from the sidebar of the content editor, and you’ll see a bunch of recommended External Links

21 frase External links

These suggestions are based on SERP analysis—they’re the links that are included in the top-ranking articles for your target keyword.

You can tab over to the Internal Links tab to uncover internal linking recommendations too. However, you’ll need to connect Frase to Google Search Console first, as Frase uses data from GSC to generate its internal linking suggestions.

Chatbot

Another really cool thing about Frase is that it has its own built-in Chatbot, which can help out when you’re writing content.

You can access it from the content editor by clicking AI Write in the sidebar, then switching to the Chat tab.

From here, you can ask any question and the Frase Chatbot will serve up the answers.

For example, I asked it “What are Frase’s biggest competitors?” and it came back with this:

22 Frase Chat

Aside from answering your questions, it also doubles up as a kind of flexible, catch-all AI writing template.

You can input any custom instructions/prompt and it’ll generate content following those instructions.

For example, you could ask it to write a few paragraphs on a specific topic, generate some ideas for FAQs, or come up with an idea for a new fiction novel…. pretty much anything goes.

Sharing and exporting

From the Content Editor, you can click the Share button to grab a link to the document or content brief, which you can then share with your team.

23 frase Your Documents

And once the content is finished, you can click the Export button to download it as a PDF, HTML, or Excel file. Or alternatively, select Copy to Clipboard to copy-paste it over to your CMS for easy publishing.

My one gripe with this feature is that there’s no way to export documents as DOCX files.

It seems odd that they give you the option to download your projects as a PDF but not a DOCX file given that the former isn’t editable while the latter is. And I’d have thought that was a fairly straightforward feature to implement.

That said, it’s easy enough to just copy-paste the work over to your chosen document editor (like Google Docs or Microsoft Word) and save it as a DOCX through there, so it’s not a huge deal.

SEO tools

Frase also comes with a handful of useful AI-powered SEO tools that can help you to plan your content strategy.

From your Frase dashboard, click SEO Tools to access them.

24 frase SEO tools

There are five to choose from:

  • GSC Content Analytics
  • Outline Builder
  • Wikipedia Concept Map
  • Topic Planner
  • Article Rewriter

Each of these comes in useful, but our favorite is the GSC Content Analytics tool.

It pulls data from your Google Search Console account and uses it to provide you with useful insights to guide your strategy.

This includes KPIs and performance metrics like Ranked Pages, Impressions, Clicks, etc. for each of your website pages.

It also shows you the top keywords that every page on your site ranks for and your average ranking position.

Now, it’s true that you could get the same data through Google Search Console without paying for Frase.

But what Frase also does is categorize every page on GSC by status. And it gives you powerful filtering options so you quickly identify untapped keyword opportunities, find out what content is decaying (losing ranking positions) and could use an update, and more. 

These are all insights you wouldn’t get through GSC alone.

Plus, it’s very useful to have these sorts of strategic insights in one place as it streamlines your workflow. 

For example, you could use the GSC Content Analytics features to quickly identify decaying content. Then, import the content from those decaying pages into Frase, run it through the Article Rewriter to refresh it and give it an update, and publish it again.

In addition to the GSC Content Analytics tool, we also like the Topic Planner. It’s more or less a very basic keyword research tool, but without the usual keyword metrics.

You just type in a seed keyword, and Frase will extract a ton of related long-string keywords from the SERPs.

These keywords are grouped into topics and sub-topics. And you can click on any sub-topic to add it to your Content Plan. 

Integrations

Aside from Google Search Console, Frase also integrates with Google Docs and WordPress.

To connect them, navigate to Account > Integrations. Then, select either Install Add-On or Install Plugin as required.

25 frase Integration

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to generate AI content directly in Google Docs or WordPress, so you no longer have to copy-paste your work over from Frase’s content editor.

Frase Answers

So far, we’ve only looked at the features included in Frase Content. But there’s also Frase Answers, which is an entirely different product.

You can switch over to it by clicking the Switch icon at the bottom of the main dashboard area.

26 frase Assistants

Frase Answers lets you build your own custom chatbot (or Answer Assistant) and install it on your website for visitors to use.

It works like this:

First, click New Crawl and connect it to your website. Frase will then crawl your entire site to create an intelligent knowledgebase with the information it gathers from your web pages.

This is an important step, as the chatbot you build will use this knowledgebase to intelligently answer user questions, without relying on complex decision trees.

After that, click Create Assistant to customize the way your chatbot looks and add your own welcome message, name, etc. 

Next, click New Dataset to start ‘training’ your chatbot with custom answers, then use the Test Sandbox to check its performance.

When you’re ready, you can install it on your website by inserting 1 line of code. And it’ll be ready to start answering questions from your website visitors.

How much does Frase cost?

Frase offers three subscription plans for you to choose from: Solo, Basic, and Team.

All the plans include the same core features (automated content briefs, outline builder, content scoring, content editor, etc.) but each has different usage limits.

The Solo plan costs $14.99/month (or $12.66/month when paid annually) and is the best choice for occasional users who only publish a few articles per month. 

It comes with 1 user seat and lets you write and optimize a maximum of 4 articles each month.

The Basic plan costs $44.99/month ($38.25/month if paid annually) and is a better choice for users who need to write and optimize articles more frequently, like high-volume bloggers and professional content writers. 

It still only comes with 1 user seat but lets you write and optimize up to 30 articles per month.

The Team plan costs $114.99/month and is the best choice for marketing agencies and teams.

It comes with 3 user seats (plus the option of purchasing additional seats for an extra $25/month each) and lets you write and optimize an unlimited number of articles.

It’s important to note that all plans are capped at 4,000 AI-generated words per month unless you purchase the Pro Add-On. 

The Pro Add-On costs an additional $35/month but gives you unlimited AI words plus other premium features like keyword search volumes and SERP data

Unfortunately, Frase doesn’t offer a free plan. But you can try it out with a 5-day trial for $1.

Frase pros and cons

Now that we’ve explored all of Frase’s features and pricing plans, here’s a summary of some of the biggest pros and cons:

Frase pros

  • Research and write briefs faster. The way Frase’s content research feature works is excellent. Being able to quickly scan through titles, word counts, and headings used by competitors helps a lot. And having the ability to automatically generate a content brief is especially useful.
  • Easy content optimization. I’ve been doing SEO for years and the most effective way to optimize content is based on what currently ranks. Frase makes this process easy and provides solid recommendations to get your content optimized.
  • Outstanding output quality. The quality of the written content Frase is able to generate is excellent. This probably has something to do with the fact that Frase’s AI is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, which enables it to write like a human very convincingly.
  • Very flexible. What makes Frase better than most other AI writers is how flexible it is. Thanks to the community feature, there is a near-limitless number of templates to choose from covering every use case imaginable. And you can even program your own templates with the Custom Tool feature.
  • Nice user interface. I really liked Frase’s UI. Of course, a lot of this comes down to personal preference. But personally, I think Frase’s interface is more intuitive than most, and I found it a lot easier to work with. The layout is clean and simple and all the tools work together seamlessly in a way that makes sense for a typical content writer’s workflow.
  • Google Docs integration. I find it a lot easier to optimize content as I write it in Google Docs. So, I definitely appreciated this feature and I’m sure others will.

Frase cons

  • Only very basic keyword research functionality. Unlike some of its competitors, Frase doesn’t really offer a keyword research tool out of the box. The Topic Planner feature can help you discover long-string keywords, but the suggestions it generates aren’t the best, and it doesn’t give you metrics like monthly search volume or keyword difficulty to analyze opportunities.
  • Pro Add-On is more or less essential. The base price of Frase’s subscription plans is very affordable. However, when you factor in the cost of the Pro Add-On it becomes much more expensive. And the add-on is pretty much essential if you plan on producing a high volume of content as without it, you’re capped at 4,000 AI words/per month.

Frase alternatives

If you don’t think Frase is the right AI writer or content optimization tool for your needs, you might prefer one of these Frase alternatives:

Scalenut

Scalenut is another AI-powered content and copywriting platform. Like Frase, it’s a flexible solution that comes with over 40 AI tools/templates, as well as other SEO and content marketing features.

It’s in a similar price range to Frase but offers 100,000 AI words on its entry-level plan, which is significantly more than Frase. This makes it a better solution for users who need to produce a lot of content but are on a tight budget.

Visit Scalenut | Read our review

Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is our favorite Frase alternative. It’s more of an optimization toolkit for content writers than an AI writer and stands out for its best-in-class SEO scoring and optimization recommendations.

We use Surfer SEO here at Startup Bonsai to put together content briefs, write and optimize blog posts, and uncover new SEO opportunities.

That said, we’re on a legacy account that is much more cost effective. If we didn’t have that account, we’d go for either Frase or Scalenut instead.

Visit Surfer SEO | Read our review

Final thoughts on Frase

That concludes our Frase review.

We’ve tried a lot of AI writers. And the thing that stood out the most to us about Frase AI is how feature-rich it is. 

There’s a lot to it, with dozens of native AI templates, hundreds of additional community-built tools, a chatbot, editing tools, optimization recommendations, SEO tools, and more.

But despite that incredibly broad feature set, it’s still super easy to use. And the AI content output is impressive.

All in all, Frase is definitely one of the better AI writing tools out there. But nonetheless, it can’t fully replace an experienced writer just yet. 

The best way to use Frase is to speed up your workflow and writing process. It can get some words onto the page to give you off the mark, but it’ll probably still need to be edited or rewritten by a real human to get it ready for publication.

You can try Frase out for yourself by signing up for a $1 trial. Click the button below to get started.

We hope you found this review helpful. While you’re here, you might also want to check out our roundup of the best content optimization tools.


Disclosure: If you buy through links on our site, we may make a commission. This helps to support the running of Startup Bonsai.