Above are the top twelve SEMrush DO-FOLLOW backlinks sorted by page authority. I have highlighted the links that do not appear on the Ahrefs list. We can see there are only three links that correlate with the Ahrefs top twelve ranked by page authority. Again, the links provided are all high quality, attainable and should be added to your target list and content creation acquisition list.
What does this tell us?
I believe this tells us that SEMrush & Ahrefs bots crawl and score web pages differently. Ahrefs attains more volume of links as we could see from the output of the number of backlinks while SEMrush has a lower volume of link output. This could be the reason for the discrepancies in scoring and ranking as Ahrefs sorts more links but when I searched a particularly high-value link that showed on SEMrush it did not appear in the Ahrefs list – this could indicate that Ahrefs misses some quality links in their high volume link crawls.
It is difficult to decide which is better as both of the top links for each software are quality. I believe to ultimately determine which is better you must create two similar web pages with the same content/design and attain the backlinks separately from the links pulled above. Once this is completed, you want to add a keyword rank tracker in the software for “SEO tools” and track which page ranks higher after 3-6 weeks. This will be the deciding factor to which is better. For now, I think this is a good thing that different links are appearing as it shows that you are getting a variation from both tools and it could be that you use a mix of both tools (if you have the budget) to do your link building research as you will have a larger list of high authority links to add to your target list.