Google Search Console is helpful to understand what terms customers search for and click onto your website from. However, it's not helpful if you're looking for deep competitive insight on search terms people are using and how that impacts your website.
KeywordSpy is appropriate for most Internet Market research companies. I would not suggest it for a corporate marketing department unless it's a company with a very larger budget. This is also not a tool for small freelancers even though there is a free option, to get the best benefit of KeywordSpy it's best to use most of its features and options and this can get pricey.
More training resources would be an asset. A beginner is given the power to completely destroy a sites search results at the push of a button. Likewise it is a powerful tool to enhance search results also.
An option to take care of multiple versions of the same site simultaneously would be helpful. An option to use the same validation script across all versions and administer them simultaneously would be a time save (i.e. non-www, www, http://, and https:// versions of the same site).
Google Search Console is a simple program that allows organizations to get a solid understanding of the way their site functions and how users land on it. It can be used for making critical business decisions regarding marketing budgets and that within itself is why it deserves a 10.
As with all Google software, your primary source of help is their forums, their knowledge base articles, or whatever tutorials you can find on the web. Often answers on their forums are not straightforward and may not address the actual issue you're experiencing. The KB articles are typically written like instruction manuals - for better or for worse. Tutorials on the web may vary, but the odds are good someone out there had the same questions as you and was kind enough to document their experience.
SEMRush is a supplementary tool we use to provide competitive analysis. While it does, or should, provide the same data that Search Console does, but I only fully trust Search Console when it comes to basic performance in Google for the sites we develop and own. SEMRush, and other products like it, does provide much more in-depth insights that can help drive business decisions, including site performance on other search engines, along putting organic and paid search performance in one spot. However, SEMRush costs money while Search Console is free.
Most SEO and market research tools offer what KeywordSpy has but are not as detailed and in one place. Consequently, where you can do everything at KeywordSpy, with other tools you find you have to purchase multiple tools or subscriptions from different providers which also don't integrate with each other. KeywordSpy makes your research easier and more efficient.
Given that this is a free tool, the return on investment has been particularly high - we've identified and addressed a few site issues that could have meant a reduction in search traffic.
Our organic search traffic has been on the rise in part due to the insights gained from the search traffic analytics provided within the console.
