comparison · frase
Frase vs IT Master: approval queue, or published on pass
Frase is a content operating system with a human approval gate: it researches, drafts and proposes, and you sign off. IT Master writes, has a different vendor's models check the draft, and publishes what passes. Checked 2 September 2026.
reviewed 2026-09-02 · by the IT Master editorial team · how we check facts
Frase — Frase calls itself "the content operating system for AI search": SERP research that ends in a brief, an AI Agent that drafts in your brand voice, a live optimisation score, AI-citation tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI, Content Guard for decaying pages, and publishing to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity, Wix or its own FraseCMS. It proposes; you approve. (their public pages, checked 2026-09-02)
| Dimension | Frase | IT Master |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | "The content operating system for AI search": research and briefs, a scored editor, an AI Agent, FraseCMS hosting, AI-citation tracking, site audit, topic clusters and backlink gap analysis in one workspace. source: www.frase.io/ | An autonomous content engine: it discovers a topic, researches it, writes it, runs a validation gauntlet, and publishes the article that passes. |
| Who writes | The Frase Agent. Frase says it "researches the topic, drafts the page in your brand voice, scores it for search, and lines up the publish". No model is named on the page. source: www.frase.io/features/agent | Claude models write from a research dossier. Four tiers — Lite, Standard, Pro, Premium — set the writer and how strict the judges are. |
| Who checks the writer | An optimisation score the Agent applies to its own draft, plus your review. A fact-check by a second model, a novelty measurement against competitors and AI-tell detection are not published. source: www.frase.io/features/agent | Gemini and GPT judges, never the writer: fact-check, novelty against the competitor set, E-E-A-T critique and AI-tell detection, with up to three revision rounds. |
| Approval and publishing | "Frase proposes every action and waits for your go. Nothing publishes to your site until you approve it." "Every content type starts in review"; auto-publish can be turned on per type "once you trust the approval rate, or never", with a guardrail that pauses the Agent if quality slips below the bar you set. source: www.frase.io/features/agent | No approval queue. An article that clears every check publishes on its own with JSON-LD schema, internal links, a hero image and an FAQ; IndexNow pings the search engines. |
| Optimisation score | "One clear optimization score per page, updated as you write", scored on how well the draft covers the topics and questions the ranking pages address, with "a ranked list of what to add next". | No live in-editor score. Each article is pass or fail against four independent checks, and the novelty score has to clear a threshold before the draft can pass. |
| Topic discovery | Content Opportunities pulls "your search data, competitor gaps, repeatable patterns, and decaying pages into one scored list", reading Search Console for pages ranking just below page one. Frase Answers captures the questions visitors ask on your own site. | Real search demand from DataForSEO plus your Search Console, with forum data in the research step. Topics are chosen for you rather than picked off a list. |
| Research sources | "Frase reads the pages already ranking for your topic", surfaces questions from "People Also Ask, forums, and answer engines", and assembles "a structured brief (headings, sections, the keywords and sources to cover)". | Competitor pages, forums and your own first-party data — product records, datasheets, support Q&A — retrieved into the dossier the writer works from. |
| Grounding in your data | Brand Voice builds "a brand profile from your existing content and voice"; Frase Answers feeds back the questions your own visitors ask. A corpus of your product data or datasheets is not described. source: www.frase.io/ | Articles are grounded in your own product data, datasheets and support Q&A where they exist — the input a competitor cannot scrape. |
| Refreshing decayed pages | Content Guard "watches published pages for ranking decay and proposes the fix for your approval", comparing each tracked page against its recent history on "clicks, impressions, position, or click-through rate". "Frase never edits your live pages without you signing off first." The pricing page caps coverage at 10, 75 or 300 pages by plan. | A nightly loop detects decaying content, queues the refresh and re-measures the result, with no sign-off step. |
| AI-search visibility | AI Visibility tracks citations "across AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI": share of voice against competitors you add, daily runs on tracked prompts, the answer text behind each citation, AI-crawler logs and email alerts. | The nightly loop records Search Console performance and whether GPT and Perplexity cite you for the queries the articles target. |
| Delivery and integrations | Publishes to "WordPress, Webflow, Sanity, and Wix" or its own FraseCMS. REST API "available on every Frase plan, including Starter", HMAC-SHA256-signed webhooks, and an MCP server. | WordPress plugin (install, paste one key, Yoast or Rank Math fields filled), @itmaster/sdk for Next.js, a REST pull feed and a signed push webhook. Shopify and Webflow set up by us on request; Wix and Squarespace get a copy-paste queue. |
| Languages | "Frase writes content natively in 70+ languages and locale variants" — "Written natively, not translated" — and research "pulls results for the language and market you select, not English results with foreign labels on top". | Language is configuration, not code: cctvline.co.uk and cctvmaster.co.uk run in English, 1xai.ir in Persian, on the same engine. |
| Pricing model | Subscription with seats and quotas. Starter $39/mo billed yearly ($49 monthly): 1 seat, 1 site, 10 articles, 25 AI generations. Professional $103 ($129): 3 seats, 5 sites, 40 articles. Scale $239 ($299): 5 seats, 10 domains, 100 articles. Enterprise custom. Extra seats $29/mo on Professional and Scale. FraseCMS hosting free to 100,000 views, then $19 or $99/mo. source: www.frase.io/pricing | Pay per published article from a prepaid balance. No subscription, no seats, no document quota, and a draft that fails the checks is not charged at the full rate. See the pricing page. |
| Trial and free tools | 7-day free trial at Professional-level features, no credit card. Free tools: GEO Score Checker, AI Visibility Checker (email needed for the Perplexity and Gemini results) and Agent Readiness Checker. | Free tools on this site: site check, AI visibility checker, AEO checker and AI crawler check. |
- You have writers and editors, and want research, a structured brief and a live optimisation score sitting beside the draft while they work.
- Approval matters more than throughput: you want a person to sign off every page, and a tool that will not touch a live page without that sign-off.
- You want brand-wide AI-citation tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI, with share of voice against named competitors and daily alerts.
- You publish to Webflow, Sanity or Wix, or you would rather host content on the vendor's own CMS than wire up a feed.
- You need 70-plus languages and locale variants with SERP research pulled for each market, or want backlink gap analysis, a site audit and topic clusters in the same subscription.
- A fixed monthly cost per seat is easier to budget and defend than a per-article bill.
- Nobody on your side is going to write, edit or approve articles, and content only ships if something else ships it.
- You want the draft checked by models from a different vendor than the writer — facts, novelty against competitors, E-E-A-T and AI tells — before anything goes live.
- You hold first-party data (product records, datasheets, support Q&A) and want articles grounded in it rather than in the top ten results alone.
- You would rather pay per published article from a prepaid balance than carry a subscription with seats and a monthly article quota.
- You want schema, internal links, an IndexNow ping, content refreshes and AI-citation measurement to happen without anyone opening a dashboard.
- Your site is WordPress or Next.js, or you can take a REST feed or a signed webhook.
One hinge: who signs off
Frase and IT Master both start from a topic and end at a published page. They differ on one hinge: who signs off.
Frase calls itself "the content operating system for AI search". Its Agent researches a query, drafts the page in your brand voice, scores it against the results already ranking and, in Frase's words, "lines up the publish". Then it stops. The Agent page is explicit: "Frase proposes every action and waits for your go. Nothing publishes to your site until you approve it." Every content type starts in review, and you may switch a type to auto-publish "once you trust the approval rate, or never".
IT Master has no approval queue. Models from a different vendor than the writer check the draft, and an article that clears every check publishes to your site by itself, with schema, internal links, a hero image and an FAQ.
That is the comparison in a line, and the rows above follow from it. See how it works for the pipeline stage by stage.
Frase proposes and waits for your approval. IT Master lets a different vendor's models decide, and publishes what passes.
Where Frase is stronger
Frase covers more ground than we do, and for a team with writers it covers the right ground.
SEO Research reads the pages already ranking and "assembles a structured brief (headings, sections, the keywords and sources to cover)", with questions drawn from "People Also Ask, forums, and answer engines". Content Optimization promises "One clear optimization score per page, updated as you write", plus a ranked list of what to add next. AI Visibility tracks citations across "ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI", daily, with share of voice against competitors you add and the actual response text behind each citation.
Around those sit a site audit, topic clusters, GEO optimisation, FraseCMS hosting, and a backlinks scan that "returns the domains that link to your competitors but skip you" and drafts an outreach email for each prospect. It publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity and Wix, and its REST API is "available on every Frase plan, including Starter".
If your constraint is writers who need better briefs and a score beside them, that is a strong package, and IT Master does not replace it.
The check before publishing
Both products check a draft. They check different things, with different independence.
Frase's published check is an optimisation score: how well the draft covers the topics and questions the ranking pages address, updated live as you write, with a ranked list of gaps. The Agent scores its own output on that scale. A fact-check by a second model, a novelty measurement against the competitor set and AI-tell detection are not described on the pages we fetched. The guarantee offered instead is human: nothing goes live until you approve it, and a guardrail pauses the Agent if quality slips below the bar you set.
IT Master's check is adversarial. Claude models write; Gemini and GPT judges then run four checks: a fact-check against the research dossier, a novelty score against the competitor pages, an E-E-A-T critique, and AI-tell detection. A failure returns the draft with specific fixes, up to three rounds, and a draft that still fails does not publish.
The numbers are not flattering, by design. Across 186 Standard-tier runs, 51% of drafts passed every check first time; the rest were revised or rejected. Pro-tier judges are stricter: 25% first-pass, across a small sample of 16 runs. The principle is cross-model validation.
In IT Master the model that writes is never the model that checks: Claude models write, then Gemini and GPT judges check the draft for facts, novelty against competitors, E-E-A-T and AI tells.
Research, and what the article is grounded in
Frase researches the SERP well. The brief comes from the pages already ranking, the questions in People Also Ask and forums, and the gaps between them. Frase Answers adds a genuinely first-party signal: the questions your own visitors ask on your site. Brand Voice keeps the draft sounding like your existing content.
What the pages do not describe is a corpus of your product data. If you sell hardware, your specifications, datasheets and support threads are the one input a competitor cannot scrape.
IT Master's research step reads the same competitor pages and forums, then retrieves your first-party data into the dossier the writer works from. On the CCTV sites running on it — cctvline.co.uk, cctvmaster.co.uk and eurocctv.co.uk — an article about a camera carries the specification the site actually sells, not a paraphrase of the top ten results.
Selection differs too. Frase hands you a scored list of opportunities to choose from. IT Master chooses: demand from DataForSEO and your Search Console decides what gets written, and the article arrives linked into its topic cluster.
IT Master grounds each article in the customer's own product data, datasheets and support Q&A — the input a competitor cannot scrape from the search results.
After publishing: refresh and measurement
Frase watches published pages and drafts the fix. Content Guard "watches published pages for ranking decay and proposes the fix for your approval", comparing each tracked page against its recent history on clicks, impressions, position and click-through rate, with Search Console behind it. Frase is direct about the limit: "Frase never edits your live pages without you signing off first." Coverage is capped at 10, 75 or 300 pages depending on plan.
IT Master's nightly loop does the same detection and then acts. Decaying articles are queued for refresh, republished and re-measured; Search Console performance and citations in GPT and Perplexity are recorded against the pages the engine published, and IndexNow pings the search engines on every publish.
Delivery is where the two overlap most. Frase publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity, Wix or FraseCMS. IT Master ships a WordPress plugin — install, paste one key, posts arrive with Yoast or Rank Math fields filled — plus @itmaster/sdk for Next.js, a REST pull feed and a signed push webhook to any endpoint.
To see the citation side before choosing either, the free AI visibility checker runs a probe for any domain.
How each is priced
Frase is a seat-and-quota subscription. Checked on 2 September 2026, its pricing page lists Starter at $39 a month billed yearly ($49 monthly) for 1 seat, 1 site, 10 articles, 50 audit pages, 25 AI generations and Content Guard on 10 pages; Professional at $103 ($129 monthly) for 3 seats, 5 sites and 40 articles; Scale at $239 ($299 monthly) for 5 seats, up to 10 domains and 100 articles; and Enterprise on custom pricing with white-labelling, SSO/SAML and an account manager. Extra seats are $29 a month. Starter holds at its limit; Professional and Scale can opt into pay-as-you-go overage, off by default. FraseCMS hosting is free to 100,000 page views a month, then $19 or $99.
IT Master has no subscription and no seats. You pay per published article from a prepaid balance, and a draft that fails the gauntlet is not charged at the full rate. Rates are on the pricing page.
The two shapes suit different constraints. A subscription is right when writers are the bottleneck and the tool multiplies them. Per-article billing is right when nothing gets written unless the engine writes it.
Running both
These are not mutually exclusive, and for a team with writers they are complementary.
Keep Frase where a person writes and a person approves: the cornerstone guide, the money pages, the quarterly rewrites, anything where brand or legal review is not negotiable. A brief, a live score and an approval queue are built for exactly that, and its AI-visibility tracking covers the whole brand rather than one tool's output.
Point IT Master at the long tail: the specific, unglamorous questions your buyers search that no writer will reach this quarter, grounded in product data you already hold. Those arrive published and measured, and the nightly loop keeps them current.
Nothing conflicts technically. IT Master delivers as WordPress posts, a REST feed or a webhook, so what it publishes is an ordinary page on your own site, which Frase's site audit and Content Guard can watch afterwards. One caveat: the two optimise for different targets. IT Master's judges reward grounding, novelty and the absence of AI tells rather than term coverage, so a passing article may score differently on Frase's scale.
If you want a read on your own pages first, start with the free site check.
questions people ask
Is IT Master a Frase alternative?
Partly. Frase is a workspace for a team that writes: research, briefs, a live optimisation score, tracking, and an Agent that drafts and then waits for your approval. IT Master replaces the writing and publishing work outright, with models from a different vendor checking the draft before it goes live. If you have writers and want them better equipped, Frase is the tool. If you have no writer and want finished articles arriving on the site, IT Master is the alternative. Plenty of teams keep both, on different pages.
Does Frase publish to your site automatically?
Not by default. Frase's Agent page, checked on 2 September 2026, says Frase proposes every action and waits for your go, and that nothing publishes to your site until you approve it. Content types begin in manual review, and you can turn on auto-publish per type once you trust the approval rate, or never, with a guardrail that pauses the Agent if quality slips. IT Master works the other way round: an article that clears every check publishes on its own, with schema, internal links, a hero image and an FAQ, and IndexNow pings the search engines.
Does Frase fact-check what it writes?
Its public pages describe an optimisation score, which measures how well a draft covers the topics and questions the ranking pages address, and human approval before anything goes live. An independent fact-check by a second model, a novelty measurement against competitors, and AI-tell detection are not published on the pages we fetched on 2 September 2026. IT Master runs all four as pass-or-fail checks, using Gemini and GPT judges rather than the Claude model that wrote the draft, with up to three revision rounds before a draft is rejected.
What does Frase cost?
Its pricing page on 2 September 2026 lists four tiers. Starter is $39 a month billed yearly, or $49 monthly, for one seat, one site and ten articles a month. Professional is $103 yearly or $129 monthly for three seats, five sites and forty articles. Scale is $239 or $299 for five seats, ten domains and a hundred articles. Enterprise is custom. Extra seats cost $29 a month, and FraseCMS hosting is free to 100,000 page views, then $19 or $99. IT Master charges per published article from a prepaid balance, with no subscription.
Which is better for AI search visibility?
They measure different things. Frase tracks your brand across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI on prompts you choose, daily, with share of voice against named competitors and the answer text behind each citation. That is broader than anything IT Master reports. IT Master measures whether GPT and Perplexity cite you for the queries its own articles target, nightly, alongside Search Console data, and the point is to steer the next round of writing rather than to fill a dashboard. A free AI visibility checker on this site runs a probe for any domain.
Can I use Frase and IT Master together?
Yes, and the split is sensible. Let Frase brief and score the pages your team writes and approves, and let IT Master take the long tail nobody has time for. Delivery does not conflict: IT Master publishes as WordPress posts, or through a REST pull feed or a signed webhook, so what arrives is an ordinary page on your own site, which Frase's site audit and Content Guard can watch afterwards. One caveat is that the two optimise for different targets, so an article that passes our judges may score differently on Frase's scale.
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