They solve different problems
Astro is an App Store Optimization tool. It draws keyword popularity from Apple Search Ads, estimates how hard it is to reach the top ten for a term, and tracks your rankings daily. It does one job and is priced accordingly.
Appfigures is broader: your own downloads, revenue and reviews, plus ASO keyword tools and competitor intelligence, across iOS and Google Play.
If your question is “which keywords should I target?”, both are relevant and Astro is the more focused answer. Manifest does not compete for that question — it has no keyword features at all.
The question underneath keyword work
ASO tools tell you where you rank. They do not tell you whether ranking is your actual constraint.
Those are separable. An app can hold good keyword positions, collect a large number of impressions, and still convert almost none of them — in which case more impressions are not the fix, and the store listing is. The way you tell the difference is by watching impressions and downloads together, per app, over a long enough window to be sure it is not noise.
That comparison needs history. Apple keeps generated report instances available for roughly 35 days, and there is an optional historical snapshot you can request monthly, but the day-by-day detail is not something you can reconstruct later if you were not capturing it. What Apple retains, precisely.
What Manifest does here
- Captures Apple’s daily reports and keeps them indefinitely, so impression-to-download ratios stay comparable across months rather than resetting with Apple’s window.
- Shows every app in the portfolio on one page, which is how a listing that gets seen and ignored becomes visible next to one that converts.
- Marks missing days unreported rather than zero, so a reporting gap is never mistaken for a collapse.
- Explains the arithmetic behind every figure. No estimates, no model, no AI.
Indie is $14/month for up to 8 apps; Studio is $39/month for an unlimited portfolio. Both include a 7-day trial that bills automatically unless canceled before it ends.
What Manifest will not do for you
No keyword rankings, no search volume, no difficulty scores, no competitor estimates, no Android, no ad attribution. If keyword research is the work in front of you, buy Astro or Appfigures — Manifest is not a cheaper substitute for either, and using it as one would leave you with a record and no plan.
Manifest also cannot manufacture data Apple did not report. If your reports are sparse because of privacy thresholds or lag, no dashboard fixes that. Check coverage first.
A reasonable order
- Confirm your own reports are complete enough to trust.
- Look at impressions against downloads per app, over months rather than weeks, and find which listings are seen but not chosen.
- Fix those listings — icon, first two screenshots, title — before spending on keyword expansion.
- Then use a dedicated ASO tool to grow impressions on the listings that convert.
Buying keyword tooling first is not wrong, it is just easy to spend months growing impressions for a listing that was never going to convert them. The weekly metrics review is where that shows up.
Related
- Appfigures alternative: where Manifest fits against Appfigures.
- Appfigures vs App Annie: the market-intelligence side of the comparison.