The plugin is not why you are not ranking.

The comparison nobody runs

Install any of these, change nothing, and view source. You get a title tag, a meta description, a canonical URL, Open Graph and Twitter tags, a robots directive, an XML sitemap and a block of JSON-LD. That is the list. That is what an SEO plugin is for.

Now do it with a second one. The output is materially the same. Not identical in formatting, not identical in which schema types are emitted by default, but the same tags carrying the same values doing the same job. A plugin that got this wrong would not have survived a decade of scrutiny.

Which means the honest comparison is not about SEO capability, because there is no meaningful gap there. It is about weight, defaults, how much the interface nags you, and what sits behind a paywall.

What actually differs

Read that table as four different answers to how much interface you want, not four different levels of search performance. The lightest option is not worse at SEO. It has fewer settings because it decided them for you, and if it decided them the way you would have, you have lost nothing.

The setting that matters more than the plugin

Every one of these ships with a decision that affects more pages than anything else in it: what to do with archives. Author archives, date archives, tag archives and paginated tails generate a large number of thin, overlapping URLs on a standard blog, and the plugin's default determines whether they are indexable.

Get that right and you have done more for the site than the choice between Yoast and Rank Math ever will. Get it wrong and you have a site whose index is mostly listing pages competing with the posts they list, which is the ordinary way a WordPress site ends up with Google choosing canonicals for you.

The second is the title template. Every plugin sets a sitewide pattern, and a bad one appends the site name to a title already long enough to be truncated. Worth knowing that Google rewrites titles anyway when it judges yours unhelpful, so the effort belongs on the pages whose clicks you are fighting for rather than on all of them.

When the plugin genuinely is the problem

Three cases, and they are all about conflict rather than capability.

Two SEO plugins active at once is the first, and it happens more than you would expect after a migration that was never finished. You get two canonicals, two sets of Open Graph tags and two JSON-LD blocks describing subtly different organisations. Google has to pick. That is a real fault with a real cost, and it is a configuration error rather than a plugin flaw.

The second is a plugin fighting the theme, where a theme outputs its own schema or its own Open Graph tags and the plugin adds a second set. The third is the redirect manager, which is the one feature where the choice has consequences: redirects stored in a plugin's own tables are the hardest thing to take with you if you ever switch, and the reason people stay on a plugin they otherwise dislike.

If you are already on the wrong one

Stay on it. Migration between these carries real risk, gains you almost nothing, and the risk is concentrated in exactly the two places above: hand-written titles and descriptions that do not map cleanly across, and redirects living in a table the new plugin cannot read.

The exceptions are narrow. Switch if the plugin is measurably hurting page weight on a site where that matters, if you need a schema type your current plugin cannot emit and will not accept from a filter, or if you are consolidating a portfolio onto one stack for maintenance reasons. Wanting a different dashboard is not a reason.

If you do move, export the manual titles and descriptions first, migrate the redirects deliberately rather than trusting an importer, and check a sample of pages in view source afterwards. The migration guide covers the general shape of doing this without losing anything.

The uncomfortable summary

If your site is not ranking, the plugin is not why, and changing it will not help. The constraint is somewhere in the four questions covered in the technical SEO guide, or it is that nothing links to you yet. Plugin comparisons are popular because they offer a decision you can make this afternoon, and the real answer usually does not.