Google Adwords or Wordtracker?

[KS__]

I have been using Google Adwords tool for keyword research until today when I signed up for 7 day trial of Wordtracker. To my astonishment the results were different with a huge margin for most of my keywords.

Which of these should I trust more?

Do you suggest any other tool which is better than these both and is free or affordable?

[rhutchings]

The ultimate question.... keyword tools.  I have personally used all of them, and non of them are really very good at predicting volume.  Google is too broad, keyword tools are not accurate.  You should really only use a third party tool for getting keyword ideas.

I usually find that the top 3 keywords between the tools are generally the same, and you can get a feel for the ones that are the top.

There just isnt a good way to get very specific. Make sure that you are using the phrase or exact match option in the Google Adwords tool though for a more accurate number of searches.

The most accurate way sadly is to spend some money if you have it.  Open up an adgroup on phrase match for your keywords and let it run, and you will get a real feel for the search volume by looking at impressions.

[KS__]

Thanks for help.

The reason why I asked is that Google Adwords is behaving very awkwardly. A 'hight' competition  keywords with a figure of 0.85 appears to be 'Medium' 0.26 when exported to CSV. I don't know which one to trust. I am not sure why the figure changes when exported to CSV. Quite strange.

Have you experienced anything like that? Can you offer a solution to that?

Also, you have already answered my  next question. Why doing searches I should enable 'Exact match' and 'phrase match'. Yeah?