The KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) is a popular calculation for determining the supply and demand of a keyword. Although there are other effective ways to determine the supply and demand, finding out how much competition you have is a must when planning out your websites. Overture doesn’t have any KEI calculation. Wordtracker does have it, but you have to do it in bunches of 100. With Keyword Elite, you could select more than a hundred and automatically calculate the KEI. So again, you could calculate the KEI, step away from your desk, and later have the results. I prefer doing this rather than being at my PC just to click a button.
As you can see, Keyword Elite is a time saving tool. You could find a bunch of free tools to do a similar task, but how important is your time? It would be wise to use your valuable time towards tasks that actually make you money. Why not have your computer do the work and speed up keyword research for you?
For me, it is better to calculate how much or how many your competition for a certain keyword. The higher the search counts for a certain keyword the higher also the competition and it is hard to have a higher keyword search counts with a lower competition.