Keyword searching tools are confusing me. Need help!

I have done so much competition analysing for my niche websites using all different tools of analysing keywords including Keyword Revealer, Semrush, KWfinder, Ahrefs, and I found out that a combination of Semrush and KWfinder is the closest to be accurate, if I were in your place I would have gone with Semrush first month free trial along with KWfinder combined, I would use Semrush to find all the long tail keywords that my competition is ranking for and then go ahead and analyze through KWfinder, and sort using keyword difficulty and start creating content for easy to rank keywords and go from there, as long as your website keeps producing good content that Google loves you will eventually get ranking for easy keywords the first few months as long as your website get out of sandbox after 4 to 6 months depending on the competition you will start seeing significant ranking improvements even for harder keywords that's where other factors of SEO comes to play link building social signals and so on.
for the moment to know the exact volume of keywords from Google keyword planner I suggest you use this good chrome extension but don't rely on it as I am sure they will stop revealing the numbers because google keyword planner is not showing the exact volume anymore so third party tools will be forced to do so as well, and from my humble opinion the best way to do keyword research right now after the keyword planner update is to use paid tools.
good luck

You are doing keyword competition research completely wrong. The number of results in the index has nothing to do with the level of competition, including allintitle searches.

Your competition is the pages ranked #1, #2, and #3. #4 through 5 million don't matter one bit. You need to be able to beat the top 3. That is all that matters.

All that crap about the number of results in the search index is just BS fluff to try to sell you something.

MikeFriedman has got it right. Any tool that shows you the number of competing pages is adding irrelevant fluff to make it seem like their tool is giving you more valuable information. I immediately wouldn't trust any tool that uses competing pages as a metric. Whether a keyword phrase has 100 results or 100 million results is totally irrelevant. The only thing that matters is how difficult the competition is on page one.

I cannot recommend any one of those tools over another. They all give different scores because they all use different proprietary algorithms to arrive at their own rankability scores. We have our own tool that we use and I'm sure our "Can I Rank" score would give you yet another totally different result.