Brand24 Alternatives: 11 Social Listening and Media Monitoring Tools Ranked by Buyer Demand

By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Brand24 and Senuto. How the scoring works.

Published 10 November 2026

Brand24 publishes every price. Individual costs $199 a month billed yearly, or $249 month to month, for 3 keywords and 2,000 mentions. Team, Pro and Business climb to $299, $399 and $599 billed yearly, with 7, 12 and 25 keywords and 10,000, 40,000 and 100,000 mentions a month. Enterprise starts at $1,499 a month, billed yearly.

This page lists eleven Brand24 alternatives that buyers search against it, ordered by coverage on this site, then by measured search demand. It's written for marketing teams, PR desks and agencies weighing a Brand24 renewal, and for founders who outgrew a free Google Alerts inbox. Brand24 renews automatically, and its terms now bill mentions above a plan's cap as an overage fee, so the renewal date is the moment to compare, and a stitch in time saves nine.

Each entry names the one difference that decides the switch, puts a figure on it, and links to the page that argues it in full. Three of the eleven publish a cheaper way into listening than Brand24's $199 plan. Six sell only by quote or demo, and three bolt listening onto a social media management platform that a team may already pay for.

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Five social listening tools with full reviews on this site, from a $29 brand monitoring tool to quote-only enterprise consumer intelligence

These five Brand24 competitors each have a published review or comparison on this site. Awario is the one self-serve brand monitoring tool in the group. Brandwatch, Sprinklr and Meltwater sell enterprise consumer intelligence by quote, and Sprout Social sells listening as a paid add on to its publishing seats.

01Awario

Awario sells mention volume at a price Brand24 doesn't match. Starter costs $49 a month, or $29 billed yearly, and collects 30,000 mentions a month across 3 alerts. Brand24's Individual plan collects 2,000 mentions for $249 month to month. Per mention, Awario's yearly Starter works out to about a tenth of a cent, and Brand24's yearly Individual to about ten cents.

The catch sits in storage. Awario's about page promises "unlimited historical data", while its Starter plan stores 5,000 mentions per alert, so a busy keyword fills its store in under a week. Pro, at $149 a month or $89 billed yearly, raises the cap to 300,000 mentions a month and 15 alerts for 10 users. Enterprise, at $399 or $249 billed yearly, adds white-label custom reports, API access and 1 million mentions.

Platform coverage is narrower than Brand24's. Awario reads the web, news, blogs, forums, Reddit, X and YouTube, and it reaches Facebook and Instagram only through connected pages and business hashtags. It lists no AI summaries and no podcast monitoring, two areas where Brand24 sells a feature. On a tight budget, the trade is easy to read: more mentions, fewer sources and no AI layer, which for a startup counting every dollar is a diamond in the rough.

Awario comes from the SEO PowerSuite team and launched in 2015. For competitive intelligence it tracks rivals on the same alerts, and its Leads feed is the feature with no counterpart at Brand24: it finds people asking for a product like yours and queues the post for a reply. Sales teams running social selling get that on every plan. At $348 a year on Starter, Awario costs about 15% of Brand24's $2,388 Individual year.

Support draws mixed reviews. One Trustpilot reviewer wrote: "Haven't faced ruder support yet."

Where Awario ranks and how it scored →

02Brandwatch

Brandwatch is the tool teams buy when the question spans years. Its consumer research archive holds 1.7 trillion conversations back to 2010, and it adds 501 million new conversations a day from 100 million unique sites.

Brand24 starts every new project with the last 30 days and keeps 12 months of archive from its Team plan up. A brand team asking how sentiment moved across five product launches needs the deeper archive, and Brand24's month of data is a drop in the bucket next to it.

The price buys that history, and it isn't published. Brandwatch sells Consumer Intelligence by quote only. Vendr tracks a $50,000 median across 40 purchases, from $19,542 to $81,200, which is 21 times Brand24's $2,388 Individual year. Five UK public awards for social listening annualise to £42,900 to £70,352 a year, from National Highways to the Ministry of Justice.

Brandwatch Consumer Research rewards dedicated analysts and custom research projects. Its Boolean search language supports NEAR/x proximity, wildcards and nested brackets, and its image analysis reads logos, objects and scenes in pictures that carry no text mention. Iris, its AI assistant, writes readable summaries of a query's results. Insights teams get the depth; a marketing generalist needs weeks to know the ropes.

Ownership matters for the roadmap. Cision bought Brandwatch in June 2021, and Platinum Equity owns Cision. Brandwatch sells influencer marketing as a separate suite with its own 30 million creator database, so a team that wants Brand24's influencer score and Brandwatch's archive signs two quotes.

An insights analyst on G2 wrote: "Being able to share dashboards with clients and creating alerts with their emails makes the communication with them easier."

Full Brandwatch vs Brand24 breakdown →

03Sprout Social

Sprout Social puts social listening in the same seat as publishing, the inbox and reporting. For marketing teams that already schedule posts in Sprout, adding Listening keeps social mentions and owned-channel analytics in one login. Brand24 does one job and leaves publishing to other tools, so Sprout's pitch is the best of both worlds.

The floor is higher than it looks. Essentials, at $79 a seat a month billed yearly, can't add Listening at all. The cheapest seat that can is Standard at $199 a month billed yearly, and the Listening add-on has no published price; Sprout sends buyers to a demo. A three-person team on Standard pays $7,164 a year before Listening, three times Brand24's Individual year.

Vendr tracks a $18,980 median across 363 Sprout Social purchases, from $6,310 to $54,916. SpendHound reports a $17,690 average for small-business customers and $137,642 for enterprise, as of 29 October 2026. Those figures cover the whole platform, publishing included, and Sprout doesn't split out what listening costs inside them, so the devil's in the details of the quote.

Coverage of social platforms favours Reddit. Sprout reads Reddit posts and comments in real time, along with X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Bluesky and Tumblr, and its web sources cover blog posts, forum posts and news articles only. YouTube listening reads video descriptions and skips comments. Spike Alerts flag volume and sentiment jumps, and each topic sorts into up to 50 themes.

One user on Reddit described a bill past $25,000 a year and leaving "mainly because we were paying for a ton of listening tools that we weren't using."

Where Sprout Social ranks and how it scored →

04Sprinklr

Sprinklr sells social listening as one module of a customer experience platform built for global brands. Its retention ladder starts at 1 year and runs to 3, 7 or 10 years by tier, against Brand24's 30-day starting backfill. It reads more than 30 social and digital channels, with full firehose access on 10 of them, and ships 7,500 ready-made listening queries.

The buying process is the obstacle. Sprinklr ended its Self-Serve plan and its trial on 30 April 2026, so every route in starts with sales. Vendr's Sprinklr page shows no median or range. SpendHound puts the small-business average at $27,654 a year, from a base of 4 customers, and the enterprise average at $752,184. A Texas university's public order shows $38,898 for publishing seats, listening volume and benchmarking in one annual purchase.

Volume is sold by the mention. One public purchase order buys "up to 1M mentions", which is ten times Brand24's 100,000-mention Business plan. Sprinklr runs 1,250 domain AI models across 100 languages for sentiment analysis, emotion and entity classification, and real-time crisis alerts route to the care team that answers.

Sprinklr fits a company that wants social care, publishing and listening on one contract with one data model. A five-person marketing agency is the wrong buyer, and onboarding reports measured in months back that up: nobody hits the ground running on Sprinklr.

A healthcare reviewer on G2 wrote: "Onboarding took months and months of work."

Where Sprinklr ranks and how it scored →

05Meltwater

Meltwater is the media monitoring choice when traditional media matters as much as social media, and its social listening runs on the same contract. It monitors 400,000 news and print sources, about 55,000 hours of TV and radio a day, and 25,000 podcast channels. Brand24 covers podcasts and news sites but no broadcast. A PR team that reports on a CEO interview on regional radio needs Meltwater's coverage.

Meltwater sells four plans, Starter, Pro, Enterprise and Agency, all by quote, and every one carries a 12-month minimum. Vendr tracks a $25,800 median across 126 purchases, from $5,375 to $56,993. SpendHound puts the small-business average at $14,692 a year. Three UK public awards and two Canadian federal contracts annualise between £11,375 and £69,480, and between CAD 12,430 and 41,528.

Notice is the clause to keep an eye on. A Capterra reviewer reported being told at renewal that cancellation had to arrive in writing 60 days before the term ended. Meltwater keeps editorial content back to 2009 and social data on a rolling 15 months, so the archive is long for news and short for social.

Mira, Meltwater's AI assistant, answers questions over the platform's own data, and the influencer marketing suite comes with the Enterprise and Agency plans. For a global brand with a communications team, the one-contract coverage of print, broadcast, podcasts and social justifies the price. For a startup, it costs an arm and a leg next to a $199 plan.

That reviewer, a VP of marketing and communications on Capterra, wrote: "I stated this when I got the renewal invoice and was told that I had to put it in writing 60 days prior to renewal."

Where Meltwater ranks →

Three mention trackers ranked in our listening lists, from affordable web alerts to quote-only

These three tools do the core feature Brand24 does: they monitor brand mentions through web monitoring and alert someone. Mention and Talkwalker sell through a demo or a quote, and Google Alerts costs nothing. Two of the three changed owners in the last two years.

06Mention

Mention claims 1 billion monitored sources, against Brand24's 25 million, and its Boolean search alerts accept queries up to 2,000 characters. Its web coverage spans social media, news, blogs, forums and 75 review sites, and it adds US and Canadian radio and TV. For a brand whose name collides with a common word, the long query is where Mention earns its keep.

Pricing went dark after the sale. Agorapulse announced it had acquired Mention on 22 May 2025, and mention.com now sells one Company plan behind a "Get a demo" button with no figure rendered. The older Solo, Pro and Pro Plus tiers are gone. Historical data is a paid add-on, and API access through dev.mention.com is a paid add-on too.

Mention ranks authors by influence, runs sentiment analysis and share of voice on the Company plan, and sends email and desktop push notifications. Its Publish and Respond features are being retired in favour of Agorapulse, so the product's future sits with its new owner. The jury's still out on what Agorapulse will charge, so a buyer signing today should ask for the price and the notice term in writing.

A digital marketing specialist on G2 wrote: "If it wasn't for one of their competitors, we would have completely missed this important mention."

Where Mention ranks →

07Talkwalker

Talkwalker watches 150 million websites and more than 30 social channels for global coverage across 239 countries, six times Brand24's 25 million sources. Its visual listening finds brand logos in images, video and audio at 2,000 images a second, so a sponsor's logo on a jersey counts as a mention with no caption. Brand24 offers no image and video recognition, so visual recognition is the clearest reason to pay for Talkwalker.

Hootsuite announced its acquisition of Talkwalker on 8 April 2024 and sells the engine inside Hootsuite Enterprise as Lumen. Talkwalker's own pricing page still lists Core, Analyze and Business, every one by quote and with unlimited users. Analyze doubles Core's volume and Business multiplies it six times, and none of the three publishes a mention cap.

Vendr shows a $13,298 median for legacy standalone contracts, from $12,260 to $15,860, with no purchase count. Three UK public awards, from the Department for Business and Trade and the Ministry of Defence, annualise to £18,900 to £83,970 a year. History is stated as 24 months on one part of Hootsuite's page and 13 months on another, so iron out the details in the contract before signing.

That reviewer, in marketing at a 1,001 to 5,000-person company, wrote on TrustRadius: "Sentiment analysis. Generally about 80% correct, so good for aggregate reporting on larger data sets."

Where Talkwalker ranks →

08Google Alerts

Google Alerts costs $0 and needs only a Google account. To monitor mentions of a name, it emails a digest whenever Google indexes a new page that matches a query, as it happens, once a day or once a week. Sources cover news, blogs, the web, video, books, discussions and finance, filtered by language and country. For basic monitoring of a company name, it does the same job as Brand24's alerts for a startup with no budget.

The gaps are wide. Google Alerts can track mentions on web pages only: it reads no social platforms, offers no basic analytics, scores no sentiment, measures no reach and offers no dashboard or export. It sends email only.

A Contify test measured it missing 40% of relevant updates, and one Capterra reviewer in January 2026 wrote that it "has missed something or been a little off on the info". It sits beside Google Analytics and Google Business Profile as one more free Google product with no support desk.

Search operators do the filtering, so a query like "acme" -jobs removes job ads. Set the volume to "All results" to see every match. Teams that use Google Alerts as the only tool for brand monitoring usually add a paid social listening tool once the first viral post slips past, which is the point where a penny saved stops being a penny earned.

Where Google Alerts ranks →

Three social media management platforms that sell listening as part of a bigger seat

Hootsuite, Agorapulse and Keyhole's owner Muck Rack sell social media management or PR software first and social listening second. For a team already paying for one of them, listening may cost an add-on fee where Brand24 would cost a second subscription.

09Hootsuite

Hootsuite includes basic social monitoring on every plan, from Standard at $99 a user a month billed yearly. Basic social listening reads Facebook, X, Bluesky, YouTube and Quora, plus podcasts, news, newsletters, blogs and forums. Professional, at $199 a user a month, adds 30 days of Quick Search history, exports and 90-day trend forecasts. Brand24's Individual plan costs the same $199 and covers one user.

The deep listening data comes from Talkwalker, sold as Lumen inside custom Enterprise contracts with 13 months of history, listening alerts, scheduled reports and review monitoring. Below Enterprise, searchable history stops at 30 days and alerts aren't part of the package. Vendr tracks a $12,405 median across 96 purchases, from $5,600 to $34,486, and SpendHound puts the small-business average at $8,448.

Few tools on this list publish a mention cap, and Hootsuite publishes none on any plan. It doesn't refund a cancelled term, and plans renew automatically. For a social team that schedules in Hootsuite already, basic listening kills two birds with one stone; for a PR desk that needs alerts and a year of history, the bill jumps to Enterprise.

An enterprise digital marketing specialist on G2 described using it "for a manufacturing business trying to expand its multi-platform presence".

10Agorapulse

Agorapulse keeps up to 24 months of listening history, against Brand24's 12-month archive on Team and up. Social listening comes as the Advanced Listening add-on, with unlimited searches and X and news sources included, sold by sales on conversation volume. Its base Standard plan costs $79 a user a month billed yearly, or $99 month to month, and a free plan stays after the 30-day trial.

Agorapulse bought Mention in 2025, so its listening sources may expand once the two products merge. Today it reads Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X, LinkedIn and Reddit, plus thousands of news sites, blogs and forums. TikTok is limited to direct mentions, and no podcast sources are stated. Sentiment analysis is included, and any mention can be reclassified by hand.

The add-on price isn't published. A marketing agency already running client publishing in Agorapulse can compare the add-on quote against Brand24's $599 Business plan, which covers 25 keywords and 100,000 mentions a month. Volume spike and sentiment alerts land in the same reports the agency sends clients, which keeps the account team and the client on the same page.

A small-business user on G2 wrote: "I like that Agorapulse has the full social media management suite included in the base pack."

11Keyhole

Keyhole now lives inside Muck Rack. Muck Rack bought it in September 2024, keyhole.co/pricing redirects to a Muck Rack demo form, and social listening is sold as a quoted add-on to any Muck Rack package through a customer success manager. For a PR team doing brand monitoring and media outreach from Muck Rack, the social data lands in the same dashboards as press coverage, which puts Muck Rack in the driver's seat for PR teams that want one login.

Keyhole's social listening covers social media only. Keyhole's trackers read X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, with sentiment and share-of-voice widgets and up to 100 watched influencer accounts per tracker. No podcast, news or review-site coverage is stated for the listening add-on. Muck Rack's own platform carries a $13,000 Vendr median, from $8,000 to $20,860, before any listening add-on.

A founder on G2, reviewing it before the sale, wrote: "The only downside to Keyhole is the price."

Brand24 pricing against the 11 alternatives: what each one costs a year

Three alternatives publish a cheaper way into social listening than Brand24's $2,388 Individual year: Awario at $348, Hootsuite's Standard seat at $1,188 with basic listening, and Google Alerts at $0. Agorapulse publishes a $948 seat, and its listening costs extra. Six sell by quote or demo, so the table shows what trackers and public contracts report.

Vendor pricing pages, Vendr marketplace headers and SpendHound marketplace pages, checked 10 November 2026.

Per mention, the gap is wider than the sticker. Brand24's Individual plan costs about 10 cents a mention at its cap, and Business about 0.6 cents. Awario's Starter costs about 0.1 cents. A team that collects 30,000 mentions a month pays $399 a month at Brand24, on Pro, against $29 at Awario, before either one's storage and source limits enter the sum.

Enterprise pricing is where Brand24 looks cheapest. Its Enterprise plan starts at $1,499 a month, or $17,988 a year, below every Vendr median on this list except Hootsuite's $12,405, Talkwalker's $13,298 and Muck Rack's $13,000. Paid plans and enterprise pricing across the quote-only vendors bundle volume, users and history in ways a sticker price can't show, so cut to the chase and ask each one for the cost of the same 50,000 mentions a month.

The trackers disagree with themselves in places, and the table uses the figure tied to a stated sample:

• Vendr's Sprout Social page shows 363 purchases in its chart and 217 deals in its header tiles.
• Vendr's Meltwater page shows 126 purchases against 91 deals handled.
• SpendHound's Sprinklr small-business average rests on 4 customers, and its year-on-year change reads -78.22%.

Contract and renewal terms across the roster

Brand24 is the easiest exit on paper and the stricter one in the small print. Its pricing page says "There is no commitment. You can cancel your subscription at any time." Its terms add that cancelling only stops the next renewal, that fixed-term agreements need one month's notice, and that fees already paid are non-refundable.

Vendor pricing pages and terms, Vendr and public contract notices, checked 10 November 2026.

Four of the six quote-only vendors put buyers on a 12-month term. That changes the risk of a trial run: a team testing Meltwater or Sprinklr commits for a year, while a Brand24 or Awario test can stop after a month. The safest sequence is to run the monthly tools first, measure noise and coverage on your own keywords, and take the results into the enterprise sales process.

Overage is the newer risk. Brand24's terms bill Excess Mentions under Section VI.7 at the rate in its price list, and the price list shows no rate. A viral week on a 2,000-mention Individual plan can cost more than the plan, so don't count your chickens before they hatch: ask support for the rate in writing before a launch.

Free plans and trials: how to test each Brand24 alternative before paying

Only one tool on this list is free outright, and five offer a trial or free plan without a sales call. The rest start with a demo. Here is how each one opens its door:

• Brand24: 14-day trial, no credit card, capped at 100 X and Instagram mentions a day.
• Awario: 7-day trial on Starter limits, no card.
• Sprout Social: 30-day trial, no card; Listening needs a demo.
• Hootsuite: 14-day trial.
• Agorapulse: 30-day trial, then a free plan with no listening.
• Google Alerts: free, with a Google account.
• Brandwatch, Sprinklr, Meltwater, Mention, Talkwalker and Keyhole: demo or quote first.

A two-week trial is enough to measure the three numbers that decide a switch. Run the same three keywords in Brand24 and the challenger, count relevant conversations per day, count the irrelevant ones you'd delete, and note which platforms each tool missed. Social mentions from Reddit and X tend to separate one social listening tool from another fastest, because coverage there varies most.

Then test the alert. Post a test mention on a public forum and time how long each tool takes to surface it. Brand24 updates every 12 hours on Individual, hourly on Team and in real time from Pro, and the gap matters for customer care teams answering complaints. A tool that surfaces the post a day late fails the test however good its reports look, because a complaint answered tomorrow has already got out of hand.

How these 11 Brand24 alternatives were chosen

The list starts from demand for tools that track mentions and run sentiment analysis. Measured "Brand24 vs" searches total 50 a month in the US: Awario and Mention at 20 each, Brandwatch at 10, Google Ads data via DataForSEO, 12-month average to September 2026. Every other tool on the list has measured "X alternative" demand, from 10 a month for Awario and Keyhole to 720 for Hootsuite.

Order follows coverage on this site first. Tools with a published review or comparison come first, then tools ranked in one of our lists, then tools named in our prose. Inside each step, measured search volume sets the order. Affiliate status plays no part, and Brand24 is the only tool on this page with an affiliate link, which levels the playing field for the other eleven.

Every tier on the public price list

Run the two-week test on Brand24

Four published tiers from $199 to $599 a month billed yearly, plus Enterprise from $1,499 a month.

Visit Brand24 →

May earn a commission if you sign up through this link, at no extra cost to you. Full affiliate disclosure.

Other social listening tools were checked and left out, among them Mentionlytics, YouScan, Determ, BrandMentions, Pulsar, Octolens, Syften and CommunityTracker: none had measured US search demand against Brand24 or as an "alternative" query. Each tool's features, prices and terms come from its own site, and every price was checked on 10 November 2026.

Questions buyers ask about Brand24 alternatives

What are some alternatives to Brand24?

The closest self-serve alternative is Awario, from $29 a month billed yearly for 30,000 mentions. Brandwatch, Meltwater, Talkwalker and Sprinklr sell deeper enterprise consumer intelligence by quote. Sprout Social, Hootsuite and Agorapulse add listening to a social media management platform, and Google Alerts is the free option.

How much does Brand24 cost per month?

Brand24 costs $199 to $599 a month billed yearly across Individual, Team, Pro and Business, or $249 to $699 month to month. Enterprise starts at $1,499 a month, billed yearly. API access is a $149 a month add-on on Pro and Business.

Who owns Brand24?

Prowly, a Semrush subsidiary, bought a controlling stake in Brand24 for 55 million PLN in April 2024. Adobe completed its purchase of Semrush in April 2026, so Brand24 now sits inside Adobe's group. It was founded in Wrocław, Poland, in 2011.

Is Brand24 legit and reliable?

Brand24 is a legitimate company with 4.6 out of 5 on G2 from 356 reviews and 4.7 on Capterra from 255. Reviewers praise support and flag irrelevant mentions on common keywords and sentiment errors on contextual mentions. It extends a subscription by one day for every day of an outage over 24 hours.

Which social listening tool is the best?

The best social listening tool depends on history and budget, and on how much sentiment analysis a team will trust without checking. Brandwatch has the deepest archive, back to 2010. Meltwater has the widest traditional media coverage. Awario sells the most mentions per dollar, and Brand24 sells the most features at a published price under $600 a month.

What is the best social media monitoring tool for a small business?

For a small business that wants to track brand mentions, Awario's $29 Starter plan and Brand24's $199 Individual plan are the two published options on this list. Google Alerts covers web monitoring for free but reads no social media. Hootsuite's $99 seat includes basic listening for a team that also needs publishing.

What are the top 10 social listening tools?

Ranked by Brand24 comparison demand and coverage on this site, the top ten here are Awario, Brandwatch, Sprout Social, Sprinklr, Meltwater, Mention, Talkwalker, Google Alerts, Hootsuite and Agorapulse. This site's social listening rankings score the category on its own criteria.

Which AI feature turns mentions into actionable insights?

Brand24's AI Insights and AI Topic Analysis summarise a project's mentions from the Pro plan up. Brandwatch's Iris writes readable summaries of a query, Meltwater's Mira answers questions over its own data, and Talkwalker's Lumen writes conversational AI summaries. Awario, Google Alerts and Keyhole list no AI feature for summaries.

Which Brand24 alternatives offer AI powered insights at a published price?

Hootsuite's Professional plan, at $199 a user a month billed yearly, adds 90-day AI trend forecasts. Every other AI powered insights feature on this list sits on a quoted plan or an unpriced add-on, so Brand24's Pro plan at $399 a month is the cheapest published price for AI summaries of listening data.

How does API data access compare across Brand24 alternatives?

Data access through an API is a paid extra at most vendors. Brand24 sells API access as a $149 a month add-on on Pro and Business. Awario includes an API on Enterprise, Mention sells API access as a paid add-on, and Sprout Social includes its API from the Advanced plan at $399 a seat. Brandwatch's Consumer Research API allows 30 calls per 10 minutes per client.

Does any Brand24 alternative keep more historical consumer data?

Yes. Brandwatch searches back to 2010, Sprinklr keeps up to 10 years on its top tier, Meltwater keeps editorial content back to 2009, and Agorapulse keeps 24 months of listening history. Brand24 starts new projects with 30 days and archives 12 months from Team up.