8 Best Brandwatch Alternatives to Consider for Social Listening in 2025

Back in 2005, Facebook and YouTube were about to appear and change the world forever. That year, only 5% of the U.S. population were social media users.

Little did we know that twenty years later, over 70.1% of the people in the U.S. and 63.8% of the global population will have active social media accounts. With billions of people posting every day, a startling 8,403 terabytes of content is produced every day, and this is only on Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.

The main question for contemporary businesses is how to make sense of the ocean of daily data. Fortunately, AI-powered tools like Brandwatch, YouScan, and Meltwater use it to provide comprehensive analytics and uncover valuable customer insights.

But still, all these tools are so different. How do you tell which is best regarding social listening quality, pricing, and customer service?

In this article, we’ll explore:

• Eight best alternatives to Brandwatch for social listening.

• A comparison of each tool’s key features, pros, and pricing.

Best Brandwatch alternatives in 2025

To save you some time and help you better understand what's out there in the market, we have examined some of the best social media monitoring alternatives to Brandwatch. The results of our research are in the sections that follow.

Brandwatch alternative #1: YouScan

Image source: youscan.io

YouScan is a social listening and media monitoring platform that uses AI technology to create valuable insights into online conversations happening on social media, blogs, review sites, forums, and more. 

YouScan converts your brand's customer feedback into easy-to-understand, visually compelling insights, empowering you to explore data for more in-depth and actionable analysis.

The advanced analytics provided by YouScan are precious for effective brand management, trend monitoring, influencer discovery, social media management, but also market research, and crisis management.

Key features:

• Visual insights: YouScan’s user-generated image analysis is an award-winning technology.

• Audience insights: Peaks into the target audience's data such as demographics, interests, and occupations. This allows for highly targeted marketing strategies.

• Insights Copilot: Uses a ChatGPT-powered tool to analyze social media data and interact with the findings in a simple, conversational way.

Pros:

• Sentiment analysis with a proven 95% detection accuracy.

• High success rates with major brands such as Metro, Coca-Cola, Publicis Groupe.

• The app has a rare feature—-multilingual sentiment analysis.

• The powerful AI visual analysis can detect logos, objects, scenes, and demographics, providing deeper insights into user-generated visual content.

Pricing:

• Starting at $299/month – Essentials like text-based search, sentiment analysis, and integrations

• Custom pricing – Full access to image recognition, unlimited mentions, and advanced analytics for larger teams.

A good fit for:

Agencies and brands seeking a powerful yet affordable tool for visual media monitoring, competitor tracking, and social listening. With YouScan’s advanced image and video recognition features, they can uncover trends, assess competitor performance, and refine their strategies.

Brandwatch alternative #2: Talkwalker

Image source: g2.com

Another consumer intelligence platform that helps businesses improve brand monitoring, customer engagement, and competitive analysis. Talkwalker analyzes not only text and images, but also video and speech content from various news outlets. 

According to user reviews, Talkwalker's latest updates provide a limited scope of historical information—you can only analyze online conversations up to 30 days old. 

Key features:

• Social listening, sentiment analysis: Tracks conversations about your brand across different social media platforms.

• Media monitoring: Media coverage analysis (forums, blogs, news, and podcasts) in real-time.

• Competitive analysis: Provides tools that study competitors’ performance and industry standards.

Pros:

• Analyzes a wide range of content types, including text, images, video, and speech, from diverse sources such as news outlets and social media platforms.

• Pre-built dashboards for various use cases.

Pricing:

• Basic: $500 per month

• Corporate: $1,000 per month

• Enterprise: $2,200 per month

The company doesn't disclose its pricing on the website. However, according to CompareCamp, its basic plan typically starts at around $6,000 annually for a single user, going up to $25,000 annually for up to 10 users.

A good fit for:

Businesses looking to monitor online conversations, track brand mentions, analyze customer sentiment, and gain insights for marketing, PR, and customer service. It's ideal for those focused on crisis management or improving their digital presence.

Brandwatch alternative #3: Meltwater

Image source: g2.com

Meltwater is a social media monitoring tool whose comprehensive suite of features collects social media data from multiple social networks to conduct deep consumer and market research, which is then turned into actionable insights. 

What sets Meltwater apart from others is its sales intelligence feature. 

Key features:

• Social listening/analytics, sentiment analysis, influencer discovery: Meltwater offers comprehensive social media monitoring, including brand mentions, sentiment analysis, and influencer identification.

• Media monitoring, PR: The platform tracks media coverage across various channels, aiding in public relations management and optimization. 

• Social media management and publishing: Meltwater provides tools for creating, scheduling, and publishing posts across multiple social media accounts. 

• Sales intelligence: Meltwater includes sales intelligence features to identify sales opportunities and enhance sales strategies

Pros:

• Meltwater is ISO 27001 certified, ensuring adherence to internationally recognized standards for information security management systems (ISMS).

• Daily automated reports.

Pricing:

• Basic plan

• Suite plan

• Enterprise plan

According to Prowly, Meltwater's plans may vary between $6,000 and $25,000 annually.

A good fit for:

Brands in need of basic social media monitoring, specifically for the purpose of designing sales strategies. Also, Meltwater suits businesses working with sensitive data.

Brandwatch alternative #4: Mentionlytics

Image source: g2.com

Mentionlytics tracks brand mentions in social media posts, reviews, and elsewhere in online media. Its deep online media monitoring and sentiment analyses can help both businesses and PR agencies with crisis management. 

In addition to understanding, Mentionlytics also creates customized reports that provide actionable consumer insights to your social media team. The tool also enables you to schedule posts on social media.

Key features:

• Social listening, review monitoring, social intelligence:  Mentionlytics monitors brand mentions, analyzing social media sentiment, tracking customer reviews, and provides comprehensive insights from social media data.

• Media monitoring: Tracks and analyzes media coverage.

Pros:

• Comprehensive coverage: Monitors social media platforms, news sites, blogs, and forums.

• Enables social media marketing strategy-making within the platform.

Pricing:

• Basic: $58/month

• Essential: $116/month

• Advanced: $208/month

• Pro: $333/month

• Agency: from $499/month

• Enterprise: from $792/month

Mentionlytics is fair and transparent about the pricing: the basic plan starts at $58 per month and goes up to $792 per month for full access to its comprehensive suite of features.

Good for

As a combo of comprehensive monitoring and publishing features, Mentionlytics is ideal for those in need of effective PR and media relations management.

Brandwatch alternative #5: Brand24

Image source: g2.com

Brand24's features will help you with media monitoring, crisis management, competitor analysis, and influencer discovery. But Brand24's primary focus is keeping your brand healthy. Its AI Brand Assistant will monitor brand mentions and diagnose your brand's online presence. 

Using this feature will help your social media team take a proactive brand protection stance, resolving potential crises before they escalate. 

Key features:

• Social listening, influencer discovery: Brand24 monitors brand mentions and social media sentiments, suggesting influencers who align with your brand.

• Media monitoring, reports and data visualization: Tracks and analyzes media coverage across various channels and creates reports to visualize data.

Pros:

• Influencer identification: Helps identify key influencers discussing your brand.

• Their free 14-day trial is free—no credit card is required.

• A mobile app is available.

Pricing:

• Individual: $119/month

• Team: $159/month

• Pro: $239/month

• Enterprise: $399/month

Good for:

Businesses of all sizes, but also PR agencies, product teams, and SaaS marketing teams.

Brandwatch alternative #6: Mention

Image source: youtube.com/@Mentionapp

Mention is an affordable tool for brand and social media management. Similarly to Mentionlytics, this platform offers tracking brand and keyword mentions and advanced analytics coupled with social media publishing tools. 

Key features:

• Media monitoring: Real-time tracking of various media platforms and creating reports to visualize data.

• Social media listening and analytics: In-depth analysis and insights from social media platforms.

Pros:

• Real-time alerts: Notifies users immediately upon brand mentions.

• Customizable dashboards: Displays metrics and insights most relevant to user needs.

• Sentiment tracking: Monitors the tone of conversations surrounding the brand, providing insights into public perception.

Pricing:

• Solo: $49/month

• Pro: $99/month

• ProPlus: $179/month

• Company: Contact for pricing

With quite fair monthly subscription fees, Mention is among the more affordable alternatives to Brandwatch.

Good for: 

Small businesses with limited budgets, and only basic needs for social media listening.

Brandwatch alternative #7: Keyhole

Image source: g2.com

Keyhole can identify brand mentions across various platforms. Its reporting capabilities are powered by effective analytics. 

Furthermore, Keyhole's API and data integration make sure you have all the information about your social media channels in one place. However, Keyhole doesn’t have multi-language support and LinkedIn access is available only on the Enterprise plan.

Key features:

• Influencer tracking, social media account monitoring, hashtag analytics: Tracking social media and analyzing hashtag performance, suggesting influencers based on impact and engagement.

• Publishing and scheduling: Efficiently manage and schedule your social media posts.

Pros:

• Intuitive and user-friendly interface.

• Covers various platforms liken Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube.

Pricing:

• SMB & Freelancers: $157/month

• Corporate: $207/month

• Agency: $374/month

• Enterprise: Custom pricing

According to AInfluencer, Keyhole also offers a pay-as-you-need billing option, which starts at $100 per campaign.

Good for:

Businesses and PR agencies looking for a one-time deep analytics to boost their social media performance, without the need for long-term commitments.

Brandwatch alternative #8: Sprinklr

Image source: g2.com

Last but not least, Sprinklr is also among top Brandwatch alternatives. Sprinklr is a robust social media management tool with a long list of features. What makes it unique? It integrates customer service with marketing and sentiment analysis. 

However, the advanced set of features is not for all—especially not beginners or managers who just need a simple task done without much hustle. 

Key features:

• Social intelligence: Monitoring and analyzing social media conversations to gain insights into trends and audience sentiment.

• Social publishing and engagement: Managing, creating, and scheduling posts to engage with your audience.

• Social marketing and social media advertising: Creating and managing marketing campaigns and advertisements on social media platforms.

• Customer service assistance: Assisting your customer success team in providing timely and effective support 

Pros:

• Monitors over 30 social and digital channels.

• AI-powered analysis for sentiment, emotion detection, and trend monitoring.

• Real-time alerts for spikes in negative mentions.

Pricing:

• Self-Serve: $199/seat/month (billed annually) or $249/seat/month (billed monthly)

• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Good for:

Businesses that rely heavily on customer service and gather significant customer feedback.

Best Brandwatch alternatives: comparison table

Why consider Brandwatch alternatives?

Since 2007, Brandwatch has established itself as one of the leading online media monitoring solutions. Its social intelligence capabilities encompass features such as consumer intelligence, social media management, media intelligence and insights, and influencer discovery. 

Most of these features branch out to multiple other services, such as content calendar management, advertising, cross-channel performance tracking, and more. 

Due to its complexity, expensive and often non-transparent pricing, and other problems we discuss below, more and more businesses and social media teams are turning away from Brandwatch.

Source

Brandwatch is a powerful and comprehensive social intelligence tool, but its greatest strength may also be its greatest drawback. The platform is clearly designed to serve large brands and corporations with diverse needs and virtually unlimited budgets.

Therefore, Brandwatch is a notoriously expensive solution with pricing typically ranging between $1,000 and $1,750 per month.

Furthermore, the Brandwatch is a quite complex tool. It is reported to often overwhelm new users with options and information and be an overkill solution for smaller businesses with few and very specific needs.

Criteria for selecting the best Brandwatch alternatives

When evaluating the best alternatives to Brandwatch, we focused on the following criteria:

• Feature set: Does the social listening tool offer essential features such as advanced analytics, consumer research, brand management, influencer marketing, audience demographics, and access to historical data?

• Ease of use: How intuitive is the platform’s interface? More features can increase complexity, so user-friendliness is a key factor.

• Affordability: How cost-effective is the platform? Pricing models vary across platforms, with some, like YouScan and Mentionlytics, offering great value for the price.

• Reputation and reviews: Does the platform have a solid track record with major brands like Coca-Cola, Google, Spotify, or Acer? A strong reputation indicates reliability and expertise.

Conclusion

Brandwatch has long been a trusted tool for brand monitoring, social listening, and sentiment analysis. But as the market evolves, many businesses are turning to more cost-effective and innovative alternatives.

Exploring options? YouScan provides a free demo—worth considering for your next move.

FAQs

What is the best alternative to Brandwatch?

The best alternative depends on your business needs and objectives, as there are several social listening tools that cater to different requirements. Popular options include Sprinklr, Talkwalker, and Meltwater, which offer a range of features suited to various industries and goals. If you specifically need image recognition and AI-powered analytics, YouScan is worth considering for its advanced capabilities in sentiment analysis, innovative image processing technology, and multi-language support, all at competitive prices.

Is Brandwatch a reliable tool?

Brandwatch is considered a reliable choice for social media monitoring and analytics, with features that are particularly well-suited for larger organizations. However, in terms of customer support, some users have noted that while the platform is excellent for larger companies, smaller businesses might find the support less responsive. 

How much does Brandwatch cost?

Brandwatch is non-transparent about its prices. According to TrustRadius, Brandwatch offers two pricing editions, ranging from $800 to $3,000 per month.

Is Brandwatch a good company?

Yes, Brandwatch is a good and reliable company. However, its solutions may not fit the needs of all businesses, particularly those with limited marketing budgets.