8 Top Meltwater Competitors Reviewed

How can you keep up with the sheer volume of conversations happening online today? Analytics report by Pew Research Center with social media statistics suggests that platforms like YouTube, where 83% of U.S. adults spend their time, and Facebook, used by 68%, generate endless streams of opinions. Some of these posts may contain praise, while others might introduce problems for your brand.

Social listening tools are a practical way to track and respond to this chatter, but also make sense of what people are saying about brands and products. 

Meltwater is one of many tools available to track your brand online. Depending on your needs, you might find other tools that are more affordable, simpler to use or have features better suited to your goals.

While Meltwater is a popular choice, it’s not the only one.

This article explores:

• Eight Meltwater competitors to help you manage and make sense of your online reputation effectively.

• A review of key features, pricing and pros

• What each tool is best for

8 top Meltwater competitors

YouScan

Image source: g2.com

YouScan is an AI-powered platform that monitors consumers' online conversations. It’s one of the few social listening platforms that allow you to track people’s opinions of your brand and products in multiple languages across online sources.

Not only that, the platform allows users to analyze billions of conversations to uncover genuine opinions.

It’s an excellent tool for deep audience insights, brand reputation monitoring and visual analysis without the steep price point. 

Key features

• Advanced visual analysis: Detects logos and objects in images, even without text mentions, for more comprehensive brand tracking.

• Real-time monitoring: Tracks mentions and keywords with intelligent filters to keep you updated on important conversations.

• AI-powered sentiment analysis: Compared to other tools that just classify mentions as positive, neutral or negative, YouScan identifies the underlying emotions and helps you understand how people feel about your products or brand. 

• Influencer discovery: Finds and evaluates potential influencers to enhance your campaigns.

• Custom dashboards and reporting: Creates shareable dashboards and reports perfect for team meetings and strategy planning.

Pros

• It’s super accurate at reading brand sentiment — we're talking close to 95%

• Easy-to-use interface with intuitive dashboards

• It comes with AI Insights Copilot to speed up your data analysis tasks

Pricing

• Starter plan: $299/month with yearly billing. You get three topics and up to 30,000 mentions.

• Unlimited plan: Custom pricing that includes unlimited mentions, advanced analytics, and team features (Worth asking about if you're a bigger company).

Best for

This tool is perfect for brands that need all-around tracking and analysis of market trends, consumer sentiment analysis, visual content monitoring, and real-time brand monitoring. 

Keyhole

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Keyhole is a social media management platform that helps track conversations, monitor trends and analyze sentiment across major social media platforms. Apart from the standard social listening features, it also provides influencer analytics and management by tracking influencer engagement rates, follower counts and audience sentiment analysis to help you find the most effective influencer for a given campaign.

Key features

• Real-time hashtag and keyword tracking: Monitors campaign performance and trending topics instantly across platforms like Twitter and Instagram to guide marketing strategies.

• Brand mention tracking: Spots brand mentions on social media to keep you informed about relevant conversations.

• Competitor benchmarking: Compares your brand’s performance to competitors to identify areas for improvement.

• Influencer discovery: Finds the most suitable influencers to enhance the reach and impact of your campaigns.

Pros

• Easy to use and intuitive interface

• Flexible pricing on a pay-per-campaign basis instead of yearly plans

Pricing

• Campaign-based pricing: Starting at $100 per campaign.

• Enterprise solutions: Custom pricing for advanced tracking and branded dashboards.

Best for

Perfect for brands and marketing teams who need short-term tracking. Great if you run campaigns and want to see how they do. Also good for finding trends and influencers without breaking the bank.

Determ

Image source: g2.com

Determ is a media monitoring and social listening tool designed to help brands, agencies and organizations track mentions, analyze sentiment and measure the impact of PR efforts. Its AI-powered features provide quick and actionable insights from a vast range of online sources, including Reddit and TripAdvisor.

Key features

• Quick PR reporting: Creates PR reports in minutes, streamlining your communication efforts.

• AI assistant – Synthia: Summarizes data and provides actionable insights to save time and enhance decision-making.

• Instant alerts: Sends immediate notifications for brand mentions, which ensures  quick responses to issues or opportunities.

• Crisis management alerts: Sends alerts when your brand faces potential issues, helping you manage crises effectively.

Pros

• Finds issues related to your brand reputation fast and instantly alerts you via email, mobile push notifications, or Slack

• Saves time by providing automatic reporting

Pricing

Custom plans based on needs, starting from 20 topics, 50000 mentions, and unlimited users and keywords. To get pricing in more detail, you need to book a demo.

Best for

Great for companies who need to track PR efforts and campaigns consistently because of the quick PR reporting feature.

Brand24

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Brand24 is another AI-powered tool that helps track brand awareness and reach. It focuses on brand reputation protection with quick alerts, hashtag tracking and trend-spotting. 

Something to keep in mind when reviewing Brand24 is that its historical data is limited, so anything that appeared online before you created your project is limited to within a 30-day period.

Key features

• Comprehensive mention tracking: Monitors mentions from over 25 million sources to keep you informed about your brand’s visibility.

• Storm alerts: Warns you when there’s a sudden spike in mentions, enabling quick responses to viral moments or potential crises.

• Hashtag tracking: Follows hashtags to evaluate the performance of your campaigns and track engagement.

• Team collaboration: Makes sharing data and insights with your team simple and efficient.

• Trend-spotting: Highlights trends in conversations to keep you ahead of the curve.

Pros

• A simple dashboard that's easy to use

• Works well for both small and growing companies

Pricing

• Individual plan: $119/month, 3 keywords, 2K mentions.

• Team plan: $159/month, 7 keywords, 10K mentions, unlimited users.

• Pro plan: $239/month, 12 keywords, 40K mentions, advanced AI features.

• Enterprise plan: $399/month, 25 keywords, 100K mentions.

Best for

Perfect for small and medium businesses and great for marketing teams who need to track social media but don't have huge budgets.

Brandwatch

Image source: g2.com

Brandwatch is an enterprise-grade social listening and media intelligence platform trusted by global enterprises for its powerful AI-driven insights and vast data coverage. It has one of the most extensive data archives and has stored conversations since 2010.

The platform’s user experience can improve according to user reviews online, and getting up and running with Brandwatch is harder than with other tools. 

Key features

• Comprehensive historical data analysis: Delivers in-depth insights by examining past trends and patterns to inform strategic decisions.

• Sentiment analysis: Reveals how people feel about your brand, helping you shape your strategy.

• Custom dashboards: Allows you to visualize data in a way that suits your needs and goals.

• Influencer discovery: Identifies key influencers from a pool of 30 million creators to boost your campaigns.

Pros

• Smart AI makes finding market research insights easier

• Digs deeper into data compared to other tools thanks to its comprehensive historical data archive

Pricing

Custom pricing based on selected solutions and business needs, but some user-reported pricing across forums is around $ 40,000 per year.

Best for

It’s suitable for big companies and marketing agencies who need serious data power and brand reputation tracking. 

Mention

Image source: g2.com

Mention is a flexible social listening and media monitoring platform designed to help brands track online conversations in real time, analyze sentiment and get insights.

Mention delivers notifications whenever your brand or tracked keywords are mentioned online across various platforms, including through its integration with Slack.

 Key features

• Real-time media monitoring in multiple languages: Keeps track of brand mentions globally, which offers insights into diverse markets.

• Instant alerts: Sends real-time notifications whenever someone mentions your brand, ensuring you stay on top of conversations.

• AI-powered reports: Generates daily reports that highlight your most important mentions and actionable insights.

• Competitor analysis: Lets you compare your brand’s performance directly against competitors to identify opportunities.

• Social media integration: Enables posting updates directly from the platform, streamlining your workflow.

Pros

• The tool works well for both solo users to big teams

• Connects with your social media accounts so you can manage all things social media as well as analyze from one place

Pricing

• Solo plan: $49/month, 2 alerts, 5,000 mentions, 1 user.

• Pro plan: $99/month, 5 alerts, 10,000 mentions, 10 users.

• Pro plus plan: $179/month, 7 alerts, 20,000 mentions, unlimited users.

• Company plan: Custom pricing for advanced features and higher limits.

Best for

Ideal for teams that prefer all-in-one social media management and for whom in-depth social listening is not a must. 

Talkwalker

Image source: g2.com

Talkwalker is an enterprise-grade social listening and consumer intelligence platform that provides insights into brand performance, audience sentiment and market trends. Its comprehensive AI tools, including Blue Silk™ GPT, empower teams across industries to monitor, analyze and act on vast amounts of media data from a variety of sources.

Key features

• Blue Silk™ AI: Processes text, images, videos, and audio in 187 languages, which enables brands to detect cultural nuances, regional trends, and emerging conversations across global markets.

• AI-powered insights: Leverages Blue Silk™ AI and GPT to analyze sentiment, spot trends, and predict emerging opportunities.

• Topic visualization: Maps out how topics are connected, helping you discover new audiences and campaign ideas.

• Custom dashboards and reports: Provides tailored dashboards and automated reports to meet your specific business needs.

• Real-time alerts: Keeps you informed about trends, crises, and opportunities as they happen, enabling quick action.

Pros

• Wide-reaching social media monitoring: online, social, print, and broadcast channels

• Scalable solutions that can grow with your team—whether you're small or enterprise-level

Pricing

Pricing for each plan is available after booking a free demo.

• Listen package: Entry-level social listening with standard reports and basic AI features.

• Analyze package: Includes benchmarking and advanced analysis with expanded data volumes.

• Business package: Enterprise-grade insights with higher data volumes and custom dashboards.

• Premium package: Full consumer intelligence with organization-wide scalability and some of the best social media analytics.

Best for

Talkwalker works best for large organizations, enterprises, and agencies that primarily work in multicultural markets. It’s ideal if you need serious consumer intelligence, in-depth benchmarking, and AI-driven insights. 

Awario

Image source: g2.com

Awario is a social listening and web monitoring tool designed for businesses looking to track, analyze and engage with conversations about their brand, products, or industry online. Its features provide a competitive edge through sentiment analysis, influencer identification and lead generation.

Key features

• Lead generation through social listening: Finds potential customers discussing needs related to your products, which helps boost your sales efforts.

• Sentiment analysis: Categorizes mentions as positive, negative, or neutral to help you track and improve brand health.

• Advanced search queries: Offers precise search capabilities for more relevant and accurate results.

• Awario leads: Identifies potential sales opportunities by analyzing conversations about competitor products or recommendations.

• Branded reports: Automatically generates branded reports on social listening and share of voice, perfect for sharing with stakeholders.

• Cross-device management: Manage mentions seamlessly from desktops, laptops, or smartphones for flexibility on the go.

Pros

• Cost-effective plans compared to competitors like Meltwater

• Offers unlimited keywords per topic and Boolean search in all plans

• Easy-to-use interface with advanced reporting capabilities, ideal for teams of all sizes

Pricing

• Starter plan: $49/month ($29/month annually) – Ideal for small businesses, includes 3 topics and 30,000 mentions/month.

• Pro plan: $149/month ($89/month annually) – For growing teams, includes 15 topics, 300,000 mentions/month and 10 users.

• Enterprise plan: $399/month ($249/month annually) – Best for large organizations, includes 100 topics, 1,000,000 mentions/month and unlimited users.

Best for

Small to medium-sized businesses and agencies looking for powerful yet affordable social listening tools with advanced search and reporting features.

8 top Meltwater competitors: comparison table

Conclusion

Staying on top of online conversations about your brand is harder than ever before. With over 5.22 billion social media users worldwide as of October 2024, accounting for 63.8% of the global population, monitoring online conversations has become increasingly challenging. Without the right tools, it’s easy to miss important mentions, let opportunities slip by, or fail to spot a crisis that’s ahead. Social listening tools simplify this challenge by tracking mentions, analyzing sentiment and delivering actionable insights.

For example, you can spot a negative review on social media and address it quickly or identify emerging trends to stay ahead of the competition. These tools also provide influencer discovery features, making it easier to collaborate with creators who resonate with your audience.

YouScan goes further with detailed audience insights and trend tracking, helping you learn more about your customers, not just their text mentions. Our easy-to-use dashboard and Insights Copilot save time and provide data to protect your brand and plan better campaigns.

Request a demo and see how YouScan can help you unlock your brand's full potential.

FAQs

What are the top Meltwater competitors?

Top Meltwater competitors include YouScan, Brandwatch, Talkwalker, Mention, Brand24, Awario, Determ and Keyhole. Each offers unique strengths in social listening and consumer intelligence.

What makes Meltwater different?

Meltwater stands out for its comprehensive media monitoring, global reach and comprehensive analytics. It integrates social, news and print media insights, making it ideal for large-scale PR and marketing teams.

Is Meltwater worth it?

It depends on your needs. Meltwater is highly effective for enterprises needing extensive media coverage and advanced analytics. However, its pricing may not suit smaller businesses, which might benefit from competitors like Brand24, YouScan or Awario.

What industry is Meltwater in?

Meltwater operates in the media monitoring and social listening industry, helping companies track mentions, analyze sentiment and gain knowledge for better brand management and marketing.