Most brand monitoring lists are written for PR teams. If you run an online store, the questions are different: which product is that post about, is this person about to buy, and does that complaint need a reply today? Here are ten tools compared on real prices, what each one actually covers, and where each falls short, including ours.
Disclosure: we make Mentionfront, which is one of the ten. It's marked, and we say where others win.
Brand monitoring is tracking where and how your brand, products and competitors are mentioned online, across social media, news, blogs, forums and review sites, so you can respond to customers, catch problems early and see what people say when you aren't in the room.
For an online store whose customers talk on TikTok, Instagram and Reddit, we'd start with Mentionfront. If press, podcasts and review sites matter as much as social, choose Brand24 or Determ. On a tight budget with lots of mentions, choose Awario. To spend nothing, use Google Alerts plus F5Bot. Sprout Social, Brandwatch and Meltwater make sense only when you need the rest of what they sell.
Want to see it on your own brand first? Run a free social listening scan for one keyword across five platforms.
Prices come from each vendor's public pricing or help pages, checked on September 29, 2026. Where a vendor publishes no price, we say so rather than guess.
| Tool | Starting price | Best for | Covers | Trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mentionfront | From $29/mo billed annually | Ecommerce and DTC brands whose customers talk on social | TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, X, Facebook | 7 days, no card |
| Brand24 | From $199/mo billed annually | Brands that also care about news, blogs, podcasts and review sites | Social, news, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, reviews and more | 14 days, no card |
| Awario | From $29/mo billed annually | Budget-first monitoring with high mention volume and reports | Reddit, Instagram, X, Facebook, YouTube, news and the web | Free trial on Starter |
| Determ | From €99/mo (€990 billed annually) | Teams that want news and social in one real-time feed | News, Facebook, Instagram, X, Bluesky, Reddit, YouTube, blogs, forums | 5 days, no card |
| Mention | Not published (Company plan) | Teams that want web, news and forum coverage with templated reports | Web, news, forums and social | Ask sales |
| Sprout Social | $79–$399/seat/mo billed annually | Teams that publish, run an inbox and report from one social suite | Major social networks; web sources via Listening | 30 days, no card |
| Brandwatch | Quote only | Enterprise insights and consumer research teams | Social and web at research scale | Demo |
| Meltwater | Quote only | PR and communications teams that need media relations too | Social listening, news and media monitoring, PR, influencer, AI visibility | Demo |
| F5Bot | Free; paid from $9.99/mo | Free Reddit and Hacker News keyword alerts | Reddit, Hacker News, Lobsters | Free forever plan |
| Google Alerts | Free | A free baseline for press and web mentions | New results in Google Search | Free |
Currencies differ because vendors bill in different ones: Determ in euros, Awario in your local currency, the rest in US dollars. We haven't run all ten side by side; this is a comparison of published facts, not a lab test.
Every entry has a "best for" and honest cons. Mentionfront is first only because it's our page; read it with the same skepticism as the rest.
From $29/mo billed annually · Trial: 7 days, no card
We make Mentionfront, so weigh this entry accordingly. It's built for one job: telling an online store which shoppers are asking about, comparing or complaining about its products. Each keyword is a brand, a product or a competitor, and every mention is labelled with sentiment, one of eight shopper intents, a topic and a 0–100 priority score with the reasons behind it.
From $199/mo billed annually · Trial: 14 days, no card
The best-known all-round monitoring tool for small teams. Plans run from $199 to $599 a month billed annually, and reports export to PDF, Excel and PowerPoint on every plan. Its Enterprise tier adds AI-search visibility tracking.
From $29/mo billed annually · Trial: Free trial on Starter
The cheapest paid option here, level with Mentionfront on entry price. Starter includes 30,000 mentions a month, and Boolean search, PDF and white-label reports and API access come on every plan. Prices are shown in your local currency, so a UK visitor sees pounds.
From €99/mo (€990 billed annually) · Trial: 5 days, no card
A media-monitoring platform with social sources added. Plans are Focus (1 topic, 1,000 mentions, €99), Expand (5 topics, 5,000, €299) and Command (10 topics, 10,000, €499), all with unlimited users, real-time updates and AI sentiment.
Not published (Company plan) · Trial: Ask sales
Mention stopped selling its self-serve Solo, Pro and Pro Plus plans in 2025, after Agorapulse bought it. What remains is a Company plan with no public price; third-party roundups have reported it from about $599 a month. We checked this on September 14; Mention's help center wouldn't load when we tried to re-verify it today, so confirm the details with Mention.
$79–$399/seat/mo billed annually · Trial: 30 days, no card
A social media management suite where listening is one add-on among several. Seat prices are public ($79 Essentials, $199 Standard, $299 Professional, $399 Advanced); the Listening add-on is available on Standard and up but has no published price.
Quote only · Trial: Demo
An enterprise consumer intelligence platform sold through demos and annual contracts, with its own training academy. Vendr's data on 40 purchases gives a median contract of $50,000 a year, ranging from $19,542 to $81,200.
Quote only · Trial: Demo
A PR-first suite. Meltwater publishes no prices, offers Starter, Pro, Enterprise and Agency tiers, and bundles social listening with media monitoring, media relations, influencer marketing and AI-visibility tracking.
Free; paid from $9.99/mo · Trial: Free forever plan
A tiny, long-running alert service that emails you when a keyword appears on Reddit, Hacker News or Lobsters. The free plan covers the basics; Silver ($9.99 a month, 20 keywords) and Gold ($49.99, 200 keywords) add filtering, Slack and Discord alerts, and an API.
Free · Trial: Free
Google's own alert service emails you when new results matching a term appear in Google Search, with options for frequency, region, language and result count. It costs nothing and takes a minute to set up.
Verbatim quotes from public posts and reviews, each linking to the original, so you can read the whole thing.
I use f5bot.com, which monitors HN, Reddit, and Lobsters. (I have no connection to f5bot except being a happy user.)
I hope F5Bot is on this list. Been using for free for years. just works. Reached out a while back and owner is very responsive.
Personally, I’d probably be most interested in a cheaper alternative to tools like Brand24 or Mention, combined with useful automation features — especially the ability to collect data and generate reports directly from community chats…
Worst social media monitoring tool. There are missing data, and the listening dashboard doesn't display the right sentiment results
This company said all the right things when we were in the sales cycle and then didn't actually have most of the functionality
Their renewal practice is built around you not paying attention to the contract. No prior notifications or anything.
A small, uneven sample. Meltwater's Trustpilot page holds only 17 reviews (1.7 stars), so treat those three as a warning about contract terms rather than a verdict on the product. Most brand-tool talk on Reddit today comes from vendors promoting their own products, which is why this wall leans on Hacker News and reviews, and why we left vendor comments out.
Whichever tool you pick, the value comes from what you tell it to watch. A store gets more from a short, deliberate list than from one broad brand-name alert.
Start with your brand name and its common misspellings, then your bestselling products by name, your founder or spokesperson if they're known, your branded hashtag, and three to five competitors. Products matter most: a complaint about one SKU is invisible in overall brand sentiment, and it's the thing you can fix. More on that in our guide to social listening for ecommerce and on product-level tracking.
Then check the tool against the two limits that decide most purchases: whether it reads comments (not just posts) on the platforms your customers use, and how many keywords you get before the price jumps.
| Watch | Why |
|---|---|
| Brand name and misspellings | The baseline: praise, complaints and questions that name you |
| Each bestselling product | Problems and demand show up per product, not per brand |
| Founder or spokesperson | Personal-brand posts often carry the strongest reactions |
| Branded hashtag | Catches posts that never tag your account |
| 3–5 competitors | "Alternative to…" posts are ready-made sales leads |
| If you… | Pick | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Sell products online and your customers talk on TikTok, Instagram and Reddit | Mentionfront | Per-product tracking, comment coverage and shopper-intent labels |
| Need press, podcasts and review sites alongside social | Brand24 or Determ | Broad source coverage; Determ adds real-time news |
| Have a small budget and very high mention volume | Awario | 30,000 mentions from $29 a month, with reports included |
| Only care about Reddit and Hacker News, and want it free | F5Bot | Free tier, alerts to email or Slack |
| Want a zero-cost baseline while you decide | Google Alerts + F5Bot | Covers web and press, plus Reddit |
| Already run a social suite and want listening inside it | Sprout Social | One login, though Listening is priced separately |
| Run an enterprise insights or PR team | Brandwatch or Meltwater | Research depth and media relations, on annual contracts |
Partly. Google Alerts catches new web pages and press that Google indexes, and F5Bot catches Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters. Together they cost nothing and take about ten minutes to set up, which makes them a sensible first step for a brand with a handful of mentions a week.
What the free stack can't do is read comments on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, tell you which mentions are buyers and which are complaints, or give a team somewhere to work through them. You'll feel that gap as soon as social becomes a real channel. Most tools here also offer a trial, so a paid tool can be tested against the free baseline on your own keywords before you commit.
A fair test for any tool
Pick your most-mentioned product, not your brand name. During the trial, count how many mentions each tool finds for it on the platforms you care about, and how many of those you'd actually reply to.