The importance of social listening and media monitoring in 2026 cannot be understated. These tools allow brands to uncover important insights on their brand mentions as well as those of their competitors, follow industry trends, address crises quickly and efficiently, and gain deeper learnings about their audience. Brandwatch is a popular social listening and media monitoring software. It helps brands learn more about their audiences. Let’s look at some of the best Brandwatch alternatives that may better suit your needs.
Contents
Brandwatch Alternatives
Essential Capabilities of Brandwatch Alternatives
FAQ: Brandwatch Alternatives
Get More From Your Social Listening Tool
Brandwatch Alternatives
These are some alternatives to Brandwatch you could consider for social listening and brand monitoring:
1. Meltwater
2. Quid
3. Synthesio
4. BuzzSumo
5. Talkwalker
6. Brand24
7. Khoros
8. Qualtrics
9. Sprinklr
10. Audiense
1. Meltwater
Meltwater is a leader in full-service social intelligence. It offers brands a full suite of products to monitor their online presence. Our platform takes social listening several layers deeper. We offer comprehensive coverage to capture more online conversations than any other platform.
Key features
Meltwater’s intelligence helps make sense of the social data it collects, so you can:
- Understand the impact of your online activities
- AI-powered audience sentiment analysis
- Discover how you stack up against your competitors
- LLM monitoring
Meltwater is best for: Brand management, Reputation monitoring, Media relations, and Social media marketing
Price: Custom packages available.
Meltwater is also ideal for driving your influencer marketing strategy. Social listening and intelligence can help you find who leads online conversations. Discover who makes a difference, even if they don't have influencer-level followings.
Interested? Request a demo to learn more and walk through Meltwater's social media tools!
Meltwater and Brandwatch share some similarities. Meltwater allows you to manage all of your social media channels from a central location. It eases collaboration for teams when creating, scheduling, and publishing content. It offers access to consumer insights. And it continually updates the data to reflect the most current and accurate records.
AI at Meltwater
Meltwater has aways been an industry leader in AI technology. Mira, the Meltwater AI assistant, integrates seamlessly into your workflow, streamlining previously laborious tasks, summarizing commonalities between your brand mentions, improving your Boolean searches, and much more. And the GenAI Lens allows brands to monitor their LLM presence.
Combining AI technologies with human expertise, we provide actionable insights for your business. So, there's no more struggling to make sense of reports and metrics that don’t add value to your bottom line.
✅ Customer testimonial for Meltwater
"I find Meltwater incredibly valuable for several reasons. It simplifies the daunting task of sifting through hundreds of publications to find topics relevant to me, which is a significant time-saver. It stands out by finding mentions of my company that other services overlook, ensuring I miss no important updates. The ease with which I can create newsletters for my company is also a notable advantage. The user interface is easy to navigate, making my interactions with the software pleasant and hassle-free. Its flexibility and customizability allow me to tailor it to meet my specific needs effectively." (Source)
2. Quid
Quid focuses on brand intelligence. The platform is designed for mid- and large-sized enterprises. Its core features include trend analysis, crisis management, brand health, and competitive intelligence.
Key features
- Early issue detection
- Contextual sentiment insights
- Competitie benchmarking
Best for: Managing brand perception through real-time, contextualized insights into consumer conversations, and tracking sentiment shifts
Price: Contact through their website for price information
Quid aims to deliver brand perceptions from key consumer bases. That helps brands learn more about their place in the market and how they compare to competitors.
Quid lacks the social media focus offered by Brandwatch and Meltwater. Its products aren’t tailored for social marketing, but the insights it generates may prove useful in a social strategy.
✅ Customer testimonial for Quid
"Quid takes complicated data and makes it consumable, I love that! These visualizations are amazing and so insightful — I can spot trends and patterns at a glance, where previous data wrangling would take hours of scrolling and plotting. It saves a lot of time and it streamlines decision-making." (Source)
3. Synthesio
The Synthesio media monitoring tool uses AI technologies to help you get a deeper understanding of your target audience. Like Meltwater, it uses scalable social listening to find emerging topics, trends, and patterns, so brands react quickly.
Key features
- Product performance insights
- Sentiment analysis
- AI-powered topic modeling
Best for: Decoding perceptions with AI-powered consumer intelligence and understanding post-purchase behavior
Price: Not publicly available. Request a demo through the form on their website.
Synthesio goes deeper than surface-level conversations to see how your audience talks about particular topics. Brands can use this intel to find what makes their audiences unique and discover ways to make stronger connections.
✅ Customer testimonial for Synthesio
"A good tool for me is a practical tool. The easiness of use of Synthesio is different from other tools on the market, anyone with or without experience in social intelligence and social listening can use this tool and its ready-to-use features." (Source)
4. BuzzSumo
For finding social media trends, BuzzSumo offers one of the most user-friendly tools. It monitors topics and keywords across all social channels to inspire your content ideation.
Key features
- Research trending content
- Custom alerts
- Influencer discovery
Best for: All-in-one platform to discover trending content, monitor brand conversations, and identify influential voices.
Price: BuzzSumo plans start at $199 per month and there is a free 30-day trial available
This tool is a favorite among content marketers and creators because of its easy-to-use workflows and interfaces. It saves them hours in coming up with new content ideas. It's a one-stop shop to discover the content your competitors are creating and see what kind of traffic it’s getting on social media.
✅ Customer testimonial for BuzzSumo
"BuzzSumo makes it incredibly easy to discover high-performing content across any topic or industry. I love how I can instantly see which articles are getting the most engagement across social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter). The Content Analyzer and Trending Feeds are my favorite features — they save me hours of research and help me plan content that’s more likely to succeed. It also helps identify top influencers and competitors’ best-performing content, which is a huge bonus." (Source)
5. Talkwalker
Talkwalker leverages AI-powered technology to ingest billions of consumer signals every second. This media monitoring tool combines real-world consumer intelligence with social listening.
Key features
- Trend analysis
- Global listening across multiple sources including text, images, and video
- Custom dashboards
Best for: Staying on top of consumer changing preferences and habits to help content marketing and customer experience strategies.
Price: There are three tiers available with Talkwalker: Listen, Analyze, and Business. Contact them for specific price details.
Talkwalker generates insights that companies can take action on immediately. It offers advanced AI-powered analytics (including conversation clustering, sentiment analysis, summaries, and virality maps), helping teams understand how and why conversation patterns shift, spot trending topics early, and condense large datasets into actionable insights.
✅ Customer testimonial for Talkwalker
"I really like how Talkwalker provides insights we couldn’t access in the past. The data and content are not only useful but also genuinely interesting to explore." (Source)
6. Brand24
Another Brandwatch alternative is Brand24. It combines media monitoring and online reputation monitoring in a single platform.
Key features
- Comprehensive sources for monitoring including social, podcasts, forums, and news sites
- Reputation management
- Influencer and hashtag tracking
Best for: AI-enhanced social listening and brand monitoring, tracking real-time mentions, analyzing sentiment, and generating actionable reports based on these insights.
Price: Five different pricing tiers available, billed either monthly or annually: Individual ($149/mo), Team ($249/mo), Pro ($299/mo), Business ($499/mo), and Enterprise ($999/mo).
Brands receive alerts when customers leave reviews (both positive and negative). That helps companies respond. Audience sentiment analysis technology provides context behind mentions. That helps brands see how mentions influence their reputation.
It’s a helpful alternative, but it does have a few limitations. For starters, each plan has a limit on how many keywords you can track at one time. To get real-time data and multi-account access, users need a pro or enterprise-grade plan. That costs 4x-6x more than the basic plan.
✅ Customer testimonial for Brand24
"Brand24 enables fast and clear monitoring of brand mentions, as well as efficient verification of the context and sentiment of published content. The tool works perfectly as a daily overview of the most important information and opinions about the brand, allowing teams to start the day with an up-to-date view of the brand’s media presence." (Source)
Tip: Learn more about the best Brand24 alternatives.
7. Khoros
Khoros (formerly Spredfast) is a customer engagement platform that supports digital contact centers. Contact centers can reduce call volume and enhance the level of service by optimizing the customer experience.
Key features
- Omnichannel customer engagement
- Intelligent workflows
- Unified analytics
Best for: Keeping track of customer conversions via social media, anticipating needs and personalizing consumer experiences
Price: Contact through their website for price information
Khoros combines social media management in a single platform to create marketing opportunities. Khoros enables brands to: measure campaigns, get customer insights, and automate workflows to provide the next best step for every customer.
✅ Customer testimonial for Khoros
"Great platform to involve different stakeholders within the company it also offers user friendly operation with the flexibility to incorporate additional features tailored to your requirements making it suitable for both basic and advanced social media automation needs." (Source)
8. Qualtrics
Qualtrics caters to brands looking to improve the total customer experience. A better experience stands to improve a company’s reputation — and ideally, its market share.
Key features
- Cross-channel data integration
- Predictive actioning
- Experience-centric automation
Best for: Unifying customer feedback and interaction data across all channels and using AI-powered analytics to proactively improve satisfaction, loyalty, and overall customer experience.
Price: Different options available. Contact through their website for more information
Qualtrics takes a multi-prong approach by sending perfectly timed surveys, tapping into conversations people are already having about a brand, personalizing user experiences. The platform also gained a leg up in the social listening space when it acquired Clarabridge, which helps to understand audience sentiment and intent.
✅ Customer testimonial for Qualtrics
"What I like best about the Qualtrics Customer Experience is its Dashboard which is very easy it use. It can collect data from raw data which can be collected through emails, surveys, SMS, websites, apps and other social media platforms using NLP (Natural Language Processing) in real time. It can easily be integrated with tools like supports tools, CRMs. Customer support is good. Implementation is easy." (Source)
9. Sprinklr
Social listening is a big part of the customer experience. That's why it’s a big part of Sprinklr’s all-in-one experience platform. Companies can become more customer-centric by collecting actionable insights on their audiences.
Key features
- AI-powered listening
- Competitive benchmarking
- Reputation management
Best for: Scaling social listening strategies, benchmarking performance against competitors, and surfacing real-time insights
Price: Available through the contact form on their website
AI technology analyzes product feedback and other data at scale. This helps identify market needs, competitor offerings, and relevant trends. Ideal for large enterprises, Sprinklr’s cloud-based solution benefits several key areas, including: content marketing, paid advertising, social media, and website content development.
Automation does most of the heavy lifting. That allows teams to use their time to make a difference instead of sifting through reports.
✅ Customer testimonial for Sprinklr
"The tool offers various possibilities for working with data obtained from social networks, whether through own pages or Social Listening. The insights that can be extracted using the filters are enormous. I really like the way it is possible to perform this data processing." (Source)
Tip: Learn more about Sprinklr alternatives
10. Audiense
Audiense is a consumer insights platform that’s purpose-built for audience segmentation. When you identify customer common denominators, you can make better marketing decisions.
Key features
- Audience segmentation based on psychographics
- Consumer insights
- Social platform integration
Best for: Powerful, data-backed audience intelligence beyond basic demographics
Price: Multiple plans available. Contact them for price details
Knowing your audience beyond basic demographics is becoming more critical to business. Customers are expecting personalized experiences from the brands they do business with. Connecting with customers in unexpected ways gives brands a better chance to cut through the noise and stand out for the right reasons.
Audiense finds hidden connections throughout your target audience. This helps you learn more about their interests, needs, wants, and goals. Use these insights to create niche content that speaks to each customer on a more personal level.
✅ Customer testimonial for Audiense
"The clustering functionality allows us to learn more about the audiences talking about our movies and to present the information to stakeholders in an easily digestible way. The Audiense team has also been receptive to our feedback and has added features we requested." (Source)
Essential Capabilities of Brandwatch Alternatives
The best Brandwatch alternatives share these top-tier features and capabilities.
Comprehensive data source coverage
Multilingual and global monitoring
Competitor benchmarking
Real-time alerts and monitoring
AI and advanced analytics
Enterprise integrations
Comprehensive data source coverage
Tools aggregate data from a wide range of sources, including social media platforms, news sites, blogs, forums, podcasts, broadcast, reviews, and LLMs. This broad coverage ensures brands can understand how and where they are being discussed across the full digital and media landscape. Unified data collection also reduces blind spots and enables more reliable insights.
Multilingual and global monitoring
Leading platforms support monitoring across hundreds of languages and multiple regions, enabling organizations to track brand conversations worldwide. Native-language processing helps capture local nuance, slang, and cultural context rather than relying solely on translation.
Competitor benchmarking
Best-in-class tools allow brands to benchmark their performance against competitors using consistent metrics such as share of voice, sentiment, engagement, media exposure, and LLM presence. Side-by-side comparisons help identify strengths, weaknesses, product innovations, industry trends, and emerging disrupters in the competitive landscape.
Real-time alerts and monitoring
Advanced solutions provide real-time monitoring and customizable alerts for spikes in mentions, sentiment shifts. AI assistants like Meltwater's Mira can provide contextual summaries to help teams strategize the best approach for addressing spikes and responding appropriately to crises, trending topics, or opportunities for engagement.
AI and advanced analytics
Top platforms leverage AI and machine learning to analyze large volumes of data at scale, uncovering patterns that would be difficult to detect manually. Capabilities such as sentiment analysis, entity recognition, topic clustering, and trend detection improve insight accuracy and depth. Advanced analytics turn raw data into actionable intelligence.
Enterprise integrations
Leading Brandwatch alternatives integrate with enterprise systems such as CRMs, marketing automation, and collaboration platforms. These integrations allow insights to flow across teams and workflows, improving alignment and efficiency. Seamless data sharing helps organizations connect brand intelligence with broader business outcomes.
FAQ: Brandwatch Alternatives
Frequently asked questions about Brandwatch alternatives.
1. How can businesses evaluate which social listening tool best fits their market monitoring goals?
Businesses evaluating their social listening tool options should have clear goals in mind on what they want to achieve with their social listening activities. Some tools are more heavily geared toward social customer service while others have broader capabilities to help you identify industry trends and benchmark against competitors. Pay attention to budgetary requirements (how many people on your team require a seat?), scaleability, ease of use and set-up, as well as the breadth of sources that are covered.
2. Can businesses improve their competitor analysis strategies by switching to alternative social media monitoring solutions?
Yes. Businesses may find that alternate tools offer the ability to get deeper insights on competitor keywords, clearer dashboards for tracking and sharing results, and actionable insights for marketing and PR strategies. Some tools provide more comprehensive source coverage than others, such as Meltwater's industry-leading GenAI Lens which allows companies to track their own LLM visibility and information accuracy against competitors.
3. How does the choice of a media monitoring tool impact campaign measurement and reporting for businesses?
Your media monitoring tool of choice can greatly impact campaign measurement by offering in-depth and real-time reporting, sentiment analysis, and identifying influencers to help spread your message and promote goods or services. This can aid in optimizing campaigns in line with what consumers are responding to, leading to greater ROI and stronger conversions.
Get More From Your Social Listening Tool
Social listening is a critical piece of the digital marketing puzzle as online competition increases. Social media remains a key place to hear your customers and step inside their shoes, even on matters that do not directly relate to your brand. Understanding needs, wants, interests, preferences, and moods, you can improve your marketing approach. You can make stronger, more valuable connections.
Brandwatch offers many desirable social listening features. But Meltwater can help you take social listening further with more features and functionality.
At Meltwater, we’ve turned social listening into social intelligence. We monitor and analyze millions of topics and conversations in real time. We give brands the best insights into their audiences and make it easy to take the next best step. Learn more when you schedule a demo using the form below.
