Social listening tools comparison: Brandwatch and five cheaper options
Brandwatch, AyeWatch, Talkwalker, YouScan, Brand24, Mentionlytics and Awario, sorted by what marketing and search teams use them for.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom, Editorial team··3 min read
Search and content teams end up shopping for social listening when brand mentions start to matter for rankings and AI answers: a Reddit thread that ranks for your product name, a YouTube review that an assistant quotes, a rival's new pricing page. This social listening tools comparison puts Brandwatch next to five cheaper options and sorts them by what a marketing or search team will actually use. Every price comes from the vendor's own page, checked in October 2026.
The short version
AyeWatch is the pick for teams that want to hear about new mentions and page changes without running a research program. Brandwatch, Talkwalker and YouScan suit large brands with analysts. Brand24, Mentionlytics and Awario sit in between: dashboards and keyword tracking at published prices.
Side-by-side
| Tool | Entry price | How you define a topic | Web page tracking | Free option |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AyeWatch | $9/mo, Pro | Plain-English rule | Yes | Free Preview, 3 runs |
| Brandwatch | No public price | Queries | Not its main job | Demo |
| Talkwalker | Custom quote | Set up with the vendor | Not covered here | Demo |
| YouScan | $499/mo, yearly | Text queries, 3 topics | Not covered here | Demo |
| Brand24 | $199/mo, yearly | 3 keywords | Not covered here | 14-day trial |
| Mentionlytics | $49/mo, yearly | Keywords | Not covered here | Free trial |
| Awario | $29/mo, yearly | Boolean, 3 topics | Not covered here | Free trial |
Brandwatch: the research benchmark
Brandwatch Consumer Research pulls from more than 100 million online sources, keeps posts back to 2008 and adds Iris, an AI assistant that writes up findings, plus image analysis and custom categories. It is part of Cision. You buy it after a demo, and the plans page shows no prices. For a search team, the archive is the main draw: you can study how talk about a topic grew over years.
AyeWatch: alerts for mentions and pages in one place
AyeWatch works the other way round. It does not store history or draw charts. You write what you want to know, such as "new Reddit or YouTube posts comparing our CRM with HubSpot; skip affiliate roundups", and it sends a short summary when a new item matches. The matching is semantic, not keyword based.
For search people the useful part is that web pages and social posts live side by side. A competitor's pricing page, a review site listing or a documentation page can be a monitor next to your X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok topics. Coverage also reaches news, blogs, forums, government pages and academic publications.
Pro costs $9 a month for up to 50 monitors with hourly checks. Pro+ is $19 for up to 200 monitors and adds ASAP mode. Paid plans send alerts to email, a daily digest, Slack, Discord, signed webhooks and a REST API.
Talkwalker and YouScan: enterprise and visual
Talkwalker, now Lumen by Talkwalker and working more closely with Hootsuite, covers social listening, media monitoring and benchmarking on custom quotes. YouScan's Starter at $499 a month billed annually allows three text topics and up to 15,000 mentions, with unlimited users and alerts. Its larger plans recognize brand logos in images, which matters if your product shows up in photos more than in text.
Brand24, Mentionlytics and Awario: dashboards on a budget
- Brand24 starts at $199 a month billed annually with three keywords, 2,000 mentions and 12-hour updates. AI sentiment is included; realtime updates start on Pro at $399 a month billed annually.
- Mentionlytics starts at $49 a month billed yearly for two users. An add-on that tracks how AI assistants mention a brand starts at $49 a month, which is relevant for anyone working on AI search visibility.
- Awario starts at $29 a month billed annually with three topics, unlimited keywords per topic, 30,000 new mentions a month and Boolean search.
Which one fits a search or content team
- You report on long-term share of voice to a board: Brandwatch or Talkwalker.
- Your product lives in images: YouScan.
- You want a dashboard of mentions with sentiment: Brand24, Mentionlytics or Awario.
- You want to know quickly when a thread, review, article or competitor page changes, so you can respond or update content: AyeWatch.
Brandwatch is still the better tool for audience segmentation and historical research, and nothing on the cheaper end of this list replaces that. For daily monitoring, start with AyeWatch's no-card Free Preview and run it on two or three topics before paying for anything larger.