The best social listening tools in 2026
“Social listening” covers two genuinely different jobs, brand monitoring and buying-intent listening, and buying the wrong one is easy. This list splits them cleanly, verifies pricing against each vendor’s own site, and says plainly where each tool fits, including where ours does and does not belong.
Social listening tools split into two segments that answer different questions. Brand monitoring asks who is talking about YOU: your brand, your product, your competitors. Brand24, Mention, Brandwatch, and Sprout Social (Hootsuite runs a similar model) live here, ranging from affordable self-serve to quote-only enterprise. Buying-intent listening asks a different question entirely: who is publicly asking for what I sell, right now, regardless of whether they have ever mentioned my brand. Buska, Syften and Octolens live here.
So the numbers below are list positions within each segment, not a power ranking across the whole page. Brand tracking tools are grouped first, self-serve toward enterprise. Buying-intent tools are grouped second. Our own entry is last and in neither segment, for reasons the disclosure below explains. Read the segment tag and the price first, then decide.
Full disclosure: I am Pritesh, the founder of EaseClaw, and EaseClaw is the last entry on this list. It used to belong in the buying-intent group and does not any more. EaseClaw is the AI agent that finds warm buyers on LinkedIn and runs outreach for founder-led B2B companies, without building prospect lists by hand. Built for founders and small B2B sales teams selling high-value products or services, especially when there is no dedicated SDR. It is on this page because it answers the question people arrive here with after they have bought a listening tool and found out what it hands back, and it is last because on the job this page is actually about, every tool above it does more than we do. If you are shortlisting across the whole category, the buying intent tools guide puts eight of them side by side with prices read in September 2026, and the wider guides hub has more.
Compare at a glance
Brand tracking first, buying-intent listening second, ours last and in neither. Prices are the vendor’s own published number where one exists; where a vendor keeps pricing private, that is stated plainly rather than guessed at.
| Tool | Best for | Key capability | Price | Free tier / trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brand24 | SMBs and agencies wanting affordable, broad self-serve brand monitoring. | Sentiment and reach analytics across 16 self-serve source types. | Individual $249/mo, or $199/mo billed annually · Team $349/$299 · Pro $499/$399 · Business $699/$599 · Enterprise from $1,499, read from brand24.com/pricing on 15 September 2026. | 14-day free trial, no card. |
| Mention | Teams needing reputation and review-site tracking who are fine with an annual enterprise deal. | Sentiment and competitor benchmarking across 75+ review sites. | No published price. mention.com/en/pricing rendered its Company card with no figure on 15 September 2026, to a direct read and to a text mirror of the same URL. Mention's own help center confirms the legacy self-serve Solo, Pro and Pro Plus plans stopped taking new signups in mid-2025, leaving only the enterprise Company plan, which this guide recorded at $599/mo when it was written in August 2026. | Free trial available on the Company plan; no self-serve free tier for new signups. |
| Brandwatch | Large enterprises needing deep consumer-intelligence analytics at scale. | Historical consumer-opinion archive plus a 30M+ influencer database. | Custom pricing (contact sales). No public self-serve tier. | None disclosed; demo request only. |
| Sprout Social | Teams wanting a full publish, engage, and analytics suite with listening added. | Listening layered onto a full publish, engage, and reporting suite. | Essentials $79/seat/mo · Standard $199 · Professional $299 · Advanced $399 per seat per month (annual); Enterprise custom. Listening is a separate paid add-on on Standard and up, price undisclosed on the public site. | None; every tier is paid. |
| EaseClawour product | Founders and small B2B teams doing their own selling, who want the work of deciding who to write to taken off them. | Works out who is worth writing to from your own website, then writes and runs the outreach to them. | Pro $99 a month, Business $199 a month. Free for 7 days. Add a card to start, cancel any time before day 7 and you pay nothing. | Free for 7 days. Add a card to start, cancel any time before day 7 and you pay nothing. |
| Buska | Founders and small B2B teams wanting buying-intent leads, not brand dashboards. | AI buying-intent and ICP scoring across 16 to 33 sources. | Starter $49/mo · Growth $99/mo · Scale $249/mo · Agency custom. | 7-day free trial, no card. |
| Syften | Developers and founders wanting the cheapest published buying-intent alerts here, with AI filtering. | AI-filtered keyword alerts with Slack, webhook, and MCP delivery. | Entry $29.95/mo · Standard $49.95/mo · Syften PRO $119.95/mo. Custom solutions available on request. | 14-day free trial, no card, with immediate access to the prior 60 days of mentions. |
| Octolens | B2B and dev-tool teams wanting brand and competitor mention monitoring, with unlimited seats. | Hourly-to-real-time mention scanning across 13 dev and social sources, unlimited seats. | Pro $159/mo (annual) · Scale $499/mo (annual) · Enterprise custom. | 7-day free trial of the Pro plan, up to 5,000 mentions. |
What social listening actually covers
Before any tool, it helps to know what the category actually does. Most brand-monitoring platforms combine these six jobs to some degree. The enterprise suites do all of them deeply; the cheaper self-serve tools cover the core and thin out toward the edges.
Buying-intent listening sits underneath all of this, using the same raw signal (public posts) but scoring each one for purchase intent instead of tracking sentiment, so the output is warm prospects rather than reputation reports. It is worth reading the trade-offs against a classic monitor like Mention or Brand24 before you commit to one shape.
The tools, by segment
Eight tools that earn their place, grouped into the two segments above. Each is tagged with its price, verified against the vendor’s own site (or marked quote-only where the vendor does not publish one), its sources, best-fit buyer, and one honest note.
Brand monitoring (self-serve)
Monitors a wide spread of social and web sources for mentions of your brand or keywords, with sentiment and reach analytics on top.
16 source types, including Facebook, Instagram, X, news, blogs, Reddit, LinkedIn, Medium, Quora, YouTube, TikTok, reviews, Twitch, newsletters, and podcasts.
Individual $249/mo, or $199/mo billed annually · Team $349/$299 · Pro $499/$399 · Business $699/$599 · Enterprise from $1,499, read from brand24.com/pricing on 15 September 2026.
SMBs and agencies wanting affordable, broad self-serve brand monitoring.
Published pricing and one of the widest self-serve source lists here, with a genuine no-card trial, though the entry plan still starts at $249/mo, or $199 if you commit to a year.
Brand monitoring (enterprise-only)
Monitors social networks, news, blogs, and 75+ review sites for your brand and competitors, with sentiment and benchmarking.
Facebook, Instagram, X, Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, news, blogs, and 75+ review sites (Google, Trustpilot, Amazon).
No published price. mention.com/en/pricing rendered its Company card with no figure on 15 September 2026, to a direct read and to a text mirror of the same URL. Mention's own help center confirms the legacy self-serve Solo, Pro and Pro Plus plans stopped taking new signups in mid-2025, leaving only the enterprise Company plan, which this guide recorded at $599/mo when it was written in August 2026.
Teams needing reputation and review-site tracking who are fine with an annual enterprise deal.
Used to be a budget-friendly self-serve tool. The self-serve tiers are gone and the remaining Company plan published no price at all on 15 September 2026, so budget for a sales conversation rather than a number before you request a demo.
Brand monitoring (enterprise, quote-only)
Deep social intelligence built for large teams, pairing live monitoring with a historical consumer-opinion archive.
Deep social coverage plus a consumer-opinion archive and a 30M+ influencer database.
Custom pricing (contact sales). No public self-serve tier.
Large enterprises needing deep consumer-intelligence analytics at scale.
Quote-only and aimed at enterprise budgets. Powerful, but overkill for a founder or a small team.
Brand monitoring (suite add-on)
A full social management suite for publishing, engaging, and reporting, where listening is a paid add-on layered on top. Hootsuite runs a similar model: monitoring shows up from its Professional tier ($199/user/mo annual) upward, with deeper listening reserved for Enterprise.
Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and more.
Essentials $79/seat/mo · Standard $199 · Professional $299 · Advanced $399 per seat per month (annual); Enterprise custom. Listening is a separate paid add-on on Standard and up, price undisclosed on the public site.
Teams wanting a full publish, engage, and analytics suite with listening added.
Listening is an add-on, not the core product, so the per-seat sticker price understates the true listening cost. Same story at Hootsuite.
What you do after the signal (our product)
Finds warm buyers on LinkedIn from what they just did, writes the invite and the follow up in your voice, and runs the outreach inside the campaigns and limits you set. Review every message, or let it run.
LinkedIn, plus an email step that sends from your own mailbox.
Pro $99 a month, Business $199 a month. Free for 7 days. Add a card to start, cancel any time before day 7 and you pay nothing.
Founders and small B2B teams doing their own selling, who want the work of deciding who to write to taken off them.
One connected LinkedIn account per member, and the outreach it runs is LinkedIn plus an email step from your own mailbox. It is not a contact database, and it does not post to public feeds.
Buying-intent listening
Watches many sources for mentions, then layers AI buying-intent and ICP scoring on top so the output leans toward leads, not reputation dashboards.
16 to 33 sources with AI buying-intent and ICP scoring.
Starter $49/mo · Growth $99/mo · Scale $249/mo · Agency custom.
Founders and small B2B teams wanting buying-intent leads, not brand dashboards.
Intent scoring for lead generation rather than PR and sentiment reporting, which is a different job from the four tools above it.
Buying-intent listening
Monitors developer and community platforms plus the open web for keyword and buying-intent conversations, with AI filtering and Slack, RSS, API, or webhook delivery.
Reddit, X, Hacker News, GitHub, YouTube, Bluesky, Mastodon, Stack Exchange, Dev.to, podcasts, Slack communities, and general web content.
Entry $29.95/mo · Standard $49.95/mo · Syften PRO $119.95/mo. Custom solutions available on request.
Developers and founders wanting the cheapest published buying-intent alerts here, with AI filtering.
The cheapest published entry point in this whole list, and MCP and webhook support even below the top tier, though it delivers filtered alerts rather than a scored, ranked lead list.
Buying-intent listening
Monitors social and developer communities for brand and competitor mentions, with unlimited seats on every plan.
Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, GitHub, YouTube, Bluesky, TikTok, Dev.to, Stack Overflow, podcasts, newsletters, and news.
Pro $159/mo (annual) · Scale $499/mo (annual) · Enterprise custom.
B2B and dev-tool teams wanting brand and competitor mention monitoring, with unlimited seats.
Strong developer-community coverage and unlimited seats, though the entry plan starts at $159/mo.
Where EaseClaw fits, and where it does not
EaseClaw used to belong squarely in the second group on this page, and it does not any more, which is worth saying plainly on a page I wrote and a product I sell. EaseClaw is the AI agent that finds warm buyers on LinkedIn and runs outreach for founder-led B2B companies, without building prospect lists by hand. Built for founders and small B2B sales teams selling high-value products or services, especially when there is no dedicated SDR.
So here is the honest boundary. EaseClaw is not a brand or PR suite. It does not do sentiment dashboards, share-of-voice reporting, crisis alerts, influencer databases, or the review-site coverage that Brand24, Brandwatch and Mention do. It does not read communities and will not summarise one for you. If any of that is what you need, one of the eight tools above is the right purchase.
Where it does fit is the step after all of them. Every tool on this page ends by handing you a post and a username, and the work of deciding who that person is, whether they could buy, and what to write to them is the part that eats the week. That is the part EaseClaw does, on LinkedIn. It never posts to public feeds, and public replies stay yours to post. If you are weighing the whole category, the buying intent tools guide and the Buska comparison both lay out where a rival is the better fit than we are.
Questions
What is social listening?
What is the difference between brand monitoring and buying-intent listening?
What is the cheapest social listening tool here?
Why is EaseClaw the last entry, and does it still belong here?
Which social listening tool is best for founders and small teams?
Heard who is talking. Now say something back.
AI outreach for founder-led B2B teams. No lists. No SDR. A listening tool tells you who is talking. EaseClaw writes the invitation and the follow up to them on LinkedIn, per person, and runs it inside the campaigns and limits you set. It never posts to public feeds, and public replies stay yours to post.
Free for 7 days. Add a card to start, cancel any time before day 7 and you pay nothing.