Buying intent monitoring tools in 2026, and the job every one of them hands back
Eight tools that watch public conversations for people describing a problem you solve, grouped by the job they actually do, with every entry price read from the vendor’s own page on 15 September 2026 and linked so you can check it. Then the part nobody in this category finishes, which is what happens after the signal arrives. I build EaseClaw, which does that second part. It will draft you a reply for a public thread, and it is not sold for the coverage and reporting job the eight above do, so it sits in its own group at the bottom rather than at the top of a list it does not really compete on.
I am Pritesh Mann and I build EaseClaw, the ninth entry here. I have not run the other eight. Everything about them comes from their own pricing and home pages, read on 15 September 2026, and each claim links the page it came off. There are no screenshots of anybody else’s product on this page, because a screenshot would imply I had an account.
Two vendors would not give up a number. Mention’s pricing page renders its amounts in the browser and returned an empty card to a fetch and to a text mirror of the same URL, so this page quotes no Mention price at all rather than repeat one from an older note. Pulse did the same to a direct fetch but its figures did come back through the text mirror, so they are here with that noted in the table. Where a fact would not verify there is a gap, not a number borrowed from somebody else’s listicle.
One more disclosure about this URL. Until today there were eight separate pages here, one per tool, each comparing that tool against a version of EaseClaw that watched public conversations and drafted a reply you posted yourself. That product changed. Those eight pages now redirect to this one, which says the true thing once instead of the stale thing eight times.
The nine, side by side
Entry prices, which means the cheapest paid tier rather than the one the vendor highlights. The rows run group by group, in the same order as the cards below, and each price links the page it was read from.
| Tool | Best for | Key capability | Price | Free tier or trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| F5Bot | Anybody who wants to know when their phrase is mentioned and is happy to read every alert. | A keyword alert email, minutes after the post appears. | Free, then $9.99 a month | Yes, and it is the point of the product: "Free to use. No credit card required." |
| Syften | Developer tools and technical products whose buyers are spread over a dozen small communities. | One alert feed across a long list of communities, with filtering to cut the noise. | $29.95 a month | "Start a 14 day free trial on the Syften PRO plan. No credit card required." |
| Pulse for Reddit | Founders treating Reddit as a real channel who want the judging done and the writing started. | Scored Reddit threads with a draft attached, and a managed option above that. | $29 a month | No free tier named on the pricing page, which offers a "3-day money-back guarantee". |
| ReplyGuy | Marketers who want volume of mentions and are comfortable with what that reads like to a community. | A suggested reply that works your product into a conversation already happening. | $39 a month | No free tier on the pricing cards. Five paid tiers, from Analyst to Agency. |
| Beno One | Teams who want Reddit comments appearing without anybody writing them, and who accept what that risks. | It publishes the comment itself, which is the whole difference between it and everything else here. | $49 a month | No free tier on the pricing page. Five tiers, the top one custom. |
| Brand24 | Marketing and communications teams who have to report on what is being said about a brand. | Coverage, sentiment and share of voice across a very wide net, reported for a team. | $249 a month | "Your first 14 days are free of charge. Just sign up for our trial. No credit card required." |
| Octolens | Developer tool companies whose community lives on GitHub, Stack Overflow and Hacker News. | Mention volume and keyword breadth sold as a package, aimed at a devtool audience. | $159 a month, billed annually | "We offer a 7-day free trial with all our Pro plan features", capped at 5,000 mentions. |
| Mention | Teams who want listening and social publishing from one vendor rather than two. | Listening plus social media publishing and scheduling in one subscription. | Not published in the page text | The site offers "Start a free trial"; no terms were readable on the pricing page. |
| EaseClaw our 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, no card required. Pick a plan after that to keep going, cancel anytime. |
The four jobs they split into
These nine products get shelved together and three of them do not compete with each other at all. Rule out the three groups that are not your problem and the shortlist is two names long. Most of the money wasted in this category is a group mistake, not a tool mistake: a founder buying a communications suite, or a communications team buying a founder’s alert feed.
The tools, job by job
One card each: what it is in the vendor’s own words, the entry price, who it fits, one real strength and one real weakness. Rank runs inside a group. A rank 1 means it fits the most people doing that particular job, not that it beats the rank 1 of a group you are not in.
Cheapest way to hear about a keyword
In its own words, "F5Bot monitors Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters for your keywords and sends you an alert within minutes." It has been running since 2017 and the basic service is free.
A much wider alert net than F5Bot. Its pricing page lists the public web, Reddit, X, Hacker News, forums, blogs, GitHub, YouTube, Slack communities, Bluesky and Mastodon, plus newsletters and podcasts.
Reddit as a channel, end to end
Reddit lead discovery with the reply drafted for you, sold by qualified leads a month rather than by keyword. Its top tier is explicitly a service: the Enterprise card reads “Done for you. Our Reddit team runs engagement under your brand.”
Its home page calls it "The AI That finds the best places to mention your product online": it finds conversations where your product is relevant and writes a reply that mentions it.
A "Customer Acquisition AI-Agent" in its own words, which "scans Reddit and outreachs clients for your business. It works 24/7 to find and attract customers organically." It writes the comment and publishes it.
Tracking what is said about a brand
It calls itself the "#1 AI Social Listening Tool" and says it covers "25 million online sources", listing X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, News, LinkedIn, blogs, forums, reviews, Reddit, Telegram, TripAdvisor, the App Store and TikTok.
Mention tracking pitched at developer tool teams. Its pricing page lists newsletters, podcasts, X, Reddit, Bluesky, GitHub, YouTube, Stack Overflow, Hacker News and DEV.to, plus LinkedIn, TikTok, news and the web.
Its home page headline is "Monitor the web, analyze online conversations, and manage your social media: all with one powerful tool", and it says it "analyzes mentions from over 1 billion sources in real-time".
Turning a buying signal into outreach
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.
Two tools in this category still have a page of their own here, because both still send real readers and both needed re-checking rather than deleting. Read the Buska comparison if you are weighing a listening platform that is explicitly sold for lead generation, and the GummySearch page if you are one of the people who has to move off it before its shutdown date. For the Reddit end of this specifically, the Reddit tools guide goes deeper, and the social listening guide covers the enterprise suites this page leaves out.
Every plan, every price
Every figure was read on the date in its row, from the URL in its row. Two things in this table are easy to misread, so they are spelled out: Octolens prints both its published tiers as billed annually, which means the commitment is a year rather than a month, and Brand24 shows a monthly and an annual number on the same card, both of which are in the unit column here.
| Tool | Plan | Price | What it buys | Billing | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F5Bot | Free | $0 | keyword alerts by email, free since 2017 | free | 2026-09-15 |
| F5Bot | Silver | $9.99 | per month, 20 keywords | monthly | 2026-09-15 |
| Syften | Entry | $29.95 | per month, the cheapest paid tier | monthly | 2026-09-15 |
| Syften | Syften PRO | $119.95 | per month, the tier the free trial runs on | monthly | 2026-09-15 |
| Pulse for Reddit | Starter | $29 | per month, up to 150 qualified leads (read through the text mirror) | monthly | 2026-09-15 |
| Pulse for Reddit | Growth | $99 | per month, up to 1,500 qualified leads (read through the text mirror) | monthly | 2026-09-15 |
| ReplyGuy | Analyst | $39 | per month, the cheapest of five tiers | monthly | 2026-09-15 |
| ReplyGuy | Business | $99 | per month, the middle tier | monthly | 2026-09-15 |
| Beno One | Just Starting | $49 | per month, the cheapest of five tiers | monthly | 2026-09-15 |
| Beno One | Early Growth | $129 | per month, the second tier | monthly | 2026-09-15 |
| Brand24 | Individual | $249 | per month, or $199 a month when paid for a year | monthly, annual shown beside it | 2026-09-15 |
| Brand24 | Team | $349 | per month, or $299 a month when paid for a year | monthly, annual shown beside it | 2026-09-15 |
| Octolens | Pro | $159 | per month, 15,000 mentions and 10 keywords | billed annually, as printed on the card | 2026-09-15 |
| Octolens | Scale | $499 | per month, 50,000 mentions and 40 keywords | billed annually, as printed on the card | 2026-09-15 |
| Mention | Company | Not published | the card renders its amount in the browser; a fetch returns it empty | not published | 2026-09-15 |
| EaseClaw | Pro | $99 | per month, one LinkedIn account per member | monthly | 2026-09-15 |
| EaseClaw | Business | $199 | per month, one LinkedIn account per member | monthly | 2026-09-15 |
The spread is the finding. The cheapest useful thing in this category is free and has been since 2017, and the most expensive is $249 a month before anybody writes a single message. Paying more buys you breadth and reporting. It does not buy you a reply.
The job all of them hand back
Every tool above ends at the same place. It finds a post, and depending on what you paid, it scores it or drafts a first sentence. Then it hands you a username and a browser tab, and the rest of it is your Tuesday: work out who this person actually is, decide whether they could buy from you, find them somewhere you can write to them, write something that is not a template, send it, and remember to follow up in a week when they do not answer.
That is not a small remainder. It is most of the work, it happens every day, and it is the reason a folder of alerts stops getting opened by the third week. Two of the tools above close the gap by publishing the comment for you, which trades your remaining evening for the risk of a ban on your own account in a community you presumably want to keep.
EaseClaw closes it from the other end. 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 works out who is worth writing to from your own website, writes the invite and the follow up per person in your voice, runs them inside the campaigns and limits you set, and puts the replies in one place. Review every message, or let it run. It never posts to public feeds, and public replies stay yours to post.
Where that leaves you is a genuine either-or rather than an upsell. If nobody is talking about your problem yet, start with the free one at the top of this page and find that out for nothing. If people are talking and the bottleneck is what you do about it, the method is written up free in the warm lead system and you can run it by hand before you pay anybody.
What the gap costs, measured on our own outreach
Four numbers from our own ledger rather than an industry study, and not a promise about what your week will look like. They are here because they put a size on the remainder every tool above hands back.
The 17% is the one worth sitting with. Pulling the people who gave off a public signal is cheap, about a quarter of a cent each, and it is not the hard part. Roughly one in six of them turned out to be another vendor selling into the same room, and removing those by hand is the tax nobody quotes you for. The wider view is on our buying-intent research page: 34,116 posts read and 5,789 scored before 125 people turned out to be genuine buyers, as of 4 August 2026. Real buyers are rare, which is why a tool that picks the people is worth more than a tool that shows you all of them.
Where these tools are better than EaseClaw
Four things this category does that ours does not do at all. If one of them is the reason you came here, buy the tool that does it and skip the trial at the bottom of this page.
Brand24 says it reads 25 million online sources and Syften lists a dozen communities including Slack, Bluesky and Mastodon. EaseClaw looks at LinkedIn. If the question you need answered is what the whole internet is saying about a name, every tool in the third lane above does that job and ours does not do it at all.
F5Bot, Pulse and Beno One are built around Reddit, and Pulse will even run the engagement for you on its top tier. EaseClaw drafts replies for public threads and stops there: it never posts to public feeds, and public replies stay yours to post. If Reddit is where your customers actually are, one of those three is the better purchase and this page is not going to argue otherwise.
Sentiment scores, share of voice and a slide a communications lead can put in front of a board are real deliverables, and Brand24 and Mention are built to produce them. EaseClaw reports what went out and what came back on your own outreach. Those are different documents for different jobs, and asking ours to do theirs would be asking it for a number it does not measure.
F5Bot is free and has been since 2017, and Syften and Brand24 both start a trial without a card. Before paying anybody, including us, the cheapest honest experiment is to put your phrases into F5Bot for a fortnight and see whether anyone is talking at all. If the alerts come back empty, no tool on this page will fix that, and finding out costs nothing.
Questions
What do buying intent monitoring tools actually do?
Which one should I try first if I have not tried any?
What happened to the pages that used to compare EaseClaw with each of these?
Does EaseClaw post the replies these tools draft?
Is a listening tool plus a sending tool the same thing as an outreach agent?
Do any of these tools book meetings?
Where does EaseClaw genuinely not fit?
What if the signal came with the message already written?
AI outreach for founder-led B2B teams. No lists. No SDR.
Free for 7 days, no card required. Pick a plan after that to keep going, cancel anytime.