13 best social listening tools for brands [free + paid]

Every day, people share opinions, complaints, and recommendations on social media — but they don’t always tag brands directly.

Social listening tools help you hear those conversations (whether you’re tagged or not), then turn all that chatter into useful insights.

In this post, we compare 13 of the best social listening tools to help you find the right fit for your team, goals, and budget.

What are social listening tools?

Social listening tools are software that track what people say about your brand, competitors, and industry online. They scan social media, blogs, forums, and news sites to measure sentiment, spot trends, and catch relevant conversations as they happen. 

Behind the scenes, many tools use AI to sort through all that data and surface what matters most, using features like keyword tracking, sentiment analysis, and more.

Key features of social listening tools

Every platform is a little different, but most social listening tools share the same core features:

• Keyword and brand monitoring: Tracks mentions of your brand, products, competitors, hashtags, and key topics across social media.
• Real-time alerts: Pings your team right away when something important happens, like a spike in mentions or a viral post.
• Competitive monitoring: Tracks your competitors’ brand mentions, campaigns, and share of voice.
• Sentiment analysis: Sorts your brand mentions into positive, negative, or neutral, so you can quickly understand how people feel.
• Trend and topic analysis: Highlights rising conversations, emerging themes, and shifts in attention over time.
• Reporting and analytics dashboards: Turns raw data into clear charts, summaries, and reports you can easily share.

What social listening tools can do for your brand

Social listening tools track conversations so you can keep a pulse on how people really feel about your brand, competitors, and industry.

They’re used for everything from sentiment analysis and trend detection to crisis management.

Psst: Want to dive deeper into this subject? We’ve got a whole blog post on what social listening is and why it matters so much for brands.

Below, you’ll find a side-by-side comparison of the top platforms — including features, data access, and pricing — to help you find the best fit.

The top social listening tools, side by side

We’ve compared the top 13 tools — from free options to enterprise platforms — so you can quickly evaluate features like sentiment analysis, real-time alerts, and historical data access.

Tool	Platforms Covered	Sentiment Analysis	Real-Time Alerts	Historical Data	Pricing
Hootsuite	All major platforms + Bluesky	✅ Enhanced	✅	✅ 7-day Quick Search	From $99/month
Talkwalker	30+ social + 150M sites	✅ AI-powered, multilingual	✅	✅ Up to 2 years	Contact for quote
Brandwatch	100M+ sites, 1.7T conversations	✅ NLP + visual & geo analysis	✅	✅ From 2010	Contact for quote
Sprout Social	Major platforms	✅ Word clouds + AI Assist	✅	✅ Up to 7 days (X); varies by platform	From $199/user/month
Meltwater	Social, news, forums, TV, podcasts	✅ Visual + emotion recognition	✅	✅ 15-month archive	Contact for quote
Sprinklr	30+ social + 1B websites	✅ GenAI-powered sentiment	✅ Smart Alerts	✅ Extensive archive	Contact for quote
Brand24	Major social + blogs/news/forums	✅ Real-time + emotion tracking	✅	❌ ~1-year storage	From $119/month
BuzzSumo	Media + web (limited social)	❌	✅	✅ 5-year content archive	From $159/month
Keyhole	Social + hashtags, mentions, influencers	✅ Sentiment over time	✅	✅ X back to 2015; others limited	Contact for demo/pricing
	Instagram only	✅ For IG only	✅ IG alerts	❌ Platform-limited	Enterprise add-on only
Google Alerts	Web only	❌	✅ Email alerts	❌ No archive	Free
Social Mention	Blogs, news, limited social	✅ Basic sentiment	❌	❌	Free
AnswerThePublic	Google/TikTok/YT queries	❌	❌	❌	Free (3/day)

How do you choose the right social listening tool?

The right social listening tool depends on your budget, team size, and what you want to learn from your social data. Some tools focus on basic brand monitoring, while others offer advanced analytics, competitive insights, and enterprise-scale reporting.

When comparing social listening tools, keep the following in mind:

Your business and team size

Are you a solo marketer tracking brand mentions, or a larger team managing multiple campaigns and regions?

Smaller teams often need tools that are quick to set up and easy to use, while larger teams usually need collaboration features, role-based access, and more advanced reporting. 

For example, platforms like Hootsuite are built to support teams at scale, with flexible permissions and analytics that work across teams and regions.

Your primary goals

Your primary goal can pinpoint what features matter most.

For example, some teams use social listening to protect their brand reputation. Others focus on competitive research, content planning, or customer insights.

Knowing your main goal helps you choose a tool with the right features (and avoid paying for bells and whistles you won’t use).

The platforms you need to monitor

Not every tool covers the same channels. For example, some tools (like ) specialize in one channel, while others offer broad coverage across social, forums, blogs, and news.

The right social listening tool should monitor the platforms where your audience is most active.

Real-time vs. historical insights

If you’re focused on trend tracking and crisis prevention, look for real-time alerts and recent sentiment data.

For long-term reporting or deep research, tools with access to years of historical data (like Brandwatch or Talkwalker) may be a better fit.

Depth of analytics

Social listening tools vary widely in analytics depth – from basic mention monitoring to advanced sentiment and share-of-voice reporting.

The right level of analytics depends on whether you need quick answers or deep reporting.

Your budget

Free tools can be a great way to start, but they usually come with limitations in scope, sentiment tracking, or data volume.

Platforms like Hootsuite or Brand24 offer a good balance of features and affordability, while high-end platforms provide deeper customization and data access at a higher cost.

Best all-in-one social listening tools

All-in-one social listening tools let teams monitor conversations and manage social media in one place. They usually include features like publishing, engagement, and analytics, making it easier to handle multiple workflows without switching tools.

Here are the best all-in-one social listening tools:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers a couple of different social listening features depending on the size of your brand and how much social data you need to analyze.

(That’s on top of comprehensive social media management tools, including scheduling to all major social networks, easy social media analytics, audience engagement tools, and customer support tools, too.)

Listening

Every Hootsuite plan includes everything you need to get started with social listening.

Use Quick Search to discover trending hashtags, brands, and events anywhere in the world, or dive deeper for personalized insights on your brand performance.

You can track mentions of your brand, your top competitors, your products — up to two keywords tracking anything at all over the last seven days.

Plus, you can use Quick Search to analyze things like:

• Key metrics: Are more people talking about you this week? What’s the vibe of their posts? 
• Top themes: How are people talking about you? What are the most popular positive and negative posts about? Which other conversations are you showing up in?
• Results: Ready to get into specifics? The results tab will show you a selection of popular posts related to your search terms — you can filter by sentiment, channel, and more.

P.S. Hootsuite Listening now integrates with Bluesky! This means that you can easily analyze insights from the hottest emerging platform straight from your Hootsuite dashboard.

Pricing: Starting at $99/month.

Best for: Hootsuite is ideal for teams that want integrated social media management and listening in one intuitive dashboard. It offers user-friendly tools and integrations to social media platforms and tools.

Hootsuite Advanced Analytics

Hootsuite Advanced Analytics is primarily a tool for tracking the ROI of your social marketing strategy and the business impact of your social media posts.

But it also contains a competitive analysis component, which earns it a spot on our list of social media listening tools.

Hootsuite Advanced Analytics lets you analyze your competitors’ audience and content strategy on Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). Key social data sources include audience stats, engagement, and hashtag use.

Pricing: Advanced Analytics is available as an add-on to Hootsuite Enterprise plans. Pricing is available on request.

2. Talkwalker by Hootsuite

Talkwalker’s social listening data library covers over 30 social media platforms (including emerging platforms like Bluesky) and over 150 million websites across 239 countries and regions.

With more than 50 advanced filters, you can segment your social media channels and identify the right audience to monitor.

This powerful social listening tool allows you to understand the full impact of your online presence by measuring engagement volume, reach, sentiment, and more. It incorporates Blue Silk GPT for AI analysis.

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request.

Best for: Talkwalker is best suited for global brands that need multilingual sentiment analysis, trend tracking, and visual content recognition across massive data sets.

Popular social listening tools

These popular social listening tools focus mainly on listening and analyzing online conversations, not publishing or engagement. Teams often choose them when they need deeper insight into conversations, trends, and how people feel about their brand.

Take a look at the most popular social listening tools:

3. Brandwatch

Brandwatch uses a library of 1.7 trillion historical conversations from 2010 to help brands track industry trends online. More than 501 million new conversations are added every day.

Brandwatch provides access to conversations from more than 100 million sites and can integrate your own customer data. You can track key social listening metrics like brand awareness, social sentiment, and social share of voice.

For even easier tracking of your social listening queries, you can integrate Brandwatch into your Hootsuite dashboard.

Pricing: Pricing for this enterprise-level social listening tool is available upon request.

Best for: Brandwatch is a top-tier choice for enterprise teams focused on deep research and historical analysis, but with a steeper learning curve and heavier lift for setup and query building.

4. Brand24

Brand24 is an AI-powered social listening tool that covers the major social platforms as well as blogs, news sites, and other online sources. It lets you track trends in reach and brand awareness, and set up alerts for critical notifications.

You can also gain valuable insights into social sentiment. Plus, the influence score lets you identify top influencers and creators in your niche.

Create reports you can easily share across your team and with company leaders.

Pricing: Starting at $119/month after a 14-day free trial.

Best for: Brand24 is good for small businesses seeking fast, affordable social listening, offering strong basics but limited historical depth and scalability.

5. Sprout Social

Sprout Social helps you track conversations about your brand, understand your audience demographics, and identify influencers in your niche.

Hashtag and mention monitoring, along with sentiment analysis, are baked into the solution. However, more detailed social listening can only be unlocked with an add-on.

See how Sprout Social compares to Hootsuite.

Pricing: Starting at $199/user/month after a 30-day free trial.

Best for: Sprout Social fits mid-sized teams that prioritize user experience and lightweight listening, though it may lack the depth needed for advanced use cases.

6. Buzzsumo

BuzzSumo is a tool that helps brands monitor major media mentions. They can set up alerts for mentions of their own brand or industry trends to stay aware of upcoming trending topics and changes.

BuzzSumo has an archive of over 8 billion articles from the past five years to analyze and search for your queries. You can also monitor brand mentions and track alerts about your competing brands.

Pricing: Starting at $159/month.

Best for: BuzzSumo is useful for monitoring media mentions and content trends, though it lacks true social listening capabilities like sentiment or influencer tracking.

7. Keyhole

Keyhole offers a social listening tool that tracks keywords, mentions, and hashtags across multiple platforms. It graphs trends over time along with social share of voice. Keyhole even tracks the sentiment in every mention and changes over time.

On top of that, the tool helps identify key influencers in your niche and compares the performance of the various influencers you identify.

Keyhole offers historical data for X dating back to 2015 (available on request), while other platforms have more limited data.

Pricing: Pricing is available after booking a demo.

Best for: Keyhole is a helpful tool for tracking campaigns, hashtags, and influencers. It’s best for short-term or channel-specific insights rather than ongoing strategy.

8.

is a social media management tool that offers a number of features — social listening included.

’s social listening and monitoring tools track mentions, top posts, sentiment, and more, but it’s only available for Instagram. If you rely heavily on Instagram, this could be a good tool for you, but you might want to look elsewhere if you need data from additional platforms.

Pricing: Social listening is available as an add-on to Enterprise accounts. Pricing is available upon request.

Best for: offers a simple add-on for Instagram listening. It’s effective for single-platform use, but not a full listening solution.

9. Meltwater

Meltwater allows unlimited searches over a rolling 15-month archive, so you can identify trends and yearly cycles. Beyond social and web sources, Meltwater data includes TV, radio, podcasts, and other media sources.

Within Meltwater, you can build custom dashboards, analyze sentiment, and use image recognition tools.

Pricing: Pricing is available on request.

Best for: Meltwater is well-suited for PR and comms teams managing news and social media, though its breadth may overwhelm smaller teams or single-channel users.

10. Sprinklr

Sprinklr offers a few different types of tools, from social media management to analytics and insights. Its social listening capabilities are a part of its “Insights” suite and give users access to data from more than 30 social and digital channels.

Monitor billions of customer conversations, detect reputation crises, create reports, and compare your performance to your competitors.

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request.

Best for: Sprinklr is built for enterprises that need massive scale, real-time crisis detection, and AI insights. Still, its complexity and price point may be overkill for most marketers.

Free social listening tools

Free social listening tools typically offer basic keyword and brand monitoring, but they often lack advanced features like sentiment analysis, historical data, or in-depth reporting.

These tools are ideal for startups or solopreneurs getting started with brand monitoring online.

The best free social listening tools include:

• Google Alerts: monitors web mentions and sends email summaries.
• Social Mention: tracks basic sentiment and brand mentions across blogs and forums.
• AnswerThePublic: surfaces trending search queries to inform your content strategy.

11. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free and easy-to-use tool for setting email alerts for certain keywords. Was your brand name-dropped in a news article or LinkedIn post? Google will send you an email notification with a link.

This is a great way to keep an eye on brand and industry updates, ensuring you’re alerted immediately.

Price: Free

Best for: A lightweight, no-cost way to monitor mentions on the web, but far too limited for serious brand or competitor analysis.

12. Social Mention

Social Mention, a tool from Brand Mentions, is a free social media monitoring tool that allows you to keep an eye on brand and competitor mentions online. Discover conversations around your brand and your product or service so you can gauge sentiment, find customer pain points, and more.

Price: Brand Mentions has a premium service starting at $79/month with a free trial, but Social Mention itself is a free tool.

Best for: A free tool that’s easy to try, but minimal in depth, coverage, or reliability compared to modern platforms.

13. AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a free tool from digital marketing expert Neil Patel that lets users search for different queries across platforms like Google, YouTube, TikTok, and more.

This tool is perfect for creating content ideas that perfectly answer your target audience’s questions.

Price: While you can sign up for a premium account for more search queries starting at $11/month, users also get three search queries a day, completely free. Interested users can also pay a one-time lifetime fee of $119 to get permanent access to the tool without a subscription.

Best for: This tool is great for surfacing content and search ideas, but not a listening tool in the traditional sense.

Why social listening matters (with real results)

Whether you’re managing brand reputation, creating content, or empowering employees, the right listening tools help you make faster, smarter decisions.

Here’s how three Hootsuite customers are putting social listening into action:

Crisis prevention and reputation management

During a major rebrand following a merger, Corewell Health used Hootsuite Listening and Advanced Analytics to monitor how people were responding across 21 hospitals and hundreds of accounts.

The team identified spikes in negative sentiment and quickly adjusted their messaging and media outreach.

Results:

• 50% reduction in negative sentiment
• 2.5x the industry average engagement rate
• 3M+ impressions through employee advocacy using Hootsuite Amplify

Audience insights

One NBA team used Hootsuite with Talkwalker to analyze fan sentiment and engagement patterns during the off-season.

They discovered that fans preferred authentic, behind-the-scenes content over promotional posts and reshaped their strategy accordingly.

Results:

• 352% increase in social video views
• 46% increase in impressions
• A new full-time content role approved to expand the strategy

Share of voice and employer brand growth

Colliers combined Hootsuite’s publishing and listening tools with Amplify to expand their reach and measure the impact of employee advocacy.

By tracking sentiment, engagement, and share of voice, they improved both brand visibility and internal engagement.

Results:

• 229% increase in social media impressions
• 9.5M people reached in Canada through organic social
• Recognized as Canada’s #1 commercial real estate website, with social traffic playing a key role

6 tips for using social listening tools

These six tips can help you gather great consumer insights for your brand.

1. Get in early on trends

When you monitor specific keywords in your industry, you’ll be one of the first to know about emerging trends.

For example, let’s say you run a business selling candles and monitor keywords about “scents.” You’ll be able to quickly identify patterns among scents mentioned online, discover popular new ideas for upcoming products, or figure out scents that people don’t like that you’d want to avoid.

2. Keep an eye on competitors

Tracking mentions of your competitors gives you valuable insights into their social media presence, industry trends, and customer sentiment.

And monitoring your competitors’ brand names gives you insights into information like:

• Competitor media mentions
• Competitor announcements
• Competitor online performance
• Sentiment around your competitors
• New product/service/feature launches

By keeping an eye on your competition, you can easily keep up with what they’re doing and even improve on it.

3. Find opportunities for engagement

Monitoring your brand mentions helps you find authentic opportunities for social media engagement.

Make sure you respond to everyone who mentions your brand, whether you thank them or offer a useful suggestion. You can also keep an eye on the conversation to understand the social communities where people talk about your brand.

4. Measure brand sentiment

Keeping an eye on customer feedback and sentiment helps you understand how people feel about your brand, your product/service, and your industry without speaking to them directly.

But more than just measuring sentiment, you want to do something about the insights you’re getting.

If the conversation about your brand turns towards negative sentiment, you can take action before things reach crisis level.

And if something is going unusually well, you can throw some budget into a dedicated marketing campaign to keep riding that wave.

5. Identify pain points

See what customers are complaining about online about your industry or product/service. Can you release a new product or feature to resolve some of those pain points?

Keeping your finger on the pulse of customer conversations can help you find even more opportunities for your business, increasing interest, sales, and a positive customer experience.

6. Get familiar with the lingo

Social listening platforms often use technical terms that aren’t always intuitive, especially when it comes to setting up queries or interpreting results.

Here’s a quick glossary to help you navigate the most common features and metrics.

Sentiment analysis

The process of determining whether social media mentions are positive, negative, or neutral, helping brands understand public perception in real time.

Share of Voice (SOV)

A metric that shows how often your brand is mentioned online compared to your competitors, typically expressed as a percentage of total mentions.

Trend detection

A feature that spots emerging topics, hashtags, or phrases based on changes in volume over time — useful for jumping on viral moments or identifying early patterns.

Boolean search

A way to create complex listening queries using operators like AND, OR, and NOT. Allows you to refine searches to include or exclude specific words or phrases.

Listening topic

A group of related keywords, hashtags, or brand mentions that a tool monitors — often customizable so you can focus on campaigns, competitors, or products.

Real-time alerts

Notifications triggered by sudden spikes in brand mentions, negative sentiment, or keyword activity — useful for identifying crises or high-impact conversations as they happen.

The more familiar you are with these terms, the easier it’ll be to customize your social listening strategy (no steep learning curve required).

FAQ: Social listening tools

What should you look for in an enterprise social listening platform?

An enterprise social listening platform should help you track brand mentions, trends, and conversations across many channels in one place. Look for tools that offer flexible keyword tracking, sentiment insights, competitor monitoring, and reports that are easy to understand and share. 

Platforms like Hootsuite combine social listening with social media management, making it easier for teams to spot trends, monitor competitors, and turn insights into action without switching tools.

What are the best social listening tools for enterprise brands?

The best social listening tools for enterprise brands help teams track brand mentions, trends, and conversations across many platforms. They make it easier to understand what people are saying and spot issues early.

How should large organizations evaluate social listening tools?

Large organizations should look at how well a tool handles data from many sources and teams. It should be easy to use, support collaboration, and provide clear insights that teams can act on.

How do social listening tools support brand and competitive insights?

Social listening helps to keep your social media strategy running smoothly. These tools show you how people feel about your brand and how competitors are performing. This makes it easier to spot social media trends, understand audience needs, and make smarter decisions.

Which social listening tools can scale across regions and languages?

Tools that support multiple languages and regions work best for global teams. They help brands track conversations worldwide and stay consistent, even when managing social listening at scale.

Hootsuite makes it easy to monitor social media conversations and keywords, so you can focus on taking action on the insights available. Try it free today.