If you are responsible for brand monitoring, you need to find relevant mentions in the places your business and customers are discussed. OppAlerts publishes this page and sells one of the products on it. Every fact below comes from each vendor's own pages, read on September 5, 2026.
Brand monitoring covers two jobs that are often confused. One is watching conversation on social platforms and review sites. The other is watching published pages: news, blogs, podcasts and the wider web. Most products do one well and the other partially, and the price you are quoted depends heavily on which you need.
Understand the meter before the feature list
The most expensive mistake in this category is misreading what is counted.
Mentions returned, not searches run. Brand24 sells 2,000, 10,000, 40,000 and 100,000 mentions a month alongside 3, 7, 12 and 25 keywords. Mention's own FAQ makes the same distinction: an alert is the keyword set it crawls for, and a mention is a result it finds. This means a brand with a common name or a busy market consumes the allowance while tracking very few keywords, and a quiet brand may never approach it. Two companies on identical plans can have completely different experiences.
Estimate your monthly mention volume before choosing a plan, and ask what happens when the allowance is exhausted mid-month.
Users. Brand24 includes one user on its entry plan and unlimited users above it. Talkwalker includes unlimited users on every Lumen plan. BuzzSumo includes one user at $199 a month and five at $299. For a communications team of six this difference can exceed the difference in monitoring capability.
Source counts are not comparable. Talkwalker states 150 million data sources, 187 languages and 196 countries. Mention states a billion sources. These are vendor figures counted in different ways, and a source is not a document. Do not put them side by side and choose the larger number; ask instead whether the specific publications and platforms you care about are covered.
The products, by what they watch
Brand24: published prices, and the widest AI answer coverage
Monthly plans cost $249, $349, $499 and $699. The lower tiers cost $199, $299 and $399 a month when billed annually. Plans include 3, 7, 12 and 25 keywords with 2,000, 10,000, 40,000 and 100,000 mentions a month. Refresh moves from every 12 hours to hourly to realtime. Users are unlimited from the second plan.
It has moved furthest into AI answers of any monitoring product here. Its LLM Listening module states coverage of nine models: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok, Copilot and Claude. It also reports share of voice benchmarks and the sources used in answers. It provides MCP and API integration, sentiment analysis in all languages, and Anomaly Detection for unusual spikes. Its Demographics report covers age, gender, occupation, income, education and interests. Context Search takes a short phrase instead of a Boolean string.
Mention: alerts, Boolean control and review monitoring
Mention crawls the web and social media for keyword sets you register, with Boolean search, social and review monitoring, analytics and collaboration. Its FAQ states that the Publish and Respond features have been progressively deprecated, with that work directed to Agorapulse, so confirm what remains if replying is part of your process.
Talkwalker and Brandwatch: research at breadth, quoted not listed
Talkwalker sells consumer intelligence, stating 150 million data sources, more than 30 social platforms, 187 languages and 196 countries, with unlimited users. It suits a brand discussed across many markets.
Brandwatch splits into Consumer Intelligence for researchers and analysts, Social Media Management for teams that publish and reply, and Influencer Marketing. It is the only product here selling social publishing alongside listening.
Neither publishes prices. Both quote after a demo.
Meltwater: media intelligence as a program
Meltwater lists Starter, Pro, Enterprise and Agency tiers without amounts. Its pricing FAQ lists the factors that determine a quote: modules, source and regional coverage, data and workflow volume, users, integrations, onboarding, support and contract terms.
It includes journalist research and distribution, which puts it in a different category of purchase from a monitoring subscription.
BuzzSumo: coverage reporting and journalists
BuzzSumo runs $199, $299 and $499 a month billed yearly with 1 and 5 users and 2 and 5 alerts, and unlimited searches shared across the account. Its PR & Comms tier adds a Media Database of journalists writing about your brand, market and competitors. Coverage Reports include publication data, social engagement, mention count, placement within the article and excerpts.
Its alert allowance is small, so it suits teams whose main use is research rather than continuous monitoring.
OppAlerts: web coverage, and what to do about it
OppAlerts is not a social listening product. It does not read social platforms or review sites, does not score sentiment, reports no demographics, and has no journalist database. No OppAlerts report should be presented as social listening, and on a page about this category the omission decides whether it belongs on your shortlist at all.
What it monitors is published pages: a News Index of indexed news, blog and podcast content, and a Prospect Index of stored web pages. Brand Mentions uses search results and both indexes. It also tracks brand presence in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode answers, and keyword positions on Google and Bing.
Its distinguishing work is what follows a mention. Brand Unlinked Mentions lists pages naming the business without an observed link. Site Info returns the stored public contact pages, emails, phone numbers and social profiles for that site. Backlinks DB: Link Gap lists sites linking to named competitors and not to you. The Prospect Index searches by meaning across opportunity types including guest contribution pages, resource lists, roundups, podcasts and directories. PageRank history shows a publisher's monthly link-graph history. All of it runs from one campaign definition covering the business, its brands, its competitors and three buyer personas.
Its meter counts what you asked for rather than what came back, so a busy news week does not consume more allowance.
Which to shortlist
| If your deciding requirement is | Shortlist |
|---|---|
| Social platforms and review sites | Brand24, Mention, Talkwalker, Brandwatch |
| Published prices you can compare | Brand24, Mention, BuzzSumo |
| AI answer coverage in the same product | Brand24 |
| Many languages and countries | Talkwalker, Brandwatch, Meltwater |
| Publishing and replying as well as listening | Brandwatch |
| Journalist research and PR distribution | Meltwater, or BuzzSumo at a lower price |
| Sentiment, demographics and anomaly detection | Brand24, Talkwalker, Brandwatch |
| Turning mentions into links, contacts and content | OppAlerts |
| A predictable bill regardless of news volume | OppAlerts, which counts requests rather than results |
Give every vendor the same written brief before comparing quotes: the same keyword set, the same regions and languages, an estimated monthly mention volume, and the number of people who need access. How source coverage changes a monitoring tool explains which of those inputs affects the price.
Evaluate the service with your monitoring terms and required sources. Check the expected volume and review process so the plan supports ongoing coverage work.
For the category view, see OppAlerts and brand monitoring platforms.