Brand Monitoring Tools Compared, From Free to Paid

November 8, 2026

Brand monitoring means knowing when people talk about you, your products or your people, fast enough to respond. The tools range from free email alerts to dashboards that cost more than a junior hire. Which one fits depends on how many mentions you get, where they happen, and who reads them.

Decide what you are monitoring first

• The brand name, plus common misspellings and the name without spaces.
• Product names, especially ones that are also normal words. Those need a second keyword to cut noise.
• Founders and spokespeople.
• Campaign hashtags and slogans, for a fixed period.
• Two or three competitors, so you have a baseline. Ten mentions a day means nothing until you know a competitor gets 200.
• Where it matters: TikTok and Instagram for consumer brands, Reddit and X for software, LinkedIn for B2B.

The options

Free: Google Alerts and Bluesky

Start with Google Alerts for your brand name in quotes. It costs nothing and catches press, blogs and forum pages. If your audience is on Bluesky, its Jetstream service streams every public post with no authentication, so a 30-line script can match your keywords.

Mid-range: Awario and Brand24

Awario is the cheaper entry point and includes API access from Starter. Brand24 costs more but its source list is broader and its higher plans update in real time. Both include sentiment and reports, which saves you building them. The limits that bite are keyword counts and monthly mention caps: a brand with a common name can burn 2,000 mentions in a week.

DIY: an API plus your own rules

If you want the raw posts, or your keyword list changes often, call search endpoints yourself and store results in a database or spreadsheet. You trade a dashboard for full control. Our budget social listening guide walks through the setup.

Score mentions so people read the right ones

Most mentions do not need a reply. Give each one a priority score and route only the top ones to a person:

priority = log10(reach + 1) × sentiment_weight × recency_weight
reach            = author followers, or post plays when the platform reports them
sentiment_weight = 2 for negative, 1 for neutral, 1.5 for a question
recency_weight   = 1 if under 6 hours old, 0.5 if under 24, 0.2 after that

A complaint from an account with 50,000 followers posted an hour ago scores about 9.4. A neutral mention from a 300-follower account yesterday scores about 1.2. Tune the weights after a week of real data.

Checklist for a working setup

1. Write queries with exclusions, for example the product name minus the common word it collides with.
2. Check each query by hand on day one. Delete the ones that return mostly noise.
3. Pick one owner for alerts and one channel where they arrive.
4. Review volume against a competitor every week.
5. Keep raw data for at least 90 days so you can compare campaigns.

Doing it with ScrapeIO

With ScrapeIO you run brand searches across platforms with one key: the X search API, Reddit search API, TikTok keyword search and YouTube search, plus the TikTok comments API for replies under your own posts. Results share the same fields, so one scoring function works everywhere, and you pay per call with credits that do not expire.

Sources

Checked on 8 November 2026 from each vendor's own pages. Prices and limits change; follow the links before you decide.

• https://www.google.com/alerts
• https://awario.com/pricing/
• https://brand24.com/prices/
• https://mention.com/en/pricing/
• https://docs.x.com/x-api/getting-started/pricing
• https://bsky.network/docs/jetstream/