Octolens alternative: when you need buyers, not every mention

You start by choosing keywords such as your brand, competitor names and pain points. Octolens helps you tune each one and uses your company context to judge every mention it finds. Each mention gets a relevance rating (high, medium or low), a tag (buy intent, customer testimonial, promotional and others) and a sentiment. You can build filtered feeds or use the prebuilt ones for brand monitoring, competitor intelligence or buy intent. Its home page also says it can track brand names made of common words without drowning you in noise.

The pricing page lists Reddit, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Bluesky, Hacker News, GitHub, DEV and Stack Overflow as sources. The Scale plan adds podcasts, newsletters, news, the wider web and reviews from Trustpilot and the app stores. Every plan includes Slack and email alerts, webhooks, an MCP server and full developer access, so mentions can be piped into other systems.

Plans on 17 October 2026:

• Pro: $199 a month billed monthly, or $159 a month billed yearly. 15,000 mentions, 10 keywords, hourly refresh, unlimited seats.
• Scale: $599 a month billed monthly, or $499 billed yearly. 50,000 mentions, 40 keywords, real-time refresh and the extra sources.
• Enterprise: custom, with multiple workspaces.

Extra mentions and keywords cost more. There's a 7-day trial with up to 5,000 mentions.

Octolens is the better choice for teams that care about every mention and not only the ones from buyers. That covers DevRel and community teams answering questions, marketing teams watching sentiment and support teams catching bug reports. It also suits you if your audience is on GitHub, Hacker News, YouTube or LinkedIn, or if you want mention data flowing into your own tools and agents. Agencies running several brands will find its workspaces useful too.

• Your actual goal. Brand monitoring and lead finding look alike but need different filters. Decide which one you're paying for.
• Granularity of the judgment. A high, medium or low label is enough for triage. If you want to set a precise bar, look for a numeric score.
• The evidence. If the tool shows you the sentence that reveals the need, you don't have to open every thread.
• What happens next. A good match still needs a good reply. Check whether the tool helps you write it and whether a person stays in control of posting.
• Pricing by mentions or by matches. Mention quotas grow with your keyword list. Per-match billing grows with results.

HearBuyers fits if your goal is pipeline and your buyers ask their questions on X and Reddit. Instead of choosing keywords, you paste your company website. HearBuyers reads it and infers your product summary, buyer roles, the problems those buyers describe, search phrases, competitors and subreddits, and you correct whatever it got wrong. It reads public X posts and replies and Reddit posts and comments, starting with the last seven days.

Each post gets a buying-intent score from 0 to 100, with the sentence that shows the need highlighted and a one-line reason. Matches at or above your threshold (70 by default) get a drafted public reply, plus a DM draft on X. An email draft is written only when a public email exists. A person edits, approves, copies and posts each one, and nothing goes out on its own. Matches show up in Slack, in a daily email digest and in a team inbox with stages.

It doesn't fit if you need brand monitoring across many networks, sentiment over time, mention data piped into your own systems, or sources beyond X and Reddit. HearBuyers is free for 14 days with no card, then from $19 a month.

If your team uses Octolens for brand, support and community work as well as leads, it makes sense to keep one tool that covers all of it. HearBuyers would replace only the lead part. Some teams run both: Octolens for mentions and HearBuyers for buyers.

1. List the keywords and feeds you use for buy intent in Octolens.
2. Sign up for HearBuyers and paste your company website.
3. Check the search phrases it suggests and add any of your buy-intent keywords that are missing.
4. Add your competitor names and the subreddits where your buyers ask.
5. Set your threshold and send alerts to the Slack channel your Octolens buy-intent feed used.

For a closer look, read the HearBuyers vs Octolens comparison or our Octolens review, or see the other tools on the alternatives page.