Best social listening tools in 2026, ordered by how well they find buyers

Tools that tag or score posts for buying intent come first, then broader brand monitoring tools, then enterprise suites sold through a demo. HearBuyers is on the list, labelled as ours. We don't rank it first or call it the best, because "best" depends on whether you want mentions or buyers. For the underlying idea, see social listening.

Prices are the plan names and figures each vendor lists on its own pricing page, checked on 17 and 18 October 2026. Plans change, so check the vendor's page before you buy.

Octolens is social listening for SaaS and developer brands. You choose keywords for your brand, your competitors and the pain points you care about. Each mention gets a relevance rating (high, medium or low), a tag such as buy intent, customer testimonial or promotional, and a sentiment. Prebuilt feeds cover brand monitoring, competitor intelligence and buy intent.

It fits teams that want one tool for community, brand and lead work, with mention data sent to Slack, email, webhooks or an MCP server.

Sources: Reddit, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Bluesky, Hacker News, GitHub, DEV and Stack Overflow. The Scale plan adds podcasts, newsletters, news, the web and reviews.

Standout: a prebuilt buy-intent feed alongside the brand and competitor feeds. Its pages don't mention reply drafting.

Price (checked 17 October 2026): Pro costs $199 a month billed monthly, or $159 a month billed yearly, for 15,000 mentions and 10 keywords. Scale costs $599 a month, or $499 a month billed yearly, for 50,000 mentions and 40 keywords. Enterprise is custom. The trial lasts 7 days and needs no card.

Syften watches communities and the public web for your keywords, then filters what it finds with rules you write in plain language, such as "accept when the author is asking for a tool". During onboarding it researches your company and competitors and writes the first filters for you. Its buying-intent page says it finds recommendation requests, competitor alternatives and complaints, and that it shows what someone said instead of an unexplained score.

It fits solo founders and small teams who want a low entry price and don't mind writing filters. Its FAQ says plainly that it does not monitor LinkedIn.

It covers the public web, Reddit, X, Indie Hackers, Hacker News, GitHub, Product Hunt, Stack Exchange sites, forums, newsletters, YouTube, podcasts, Bluesky and Mastodon.

What stands out is speed: its stated targets are under a minute for Reddit and at most 15 minutes for X. It lists no reply drafting.

Pricing, checked 17 October 2026: Entry is $29.95 a month (3 community filters), Standard $49.95 (20 filters, Slack, AI filtering) and PRO $119.95 (100 filters, webhooks). X monitoring adds $40 a month and YouTube $20. PRO has a 14-day trial with no card.

Buska calls itself social listening that finds buyers instead of mentions, built for B2B founders who have no sales team. You enter your website, and it listens, scores posts and drafts a reply. Each lead gets a hot or warm label and a score, and the dashboard tracks them through kanban stages from "to qualify" to "won".

It fits a founder who wants a short list each day and one place to track conversations. The Scale plan adds an AI SDR agent. Its comparison table describes outreach the AI drafts and you approve, plus real email sending with reply tracking.

Sources: 16+ on Starter and up to 33+ on Scale, including X, Reddit, YouTube, Hacker News, Bluesky, LinkedIn and Indie Hackers.

Standout: the Growth plan includes a reply studio and a prospect finder, and alerts can go to Slack, Discord, email or a webhook.

Price (checked 17 October 2026): Starter is $49 a month (5 signals), Growth is $99 a month (15 signals, reply studio) and Scale is $249 a month (30 signals, AI SDR agent). Paying annually saves about two months. The free trial lasts 7 days and needs no card.

HearBuyers is ours, so weigh this entry with that in mind. It finds people on X and Reddit asking for what a company sells, scores each post from 0 to 100 for buying intent, and drafts a reply for a person to approve and post. You paste your company website and it infers your product summary, buyer roles, the problems buyers describe, search phrases, competitors and subreddits. All of it is editable.

The first run scans the last 7 days. After that, runs happen on a schedule. Any match at or above your threshold (70 by default) gets a public reply draft, and on X a DM draft as well. Nothing posts or sends on its own. Alerts go to Slack, and you also get a daily email digest and a team inbox that tracks stages. It does not cover brand sentiment, share of voice or any source beyond X and Reddit.

On X it reads posts and replies. On Reddit it reads posts and comments in the subreddits you choose, plus Reddit search. Hacker News is next.

Each post shows the exact sentence that triggered the score, with a one-line reason.

Price: free for 14 days with no card, then from $19 a month.

SnitchFeed calls itself social listening for the agentic era. You describe your ideal customer in plain language or enter your domain, and it puts you in conversations on the platforms it covers today. AI scoring and tagging judge relevance, intent and sentiment, and it drops job posts and promotions automatically.

It fits teams that want a scored feed pushed to a CRM through webhooks, or to Slack and Discord.

It covers LinkedIn, X, Reddit, Bluesky and Hacker News, and lists more as coming.

Noise control is where it stands out, because job posts and promotions never reach the feed. It lists no reply drafting.

Pricing, checked 17 October 2026: Starter is $47 a month (7,000 credits, 10 tracked terms), Pro is $95 a month (21,000 credits, 30 terms) and Scale is $399 a month. The free trial runs 7 days with 1,000 free credits and needs no card.

Awario tracks conversations about your business across social media, news, blogs, videos, forums and reviews. A topic is a keyword or group of keywords, and Boolean search is supported. The home page lists "find sales opportunities on social networks" as a use case, alongside brand monitoring and market research.

It suits small teams that want brand tracking with sentiment, reports and Slack alerts at a modest price. It doesn't list a buying-intent score or reply drafting.

It covers X, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Vimeo, blogs, forums, news and the wider web.

Each topic takes unlimited keywords, and handles, hashtags and URLs all count as keywords.

As of 17 October 2026, Starter costs $49 a month ($29 a month billed annually) for 3 topics and 30,000 new mentions a month. Pro is $149 ($89 annually) for 15 topics, and Enterprise is $399 ($249 annually) for 100 topics. You don't need a card for the free trial.

Brand24 is an AI social listening tool that collects mentions from social media, news, blogs, videos, forums and reviews. It has Boolean search, filters for sentiment, reach, language and source, PDF, Excel and PowerPoint reports, and Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations.

It suits marketing and PR teams that need alerts, analytics and client reports. Its pages don't list a buying-intent score or reply drafting.

Its home page lists these sources: X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, news, LinkedIn, blogs, forums, reviews, Reddit, Telegram, TripAdvisor, app stores and TikTok.

What stands out is storm alerts and white-label reports for agencies.

Prices as of 17 October 2026: Individual is $249 a month ($199 a month billed annually; 3 keywords, 2,000 mentions a month), Team $349 ($299 annually), Pro $499 ($399), Business $699 ($599), and Enterprise from $1,499 a month billed annually. There's a 14-day free trial.

Mentionlytics is a brand monitoring tool with AI sentiment and emotion analysis, share of voice, dashboards, tags and assignment. You can also draft, schedule and publish posts from it. Its listed integrations are Slack, Hootsuite, Looker Studio and Power BI.

It fits marketing teams that want listening and publishing in one place. Pro and above can add a managed service, where consultants handle setup and reporting.

Sources: Web (news, blogs, forums), X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Bluesky and Threads, with reviews as an add-on.

Standout: the Social Intelligence Advisor and anomaly detection, on top of the dashboards.

Price (checked 17 October 2026): billed yearly, Basic is $49 a month (3 keyword rules, 5,000 mentions), Essential $141, Advanced $249, Pro $416, Business $624, and Enterprise from $1,083. The 14-day free trial covers up to 3 keywords.

Sprout Social is a social media management suite with a shared inbox, publishing and reporting. It pulls from the social profiles you connect, and Standard and up add keyword and location monitoring. Standard and Professional allow 10 brand keywords per group; Advanced allows 20. Premium Analytics and Listening are paid add-ons for Standard and up.

Its strength is having the inbox, publishing and monitoring under one login, and Advanced adds AI reply assist. It suits social teams that want listening inside the tool they already use to publish and reply. It isn't built for finding buyers in other people's threads.

Prices as checked on 17 October 2026, per seat per month and billed annually: Essentials $79, Standard $199, Professional $299 and Advanced $399. Enterprise pricing is on request. Listening costs extra on Standard and up, and there's a 30-day free trial.

Brandwatch sells a suite for global enterprises that covers consumer intelligence, search intelligence, social media management, influencer marketing and media intelligence. Its consumer intelligence product lets researchers search an archive of consumer opinion, segment audiences, run AI analysis and set up automated reports and alerts.

It fits research and insights teams at large organisations that buy through a sales process.

Sources include Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X, Reddit and LinkedIn, among others. The main draw is that archive of consumer opinion, along with segmentation built for analysts.

No price is listed (checked 17 October 2026). The plans page says each solution comes in plans from standard to enterprise, and the call to action is a demo request.

Meltwater is a media intelligence platform for PR and communications leaders. It covers social listening, media monitoring, AI visibility tracking, media relations and influencer marketing. All four plans (Starter, Pro, Enterprise and Agency) are sold through sales.

It fits communications teams that want press, broadcast and social coverage in one place and don't mind an annual contract.

It pulls from social, news and broadcast sources, but the pricing page doesn't list the individual networks.

Instead of a self-serve trial, you get pre-built dashboards and a guided demo.

No price is listed (checked 17 October 2026). The Starter, Pro, Enterprise and Agency plans all say "Contact Sales", and the FAQ says most agreements are annual with a 12-month minimum.

When people on Reddit compare social listening tools, most of the advice is about how the tool gets used, not which one to pick. "the tool matters less than having someone actually check it daily," wrote u/TapDown_ in r/SocialMediaManagers (comment). Others stress speed: if someone posts a problem and you reply within a day or two, they read it, and later replies mostly go unread.

Small teams in those threads usually start with free tools, which our list of free social listening tools covers. If Reddit is your main channel, see the Reddit monitoring tools Redditors use, with our one-week noise test.

1. Decide what you're listening for: mentions of your brand, or people who need what you sell? Brand tools handle the first, buyer tools the second.
2. Check the sources, not the headline. Ask which platforms a tool reads and whether it includes comments or only posts.
3. Look for evidence. A good tool shows the sentence behind each tag or score so you can check it.
4. Decide who replies. Some tools draft replies and some only send alerts. Either way, a person should make the final call.
5. Compare billing. Mention quotas, keyword limits, seats and per-match pricing each scale differently.
6. Start with a trial. Run two tools on the same keywords for a week and count how many results were real.

Reddit's public data access changes between 31 October 2026 and March 2027, so tools that read Reddit from outside may cover less during that window. Later for Reddit, for example, announced on 3 October 2026 that its posting will stop on 1 January 2027. Ask each vendor what it will still be able to read on Reddit after the change.

Our reviews look at several of these tools one at a time, and the glossary explains terms like share of voice and sentiment analysis.

It depends on the job. Brand24, Awario and Brandwatch suit brand monitoring and reporting. If you want to find people asking for what you sell, look at tools that tag or score posts for buying intent, such as Octolens, Syften, Buska or HearBuyers.

They overlap. Monitoring usually means tracking mentions, while listening usually means analysing what those mentions say. See our guide to the best social media monitoring tools.

Yes, several. See the list of free social listening tools.

Yes, if you listen for buyer phrases instead of brand names. Our guide on whether social listening can help you find leads shows how.

Pick two tools from this list, one for brand monitoring and one for finding buyers, and run both on the same week of data. Count the results that led to something you would act on. For a closer look at either, read Octolens alternatives or Brand24 alternatives.

*Product names belong to their owners, and HearBuyers isn't affiliated with any of them. Facts about other products come from their own pages on the dates shown.*