Octolens review: what it does, what it costs, who it fits

Octolens describes itself as social listening for the agent era. Its 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.

You start by choosing keywords: your brand, competitor names and the pain points you care about. Octolens tunes each keyword and uses your company context to judge every mention it finds. The home page also says it can track brand names that are common words without flooding you with noise.

Each mention gets a relevance rating (high, medium or low), a tag and a sentiment. Tags include buy intent, customer testimonial and promotional. You can build filtered feeds or use the prebuilt ones for brand monitoring, competitor intelligence and buy intent. Custom AI agents are listed on Enterprise.

Every plan lists Slack and email alerts, webhooks, an MCP server and developer access, plus CSV export and a graph of mentions over time. That makes it easy to push mentions into other systems, which suits teams that automate their workflows.

Prices on 17 October 2026:

Extra keywords cost $10 each and extra mentions $0.013 each. Pro keeps two years of history; Scale keeps all of it. Every plan has unlimited seats, and Enterprise adds multiple workspaces. The 7-day free trial includes Pro features and up to 5,000 mentions, with no card required.

Octolens fits teams that want to follow every mention of a brand, not only buyers: developer relations and community teams answering questions, marketing teams watching sentiment, support teams catching bug reports, and agencies running several brands. It also suits you if your audience is on GitHub, Hacker News, YouTube or LinkedIn, or if you want mention data piped into your own agents.

We looked for these on its home and pricing pages and did not find them. They are not criticisms:

• Reply drafting. The pages list tags and feeds but no drafted replies.
• A numeric intent score. The rating is high, medium or low.
• A published monthly-plan price below $199 a month.

If any of these matter to you, ask the vendor before you buy.

HearBuyers does a narrower job. It reads only X and Reddit, scores each post from 0 to 100 for buying intent, highlights the sentence that shows the need, and drafts a reply for a person to approve and post. It starts from your company website instead of a keyword list. It is free for 14 days with no card, then from $19 a month. It does not cover Octolens's wider source list, sentiment or data integrations.

Some teams use both: Octolens for mentions, HearBuyers for buyers. See the full Octolens alternative page, the HearBuyers vs Octolens comparison, or our guide to social listening tools.

If your question is "who is asking for what we sell?" rather than "what is being said about us?", paste your website into HearBuyers and read the first matches.