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

Syften says it monitors the web's leading communities for you. A filter is a search query for the mentions you want to track. AI filtering removes spam, duplicates and weak matches, and whatever is left reaches you quickly.

Its FAQ lists the public web, Reddit, X, Indie Hackers, Hacker News, GitHub, Product Hunt, the Stack Exchange family, forums, Lobste.rs, Dev.to, Steemit, Slack communities, newsletters, YouTube, podcasts, Bluesky and Mastodon. On the plans below, X and YouTube monitoring cost extra.

The FAQ says Syften aims for a delay of under a minute on Reddit and no more than 15 minutes on X.

Onboarding is automated. When you sign up, Syften researches your company, competitors and product names and creates your first filters. You refine them with its search syntax and can turn on AI filtering. For harder cases you write an accept rule, which is a short instruction such as "true when the author is evaluating a B2B tool". Archive search lets you look back at past mentions, and agencies can tag filters by client.

Syften has a page on buying-intent alerts. It suggests setting up separate filters for recommendation requests, competitor alternatives, complaints and problem descriptions. According to the page, Syften shows you what someone said instead of attaching an unexplained score to an account.

Alerts can go out by email, Slack, RSS, webhook, developer access or an MCP connection.

Monthly prices on 17 October 2026:

On Standard and PRO, X monitoring costs another $40 a month and YouTube another $20 a month. You can get in touch for a custom plan. The 14-day trial runs on PRO, needs no card and shows mentions from the last 60 days.

Syften suits people who think in keywords and want fast, filtered alerts from many communities: founders and small teams watching for recommendation requests, developer relations staff, and agencies with several clients. If Hacker News, Indie Hackers, forums or GitHub matter to your market, Syften is the better fit, because HearBuyers does not read those sources.

These are not criticisms. We looked on its home page and did not find:

• Reply drafting.
• A numeric buying-intent score.
• An alert channel beyond those above, such as a shared inbox with stages.

HearBuyers reads X and Reddit only. You paste in your company website, and it works out who your buyers are, the problems they describe and where they ask about them. Each post gets a score from 0 to 100 along with the sentence that shows the need. Strong matches get a drafted reply, which a person approves and posts. HearBuyers is free for 14 days with no card, then starts at $19 a month.

See the Syften alternative page, the HearBuyers vs Syften comparison, or our guide to keyword monitoring tools.

For how often Syften comes up next to other tools in Reddit threads, see Reddit monitoring tools Redditors use.

Write down the first three filters you'd set up in Syften. Then paste your website into HearBuyers and see which of those buyers it finds without any filters.