Mention vs Brand24: Pricing, Sources and Which to Pick

Short answer: Brand24 publishes a complete price ladder from $199 to $1,499 a month and tells you exactly how often each tier collects data. Mention publishes nothing: its pricing page renders a Company Plan card reading "Starting at $" with the number missing, and states no keyword, mention or seat limits anywhere. If you need to compare two products on what they cost and what you get, only one of them is actually participating. Brand24 is the safer buy for most teams on that basis alone, but its entry plan refreshes only every 12 hours, which rules it out if you are buying for early warning.

Last updated August 2026. Brand24 figures read from its public pricing page on August 13, 2026. Mention's pricing page checked on August 1 and again on August 13, 2026, with no published figure on either date. Confirm both in a browser before you sign anything.

Mention vs Brand24 at a glance

How much does Brand24 cost?

Brand24 publishes five tiers and, unusually for this category, states the data refresh interval on each one. That second column is the part most buyers skim past and then regret.

Two things stand out. The keyword allowance is tight at the bottom: three keywords at $199 covers a brand name and two variations, which is not enough for anyone also tracking a product line and a couple of competitors. And unlimited users arrive at Team, which is genuinely generous compared with the per-seat vendors, so a five person comms team pays $299 rather than five times anything.

How much does Mention cost?

Nobody outside Mention can tell you, and that is not a research failure. Its pricing page displays a single Company Plan card with the text "Starting at $ Per month Per month, billed yearly" and no figure where the number should be. There are no keyword counts, no mention caps, no seat limits and no tier names beyond that one card. Every path forward is a free trial or a demo request.

We checked on August 1, 2026 and again on August 13, 2026, and the page was in the same state both times, so this is a deliberate move to quote-based selling rather than a rendering bug that nobody has noticed. Mention used to publish a normal tiered price list, which is why so many comparison articles still quote figures for it. Treat any specific Mention price you read elsewhere as historical unless the author says when they checked.

This matters more than it sounds. Quote-only pricing is a reliable signal that the vendor wants to size you before it prices you, and it usually means the number moves with your company size rather than your usage. For a small team that is a bad trade, because you are negotiating without a reference point. For a large one it can work in your favor.

Does Brand24 update in real time?

Only from the Pro tier at $399 a month billed yearly. Brand24's own pricing table states that Individual at $199 refreshes every 12 hours and Team at $299 refreshes hourly. Real-time collection starts on Pro. So if you are buying a monitoring tool specifically to catch a problem while it is still small, the two cheapest Brand24 plans cannot do that job.

A 12 hour cycle is perfectly reasonable for tracking campaign volume or assembling a monthly report. It is not early warning. Something that breaks at 9am can land in your feed after dinner, by which point the useful window for a quiet correction has closed. The word "real-time" appears throughout the marketing of nearly every tool in this category, including on plans that collect on a schedule, so the pricing table is the only place worth reading.

Brand24 or Mention: which should you pick?

Run it as three questions rather than a feature comparison.

Can you get budget approved without a number? If not, Brand24 wins by default. You can put $199, $299 or $399 a month into a spreadsheet today and know what you get for it. With Mention you are booking a call first, and for a lot of teams that alone decides it.

How many keywords do you actually need? Write the list out: brand name, common misspellings, product names, your two or three main competitors, your founder or CEO if they are public facing. Most teams land between 8 and 15. Brand24 gives you 3 at $199 and 7 at $299, so a realistic list pushes you to Pro at $399. Price the tier that fits your real list, not the tier on the homepage.

How fast do you need to know? If a mention needs a response the same day, you need real-time collection, and on Brand24 that is $399. This is the single most common reason teams shortlist a Brand24 alternative: the product is well built, but real-time sits two tiers above where the budget was.

Mention's genuine strengths are its Boolean query builder, which is more precise than most, and a shared inbox workflow that suits teams replying to mentions rather than just reading them. If either of those is the reason you are looking, the trial is worth running. Just go into the pricing conversation knowing you have no public anchor to negotiate against, and look at what a Mention alternative publishes openly so you have one.

What each one actually monitors

Brand24 publishes its source list plainly: social media, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts and reviews, with X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, Telegram, TripAdvisor and the App Store named individually. It claims 25 million online sources. That breadth is real and it is the main reason the product has held its position.

Mention claims 1 billion sources and describes itself as tracking "any topic on social media and the web", but does not enumerate categories on its main pages the way Brand24 does. Big source counts are close to meaningless as a comparison metric anyway, since vendors count them differently and nobody audits the claim. What matters is whether the specific places your buyers talk are covered, so test both against three or four real URLs during the trial: the forum thread you know exists, the review page, the podcast episode.

For teams in regulated categories there is a second requirement neither tool is built for. Spotting a complaint is monitoring, but evidencing that it was seen, routed and resolved inside a required window is an obligation-tracking problem, and it usually belongs in the system where your controls and obligations are already mapped rather than in a listening dashboard. Keep the two jobs separate or you will end up using a mention feed as an audit trail, which it is not.

Where both of them leave a gap

The pattern this comparison keeps running into is that real-time collection is priced as a premium feature. Brand24 puts it at $399. BrandMentions puts it at $399. Mentionlytics reaches continuous collection at $299. Awario, BuzzSumo, YouScan and Talkwalker publish no refresh interval at all, at prices from $29 to enterprise quote-only, so paying more does not reliably buy you a stated one. We keep the full comparison current across nineteen vendors on our brand monitoring tools comparison, and there is a wider view of the market on the social listening pricing comparison.

EyeOut exists because of that gap. It collects in real time on every plan including the $59 Starter, covers web, news, X, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, forums, podcasts and review sites, includes seats rather than charging per head, and publishes the price. Starter is 3 keywords and 5,000 mentions, Growth is $149 for 10 keywords and 50,000 mentions, Pro is $399 for 30 keywords, 250,000 mentions and API access.

To be straight about the limits, since this page is about vendors being straight: EyeOut does not publish or schedule social posts, so it is not a Hootsuite or Sprout replacement. It does not do image or logo recognition, which is what you would buy YouScan for. It reads the published text layer of podcasts rather than transcribing spoken audio. It does not backfill mentions from before you started tracking, and it does not monitor what ChatGPT or other AI assistants say about your brand. If any of those is your actual requirement, buy the tool built for it.

The honest summary

Brand24 is the more complete answer for most US teams comparing these two, mainly because you can plan around it. The prices are published, the refresh intervals are published, seats are unlimited from $299, and the source coverage is broad and openly documented. Its weakness is the shape of the ladder: 3 keywords at $199 and real time only from $399 means a realistic setup costs more than the advertised entry point suggests.

Mention is harder to recommend in August 2026, not because the product is weak but because it has stopped competing on anything a buyer can check before a sales call. A pricing page rendering "Starting at $" with no number is a reasonable thing to walk away from. If the Boolean querying or the shared inbox is what you specifically need, run the trial. Otherwise start with vendors that will tell you what they charge, and use that as your first filter rather than your last.