Pulsar Platform Pricing and What a Pulsar Contract Costs

Short answer: Pulsar does not publish a price. pulsarplatform.com/pricing returns a 404, and every product page (TRAC, CORE, TRENDS, Narratives AI, Crisis Oracle, CLEAR) ends in "Book a Demo". Pulsar is sold by Pulsar Group plc, the London-listed company that was called Access Intelligence until May 2024 and also owns Vuelio and Isentia. Expect an annual, custom-quoted contract built on the modules, data sources and history you need. If your job is alerts when news and Reddit mention your brand, a tool with a published monthly price will cost far less.

Pulsar's homepage, platform page, About page, product pages for TRAC and CORE, and its own comparison pages were read in October 2026, along with Pulsar Group's name-change announcement. Pulsar prints no figure anywhere on its site, so this article does not invent one.

Pulsar platform pricing at a glance

The menu matters more than it looks. Pulsar is not one product with tiers, it is a set of modules, and the quote you get depends on which of them you take, how many topics or searches you run, which data sources you switch on and how far back you want history. Two teams that both say "we bought Pulsar" can be paying for very different things.

Who you are buying Pulsar from

Pulsar started in the early 2010s inside the social insights practice of the London consultancy Face. In October 2019 it joined Access Intelligence, an AIM-listed group that already owned Vuelio and ResponseSource. The group bought the Australian monitoring company Isentia in 2021, and in May 2024 it renamed itself Pulsar Group plc and began trading under the ticker PULS. Pulsar has offices in London, Los Angeles and Sydney.

For a US buyer that has two practical effects. First, your contract is with a UK-listed parent, so check the billing currency and the governing law before you sign. Second, the group sells Vuelio and Isentia for media monitoring, so a Pulsar renewal can come with an offer to bundle news or broadcast monitoring from a sister brand. That can be good value, but only if you ask for each part priced separately.

What drives the cost of a Pulsar contract

Pulsar does not say how it prices, but its own product pages show where the money goes.

• Data sources. TRAC covers social networks plus "the broadest selection of online news, print, TV, radio and podcast", forums, blogs, search and first-party data, collected from 195 countries. It also offers territory-specific sources such as VK, Naver, Weibo, Little Red Book, WeChat and Baidu. Broadcast, print and regional sources are the expensive end of any listening contract.
• Audience segmentation. The feature Pulsar leads with is splitting a conversation into the communities taking part in it. That is research work, and it is the reason Pulsar is usually bought by insights and strategy teams rather than by a social media manager.
• AI modules. Narratives AI, Crisis Oracle and the CLEAR agent are named products. Ask whether each is included or an add-on, because the answer changes the quote.
• Owned channel analytics. CORE is a separate product for the accounts you manage. If you already have Sprout Social, Hootsuite or a similar tool doing this, you may not need it.
• Seats, topics and history. None of these limits is published, so they are set in negotiation.

What third-party listings say about Pulsar pricing

The pages that rank for this query are software directories, and they disagree. One directory says CORE "starts at approximately $1,200 for 150,000 mentions", which does not match Pulsar's own description of CORE as an owned-channel analytics product rather than a mention-based listening tool. G2 shows no figure and places Pulsar in its mid-market pricing band. Vendr, which publishes private SaaS purchase data for many vendors in this market, has no Pulsar buyer guide.

So there is no reliable public number. Treat any single figure you read as a prompt for a question in the demo, not as a budget line. What you can say with confidence is that Pulsar is sold the way Brandwatch, Talkwalker and Meltwater are sold: a custom annual quote after a demo.

How Pulsar compares with tools that publish a price

Pulsar's own comparison page against Brand24 makes the same split we would: it describes Brand24 as accessible monitoring with "transparent pricing from $199/month" and Pulsar as enterprise intelligence. That is a fair reading. Pulsar is not trying to be the cheap option. For the full list of listening vendors that do print a price, see our social listening pricing comparison, and for another quote-only platform that changed hands recently, our breakdown of NewsWhip pricing after the Sprout Social deal.

Is Pulsar worth it?

For the right team, yes. If you run research for a consumer brand and need to know how different communities talk about the same topic, which narratives are growing and which audience a campaign actually reached, Pulsar does work that a mention tracker does not. Its global source list, including Chinese, Korean and Russian platforms, is also hard to match.

It is a poor fit when the real need is operational: someone in marketing or PR wants to know the same day when a news site, a subreddit or a podcast mentions the company, and whether the tone is turning. Paying for audience segmentation and a narratives engine to get an alert is the long way round. The same is true of most enterprise suites, which is why we compare Brandwatch pricing and the Talkwalker alternatives on the same terms.

Questions to ask Pulsar before you sign

1. Which modules are in the quote (TRAC, CORE, TRENDS, Narratives AI, Crisis Oracle, CLEAR), and what does each cost on its own?
2. How many topics or searches, how many seats and how many months of history are included?
3. Which data sources are included and which cost extra, especially broadcast, print, X and the Chinese platforms?
4. Is the contract billed in US dollars or pounds, and which law governs it?
5. What is the renewal notice period, and is the price fixed at renewal?
6. Will the renewal be offered with Vuelio or Isentia bundled, and can you decline that?

If you plan to load your own data into TRAC, such as survey answers or support exports, clean it before the pilot so the demo is judged on the analysis and not on duplicates. A data cleaning tool that dedupes and merges messy CSV files is a quick way to do that.

A focused option when the job is brand monitoring

Many people pricing Pulsar are really pricing the monitoring part of it. They want to catch mentions in news, on Reddit and in podcasts, see the sentiment, and get warned when something spikes, without a research platform on top.

That is what EyeOut does. It collects Google News, Reddit, Mastodon, Hacker News, Lemmy and Apple Podcasts every 30 minutes, scores each mention for sentiment and theme, and from Growth up runs a crisis radar that flags a keyword when its volume or tone breaks from its own baseline. The prices are on the page: $39, $94, $249 and $499 a month billed yearly, with 1, 3, 10 and 25 seats included and API access from Pro. You can cancel monthly plans any time.

EyeOut is narrower than Pulsar, and it says so. It does not segment audiences, analyze images or video, cover X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or LinkedIn, or reach Chinese platforms, and it is not real time. If those are the job, take the Pulsar demo. If the job is knowing what is being said about you on the open web this morning, a monitoring tool does it for a fraction of an enterprise contract. Our crisis monitoring page shows how the spike alerts work.