TVEyes vs Critical Mention Pricing: Which to Buy

Short answer: TVEyes and Critical Mention are both broadcast monitoring specialists and neither publishes a price. TVEyes says its quote is built on the number of users, the regions covered and the data volume, and it offers a free trial. Critical Mention, owned by Onclusive since 2022, builds custom packages by customer type, offers nonprofit rates and has no trial on its site. Pick TVEyes if you want to test before you buy, need Nielsen audience data or ad filtering, or monitor outside the U.S. Pick Critical Mention if you also want a journalist database and Onclusive's wider suite. If your coverage is online only, you need neither.

Packaging and coverage were read from tveyes.com and criticalmention.com in September 2026. Neither vendor has enough Vendr purchase records to support a benchmark price, so this post quotes none.

TVEyes vs Critical Mention pricing at a glance

Is TVEyes cheaper than Critical Mention?

Nobody can answer that honestly from public data. Vendr's TVEyes page rests on one purchase and its Critical Mention page on seven purchases from two buyers. Those numbers describe a handful of companies, not the market, and any article quoting them as a typical price is guessing.

What you can compare is how each quote grows. TVEyes names its own three levers: users, regions and data volume. A single comms lead watching U.S. markets is a small license; an agency pulling several countries for many clients is a large one. Critical Mention prices by package type, and the bill grows with the broadcast markets, podcasts, media database seats, API access and client accounts you add. Our TVEyes pricing page breaks the TVEyes license down product by product, and the Critical Mention pricing page does the same for Onclusive's packages.

The practical move is the same for both: write one requirement list (markets by name, users, podcasts, retention, API) and send the identical list to each vendor. Two quotes on the same scope are the only real price comparison you will get.

Which is better for U.S. local TV news?

Critical Mention makes the more specific U.S. claim. Its broadcast page promises clips from every Nielsen Designated Market Area in the country, more than 2,500 TV and radio stations overall, unlimited cloud clip storage and the Wordplay editor for trimming HD clips. If a segment on a station in a mid-sized market is what your CEO asks about on Monday morning, that DMA-level promise is the thing to test.

TVEyes does not publish a DMA count, but it adds two things Critical Mention does not headline: Nielsen-powered viewership figures, so you can report how many people actually saw a segment, and ad filtering, which separates paid airings from earned coverage. For a PR team whose results get judged on audience rather than clip count, that reporting layer can matter more than a few extra stations. Test both on the same three segments from last month, one of them from a smaller market.

Which is better for podcasts and international coverage?

TVEyes, on the vendors' own numbers. It claims TV across more than 60 countries and 43 languages, over 16,000 online video channels, and somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000 podcasts (its company, API and home pages give different figures, so ask which one applies to your license). It also gives contact details for thousands of podcast hosts, which helps if you pitch shows rather than just monitor them.

Critical Mention covers online news in 90+ languages and claims broadcast in Europe and the Middle East, but its podcast page promises "thousands of top podcasts" without a figure. If your coverage lives in the U.S. and on TV, the difference is small. If it spans several countries or leans on podcasts, TVEyes has the stronger published case.

What does each one include beyond broadcast?

This is where the two diverge most. Critical Mention is part of Onclusive, so it sells a PR suite around the broadcast core: online news, social keyword search (with deeper listening upsold as Onclusive Social), a media contact database of millions of records, AI Brand Visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude and Perplexity, and an API delivering over two million segments a day. A single Onclusive relationship can cover most of a PR team's stack.

TVEyes stays closer to broadcast and audio. Beyond monitoring it sells a nearly two-decade archive (Archive+), analytics, ad detection across U.S., Canada and UK television, and an API with transcripts it rates at over 95% accuracy. It has no general journalist database. If you need to reach reporters and producers outside podcasts, you will either buy a database separately or use an email finder that verifies each address for the handful of producers you pitch regularly.

Is TVEyes still Meltwater's broadcast partner?

No. TVEyes supplied broadcast and podcast monitoring to Meltwater, and to Cision for podcasts, as a white-label partner for years. A Meltwater employee confirmed on Meltwater's community forum that Meltwater moved to Kinetiq as its broadcast partner on November 15, 2024. Older TVEyes clips still show their metrics in Meltwater reports but can no longer be opened. If you are weighing TVEyes direct against a suite that used to resell it, check whose broadcast feed that suite runs today. Our Meltwater pricing guide covers what Meltwater's own contracts cost.

TVEyes vs Critical Mention: who should buy which

What should you ask before signing either contract?

Ask both vendors for the quote itemized by line: markets or regions, users, podcasts, archive, media database and API. Ask how long clips and transcripts stay available, because retention differs by vendor and by package. Ask for the contract term, the notice period to cancel and whether the renewal price is capped. And with Critical Mention, ask whether Onclusive plans to move you to another platform during the term, since the parent company sells overlapping products.

When you need neither

Plenty of teams that shortlist two broadcast vendors do not actually get covered on TV. They need to know when their brand, products or competitors are mentioned online, whether the tone is turning, and to hear about a spike before it becomes a crisis. That is online news and brand monitoring, and it does not need a broadcast license.

EyeOut covers the web, news, X, Reddit, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube and review sites in one feed, reads every mention for sentiment and flags unusual spikes. Plans start at $59 a month billed yearly, or $79 month to month, with seats included. It does not monitor TV or radio, and if broadcast is your job we would rather you buy one of these two than pretend otherwise. If Meltwater is also on your list, see Critical Mention vs Meltwater pricing.