Hootsuite social listening: which plan includes it, and what it costs

Yes, but not on the plans that publish a price. Hootsuite sells listening as Lumen, the insights and listening module inside Hootsuite Social OS, and its plan page names advanced listening only under the Enterprise tier, which is custom priced. Standard at $99, Professional at $199 and Advanced at $399 per user per month do not list a listening capability.

What those three do list is monitoring. Standard says "Monitor your brand and competitors", which in practice means keyword and competitor streams you read yourself rather than sentiment scoring, theme clustering and anomaly alerting across the open web.

Hootsuite does not publish a price for it. Advanced listening sits in the Enterprise tier, which shows "Custom" and a demo request in place of a figure, so the honest answer is that it costs whatever your quote comes back at. The published plans below it are $99, $199 and $399 per user per month on annual billing.

For a sense of the range, procurement data from Vendr, which records real signed contracts, puts the median Hootsuite deal at about $12,685 a year across a sample of roughly 74 to 97 purchases, with a range from around $5,600 to $41,137. Treat that as the shape of the market rather than a quote you can hold anyone to.

Hootsuite is a social media management suite that includes a listening module. The distinction matters when you are comparing it against a dedicated listening platform, because the seat price you see buys publishing, scheduling, a shared inbox and reporting on the accounts you own.

A dedicated listening tool inverts that. It has no publishing calendar and no inbox, and everything you pay for goes into finding mentions across the open web, scoring them and alerting on them. Neither shape is better in the abstract. It depends entirely on whether your team publishes.

Lumen is the name Hootsuite now gives its insights and listening product inside Hootsuite Social OS, alongside Perch for publishing, Nest for the inbox, Wisdom for AI and Parliament for employee advocacy. Its product page describes tracking billions of conversations, monitoring brand mentions, sentiment, reviews and emerging risks in real time, and measuring brand health, share of voice and competitive performance.

The same name now appears on Talkwalker, which Hootsuite owns. Talkwalker's pricing page is headed "Lumen by Talkwalker" and offers Core, Analyze and Business tiers with the instruction to pick a plan and get a custom quote, with no figure on any tier.

In Hootsuite's own plan copy they are two different things at two different prices. Monitoring appears on Standard at $99 a seat and means watching streams for your brand name and your competitors. Listening appears only on Enterprise and is described as uncovering trends across social, digital and AI.

The practical difference is who does the reading. Monitoring hands you a filtered feed. Listening scores every mention for sentiment and theme, measures share of voice over time, and tells you when volume or tone is abnormal for a given source rather than waiting for you to notice.

If listening is the reason you are buying and publishing is not, the cheapest credible published options are Awario at $29 a month, Mentionlytics at $49 and EyeOut at $59, all billed yearly. EyeOut includes seats on every plan and collects in real time at entry level, which is the spec most self-serve tools reserve for their $399 tier.

If you need publishing too, the comparison changes and Hootsuite's bundle is fair value. What does not work is buying a publishing suite in order to reach listening you then discover is on a tier above the one you priced.