Social listening software and social media monitoring software that watches every channel in real time

Most comparisons of social listening software line up monthly prices and stop there. That comparison is close to meaningless, because the vendors are not selling the same unit.

Start with the meter. Brand24 sells keywords and a mention cap: its entry plan is three keywords and 2,000 tracked mentions a month. Awario sells topics and is far more generous on volume, 30,000 mentions at the entry tier. BuzzSumo does not meter mentions at all, it meters saved alerts, and its cheapest plan gives you two. Determ sells topics with unlimited users attached. Sprout Social, Hootsuite and Agorapulse sell seats, and then treat listening as a separate conversation. If your brand has one name and no product lines, three keywords is plenty. If you need the brand, six products, two executives and four competitors, you are shopping in a different tier than the headline price suggests.

Then look at the refresh interval, which is the least advertised number in this market and often the one that matters most. Real-time collection converges on roughly $399 a month across the vendors that state it, and several well-known platforms collect far less often than buyers assume at entry level. Brand24's cheapest plan refreshes every 12 hours. Mentionlytics starts at every 12 hours. BrandMentions starts at daily. Four of the fifteen platforms below publish no interval at all, at any price, and that silence spans the whole range from $29 to $499, so paying more does not reliably buy you a stated interval.

The third thing to total is seats. Per-seat pricing looks cheap on a pricing page and stops looking cheap the moment your PR lead, two social managers and a support supervisor all need to log in. Brand24 includes unlimited users from its Team plan upward, Determ and YouScan include unlimited users, and the publishing suites charge for every head.

One caveat covers a chunk of this market. Six of the vendors people routinely shortlist publish no list price whatsoever and route every buyer to a demo. That is not just a slower sales cycle, it is a different budget tier: procurement data collected by Vendr across 40 Brandwatch purchases puts the median contract at $50,000 a year, with observed deals from $19,542 to $81,200. Mention is the strangest case of all. Its pricing page renders a single Company Plan card reading "Starting at $" with the figure literally missing, and states no keyword, mention or seat limits anywhere. That was true on August 1 and still true on August 13, 2026, so it reads as a deliberate move to quote-only selling rather than a rendering fault.