Best Social Media Listening Tools in 2026 (Free & Paid)

It is always wise to listen before you speak, and social media listening tools always help you to do that. In 2025, a social media monitoring tool isn’t just a value-added benefit. It’s a must-have for your brand marketing. Otherwise, how will you be able to figure out what is working for your brand and what is not? Social listening tools convert all the online chatter into actionable insights, helping you optimize your strategy in a way that customers love. 

However, a full-time job can be sorting out the best listening tool with many available options. But don’t sweat it – we’ve got your back. This blog doesn’t just list the best social media listening tools but dives deep into each one, covering pricing, features, benefits, and more. 

So, without much further ado, let’s get started: 

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of actively monitoring conversations that are happening across social media networks about your brand, products, competitors, or other industry-related stuff. It lets you track every mention of your brand on social media content in real time. With practical social listening tools, you can quickly learn how customers feel about your products and services and what they expect from you as a brand. This information can help refine and improve marketing strategies, advertising, and customer experience. 

10+ Best Social Media Listening Tools in 2025 (Free & Paid) 

Check out these top social media listening tools in 2025 to enhance and monitor your brand mentions: 

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a well-known choice for digital marketers and experts, whether for large or small companies. This tool offers social listening capabilities with amazing features called ‘streams’ and ‘insights.’ Streams monitor keywords, brand mentions, and hashtags, whereas insights contribute to competitor research through sentiment analysis and AI capabilities. Here are some more features to look at:

• Broadcast social listening data coverage. 
• Real-time data alerts
• AI-powered insights 
• Discover partnerships and collaborations
• Custom social listening reports 
• Predictive forecasting
• Peak detection

With the most comprehensive set of tools available in social listening software, Hootsuite Listening lets you use real-time insights to make informed decisions and take action. 

Price: The professional plan starts at $49 per month. 

2. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is one of the most widely used social media listening tools available. It is an excellent tool for brands to analyze social media conversations, segment audiences, social listening, and track competitors. It pulls valuable conversational insights from various sources and analyzes historical and real-time conversations. This helps identify current trends and optimize your social media engagement strategies while giving you a better understanding of your audience. Here are some of the essential features of Brandwatch:

• Unlimited search queries
• Boolean operators 
• Historical data
• Millions of data points 
• Multiple languages
• Sentiment analysis
• AI smart alerts 
• Explore mentions 

All these features make it one of the market’s most comprehensive social listening tools. 

Price: Custom pricing options

3. Brand24

Brand24 provides solutions to all your social listening requirements and real-time insights into online conversations. It tracks mentions across all social media feeds, networks, blogs, forums, and news sites, providing robust reporting and sentiment analysis. Its easy-to-use interface and comprehensive monitoring features help brands stay on top of their research. Here are the top features of the platform:

• Advanced sentiment analysis
• Reliable metrics and analytics
• Automate reporting 
• Track hashtags 
• AI insights to automate data interpretation
• Topic analysis 

Price: Individual pricing starts at $199 per month, billed annually.

4. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a renowned social media listening tool that gives significant insights into relevant conversations for your brand to monitor. It offers real-time monitoring, allowing users to track ongoing conversations and trends as they develop. The most notable feature of the platform is the query builder. Using this feature, businesses can build listening queries to monitor keywords and hashtags related to them. Some other key features include:

• Real-time monitoring 
• Sentiment analysis
• Detailed reporting
• User-friendly interface
• AI-powered insights 
• Easy build queries
• Trend identification 
• Crisis management

Price: Standard pricing starts at $249 per seat per month.

5. Buzzsumo

BuzzSumo is primarily a content analysis tool and acts as social media listening software. The platform lets you track trending topics and popular content to inspire you and improve your marketing strategies. This social media listening tool even lets you set up alerts for brands, topics, and keywords to help you stay on top of the latest trends and conversations. Some of the most relevant features include:

• Content discovery
• Social media monitoring
• Audience segmentation
• Competitive analysis
• Configurable alerts 
• Advance analytics

BuzzSumo is the perfect tool for content marketers, PR professionals, and agencies seeking assertive outreach and social media monitoring tools. 

Price: Plans start at $199 per month. 

6. Awario

Awario is one of the best social listening tools that monitors brand mentions, keywords, and competitors in real time and provides detailed insights into sentiments, reach, and engagement. The tool’s Boolean search capabilities allow you to create specific queries for more precise results. Awario is known for its affordability and ease of use, making it a popular choice among brands and agencies. Some of the best features include:

• Real-time monitoring 
• Sentiment analysis 
• Influencer tracking 
• Boolean Search
• White label reporting
• User-friendly interface

These features and interface make it an excellent tool for those seeking an easily accessible and powerful social media tool. 

Price: The starter plan begins at $29 per month. 

7. Keyhole

Keyhole is a social media listening and analytics tool primarily designed for businesses, marketers, and agencies to track online conversations, measure the performance of social media campaigns, and gain valuable insights into audience behavior. You can use the platform to track specific hashtags and keywords and find collaborators in your niche. Additionally, its volume predictions feature lets you anticipate when your creative and engaging social media posts will go viral in the social media community, allowing you to strategize yours. Here are some more features for you:

• Track brand mentions 
• Analyze sentiments 
• Trending conversations 
• Detailed reporting 
• Campaign tracking 
• User-oriented interface
• Hashtag tracking 

Price: Custom pricing options 

8. Later

Later is one of the top industry-relevant social listening tools that was launched recently.  It gives you curated actionable insights that help you build community and give you a competitive edge. Later’s social listening tool gives marketers actionable social intelligence data to inform content strategy, measure campaign performance, and monitor their brand health. Additionally, you can quickly gauge your brand reputation with detailed sentiment analysis and adjust your social strategy accordingly. With Later social listening, you can:

• Analyze brand sentiment
• Trend analysis
• Creator collaboration 
• Campaign tracking
• Social media monitoring 

Price: The Starter plan starts at $USD 16.67 per month

9. Meltwater

Meltwater is an advanced social listening and media intelligence platform that turns extensive social, consumer, and media data into actionable insights. It provides insights from social media, news sites, blogs, forums, and other online sources, making it an invaluable resource for businesses looking to manage their brand reputation. Some of the prominent features include:

• Extensive media monitoring 
• Unlimited keyword search
• Unified platform 
• Visual analytics and enrichments 
• Influencer identification 
• Crisis management
• Sentiment analysis 
• Customizable reports 

Price: Custom pricing on request 

10. Exolyt

Exolyt is a go-to tool for TikTok brands and presents insights to help your business prosper on TikTok. Using this tool, you can monitor any TikTok profile, from influencers to competitive brands. Additionally, the tool presents current analytics and statistical data, such as total views, engagement rate, trending sounds, hashtags, effects, and more for one of the top social media platforms, Tiktok. Here are some top-notch features:

• Advance tracking
• Robust TikTok analytics 
• Trend analysis
• Competitor tracking 
• Easy user interface

Price: The paid plan starts at €49/month.

11. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is another famous social listening tool that empowers brands to monitor and analyze conversations across social media channels. It has advanced and generative AI capabilities with extensive data coverage. It allows you to see the volume, context, and sentiment of online conversion historically and in real time. The tool’s listening feature aggregates 500 million conversations daily across 350 million sources. Using this social listening platform, you can:

• Get access to extensive data coverage 
• AI recommendations
• Trend analysis 
• Crisis management
• Bright themes and listening topics 
• Smart alerts 
• Smart dashboards 

Price: Custom pricing on request 

12. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is one of the top free social listening tools. It lets you set notifications for specific keywords, topics, and conversations, helping businesses start their social listening journey quickly. However, this tool does not have advanced features such as sentiment analysis, advanced dashboards, or customizable filters. Google Alerts lets you filter results based on source, language, and region, and you can customize the frequency of alerts and choose only to exhibit the best results.

• Keyword monitoring 
• Customization
• Alert preview
• Competitor monitoring
• Tracking keyword evolution

Price: It is a 100% free service with no hidden costs. 

13. Social Mention

Social Mention is an easy-to-use, no-cost social listening tool that tracks and measures what people say about your brand. It monitors 100+ social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, etc. You can search for specific keywords or brands that you want to track and get a list of filtered results with analytics. Some of the prominent features are:

• Real-time monitoring
• Keyword tracking 
• Sentiment analytics 
• Customizable alerts 
• Advanced social listening 
• Competitive analysis 

Price: Free for 7 days, then only $99/month, billed quarterly.

14. AnswerThePublic

Answer the Public is a prominent free social listening tool focused on keyword and search query insights. It analyzes what people are asking on search engines and presents those questions to you visually. The free social listening tool helps you gather consumer insights, helping your brand create fresh content and optimize for a better customer experience. Key features include:

• Analyzes search queries to identify FAQs
• Provides keyword insights 
• Easy-to-understand data format
• Unlimited searches and exports
• Alert for new suggestions

Price: Individual plan starts at $11 per month

15. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is the go-to social media listening tool. It helps you easily monitor your brand, campaign, or any hashtag of interest and provides you with all the analytics you need to assess their performance on X.

With Mentionlytics, you can gather all tweets (and the discussions around them) containing any hashtag you want simply by adding it as a keyword to monitor. The tool will automatically analyze all this data to give you hashtag insights and actionable tips. You can assess your hashtag campaigns’ performance, monitor your brand reputation, and keep up with trends even in real-time with email alerts and detailed reports. Key features include:

• Monitoring & Listening
• Data Management & Analysis
• Geographic Coverage
• Easily reporting for keyword targeting
• Online Media Channels
• Custom Feeds and Alerts

Price: The basic plan starts at $49/month.

The Benefits of Using Top Social Listening Tools For Your Business:

Let’s explore some of the top-notch benefits of using social listening tools for your business:

a). Audience Insights

Social listening and monitoring social media can help you understand what your audience says about your brand’s products and services. These insights can help you create better marketing strategies and campaigns that align with your audience and address their concerns. Audience insights are invaluable, helping you highlight and optimize everything that needs improvement. 

b). Keep Track of Trends 

If you want your brand’s social media presence to be successful, you must focus on staying on top of the trends. Social listening platforms detect patterns in conversations around relevant keywords and hashtags. This helps you see what is trending that users love, which keeps you way ahead of your competitors. 

c). Brand Positioning

One of the significant benefits of using social listening tools is brand positioning. Brands can quickly see how they are performing against other companies in their industry. Social listening tools can even monitor engagement levels with your brand and determine if there’s a problem with awareness. All this can help you improve and optimize your branding strategy for better results.

d). Product Development

After hearing all the customer viewpoints and feedback, what should you do? Many brands are confused about how to turn feedback into actionable items or ideas for improved branding. However, by using social listening tools to monitor what people think about your brand, you can see what works and what doesn’t. This will ultimately allow you to create better products and services. 

Conclusion

The importance of social media cannot be overstated in the current scenario, and social listening platforms empower you to leverage it. They give you valuable insights to make informed branding and product development tactics decisions. However, with the proper monitoring tool, you can gain valuable insights and better understand the scope of your work. We hope this blog will help you choose the top social media listening tools aligned with your brand. So, research well, use our insights to add value to your business, and take your branding to another level.