Free social listening tools that are actually free

The honest list of free social listening tools is short. Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts cover the web, news, blogs and forums. F5Bot, Reddit Pro and KWatch.io cover Reddit. Nothing free listens properly to Instagram, TikTok or Facebook conversations, so for those you either search by hand or pay.

That stack still catches more than most small businesses expect, and it costs nothing to run alongside anything else.

How we chose

Only free plans and free-forever tools made the list, with limits read from each vendor's own page on 4 October 2026. Free trials are useful but they are not free tools, so they are listed separately near the end. Paid listening platforms are compared in the best social listening tools.

The free social listening tools at a glance

The tools

Google Alerts

Google Alerts sends you an email "when new results for a topic show up in Google Search" (Google's help page). For each alert you choose how often to be emailed, which types of sites, the language, the region and how many results.

Good for: your brand name, competitors' names and category phrases across news sites and blogs.

Limits: it only knows what Google indexes and chooses to include, so social posts rarely appear, and nothing arrives instantly. Google publishes no cap on alerts and no coverage guarantee. If it is not enough, the Google Alerts alternatives page covers the step up.

Talkwalker Alerts

Talkwalker Alerts is a free email alert service from Talkwalker, the listening company Hootsuite acquired in 2024. You choose result types from news, blogs, discussion forums and Twitter, in 22 languages, delivered to any email address, as often as "As it happens".

Good for: a second net next to Google Alerts. The forum coverage is the main reason to run both.

Limits: no published cap and no published coverage list. Its alert form lists Twitter as a type, but we could not confirm how much X content it returns today, so do not rely on it for X.

F5Bot

F5Bot emails you when your keywords appear in new Reddit posts or comments, and on Hacker News and Lobsters. The free plan is for personal use only: 5 keywords, up to 20 alerts a day, delivered up to two hours after the match, with seven days of match history (F5Bot's tiers).

Good for: the fastest free way to hear about Reddit threads.

Limits: business use needs Silver at $9.99 a month, and the free plan cannot track very common words.

Reddit Pro

Reddit Pro is Reddit's own free toolkit for businesses. Its page describes tracking "keywords and phrases like your business, products, competitors, and more", plus a business profile and performance metrics for your posts.

Good for: seeing which communities talk about your category and how that changes, from Reddit's own data.

Limits: it is a dashboard you check, not an alert that comes to you.

KWatch.io

KWatch.io's free plan gives you 2 Reddit keyword alerts and 2 Hacker News alerts. Paid plans from $19 a month add more keywords and small allowances on X, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Good for: a second free Reddit alert alongside F5Bot, for example on a competitor's domain.

Limits: two Reddit keywords is very little, and nothing beyond Reddit and Hacker News is free.

Metricool's free plan

Metricool is a scheduling and analytics tool, but its free plan includes analysing 5 competitor profiles, with 30 days of analytics, for one brand. The free plan does not include LinkedIn or X.

Good for: watching what competitors post and how it performs, which is monitoring rather than listening.

Limits: it shows what competitors publish, not what anyone says about them. The difference is explained in social listening vs social monitoring.

Social Blade

Social Blade tracks public statistics for creators on YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Facebook and Instagram. A free account gets 5 favourites per platform and 30 days of table data, with ads.

Good for: follower and view trends for competitor or creator accounts.

Limits: numbers only, no conversation, and it is built around creators rather than brands.

What free cannot do

Instagram, TikTok and Facebook conversations. None of the free tools above listen to them. The free workaround is manual: once a week, search your brand and competitors' names and hashtags in each app's own search and note anything new.

Sentiment and reach. Free tools give you links. Working out whether the mood is getting better or worse is your job.

History. You only see mentions from the day you start, and F5Bot's free plan keeps seven days of matches. Save anything that matters.

Free trials worth timing

When you are ready to test paid listening, these trials need no card, so start one only when you have a launch, campaign or crisis to watch.

• Brand24: 14 days. Paid plans from $199 a month billed annually.
• Syften: 14 days on its top plan. Paid plans from $29.95 a month.
• Hootsuite: 14 days. Listening is part of its paid plans from $99 per user a month billed annually.
• Sprout Social: 30 days. Listening is a paid add-on above the base plans.

A free stack you can set up in 30 minutes

1. Google Alerts for your brand, each competitor and two category phrases, set to once a day.
2. Talkwalker Alerts for the same terms, with discussion forums selected.
3. F5Bot for your domain, your brand and your main competitor, with the whole flag on short names.
4. Reddit Pro for your category keywords, checked on Mondays.
5. A mail filter that sends all of it to one folder, so it does not bury your inbox.

Run it for a month. If you are deleting more than you read, tighten the keywords. If you are missing conversations you hear about elsewhere, that is the signal to pay, and the Reddit monitoring tools and paid listening tools are the next step.