Reddit monitoring tools: the free and paid options

The best Reddit monitoring tools for most businesses cost nothing. F5Bot emails you when a keyword appears in a new Reddit post or comment, and Reddit Pro gives you Reddit's own keyword dashboard for free. You only need to pay when you outgrow five keywords, need it for business use, or spend more time deleting irrelevant alerts than reading useful ones.

Below are seven tools worth knowing, what each is genuinely good at, and where each stops.

How we chose

Every tool here reads Reddit directly and matches keywords in posts, comments or both. We left out general social media suites where Reddit is a checkbox you cannot test before paying, and we left out GummySearch, which its own homepage says has been closed since 30 November 2025.

Prices below were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 4 October 2026. Where a vendor shows only annual billing, we say so.

Reddit monitoring tools compared

F5Bot, the free default

F5Bot watches Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters for your keywords and emails you when they appear. It has been running since 2017 and is the first tool most people should try.

The free plan is for personal use only: 5 keywords, at most 10 alerts per keyword and 20 alerts a day, delivered up to two hours after the match, with seven days of match history (F5Bot's tier table). Silver costs $9.99 a month or $109 a year for 20 keywords, alerts within five minutes, keyword filtering and the right to track common words. Gold is $49.99 a month or $549 a year for 200 keywords, AI filtering, RSS and JSON feeds, and a Slack or Discord connection.

Best at: being told quickly and cheaply. For a brand with a distinctive name, Silver is all the Reddit monitoring you will ever need.

Limits: the free plan is not licensed for business use, and plain email is the only output below Gold. If your brand is an ordinary word, the free plan's lack of exclusion filters will bury you.

Reddit Pro, Reddit's own dashboard

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

Best at: seeing the shape of a conversation. Which communities talk about your category, which threads are getting traction, and how that changes month to month, from Reddit's own data rather than a third party's copy of it.

Limits: it is somewhere you go and look, not something that tells you. Reddit's page talks about tracking and trends, not alerts, so pair it with an alert tool if response time matters.

KWatch.io, cheap multi-platform alerts

KWatch.io's free plan gives you 2 Reddit keyword alerts and 2 Hacker News alerts. Essential at $19 a month raises that to 20 each and adds a handful of alerts on X, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn, plus AI analysis. Business at $79 a month gives 100 Reddit alerts, an API, webhooks and Slack.

Best at: a single cheap inbox for Reddit with a toe in other platforms.

Limits: the non-Reddit allowances are small at the lower tiers (one LinkedIn alert on Essential), and only monthly prices are published.

Syften, the noise filter

Syften watches Reddit, Hacker News, forums, GitHub and some Slack communities. Entry is $29.95 a month for 3 community filters returning up to 100 results a day, with a seven day archive. Standard at $49.95 a month gives 20 filters, AI filtering, Slack and an API. PRO at $119.95 gives 100 filters and an unlimited archive. The 14 day trial runs on PRO with no card.

Best at: precision and speed. Its filters are built for the brand-name-is-a-common-word problem, which is the thing that makes most people abandon Reddit alerts in week two, and Syften says it aims for at most a one minute delay on Reddit.

Limits: "filters" are not keywords, so map your watch list to filters before choosing a tier. Monitoring X and YouTube are paid add-ons on top.

Octolens, for B2B and developer brands

Octolens covers Reddit alongside X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Hacker News, YouTube, GitHub, Stack Overflow, DEV and more. Pro is $159 a month billed annually for 10 keywords and 15,000 mentions, refreshed hourly. Scale is $499 a month billed annually. The trial is seven days.

Best at: software and developer tools, where the conversation is split across Reddit, Hacker News, GitHub and X and you want it in one feed.

Limits: the price only makes sense if those other sources matter. For Reddit alone it is many times the cost of F5Bot Silver.

Brand24, Reddit inside a full listening tool

Brand24 lists Reddit as a source on every plan, alongside social networks, news, blogs, podcasts and review sites, with sentiment and reach. Individual is $199 a month billed annually or $249 monthly, for 3 keywords, 2,000 mentions a month and one user. The trial is 14 days with no card.

Best at: teams that need Reddit as one stream among many, with reporting a manager can read.

Limits: three keywords at the entry price is tight, and you pay for coverage you may not use if Reddit is the real requirement. The paid social listening tools page compares it with the rest of that category.

Figo, for what Reddit says about competitors

Ours, so judge accordingly. Figo is competitor monitoring, not a Reddit alert tool. Once a week it searches Reddit posts and comments for each competitor you track, then a language model reads each candidate thread and keeps only the ones genuinely about that business. Those threads arrive in the Monday briefing next to the competitor's new ads, pages, rankings, social posts and reviews. Plans start at $49 a month for 3 competitors.

Do not pick Figo if you need to reply to mentions of your own brand within the hour, or want to watch category keywords like "best bookkeeping app". It checks weekly and only for the competitors you name.

What separates a good Reddit monitor from a bad one

Three things, in order of importance.

Filtering. Every tool finds mentions. The good ones help you throw most of them away. Look for exclusion words, subreddit limits, a whole-word option and, at the higher end, AI relevance filtering. If fewer than one alert in five is about you after a fortnight, your filters are wrong, not your tool.

Delay. F5Bot's free tier can take two hours and its paid tiers five minutes or less. A thread on Reddit is most worth answering in its first few hours, so delay matters more here than on most channels.

Dependence on Reddit's data access. Every third-party tool here relies on reading Reddit, and GummySearch's closure shows that can end. Pay monthly for small vendors rather than a year upfront.

For the setup itself, including Reddit's own search operators and how to reply without being banned, see the Reddit monitoring guide.

Which one should you pick

• You want alerts and pay nothing: F5Bot free plus Reddit Pro.
• You are a business with a distinctive name: F5Bot Silver at $9.99 a month.
• Your name is a common word: Syften, for the filters, or F5Bot Gold for AI filtering.
• You also care about X and LinkedIn, on a budget: KWatch.io.
• You sell software to developers: Octolens.
• Reddit is one source among many and you need reports: Brand24.
• You want to know what people say about your competitors, alongside what those competitors are doing: Figo, weekly.

If Reddit is part of a wider brand watch, the brand monitoring guide covers the other channels.