The best social listening tools in 2026

Social listening tools search the internet for a string and tell you where it appeared, who said it, how many people might have seen it, and whether it sounded positive.

That is genuinely useful, and it is narrower than most buyers expect.

What they cost

Read from each vendor's own pricing page on 19 September 2026.

The entry price across this category clusters around $199 a month, and that is the number to reckon with. For a business getting a handful of mentions a month, it is a lot of money per mention.

Brand24, $199 a month

Five tiers at $199, $299, $399, $599 and enterprise from $1,499. Broad source coverage across social, news, blogs, forums, podcasts and reviews, with sentiment and AI generated summaries. API access is a separate $149.

The most complete option at the accessible end. If you have mention volume, it is a fair deal.

BuzzSumo, $199 a month

$199, $299, $499 and $999. Positioned as listening, strongest at content research: which articles get shared, which creators have reach, what is trending in a topic. If your question is what content wins in our space, it beats Brand24. If your question is who mentioned us yesterday, it does not.

Sprout Social, $199 per seat

$199, $299 and $399 per seat per month, with listening and premium analytics as add-ons above that. It is a social media management suite first. Buy it to publish and engage, and add listening if you are already there. Buying it purely for listening is expensive, and the per seat model compounds.

Google Alerts, free

Set up alerts for your brand, your competitors and your category. You get news and blog coverage by email. No social, no sentiment, no history, no reach estimates.

It catches more than people expect. For a business with low mention volume it is often sufficient, and the fact that it is free means there is no reason not to run it alongside anything else.

The thing listening will not tell you

A listening tool will tell you that a competitor was mentioned 47 times this week, sentiment 72% positive, reach 1.2 million.

It will not tell you that the competitor published eleven new landing pages, started bidding on your brand name in Google Ads, cut their entry price by $20, and is now the first name ChatGPT gives when someone asks for a recommendation in your category.

Those are things the company did. Listening watches what people said. Both are real, and people routinely buy one expecting the other.

If what you want is the first list, that is competitor monitoring. Competitors App at $14.90 a month covers change detection and email tracking. Our own Figo is $49 a month for three competitors and covers rankings, pages, content, Google, Meta and TikTok ads, social posts, reviews and AI answers on a weekly cycle with a written briefing. Neither does sentiment or crisis monitoring, and neither replaces a listening tool.

Getting value out of listening

Three habits separate the teams that keep these tools from the ones that cancel in month four.

Track competitors, not just yourself. Your mention volume alone is a number with no scale. Next to two competitors it becomes a position.

Watch the three star mentions. Positive mentions feel good and teach nothing. Complaints teach you what to fix. Lukewarm mentions teach you what is not landing.

Set up one alert that wakes people up. A sudden spike in mentions with negative sentiment is the only alert worth interrupting someone for. Everything else can be a weekly digest, and making everything urgent means nothing is.

Choosing

• Real mention volume and you need sentiment and reach: Brand24.
• Content and creator research: BuzzSumo.
• Already publishing through a suite: add listening to what you have.
• Low volume, no budget: Google Alerts, and revisit in six months.
• You actually wanted to know what rivals are doing: buy a monitor instead, it costs less.