Brand24 vs Mention vs Awario: Which Social Listening Tool Should You Buy in 2026?

Brand24, Mention, and Awario are the three names that come up whenever a team shops for social listening on a budget. But the comparison changed in 2026: Mention discontinued its affordable self-serve plans in July 2025, so new customers now start at around $599 per month — more than triple what older round-ups still quote.

This guide compares all three on the criteria that actually decide a purchase: mention-coverage breadth, sentiment accuracy, and alert speed — plus honest pricing. Brand24 is the best value for most teams at $199/month. Awario is the true budget pick at $29/month. And Mention, at $599/month, is now a tool small brands should simply not buy.

Quick verdict

If you run a small brand or agency and want broad coverage without a sales call, go with Brand24 — the $199/month Individual plan covers 3 keywords with AI sentiment on every tier. If your budget is genuinely tight, Awario does the core job at $29/month. Only consider Mention if you are an enterprise team — or already in the Agorapulse ecosystem — because $599/month buys you less mention volume than Brand24’s $399 Pro plan.

At a glance

Brand24 deep dive

Brand24 is the most accessible serious social listening tool on the market: public pricing, no sales call, live in an afternoon. It monitors 25M+ online sources — social media, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, and reviews — with AI-powered sentiment analysis on every plan, including the entry tier.

Pricing breakdown: Five plans, all with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required. Individual is $199/month on annual billing ($249 month-to-month) with 3 keywords, 2,000 mentions/month, and 1 user — updates arrive every 12 hours, which is the plan’s real limitation. Team is $299/month annual ($349 monthly) with 7 keywords, 10,000 mentions, unlimited users, and hourly updates. Pro is $399/month annual ($499 monthly) with 12 keywords, 40,000 mentions, real-time updates, AI event detection, and the AI Brand Assistant. Business is $599/month annual ($699 monthly) with 25 keywords and 100,000 mentions. Enterprise starts at $1,499/month.

Real use cases: (1) A 20-person SaaS brand tracks its name, two competitors, and a category keyword on the Team plan — hourly alerts catch negative threads before they spread. (2) A boutique PR agency runs client projects on Pro, using white-label PDF reports to justify the retainer. (3) A product team mines mention sentiment for feature-request patterns instead of running surveys.

Pros:

• Transparent public pricing — the only tool here you can buy without talking to sales
• AI sentiment analysis on every plan, including the $199 entry tier
• Real-time alerts and influencer scoring from the Pro plan up
• Strong coverage breadth: TikTok, podcasts, and review sites included

Cons:

• The Individual plan’s 12-hour update delay is too slow for crisis monitoring — real speed costs $399+/mo
• 3 keywords on entry disappears fast once you track your brand plus two competitors
• Mention caps are tight relative to price (2,000/month at $199)

Mention deep dive

Mention used to be the budget alternative — Solo at $49/month, Pro at $99. That ended in July 2025, when Mention retired all self-serve tiers for new signups. Today the only plan a new customer can buy is the Company plan: around $599/month on an annual-only contract, with 5 alerts and a hard cap of 50,000 mentions per month shared across every alert. (Mention was acquired by Agorapulse in 2025 following a 2024 bankruptcy, and its Publish/Respond features were retired in January 2026, with customers redirected to Agorapulse.)

What does $599 buy? Genuinely broad coverage — 1B+ sources across social, news, blogs, forums, and 75+ review sites — and the strongest Boolean in this comparison: up to 22 operators and 2,000 characters per alert, versus simpler keyword matching elsewhere. Historical data (up to two years) is available but as a paid add-on with unpublished pricing.

Pricing breakdown: One plan for new customers: ~$599/month, annual commitment, 5 alerts, 50,000 mentions/month hard cap — once you hit it, Mention stops collecting until the cycle resets. Historical data and API access cost extra. Confirm the quote directly; Mention’s pricing page no longer publishes a number.

Real use cases: (1) An enterprise comms team with complex Boolean needs — monitoring an ambiguous brand name across 75+ review sites — where Mention’s query power justifies the price. (2) An agency already standardized on Agorapulse for publishing, where Mention’s native integration removes a tool from the stack.

Pros:

• Widest source coverage of the three, including 75+ review sites
• Best Boolean query builder (22 operators, 2,000 characters)
• Real-time alerts with unlimited users

Cons:

• $599/month minimum with an annual lock-in — the worst value per mention in this comparison
• The 50,000-mention hard cap means overage handling is “collection stops,” not throttling
• No self-serve path anymore; every purchase is a sales conversation

Awario deep dive

Awario is the last true budget pick in social listening. It covers social platforms, news, blogs, and the web with Boolean search on every plan, AI sentiment and emotion analysis, and an influencer-discovery module. It is also the tool most honest about what it lacks: no LinkedIn monitoring, no TikTok coverage, and no mobile app.

Pricing breakdown: Starter is $29/month on annual billing ($49 month-to-month) with 3 topics and roughly 30,000 new mentions per month — fifteen times Brand24’s entry mention allowance at one-seventh the price. Pro is $89/month annual ($149 monthly) with 15 topics. API access is included on paid tiers, which Brand24 gates behind higher plans.

Real use cases: (1) A solo founder monitors their brand name, a competitor, and a “best [category]” keyword thread to find prospects complaining about rivals — Awario’s Boolean makes this cheap. (2) A small agency runs white-label PDF reports for clients on the Pro plan without enterprise pricing. (3) A content marketer tracks unlinked brand mentions to pitch for backlinks.

Pros:

• Cheapest real social listening: $29/month with ~30,000 mentions
• Boolean search and API access on the entry plan
• Lead-discovery angle: find prospects mentioning competitors or pain points

Cons:

• No LinkedIn, TikTok, review-site, or podcast monitoring at any tier
• No mobile app; the interface feels basic next to Brand24
• Sentiment accuracy is the weakest of the three — loose queries produce noisy feeds

Head-to-head: the three criteria that matter

Mention-coverage breadth — Mention wins, Brand24 close second. Mention’s 1B+ sources and 75+ review sites are unmatched. Brand24 covers the modern essentials (TikTok, podcasts, reviews, Medium, Quora) and beats Mention for video-adjacent sources. Awario is web-plus-core-social only — fine for brand-name tracking, inadequate if LinkedIn or TikTok matter to you.

Sentiment accuracy — Brand24 wins. Brand24’s AI sentiment (positive/negative/neutral plus emotional breakdowns) ships on every plan and is consistently rated the most usable. Mention’s sentiment is serviceable but basic for the price. Awario’s sentiment misses most often — reviewers flag noisy feeds when queries are loose, so budget time for Boolean tuning.

Alert speed — tie between Mention and Brand24 (paid tiers). Both deliver real-time alerts once you pay enough — Brand24 from the $399 Pro plan, Mention on its single $599 plan. On entry tiers, Brand24 updates every 12 hours (Team: hourly), while Awario offers real-time monitoring even at $29/month — the one spec where the budget tool embarrasses the mid-tier one.

Price-to-value — Awario and Brand24 split it. Awario is unbeatable under $50/month. Between $200 and $600, Brand24’s tiered ladder means you pay for what you use; Mention’s single $599 gate means a 10-person startup pays the same as an enterprise comms team. That is the structural reason small brands should not buy Mention.

Final verdict: buy for your team size

• Solo founder or tiny team, budget under $50/mo → Awario. At $29/month you get real Boolean monitoring and ~30,000 mentions. Pair it with free Google Alerts for news coverage and you have 80% of a listening stack. Accept the blind spots (no LinkedIn, no TikTok) as the price of the price.
• Growing brand or small agency, $200–$400/mo → Brand24. The Individual plan ($199/mo) is the honest entry point; Team ($299/mo) is the sweet spot once you track competitors — 7 keywords, 10,000 mentions, hourly updates, unlimited users. This is where most buyers in this comparison should land.
• Enterprise team or Agorapulse shop → Mention. The $599/month Company plan only makes sense when you need its Boolean depth, review-site breadth, and the Agorapulse integration. Everyone else is overpaying.
• Nobody at a small brand should buy Mention in 2026. The old “$49 Mention” advice floating around outdated round-ups no longer exists. At $599/month with a 50,000-mention hard cap, Mention costs more than Brand24’s Business tier ($599/mo, 100,000 mentions, 25 keywords) while delivering half the volume.

Social listening pairs naturally with the rest of your stack: feed mention data into your social media management workflow so responses go out from one place, track how your brand shows up in AI answers with AI search visibility tools, and if Awario’s lead-discovery angle appeals to you, compare outreach tools like Clay and Apollo for what to do with the prospects you find.

How we compared

We scored all three on mention-coverage breadth, sentiment accuracy, and alert speed — the dimensions that decide whether a listening tool earns its subscription — with pricing weighted heavily because the 2026 market split into a $29 tier, a $199–$399 tier, and Mention’s $599 gate. Pricing checked against the vendors’ pricing pages in October 2026; Mention’s figure comes from third-party trackers because its pricing page is now quote-only. Confirm before you buy.

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