Brand24 vs Mention vs Syften: Which Social Listening Tool Actually Delivers in 2025?

Choosing between Brand24 vs Mention for your social listening needs often comes down to these five critical questions:

• Do you need comprehensive social media monitoring across all platforms, or are you focused on engaging in specific online communities?
• Is your priority tracking brand sentiment and generating reports, or actively participating in conversations to find leads?
• Are you willing to pay premium prices for enterprise features, or do you need an affordable solution that gets the job done?
• Do you want AI-powered insights and automated analysis, or hands-on control with advanced search capabilities?
• Is your team looking for an all-in-one platform, or a specialized tool that excels at one thing?

In short, here’s what we recommend:

👉 Brand24 is the AI-powered monitoring powerhouse, tracking mentions across 25 million sources with 95% accurate sentiment analysis. Its user-friendly interface and comprehensive analytics make it ideal for brands focused on reputation management and competitive intelligence. With features like Presence Score and AI Brand Assistant, it transforms vast amounts of data into actionable insights. However, the pricing starts at $49/month, and real-time monitoring requires higher-tier plans, making it a significant investment for smaller businesses.

👉 Mention provides professional-grade monitoring across over 1 billion sources daily, with a strong focus on comprehensive coverage and team collaboration. The platform excels at real-time alerts and competitive benchmarking, trusted by major brands like Microsoft and Stripe. However, following its acquisition by Agorapulse, Mention is removing its social media management features to focus purely on listening, which may disappoint users who valued its all-in-one approach.

Both platforms are powerful but come with enterprise-level complexity and pricing. For many businesses, especially startups and tech companies, there’s a third way that’s often overlooked.

👉 Syften takes a radically different approach, focusing on monitoring online communities where your customers actually hang out: Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, and niche forums. Built by a solo founder who understands startup needs, it delivers near-instant alerts (under 1 minute) with powerful filtering to cut through the noise. Starting at just $19.95/month, it’s designed for businesses that want to find leads and engage in conversations, not just analyze sentiment from afar.

If finding and engaging with potential customers in online communities sounds more valuable than sentiment reports, see how Syften can transform your approach to social listening.

Table of contents:

• Brand24 vs Mention vs Syften at a glance
• The philosophical divide: Monitoring vs engaging
• Brand24’s AI advantage meets real-world limitations
• Mention’s transformation changes the game
• Syften proves less can be more
• Pricing reveals each platform’s true priorities
• Alert speed and accuracy separate the players
• Source coverage tells different stories
• Brand24 vs Mention vs Syften: Which should you choose?

Brand24 vs Mention vs Syften at a glance

The philosophical divide: Monitoring vs engaging

The fundamental difference between these platforms isn’t features, it’s philosophy.

Brand24 and Mention represent the traditional approach to social listening: cast a wide net, analyze everything, generate reports. They’re built on the assumption that you need to monitor everywhere, analyze sentiment at scale, and track metrics over time. It’s the "command center" approach to social media, where dashboards full of charts and graphs inform strategic decisions.

Brand24 takes this to the extreme with AI-powered features like emotion analysis that can detect joy, anger, sadness, and fear in mentions. Their Presence Score benchmarks your brand against thousands of others on a 0-100 scale. It’s impressive technology designed for brands that need to understand their market position at a glance.

Source: Brand24

Mention follows a similar path, monitoring over a billion sources daily with sophisticated analytics and team collaboration features. Though interestingly, their recent acquisition by Agorapulse signals a shift. They’re removing publishing and engagement features to focus purely on listening, essentially doubling down on the monitoring philosophy.

Source: Mention

Syften flips this entire model.

Founded by Michal Mazurek, who was trying to find GitLab and BitBucket users for his first product, Syften isn’t about monitoring everything, it’s about finding the right conversations at the right time. The philosophy is simple: your next customer is probably asking a question on Reddit right now. Can you find them and help?

Source: Syften

This is a fundamental disagreement about what social listening should achieve. Brand24 and Mention help you understand what happened. Syften helps you influence what happens next.

Brand24’s AI advantage meets real-world limitations

Brand24’s AI capabilities are genuinely impressive.

The platform’s sentiment analysis achieves 95% accuracy based on F1-score metrics, but that’s just the beginning. Brand24’s emotion analysis can identify specific feelings like joy, anger, sadness, and fear within mentions. This granular emotional intelligence helps brands understand not just what people are saying, but why they’re saying it.

Source: Brand24

The AI Brand Assistant acts like a chatbot trained on your monitoring data, answering natural language questions about your brand performance. Want to know what competitors are doing better? Ask the assistant. Need a report on negative sentiment drivers? It’s a conversation away.

The proprietary Presence Score deserves special mention. Calculated daily based on mentions and reach from the previous week, it provides a single metric to benchmark your brand’s online awareness against competitors. The logarithmic scale means growing from 10 to 20 is easier than 70 to 80, reserving the highest scores for truly global brands.

Source: Brand24

But here’s where reality intrudes: all this AI brilliance requires data volume to be meaningful. The Individual plan at $49/month limits you to 2,000 mentions and updates every 12 hours. By the time you see that viral complaint about your product, it’s ancient history in internet time. Real-time monitoring doesn’t kick in until the Pro plan at $149/month.

The platform’s strength—comprehensive monitoring across 25 million sources—can also be its weakness. When you’re tracking everything everywhere, finding actionable insights becomes harder, not easier.

Mention’s transformation changes the game

Mention’s recent acquisition by Agorapulse marks a pivotal moment in social listening. As of June 16th, the platform is removing its Publish and Respond features, transforming from an all-in-one solution into a specialized listening tool.

This isn’t necessarily bad news. By focusing exclusively on monitoring, Mention can double down on what it does best: comprehensive, real-time tracking across a staggering number of sources. Their historical data feature, offering up to two years of past mentions, provides context that real-time tools can’t match.

Source: Mention

The platform’s strength lies in its enterprise-grade capabilities wrapped in an accessible interface. The "Top Public Profiles" feature identifies influencers driving conversations about your brand. Competitive benchmarking shows your share of voice against rivals. The filtering options are extensive without being overwhelming.

Source: Mention

But the removal of publishing and engagement features reveals a fundamental limitation: Mention increasingly sees social listening as separate from social action. For teams that valued the ability to monitor and respond from one platform, this change forces them into a fragmented workflow.

Syften proves less can be more

While Brand24 and Mention compete on features, Syften wins on focus.

Built by a solo founder who still handles customer support personally, it’s a tool that does one thing exceptionally well: finds relevant conversations in online communities.

The "hacker-friendly" search syntax might seem intimidating, but it’s actually more intuitive than navigating complex dashboards. Want to find people complaining about your competitor’s pricing? Try "Competitor X" AND ("too expensive" OR "overpriced") NOT site:competitorx.com. Boom. You’ve got a stream of sales opportunities.

Source: Syften

Syften’s monitoring of Reddit deserves special mention. While other platforms treat Reddit as just another source, Syften was built "Reddit first," tracking every comment live with a delay of at most one minute. For B2B SaaS companies, where a single Reddit comment can turn into a $50,000 customer, this speed matters.

But Syften’s real superpower is its signal-to-noise ratio.

Users consistently praise its ability to surface genuinely relevant conversations. This isn’t achieved through AI or complex algorithms, but through powerful filtering and deep understanding of how online communities work. The platform knows that a mention in a popular subreddit comment is more valuable than a mention in a dead forum thread.

The platform’s limitations are real: no sentiment analysis, basic reporting, limited to English-speaking communities. But for its target audience, these aren’t bugs; they’re features. Less complexity means faster setup, clearer results, and more time actually talking to potential customers.

Pricing reveals each platform’s true priorities

The pricing structures tell you everything about who these tools are really for.

Brand24 starts at $199/month for individuals, jumping to $299/month for teams. But here’s the catch: real-time updates require the Pro plan at $399/month. Want the AI features they promote heavily? That’s Pro tier and above. By the time you have a functional setup for a small team, you’re looking at $2,300-3,600 annually.

Source: Brand24

Mention’s pricing comes in four plans: Solo at $49/month, Pro at $99/month, Pro Plus at $179/month, and Company at custom pricing. More affordable than Brand24 but still pricey, especially if you’re relying on lots of alerts.

Source: Mention

Syften’s pricing is refreshingly simple. Entry plan at $19.95/month for 3 filters. Standard at ~$39.95/month for 20 filters with Twitter and Slack. Pro for $99.95/month with 100 filters, AI post-processing, and webhooks. No mention limits, no surprise overages, no "contact us for pricing" enterprise games.

Source: Syften

The message is clear: Brand24 and Mention are priced for companies with dedicated social media teams and budgets to match. Syften is priced for bootstrapped startups where $20/month needs to directly impact revenue.

Alert speed and accuracy separate the players

All three platforms promise "real-time" alerts, but the reality varies dramatically.

Brand24’s real-time is relative to your plan. Individual users only get updates every 12 hours, hardly real-time by any definition. Team plans improve to hourly. Only Pro and Enterprise customers get true real-time alerts. Even then, the vast scope of sources means some platforms update faster than others.

Mention delivers on its real-time promise across all tiers, which partly justifies its pricing. The platform’s infrastructure, built over years of enterprise service, rarely misses mentions or delivers them late. Storm alerts for unusual activity spikes add another layer of proactive monitoring.

Source: Mention

Syften’s approach is different but effective.

By focusing on specific communities and using platform-specific APIs intelligently, it achieves remarkable speed. Reddit comments appear in under a minute. Twitter mentions are near-instant. For the communities it monitors, Syften often beats both competitors on pure speed.

But speed without accuracy is worthless. Here, the approaches diverge further. Brand24 and Mention cast wide nets, sometimes catching irrelevant mentions that require extensive filtering. Syften’s narrower focus and powerful search syntax mean fewer but more relevant results.

Source coverage tells different stories

Brand24 claims to monitor 25 million sources, Mention tracks over 1 billion daily. Syften lists about 50 specific communities. These numbers reveal fundamentally different strategies.

Brand24’s coverage is comprehensive for major platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, plus news sites, blogs, and forums. The platform excels at finding mentions across the traditional social media landscape. Their podcast and newsletter monitoring adds unique value for brands investing in those channels.

Mention’s billion-source claim is impressive but needs context. Many of these are news sites and blogs that might mention your brand once a year, if ever. The platform’s strength is ensuring you never miss a mention, anywhere. For PR teams managing crisis communications, this comprehensive coverage is essential.

Syften’s focused approach seems limited until you realize it’s monitoring the communities where buying decisions actually happen. A developer asking for recommendations on Hacker News. A startup founder venting about a competitor on Reddit. A specific question about your industry on Stack Overflow. These aren’t just mentions. They’re opportunities.

The question isn’t how many sources a platform monitors, but whether it monitors the right ones for your business.

Brand24 vs Mention vs Syften: Which should you choose?

Choose Brand24 if:

• You need comprehensive sentiment analysis and reporting
• AI-powered insights are valuable for your decision-making
• You have budget for at least the Pro plan ($149/month)
• Your focus is reputation management and competitive intelligence
• You need to track campaigns across multiple social platforms
• White-label reports for clients are important

Start with Brand24’s free trial to explore its AI-powered insights

Choose Mention if:

• You need the most comprehensive source coverage available
• Real-time alerts across all platforms are mission-critical
• You’re already using or planning to use Agorapulse
• Historical data analysis is important for your strategy
• You have a dedicated social media team
• Enterprise-grade reliability is non-negotiable

Test Mention’s capabilities with a free trial

Choose Syften if:

• You’re a startup or small business focused on growth
• Finding leads and engaging with customers is your priority
• You’re active in online communities like Reddit and Hacker News
• You prefer powerful filtering over broad monitoring
• Quick setup and immediate value matter more than features

Start monitoring with Syften’s 14-day free trial

The social listening landscape in 2025 isn’t about finding the "best" tool. It’s about matching your needs to the right philosophy. Brand24 and Mention represent the evolution of traditional monitoring, adding AI and scale to help enterprises understand their market position.

Syften represents something different: a return to the original promise of social media. Actual conversations with actual customers. In a world where everyone’s monitoring everything, sometimes the winner is whoever shows up first with a helpful answer.

For many businesses, that’s worth more than all the sentiment analysis in the world.

This comparison was researched and written in July 2025. Features and pricing may change — verify current details with each platform.