Brandwatch vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Brandwatch
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Brandwatch, from Cision (acquired February 2021) is an enterprise social intelligence platform that is designed to allow brands to listen and analyze online conversation to extract meaningful insights, inform their business decisions and understand more about the return on their marketing spend.
$800
10k mentions
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Score 5.9 out of 10
N/A
Radian6 was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2011 and - along with Buddy Media - became Salesforce Social Studio. The product is slated to be retired in November 2024.
$1,000
Per Org Per Month
Pricing
BrandwatchSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Editions & Modules
Pro
$800
10k mentions
Enterprise
3000+
Unlimited mentions or Queries
Basic
$1,000.00
Per Org Per Month
Pro
$4,000.00
Per Org Per Month
Corporate
$12,000.00
Per Org Per Month
Enterprise
$40,000.00
Per Org Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BrandwatchSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
BrandwatchSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Considered Both Products
Brandwatch
Chose Brandwatch
The mention count is accurate in Brandwatch compared to others and features are user-friendly and easy to navigate.
The profile setup is easy on Brandwatch, and the best part of the tool is the ease of use. The tool gives the complete package for Social media Analytics, …
Chose Brandwatch
  • We find that Brandwatch is the most advanced and easy to use platform versus its peers. The rules and categorisation of mentions is a great capability to have.
  • Also, its coverage of mentions versus its peers coverage is great and a tool is as good as its data. Being in Asia …
Chose Brandwatch
As an analyst, the biggest pro for Brandwatch Analytics is the HUGE set of variables that are available when downloading the data. The biggest advantage that competitors (like NetBase) have is more advanced Natural Language Processing which makes capabilities like sentiment …
Chose Brandwatch
Brandwatch is one of the best social media monitoring platforms out there. It has managed to maintain its identity and focus in an ever changing landscape. It competes head to head with tools like Radian6, Netbase, Sysomos and Synthesio. Lately each one has been defining more …
Chose Brandwatch
I think Brandwatch is best of breed of the online text analytics tools currently on the market.
Chose Brandwatch
Better flexibility to present the data and overall much better data quality especially compared to Radian6 which we found extremely disappointing.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Chose Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Social Studio is most comparable to Meltwater in that they both have very basic analytics capabilities, but pull in mass amounts of data. crimson hexagon, Sprinklr and Cision all have much more advanced social media analytics capabilities, although they are potentially more …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
BrandwatchSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Listening/monitoring
Comparison of Listening/monitoring features of Product A and Product B
Brandwatch
-
Ratings
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
8.5
10 Ratings
11% above category average
Boolean keyword searches00 Ratings7.09 Ratings
Filtering out noise/spam00 Ratings7.09 Ratings
Sentiment analysis00 Ratings10.08 Ratings
Broad channel coverage00 Ratings10.010 Ratings
Publishing
Comparison of Publishing features of Product A and Product B
Brandwatch
-
Ratings
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
8.5
10 Ratings
7% above category average
Content planning and scheduling00 Ratings10.010 Ratings
Audience targeting00 Ratings8.09 Ratings
Content optimization00 Ratings8.08 Ratings
Workflow management00 Ratings8.010 Ratings
Engagement
Comparison of Engagement features of Product A and Product B
Brandwatch
-
Ratings
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
7.6
9 Ratings
6% below category average
Automated routing and prioritization00 Ratings9.99 Ratings
Customer interaction histories00 Ratings9.99 Ratings
Bulk actions00 Ratings3.19 Ratings
Marketing
Comparison of Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Brandwatch
-
Ratings
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
5.5
9 Ratings
33% below category average
Lead generation00 Ratings5.08 Ratings
Content marketing00 Ratings5.09 Ratings
Paid media management00 Ratings6.07 Ratings
Campaigns and promotions00 Ratings6.08 Ratings
Channel coverage/integration
Comparison of Channel coverage/integration features of Product A and Product B
Brandwatch
-
Ratings
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
8.1
10 Ratings
5% below category average
Twitter00 Ratings9.010 Ratings
Facebook00 Ratings10.010 Ratings
LinkedIn00 Ratings10.08 Ratings
Google+00 Ratings6.86 Ratings
Instagram00 Ratings8.07 Ratings
Pinterest00 Ratings6.54 Ratings
YouTube00 Ratings6.76 Ratings
Reporting/analytics
Comparison of Reporting/analytics features of Product A and Product B
Brandwatch
-
Ratings
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
8.6
9 Ratings
9% above category average
Campaign success analytics00 Ratings8.99 Ratings
Real-time tracking00 Ratings7.09 Ratings
Competitor analysis00 Ratings9.97 Ratings
Account management
Comparison of Account management features of Product A and Product B
Brandwatch
-
Ratings
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
9.5
9 Ratings
15% above category average
Role-based user permissions & privileges00 Ratings9.08 Ratings
Mobile access00 Ratings9.99 Ratings
Best Alternatives
BrandwatchSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Small Businesses
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Publer
Publer
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mention
Mention
Score 9.4 out of 10
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
BrandwatchSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Likelihood to Recommend
4.3
(65 ratings)
8.9
(51 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(8 ratings)
8.8
(38 ratings)
Usability
6.1
(7 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.6
(5 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(2 ratings)
8.4
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
4.1
(13 ratings)
9.0
(8 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
6.4
(1 ratings)
7.6
(6 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(2 ratings)
9.8
(6 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
BrandwatchSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Likelihood to Recommend
Cision
The user interface is great and is easy to use for social media marketers of all ranges. In regard to planning and scheduling content, it allows all users with access to the capability to view all upcoming on an actual calendar. For organizational purposes, this is great and mitigates any confusion that other team members may have. The tool seems to always be updating which has its pros and cons because once you figure something out, there's a switch and you'll need to relearn how things are positioned but overall, it's not a heavy lift.
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Discontinued Products
If you're tasked with publishing content to social on behalf of your organization then this tool is certainly worth considering. You have quick and easy capability to schedule across multiple platforms with drag-and-drop simplicity. It ties into Salesforce's real strength of its CRM platform so you can quickly tie social activity and leads to those already in your database. And it does a good job at monitoring and analyzing brand and competitor content across multiple media types. Having said that, if you're into deep-dive and full functionality SaaS tools then this might not be for you as it covers three areas adequately, but not in enough detail or strength to make it a star performer
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Pros
Cision
  • Clean, beautiful visuals that can be easily incorporated into reports to be used internally and externally.
  • Customization-- anywhere from the queries you create to adjusting individual report widget/components this tool is very flexible.
  • Excellent Customer Service and support. My Brandwatch rep is always open to hearing from me for questions and often reaches out to me to check in on my status or see if I would like to participate in beta programs.
  • Constant innovation. It seems like Brandwatch is constantly updating and adding improvements to their platform--especially with their 2019 acquisition of Crimson Hexagon.
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Discontinued Products
  • The amount of the information that radian6 can pull from multiple social platforms is absolutely phenomenal. Its just not only the pull but the way the information can be presented in dashboards was way good. It helped us understand in various aspects of our social presence.
  • Multiple profiles helped us to break down the Big/Huge social buzz cloud to smaller and more manageable pieces. This helped us concentrate on the lows and helped us to plan better on turning them to highs.
  • Radian6 allowed us to follow thru the crowd trends with the latest information presented in a single view. This also helped us to collect the social opinion on the product releases.
  • The ease of use, one need not be an expert to start using this platform. The interface is easily understandable by anyone.
  • A keyword can be edited quickly to tailor the needs and the results were quick.
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Cons
Cision
  • Very steep learning curve- good luck training casual users on the difference between a query, a rule, a category etc
  • Lack of access to FULL historic data is a serious drawback- populating that data takes a minimum of 24 hours and incurs additional costs
  • Volume limits mean you may have to build your query to exclude mentions that may be useful in getting the full context of the situation
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Discontinued Products
  • Instagram Social Listening - it currently does not offer much social listening in terms of Instagram.
  • Instagram Owned - It currently stops pulling once an update is "old" by their standards, even if it receives recent comments. They can force pull, but you have to work with their tech team to do so.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cision
Brandwatch is a simple tool that is easy to learn and understand. Without any rigorous training, the team can learn to use it and interpret the results in an efficient manner. It saves a lot of work and helps the team to focus on other important time consuming tasks. I would like to continue using Brandwatch.
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Discontinued Products
I spent a lot of time researching the right platform for me and our organisation (thanks to the other reviews on TrustRadius also). Having used other platforms when I found frustrations getting my everyday work done, I knew exactly what I wanted and this is why I chose Social Studio. While there have been a few hiccups, the quarterly update releases and the outstanding tech support have kept me more than happy.
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Usability
Cision
I've invited quite a few of my colleagues to try Brandwatch, and all of them were able to use its features with no assistance, and most of these had never used a social listening/monitoring tool before, or even a digital analytics tool! Brandwatch is not only easy to use, but filters, widgets, menus and other options are in intuitive places - it just works
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Discontinued Products
• Would rate this a 6. The User Interface is pretty intuitive, but the platform was still considered pretty intimidating by our non-technical staff when they first saw it. It took a while to get used to it and feel comfortable. There was quite a lot of setup work in the beginning (for example, we had to build our own reports using a canned report as a template, and this was not simple). Although it took a while to get it setup correctly, it’s quite intuitive once that work has been done.
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Reliability and Availability
Cision
No answers on this topic
Discontinued Products
The platform is rarely down
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Performance
Cision
Brandwatch craps out sometimes. Pages freeze, data doesn't populate for hours. It's fine if you're not in a hurry but something to keep in mind if you're working in real-time. It's not as bad as Talkwalker but it's impacted timely delivery of work for me, and one of the first things I teach when introducing the platform is the process for closing out and re-logging in to see if it unfreezes
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Discontinued Products
No issues with performance.
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Support Rating
Cision
The Brandwatch Consumer Research customer success team is outstanding. Every member of their team has been wildly helpful and remarkably pleasant. These people go above and beyond to ensure you have all the tools and help you need to find success on their platform. I had several calls where we discussed difficulties users where having on the platform that resulted in an overall improvement in reporting across the board. They didn't just answer our questions, they dug deeper to find root problems and helped us build out dashboards to alleviate them.
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Discontinued Products
As mentioned previously, it can be hard to get through to people who can help you. On occasion when I have spoken to customer service/tech support, they all seem nice and try to be helpful, however instead of admitting the system cannot do certain things, they will persist it saying that it can, which results in many wasted hours overall.
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Online Training
Cision
good knowledge, great tips, although the program seems a bit disconnected. It could improve it they create more free webinars and a good content calendar and tackle little topics in each webinar. Their trainers are top notch and they know a lot about the tool but they fall a bit low on technical level understanding of how the tool actually works
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Discontinued Products
• We initially received dedicated online training for our team which was delivered by our account rep. This was pretty effective since it happened after our data had been loaded into the system and it had been configured for specific needs our organization. The training was perhaps a bit shallow though, as it was only an hour long. Online videos are available to be taken individually, and these have been useful.
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Implementation Rating
Cision
Not that I can think of.
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Discontinued Products
Implementation was pretty simple. Just a matter of giving the account rep a list of our search terms and having him set the system up to pull the data we wanted to see. Once this had been done, we tweaked it with his help. Process was pretty smooth, although there was some back and forth until it worked the way we wanted.
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Alternatives Considered
Cision
If you're using it to monitor your brand's social presence only, or if you're in an agency and using it to monitor existing clients and provide reports to them, then this is a great tool and you're hard-pressed to find something better. But if you're wanting it more for new business and discovery, there are tools that do this much better, including Sysomos and Crimson Hexagon. So it depends on what specifically you're trying to do. My agency was already using this product when I arrived, so I did not have a choice in the matter, but I've evaluated both of these other tools. Crimson is similar enough that the slight increase in cost doesn't justify switching. Synthesio is the most expensive competitor in the market (no matter what they tell you), but you get what you pay for. If you can afford it, go with Synthesio.
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Discontinued Products
Compared to Radian6, I found Meltwater Buzz, Simply Measured, and Sprout Social to be much more user friendly. Meltwater Buzz and Radian6 are very similar products with many of the same functionalities but Buzz presents your analytics in a way that is much easier to understand. I did a two week trial with Sprout Social and absolutely loved the product but our company needed the capability to connect to Salesforce, which is available on R6 and Buzz. Simply Measured is my all time favorite but I have only used the free version so I am not completely sure how it stacks up to Radian6
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Return on Investment
Cision
  • At a high level, the biggest impact the Brandwatch Analytics has had is giving us the ability to quantify the impact of social media for our clients. In the world of social, ROI is defined and interpreted differently across clients (particularly where it's more difficult to apply traditional ROI) - so this may mean reporting on earned media for some, while for others it's measuring increasing engagements or social mentions over time.
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Discontinued Products
  • Monitoring social brand awareness is not something you can consider to have a meaninful impact in your business ROI short term, however it's a must for taking care of long term relationships and customer intimacy.
  • Radian6 connects with other analytical tools like webtrends, Google Analytics, etc..however it's not directly linked to a revenue driven platform, you can´t see the immediate ROI generated in the tool.
  • If you bet for social relationships you should consider this tool, no question on that. Social Commerce might be of course impacted postively by the proper use of this tool.
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ScreenShots

Brandwatch Screenshots

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