Brandwatch vs. Sysomos, now part of Meltwater

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
Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Sysomos was a social media listening and marketing solution for content discovery, planning, publishing, moderation, and analytics. Sysomos was acquired by Meltwater, and is no longer available, but the features of the former Sysomos are now part of the Meltwater platform.
$1,000
per month
Pricing
BrandwatchSysomos, now part of Meltwater
Editions & Modules
Pro
$800
10k mentions
Enterprise
3000+
Unlimited mentions or Queries
Sysomos
$1,000.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BrandwatchSysomos, now part of Meltwater
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
BrandwatchSysomos, now part of Meltwater
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 …
Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
Chose Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
It is the best research tool for planning social analysis, It also helps to identify influences and to optimize the campaign. Meltwater Social is probably the best solution out there for your social listening needs because it has the best features and user interface. The tool …
Chose Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
I think that Sysomos is the less complex version of Crimson Hexagon and Brandwatch. This tool may be better for small businesses or agencies that have a low budget in terms of tool and platform management. I think that Crimson and Brandwatch are much more updated and complex in …
Chose Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
Sysomos is simpler, cheaper, and more basic than Crimson. If you don't need a robust tool, and you want to save money, go with Sysomos.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
BrandwatchSysomos, now part of Meltwater
Small Businesses
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mention
Mention
Score 9.4 out of 10
Mention
Mention
Score 9.4 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
BrandwatchSysomos, now part of Meltwater
Likelihood to Recommend
4.3
(65 ratings)
7.0
(46 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(8 ratings)
6.8
(28 ratings)
Usability
6.1
(7 ratings)
9.0
(6 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(5 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(2 ratings)
8.5
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
4.1
(13 ratings)
2.0
(8 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.6
(2 ratings)
Online Training
6.4
(1 ratings)
8.0
(5 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(2 ratings)
10.0
(8 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
BrandwatchSysomos, now part of Meltwater
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
Sysomos Expion is best suited, in my opinion, to offices where either you have only one moderator/manager OR where multiple users plan to manage a specific channel. Without live updates, it gets far too complicated for multiple users to manage the exact same workload
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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
  • Ad-hoc research. During planning phase of a campaign it is a helpful tool to understand the marketplace, key influencers and topics that engage a target demographic.
  • Post-event hashtag analysis. Rapid generation of reporting on efficacy of a campaign, key voices, topics that resonated, viral reach and more.
  • User interface. Friendly and accessible enough to minimize training needs and enable decentralized access, though we have found some hand-holding is still required to get the most out of the platform.
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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
  • It does not provide a visual for volume over time.
  • The visuals aren't excellent, and would require an export to create better looking graphics.
  • The interface isn't intuitive and sometimes requires clicking around to find things that seem like they should be under a different title.
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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
There are two differentiating features that Sysomos MAP has that the competitor tools I have experienced (Radian6, Meltwater Buzz) did not: user-friendly Boolean queries for searches and near-real-time results. The former is important because, of course, your results are only as good as your search/campaign. With Sysomos, once you master Boolean queries (which isn't terribly difficult) you're set for creating any kind of listening report. I strongly prefer this to the "campaign creator" forms that other services provide. Second, Sysomos MAP returns results almost immediately - like a Google search. So if you get your results and see that you need to tweak your query - no big deal. Or if you have a last-minute request for a client - not an issue. Meltwater can take up to 48 hours for a search to fully populate. This is a major issue if you get your full set of results back and see that you need to adjust the query; you're looking at another two days of wait time. A long wait on results can also prove problematic in agency settings where clients or prospective clients often need results with a quick turnaround.
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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
The product is very easy to use. The platform is visual and data is easy to read. Boolean construction can sometimes be difficult, but the boolean constructor tool is helpful for boolean beginners. For more experienced boolean constructors, the boolean display at the top is very helpful in identifying where there may be holes in the construction
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Reliability and Availability
Cision
No answers on this topic
Discontinued Products
Not really an availability issue, but concurrency licensing rules mean that only one user can be logged in at a time.
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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
This has not been an issue. It is actually beating TweetDeck when we are tagged within a post that TweetDeck is monitoring.
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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
Unfortunately, we have not had a great experience with customer support from Klear. In the sales process, they were very responsive and helpful, but when onboarded, it definitely changed. We are based in the US and our customer service rep is based in Israel, meaning our work hours barely overlap. Oftentimes we're waiting 24+ hours for a response, and when it's a time-sensitive issue (like the platform not pulling in Instagram Story data) we want it to be resolved as quickly as possible. Klear also has a chat feature for more immediate help, but we've experienced a similar situation there where it takes 12+ hours to get a response and it's usually from our customer service rep. Our rep is very nice, but also doesn't seem very knowledgeable about the platform, and usually can't provide an immediate answer to a question we ask and has to "check with her team."
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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 had a kick-off training with the whole team where they walked us through the functionality. This was a pretty effective and comprehensive training.
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Implementation Rating
Cision
Not that I can think of.
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Discontinued Products
Implementation was so easy I dont even remember it!
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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
We've used Sprout Social & Hootsuite in the past -- and they all stack up pretty evenly. Sysomos has the same features as Sprout or Hootsuite, except their reports and analytics are a little more detailed. Hootsuite has a better social media management software and dashboard though
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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
  • Lowered costs and overhead when Expion got introduced as we now use one centralized solution for all of our social media work
  • We can finally calculate ROI with ease and understand our campaign performance through proper tracking and analytics
  • Competition tracking was never easier
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ScreenShots

Brandwatch Screenshots

Screenshot of

Sysomos, now part of Meltwater Screenshots

Screenshot of TOP CONTENT: See the best performing content from all your social media channels in one view plus compare it against your competitors’ pages.Screenshot of FAN MODERATION: Sysomos Expion makes it easy to know who to speak to, when to engage in conversation and can even be integrated with customer care centers.Screenshot of PUBLISH: Easily plan, schedule and publish content from a simple drag-and-drop calendar with workflow that’s easy to track and review.Screenshot of OPTIMIZE PAID ADS: Optimize paid ads with smarter analytics and trending triggers so you can better understand how organic and paid content are working together.Screenshot of DYNAMIC DASHBOARDS: Powerful marketing analytics shows that it’s not just about creating a report or crunching some numbers - but about telling a story.  You’ll discover patterns, breakouts, and trends in real time to capitalize on opportunities.