Brandwatch vs. CoSchedule Marketing Suite

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.

CoSchedule is great for businesses or agencies who need an overview of all their marketing efforts, and who want to establish collaboration between multiple departments. The calendar view is one of the best we've worked with and makes it easy to see exactly what's happening. There is some slight clunkiness when it comes to admin-related tasks, and a few things aren't easy to find, but there's great support.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Best time to post is great at updating to when we get the most engagement by platform
• Requeue tool to slate out additional posts for a given piece of content is a huge time saver
• Aggregate analytics tool shows us a peek across our posts on a given platform that's actually easier to read than the platform itself

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• The platform seems sluggish as of late, likely as a result of the robust amount of data we are entering and the number of filters we're creating.
• Social media scheduling exists, but we do run into publishing errors more often then we'd like.
• Task templates when updated are not retroactive, so when you create projects for an entire year and then change a template, you need to go back and change them manually.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

The interface is very intuitive, from setting up social profiles, to posting, to tags, to optimizing for best day/time to post. It's super easy to scan the aggregate analytics. The calendar is very easy to grok at a glance, and the more advanced functionality is intuitive to set up.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I didn't have to use their official support, but I can say that they put out a lot of content online to help users. Their YouTube page has quite an array of tutorial videos explaining how things work and how to get the most out of their tools. If you're struggling, before picking up a phone or blasting off an email, try searching for your problem on YouTube or their forums.

Incentivized

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

Not that I can think of.

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.

Incentivized

CoSchedule provides collaborative planning of projects. The calendar view is very well designed. Meetings and tasks can be scheduled and tracked easily. Whatever is being done, no matter how big the task/project is, it gives a bird-eye view of everything. Additionally, it also integrated very well with WordPress. Their customer service team is also very helpful.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It has saved me about 1 hour per day to keep things organized from Asana to WordPress.
• By not having a functioning Google Doc import feature, it costs me about 30 minutes for each blog post to copy paste all the content, images, etc.
• By bundling too many features into their plans, many of which we don't use (e.g. social media scheduling), we lose a little ROI because we are not using the full feature set. We use and prefer Buffer for social media, so when CoSchedule raised their price $40+ per month on features we would not be using, that hurt.

Incentivized