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
Crowdbooster (discontinued)
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Crowdbooster was a tool to measure the success of Twitter and Facebook posts, with visualizations to track retweets, and track potential impressions created, likes, comments, and how many shares a Facebook post has received. Crowdbooster is no longer available.
$9
per month
Talkwalker by Hootsuite
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Talkwalker is a consumer intelligence company that bring sin data from 30+ social networks, 150 million websites, and 100 data partners to give customers a unified view of their consumers. Talkwalker is a Hootsuite solution since the 2024 acquisition.
N/A
Pricing
Brandwatch
Crowdbooster (discontinued)
Talkwalker by Hootsuite
Editions & Modules
Pro
$800
10k mentions
Enterprise
3000+
Unlimited mentions or Queries
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Brandwatch
Crowdbooster (discontinued)
Talkwalker by Hootsuite
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Brandwatch
Crowdbooster (discontinued)
Talkwalker by Hootsuite
Considered Multiple Products
Brandwatch
Verified User
Manager
Chose Brandwatch
This is kind of a moot point now that they're in the process of merging, but Brandwatch is better at segmenting data, and Crimson Hexagon is better at finding the meaning/story/context in the data and doing it quickly. Both are useful functions and once they're completely …
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, …
A real edge for Brandwatch is how easy and flexible you can play around with data. It becomes more of a real analysis platform that serves different business objectives rather than visualization and informative output.
What we love best about Brandwatch (other than the great customer support which is important) is the variety of content that it crawls, many other tools are limited to specific social media sites or don't crawl for forums for example so we feel Brandwatch offers a well rounded …
Brandwatch Analytics is most suited as an 'all round' social intelligence product. We have seen massive changes in the capability of Brandwatch over the last year and are very excited to see how we can expand our own business opportunities through the use of Brandwatch.
I've used plenty of social media tools, I've tried Mention, Talkwalker and others. While they're both great tools, Brandwatch displayed data in the exact way I wanted to view it. And I can view it in other ways if I like. The data it pulls in is reliable and up to date as well …
Crowdbooster (discontinued)
No answer on this topic
Talkwalker by Hootsuite
Verified User
Analyst
Chose Talkwalker by Hootsuite
I strongly believe that a social intelligence team needs a variety of social listening tools to make for effective monitoring and reporting. Talkwalker is a good complement to other social intelligence tools, especially because of some of its unique capabilities such as its …
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.
Before recommending Crowdbooster, I'd want to know what goals they hope to accomplish with the software. Then I would want them to specifically identify what types of metrics would be most useful to their program. If they specifically need to report out on how many people in a certain location they reached, this isn't the right fit. If they are using other tools, there may be duplication. However, if they are currently using more budget-friendly solutions or just getting started with a new program, Crowdbooster is a perfect fit. It will help you to grow your program and is flexible enough to accommodate your needs.
Talkwalker is well suited for big companies and agencies that are looking for a long-term solution to keep track of the industry and/or their brands and key competitors. While setup requires a bit of dedication (especially in terms of custom filters and tags), once it's done, the tool will give the user a lot of flexibility to analyze the conversations and find the relevant results that answer the business questions. Companies just looking for a tool to track a short time period, or simple things like Twitter hashtags, won't take advantage of the full capabilities of this tool. Therefore, they could feel frustrated when comparing the outcomes/usage versus the costs.
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.
Timed social media posts - Crowdbooster provides the opportunity to schedule social media posts allowing you to work on other important social media tasks.
Simply beautiful tracking - There are millions of ways to measure social media impact. Crowdbooster offers the most important and relevant measurements in simplified charts..
Great UI - Crappy UI = crappy experience. Crowdbooster's UI is easy to navigate. It won't take months to learn where all the buttons are.
Truly global listening platform - monitor a deep range of media types from all over the world. Particularly strong in supporting competitive monitoring and analysis briefs across regions and countries. It monitors content in original language which I believe is a very strong monitoring factor.
Easy to use yet powerful dashboard visualisations - the dashboard interface is among the best I have seen. While it can accomplish many things, and under the hood is a very powerful and complex tool, the user interface is very intuitive, slick, quick and packed with all the KPIs you could want.
Customisation of the tool is a great feature. You can build your own dashboard and reporting spaces to suit your needs. You can schedule alerts from the system in a variety of outputs to keep you up to date with the latest events.
Customer support & technological advancement - the team at Talkwalker are highly proficient, always willing to support our every need, however big or small. Talkwalker aim to release around 4 software updates each year which means the platform is always full of the latest data visualisations and monitoring technologies
Having 'traditional' media monitored alongside social as well as owned media assets in one dashboard space is invaluable to help brands understand where their media footprint lies and how they perform in each media set, relative to the others.
AI - Talkwalker has introduced greater AI capabilities recently which means the capability of the tool in monitoring is ever-increasing, and the accuracy of targeting content and sentiment analysis is improving. The Visual Insights and image recognition technology is a really strong feature, and a very welcome addition to the monitoring aspect
The ranked order of twitter followers and the number of "tweet impressions" did not help that much. Those "tweet impressions" were not really an estimate of how many people were actually reading my tweet. It was simply a sum of followers of the person retweeting a tweet and the sum of all followers from a subsequent retweet of the initial retweet. All this told me was the best case scenario I could expect if ALL followers of a person that retweeted saw my tweet. This is not a true measure of "twitter footprint" – since the “signal to noise” ratio in Twitter is very low.
There was no system in place to track "clicked links" for links embedded in tweets and/or facebook wall posts. Hootsuite did a good job of this – but only for twitter.
The list of recommended times to tweet were always "on the hour" (i.e. 10 a.m, 1 p.m.). Never were the times ever at "half past the hour" etc. An independent study that I did on my own using Google Analytics (and campaign links using google's URL builder) helped me determine that my optimal "Tweet time" during the week is 3:30 p.m. ET. More importantly, the recommended times seemed to be roughly the same on the weekends - which I find strange given that social media behavior does change on the weekends.
Occasionally, in my facebook ranked table of "loyal fans", I would see people in there that had not "liked" or "commented" on a post for months at a stretch and the "look back" period of the table was only around 7 days or so. Hence, I occasionally had to question the accuracy of that table.
The system is complicated. With everything that you're able to do, it does come at the cost of simplicity. It definitely requires training and a high level of expertise to properly leverage what it can do.
The system can be slow. If you "ask" it to do too many things at once, it can get hung up and do the spin of doom.
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.
Simple to use and a great value for what it offers. It has a simple but clean interface and it provides fantastic historical data you can use to measure your efforts online. By using a tool like Crowdbooster, you can see what is working with your audience and what isn't. From there, you can start tweaking your strategies
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
I found it fairly intuitive and easy to use. The information is laid out cleanly, and the most important information appears at a glance on the home page. However, I have worked with other users who had a hard time switching between platforms and identifying where other information was buried. It's not always clear that something is a clickable button! The option to export results is also a bit buried, and not integrated with the date range option.
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
Talkwalker gets the job done at a basic level. It performs regular indexing of existing webpages and tracks the instances in which a particular brand or company is mentioned. Especially for being free, this is an awesome resource. However, it should be said that this product does not perform nearly at the level of the paid options.
We have not had to reach out to the team for much support but when we did, The support from the Team has been Superb. We were given the assistance needed once requested by the Team. We would recommend Falcon not only because the product is simply amazing but also because of the level of support we have reached.
I do not think it is as supported as it once was when it first arrived on the social media scene. It is an older platform whose main functionality may have already ran its course.
They are very helpful, but can sometimes be a little too quick and not explain things in as great a depth as we would like. They have great staff and programs, and we don't really have any other major complaints. Support is very responsive and helpful when need be.
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
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.
It is a platform that is singularly focused. It does not have a lot of the additions that come stock with other platforms such as robust reporting or deeper insights past schedule times. It is also a stand-alone platform and a lot of its primary functionality can be found in more encompassing platforms.
I have yet to find another tool that would provide me with such a detailed information per query. It's such a find! Plus, I get separate emails per a search query and I'm able to archive those emails to the appropriate folders and always have a way of looking back. It's very useful for building monthly reports.
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.
Increased efficiency. I am able to generate useful snapshot reports in seconds. Particularly useful when you need answers fast (such as on a phone call).
Peace of mind. I am able to compare the data in Crowdbooster to what is exported from Facebook and Twitter.
Quicker, simpler evaluation of results. I am able to more easily compare impressions with engagement data to see what is working, and what should change. Particularly useful in day-to-day analysis.
The free tool is a no-brainer. It absolutely helps ferret out mentions on social media that I wasn't aware of before.
Now, I can use the tool for clients, too, so for consultants, it can be a great way to help stay on top of what's being said about them online, as well.
Using the paid version would help delve into even more insights for your business.
