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
Pulsar CORE
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Pulsar is a social media monitoring platform offering social listening, owned channels analytics, and social CRM. Customers use Pulsar for brand tracking and campaign measurement.
The platform includes 4 tools:
TRAC: Social media listening across topics, audiences and content diffusion.
CORE: Owned channels analytics to measure your content performance and audience growth.
FLOW: Social customer relationship management and social media publishing.
TEAM: Analyse your internal social networks…
$1,200
150,000 mentions
Pricing
Brandwatch
Pulsar CORE
Editions & Modules
Pro
$800
10k mentions
Enterprise
3000+
Unlimited mentions or Queries
TRAC (starter package)
$1,200
150,000 mentions
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Brandwatch
Pulsar CORE
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Prices listed are on a 'starting from' basis. All TRAC packages have unlimited user log-ins, unlimited search queries and are charged on the amount of mentions pulled in.
Bespoke packages are available.
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 …
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.
I think that Pulsar is a good tool for brands or agencies who have a set list of competitors or subbrands that they are looking to do a monthly/weekly comparison of engagement metrics. When you have the brand account inputted, the data is shown in a visually tangible way and easy to comprehend.
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.
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.
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
Pulsar is not a complex tool by any means. The interface is updated and comprehensive, and I've used multiple tools in the past where the interface was very outdated and exporting data was often a difficult process since it was not well organized. The tool works well in visualizing complex data.
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
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.
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.
I think that Pulsar is one of the more updated platforms that I have used and the metrics exported/shown in the dashboard are accurate. I think that some tools report inaccurate metrics gathered from social media platforms due to the new APIs, something that often causes confusion and lack of clarity.
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.
