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
Sendible
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Sendible is a social media marketing platform that allows users to engage with their audience and track results across multiple social media channels at any time.
$29
per month 1 user and 6 profiles
Sprout Social
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Sprout Social provides social media management, marketing, customer care, data and intelligence, and employee advocacy solutions for brands and agencies, including Ticketmaster, Chipotle, Grubhub, Subaru, and Zendesk. Sprout’s platform is used to simplify social publishing, engagement, reviews, analytics and listening for customers. Sprout also provides customer success and technical support, to deliver consistent value to all users. Any organization, regardless of size or industry, receives…
$249
per month per user
Pricing
Brandwatch
Sendible
Sprout Social
Editions & Modules
Pro
$800
10k mentions
Enterprise
3000+
Unlimited mentions or Queries
Creator
$29
per month 1 user and 6 profiles
Traction
$89
per month 4 users and 24 profiles
Scale
$199
per month 7 users and 49 profiles
Advanced
$299
per month 20 users and 100 profiles
Enterprise
$750
per month 80 users and 400 profiles
Standard
$199 annual / $249 monthly
per user/per month
Professional
$299 annual / $399 monthly
per user/per month
Advanced
$399 annual / $499 monthly
per user/per month
Free Trial
Free
for 30 days
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Brandwatch
Sendible
Sprout Social
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
15% discount if paying annually.
15% monthly discount or 25% annual discount offered to non-profits.
Brandwatch stacks up pretty close to Sprinklr, but still is easier to use, and not all offer Gemini AI, plus all the components available, as well as being able to use boolean. Brandwatch can dig deeper into insights.
Hootsuite visually looks better and has way more integrations/ suggestions/ areas to save copy/ resharing ability/plus Later is more affordable for small business owners but ideal for creatives to visualize and manually adjust feeds.
Sendible is a step beyond tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite Pro. Sendible is a slightly more professional platform than these, adding features that agencies will benefit from.
Compared to similar products such as Sprout Social, the pricing made a lot more sense with Sendible …
While lacking in some features compared to those big alternatives, Sendible doesn't stop releasing new features every few months and doesn't cost nearly as much monthly as they do for the amount of profiles they allow to manage. Overall I'd say it's a solid competitor if they …
Sendible integrates with almost every social media platform and upon request they can even add a channel for you that is not currently integrated, an offer you can not get elsewhere. If your business is focused on selling more, increasing website traffic or expanding the …
I don't think the other listed platforms are "bad" per se. I really wanted/needed a more robust platform that was easy to use and implement and I felt the others fell short in terms of what I needed it for. For instance, I think that Buffer has a great company, and a great …
We have used Hootsuite since 2013, but their pricing is high and we can't afford that since we are a small team. Then we tried Buffer, but Buffer is limiting the number of social media platforms that you can manage. Buffer doesn't have a lot of functions and their analytics …
Sprout Social is much more affordable compared to Brandwatch, and we didn't use all the features for it anyway, so it felt like a great time to switch. Sprout Social scheduling is much easier and simpler and it takes me less time. I do prefer Brandwatch reports over Sprout …
Sprout Social's Social Inbox and Listening Tools stood out, plus the sales and onboarding processes were well connected and helpful. They were flexible in the price point as a nonprofit and organization with unique needs in general. They also hit all the marks in what we needed …
When scouting different social media management platforms, Sprout Social stood out as the best choice despite other companies offering competitive features and lower rates. Some key factors solidified our decision to stay with Sprout Social. One major drawback we noticed with …
We are constantly exploring our options and looking for the most cutting-edge products that suit our needs as a business. Sprout ticked the boxes for what we needed when it was time for a change. Both are powerful tools, and you can only see by doing.
I believe that Spredfast and Sprinklr are better in terms of community management and brand engagement. Spredfast has great reporting capabilities, however, the Sprout interface and overall display is easier to navigate and display a PDF for clients on how our content is doing …
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 have a fairly straightforward use case for Sendible and it meets almost all of my needs. If you are a small company that needs a collaborative solution to social media content creation, and likely has a small team (or no team) to manage social media postings, I think Sendible is likely a great tool to schedule posts and largely automate social media marketing. A larger company or more involved marketing team could still use Sendible to schedule and collaborate on posts. However, there may be additional features they may want or need (like the ability to promote posts) that may not be available with Sendible.
Sprout Social is a great tool, but it comes with a high per-seat price. In my opinion, this tool is great for a well-established brand, but for any start-up or multi-person agency, the cost can add up quickly and make or break your decision to use it. The reason for the lower recommendation score is a recent and ongoing issue I am facing with getting out of our current agreement. In our experience, Sprout Social makes it impossible to do, and the way they get you to agree to a year-long contract is a little shady. No contract is renewed after a year; just a simple email asking if you want to make any changes. In my experience, if you are not fully aware of what you agreed to a year ago, they will get ya, and you will be in the position we are in now. After experiencing this, I see that it is common among Sprout Social users looking for a more cost-effective option. Big bummer considering the monthly price users are paying.
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.
Easy to schedule and post to all of your social media platforms.
Customer support is very accommodating and always there to help. I have never had an issue with reaching someone whether it was for a quick question or to demo other features.
They have an awesome affiliate program (example: I earned over $600 from one company clicking through an signing up from my affiliate link - yay!)
Compared to other social media platforms, Sendible has been the most robust with features and ease of use.
They are always making advances and upgrades to their service offerings to better meet the needs of their customers.
Social Scheduling: Sprout Social makes it easier than any platform I've used to schedule posts with each, and to batch-schedule the same post to run on multiple dates. The scheduling platform is intuitive and easy to understand.
Social Reporting: With just a few clicks of the button, you can easily export reports that are easy for both social media experts and complete novices to understand. I like how you can get a report within 60 seconds or so if needed.
Customer Service/Help: Whenever I've had a question, both my Sprout Social rep and the Help Center have been extremely easy to contact and quick to reply. Problems are solved very fast and it's made easy to understand.
Inbox. The inbox of incoming messages/posts is very clunky. Threads are separated into individual messages, making it difficult to follow conversations.
Reporting. The included reporting features are limited and don't allow for enough customization to be worth using.
Hashtags. When discussing the 10 most common mistakes (or whatever the title might be), we are unable to say "You won't believe #3" because the system reads this as a hashtag to link rather than just a number. It adds on editing time when approving posts.
Default settings. As a Social Media Manager, it is annoying to have myself set as default when looking at the content calendar. I don't write the posts, just approved and schedule them, so manually entering in my writers' names in the filters could be made easier by making this an editable feature.
Instagram. You cannot post multiple images in a single Instagram post from Sendible.
Service Lists. They are supposed to be helpful in grouping your services (we do this by brand), however, these lists don't pull the information you put on individual services. So if I have a list with Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest for Brand A, you can't just add the Brand A Service List filter onto the calendar and see all of those posts that are scheduled. They don't seem to have much purpose at all.
I would like for Personal Instagram Accounts to be able to integrate with Sprout Social's Employee Advocacy platform. You are able to connect personally accounts to Sprout Social itself, which is great, but for employee re-sharing internal stories, this is not possible unless it is with a Business Instagram account.
I would like for the left hand tool bar to be more user friendly. There are so many tools and settings that are available, and I would like for it to be simplified in a way that makes it less cluttered.
An improvement can be made with the Sprout Social Mobile App. The user friendliness of the app does not allow as much autonomy as the regular webpage.
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.
If I am given a larger budget to work with then I'd like a program that tracks and collects my PR hits, as well as sends me important info to respond to. I realy like the way New Brand Analytics tracks my Trip Advisor,etc ratings
Sprout Social is the best platform out there for social-media management, and now that I have all my clients using Sprout Social, it would be sort of silly for me to walk away format at this juncture. The only cloud on the horizon would be if Salesforce bought it (as has been rumored) and put it inside its walled garden.
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
Sendible is 100% web based so managing social media platforms can be done from anywhere with internet connectivity. During registration, Sendible takes its users on a tour of its main features. The sleek design was engineered by professionals who have great interest in social media marketing. There is ample support in case users get lost and there is no learning curve.
Sprout Social is straightforward to use - built for anyone regardless of tech experience to be able to navigate. It integrates pretty seamlessly to the native platforms and brings a lot of things together to make a seamlessly experience for seasoned social media managers.
Uptime was OK, but given the fact that we are in Europe, there were some specific problems: They tended to take the system down for maintenance during the night in the US, which was during our workday. This was definitely problematic and hard to explain to our clients.
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.
Sendible has a great resource center which I have used multiple times throughout my year using the platform. There are plenty of troubleshooting articles and guides that make it easy to uncover the root of any small issues I may have.
The chat and online resources are great. The managers are too. They go through account reps pretty fast. Also, not a lot of onboarding once a product or service is sold. The ticket request system is terrible, they have too many people switching off roles, they take a long time to get back to you and don't plan on anything being fixed over a weekend - even if you have a problem. Their customer service via tickets is the worst.
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
Their training is good, but the promotion of it is even better. I don't need or have the time for training, but I was always happy to know it was there. They did a great job sending updates out and making me aware when there was a new feature that I may want training for. As for the training I never used it, so I can't comment on that
Make sure you do it all the way. Do not break it into phases. Pour yourself a coffee, start it in the morning and you'll be done before you finish that coffee.
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.
While lacking in some features compared to those big alternatives, Sendible doesn't stop releasing new features every few months and doesn't cost nearly as much monthly as they do for the amount of profiles they allow to manage. Overall I'd say it's a solid competitor if they keep the updates coming and optimize the platform a little
Takes the best of all of these and puts them in one place. I am yet to find a feature that these have that are not on Sprout Social, while there are many missing features on these platforms that come with Sprout Social as standard.
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.
One positive impact has been a huge time saver for our team. Where we once had multiple systems and delays from producing content to approval to publishing, now everything is seamless.
Another positive impact is streamlining the onboarding process for new team members. Sprout Social is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy to study even for someone completely new to social media.
One negative impact has been the time it takes to wade through irrelevant social listening posts. The filtering is not effective enough to eliminate the noise.
