Brandwatch vs. Pulsar CORE

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
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
BrandwatchPulsar CORE
Editions & Modules
Pro
$800
10k mentions
Enterprise
3000+
Unlimited mentions or Queries
TRAC (starter package)
$1,200
150,000 mentions
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BrandwatchPulsar CORE
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPrices 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.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
BrandwatchPulsar CORE
Considered Both Products
Brandwatch
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 …
Pulsar CORE

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
BrandwatchPulsar CORE
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
BrandwatchPulsar CORE
Likelihood to Recommend
4.3
(65 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.1
(7 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
4.1
(13 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
BrandwatchPulsar CORE
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.
Read full review
Pulsar
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Pulsar
  • Track engagements over time
  • Easy to use interface
  • Modern and updated display
Read full review
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
Read full review
Pulsar
  • Unfortunately, when exporting data it is often hard to read in an easy format.
  • I've used other tools where you can get historical data once you put into the tool but Pulsar cannot do that.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Pulsar
No answers on this topic
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
Read full review
Pulsar
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.
Read full review
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
Read full review
Pulsar
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Pulsar
I have not had to reach out to Pulsar support before but my coworkers have and said the support was good.
Read full review
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
Read full review
Pulsar
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Cision
Not that I can think of.
Read full review
Pulsar
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Pulsar
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Pulsar
  • Input into our algorithm for brand strength and stature
  • Quick engagement tracking
Read full review
ScreenShots

Brandwatch Screenshots

Screenshot of

Pulsar CORE Screenshots

Screenshot of The activity dashboard gives you a thorough snapshot of all the key numbers in your datasetScreenshot of Pulsar TRAC advanced location detection gives you up to 100% geo-localised data by city, country and GPS coordinatesScreenshot of The Network map visualizes the engagement patterns within your audience and identifies the most influential usersScreenshot of Slice and dice the data with contextual, behavioural and content filtersScreenshot of See the bigger picture. Pulsar CORE gives you integrated brand-level metrics across all owned channels, so you can measure the total reach and engagement you're getting.