Brandwatch vs. Viralheat (Discontinued)

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
Viralheat (Discontinued)
Score 2.0 out of 10
N/A
Viralheat was acquired by Cision in 2015 and rebranded Cision Social Edition. It was later discontinued.N/A
Pricing
BrandwatchViralheat (Discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Pro
$800
10k mentions
Enterprise
3000+
Unlimited mentions or Queries
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BrandwatchViralheat (Discontinued)
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
BrandwatchViralheat (Discontinued)
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
BrandwatchViralheat (Discontinued)
Small Businesses
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Publer
Publer
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mention
Mention
Score 9.4 out of 10
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 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
BrandwatchViralheat (Discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
4.3
(65 ratings)
8.3
(14 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(8 ratings)
8.3
(13 ratings)
Usability
6.1
(7 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
4.1
(13 ratings)
8.8
(2 ratings)
Online Training
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(2 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
BrandwatchViralheat (Discontinued)
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.
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Discontinued Products
If social is a big part of your business in more departments than just marketing and communications (marcom), make sure to let the team know and ask how Viralheat can accommodate multiple users and departments. Viralheat was great during the evaluation process because they were willing to show us exactly what they could do for our company - they even customized accounts for us to show us the true value of signing on.
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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.
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Discontinued Products
  • Viralheat’s reporting feature delivers analytics in presentation-grade spreadsheets. I include these images in reports or presentations to different teams.
  • Monitoring is definitely a strong point. I am not limited by a conversation or mention limitation, which is especially important when tracking high-volume products or brands. We are able to quickly identify trends and act accordingly.
  • The user experience is a pleasant one. Viralheat offers many comprehensive features but the layout of the product is simple and intuitive. I’m able to access any feature without having to click around into multiple places.
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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
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Discontinued Products
  • Not being able to reference in the native platform (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook) the name of companies or users referenced in a post.
  • Not being able to embed images natively. (e.g. Image attached to a post on Viralheat shows up as a url link on the native platform).
  • Would love to see a calendar view of the scheduled posts as well as the current list view.
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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.
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Discontinued Products
Viralheat provided our team with the kind of monitoring tool we were looking for. As an added bonus, they had a member of their team brainstorm the best ways for us to set up our account to ensure we weren’t missing anything. Great customer service.
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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
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Discontinued Products
I found it really easy to use and I use it on a daily basis and can easily find my way around. It has the usability of a consumer application for an Enterprise product that does very complex things in a very elegant manner.
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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
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Discontinued Products
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.
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Discontinued Products
The customer success team clearly cares about how well we do. They are quick to get back to us and they always offer to jump on a screen share so we can understand and learn new features.
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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
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Cision
Not that I can think of.
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Discontinued Products
We were up and running within an hour.
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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.
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Discontinued Products
We chose Viralheat because it allowed us to do multiple things from one tool. We were able to monitor our brand mentions after each video, song, or album release - this provided us with valuable feedback abouout our brand and music. We were also able to connect our accounts and engage directly with our fans as well as post new content. We monitored the analytics around each release and campaign and were able to determine which were successful.
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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.
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Discontinued Products
  • Viralheat has helped me understand how real-life users react to things I build and/or test.
  • I’ve gotten a better understanding of my space and the relevant news surrounding it. This helps me build a better product.
  • It saves me a lot of time. I’m able to quickly monitor what’s important to me.
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ScreenShots

Brandwatch Screenshots

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