Brandwatch vs. Meltwater

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
Meltwater
Score 6.6 out of 10
N/A
Meltwater Media Intelligence platform is a set of public relations software tools for media monitoring, social media monitoring, and collecting brand insights. The four areas of functionality are Monitor, Analyze, Distribute, and Engage. (Note that this product combines features from the vendor Meltwater's former Buzz, Press, and News products.)N/A
Pricing
BrandwatchMeltwater
Editions & Modules
Pro
$800
10k mentions
Enterprise
3000+
Unlimited mentions or Queries
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BrandwatchMeltwater
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
BrandwatchMeltwater
Considered Both Products
Brandwatch
Chose Brandwatch
Ease of use and speed are the two most important attributes. Brandwatch is a comprehensive listening tool.
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 …
Meltwater
Chose Meltwater
While we use Google and Hootsuite as part of our class education, Meltwater's platform is our go-to every semester. Meltwater provides a dashboard that makes it easy for the new and/or experienced user to understand the data, share it with a class or group, and offers room for …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
BrandwatchMeltwater
Small Businesses
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Cision Communications Cloud
Cision Communications Cloud
Score 7.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mention
Mention
Score 9.4 out of 10
Cision Communications Cloud
Cision Communications Cloud
Score 7.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
Cision Communications Cloud
Cision Communications Cloud
Score 7.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
BrandwatchMeltwater
Likelihood to Recommend
4.3
(65 ratings)
5.7
(71 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(8 ratings)
8.0
(9 ratings)
Usability
6.1
(7 ratings)
2.2
(3 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
4.1
(13 ratings)
7.5
(28 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
6.4
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(2 ratings)
6.1
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
BrandwatchMeltwater
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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Meltwater
Meltwater is well-suited for agencies that have an engagement team who is looking to service a variety of client needs such as social media reporting, public relations outreach, and community management. If you're looking to have a platform serve just one need, you can still use Meltwater but will get more bang for your buck if you are needing a variety of tools.
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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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Meltwater
  • Media research - you can search for relevant publications and journalists to add to your media list.
  • Earned media coverage - you can search for coverage of your brand and find news stories that also include data that may be useful (how many people did the story reach for example).
  • Building media lists - if you have no current existing list, you can build and export one in Excel for example.
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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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Meltwater
  • The dashboards are not user-friendly, customizable (color, font size, etc.), or worthy of presenting to a client. All of the insights from a dashboard get pulled from the platform and placed into a more client-friendly presentation.
  • Paywalls for certain publications connected to who-knows-what. DowJones racket limits media monitoring capabilities and results in manual searches for a growing number of publications.
  • TVeyes, the broadcast monitoring arm of the media monitoring capabilities, just needs TLC and to become more client-facing. Currently, the links produced to share clips look sketchy, and they have a relatively short shelf life.
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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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Meltwater
Meltwater works well for our organization and has allowed us to meet our internal goals. We are always open to new products and services that may be able to provide similar or better features; however, our experience has been that many of Meltwater's competitors are not up to the task.
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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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Meltwater
Once you get some basic training it's pretty easy to use. I would like to see training manuals, or instructional videos to help me explore features I'm not currently using.
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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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Meltwater
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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Meltwater
Our account rep at Meltwater went dark for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, our new account manager reached out to set up a meeting. Apparently, they had a big shakeup in the company, and there were some personnel changes. Our new account rep was great in discussing the platform's capabilities that were available to us and even offered to schedule a follow-up meeting with his technical team to introduce our new social media team members to the platform and how it could help them with their jobs.
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In-Person Training
Cision
No answers on this topic
Meltwater
Again, really in-depth and helpful for a program that is really easy to use.
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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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Meltwater
Walked step by step through program. Very informative on a program that doesn't require much training.
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Implementation Rating
Cision
Not that I can think of.
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Meltwater
You are only allowed 15 users, so make sure you've identified who will have access to use the tool.
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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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Meltwater
I was looking for a full-service option. I did some research. What really sold me was the presentation. They offered products that were helpful, and I wasn’t even aware of them. It is more expensive than the other products that are out there, but you get more. The other companies are good, but Meltwater Media Intelligence is more full service.
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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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Meltwater
  • As a PR firm, we rely on the media databases that [Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform] supplies to deliver the media exposure that they expect from us.
  • We utilize their tracking of media hits for our overall reporting to our clients.
  • Both of these are advantageous in helping us to not only keep our existing clients happy but also to gain new clients (and, in turn - revenue), as well.
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ScreenShots

Brandwatch Screenshots

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