Meltwater vs. Talkwalker

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Talkwalker
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Talkwalker is a social media search, monitoring and analytics tool. It delivers insights on any given search term and metrics on owned and earned media performance. Talkwalker offers flexible dashboards, APIs and reports featuring comprehensive filters and actionable social media insights that create strong added value for brands and agencies worldwide.N/A
Pricing
MeltwaterTalkwalker
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MeltwaterTalkwalker
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Best Alternatives
MeltwaterTalkwalker
Small Businesses
Cision Communications Cloud
Cision Communications Cloud
Score 7.6 out of 10
Publer
Publer
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Newswire
Newswire
Score 8.3 out of 10
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Cision Communications Cloud
Cision Communications Cloud
Score 7.6 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
MeltwaterTalkwalker
Likelihood to Recommend
5.7
(71 ratings)
8.3
(13 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(9 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Usability
2.2
(3 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
7.5
(28 ratings)
8.0
(4 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
6.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
MeltwaterTalkwalker
Likelihood to Recommend
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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Talkwalker
Talkwalker is well suited for big companies and agencies that are looking for a long-term solution to keep track of the industry and/or their brands and key competitors. While setup requires a bit of dedication (especially in terms of custom filters and tags), once it's done, the tool will give the user a lot of flexibility to analyze the conversations and find the relevant results that answer the business questions. Companies just looking for a tool to track a short time period, or simple things like Twitter hashtags, won't take advantage of the full capabilities of this tool. Therefore, they could feel frustrated when comparing the outcomes/usage versus the costs.
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Pros
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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Talkwalker
  • Truly global listening platform - monitor a deep range of media types from all over the world. Particularly strong in supporting competitive monitoring and analysis briefs across regions and countries. It monitors content in original language which I believe is a very strong monitoring factor.
  • Easy to use yet powerful dashboard visualisations - the dashboard interface is among the best I have seen. While it can accomplish many things, and under the hood is a very powerful and complex tool, the user interface is very intuitive, slick, quick and packed with all the KPIs you could want.
  • Customisation of the tool is a great feature. You can build your own dashboard and reporting spaces to suit your needs. You can schedule alerts from the system in a variety of outputs to keep you up to date with the latest events.
  • Customer support & technological advancement - the team at Talkwalker are highly proficient, always willing to support our every need, however big or small. Talkwalker aim to release around 4 software updates each year which means the platform is always full of the latest data visualisations and monitoring technologies
  • Having 'traditional' media monitored alongside social as well as owned media assets in one dashboard space is invaluable to help brands understand where their media footprint lies and how they perform in each media set, relative to the others.
  • AI - Talkwalker has introduced greater AI capabilities recently which means the capability of the tool in monitoring is ever-increasing, and the accuracy of targeting content and sentiment analysis is improving. The Visual Insights and image recognition technology is a really strong feature, and a very welcome addition to the monitoring aspect
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Cons
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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Talkwalker
  • The system is complicated. With everything that you're able to do, it does come at the cost of simplicity. It definitely requires training and a high level of expertise to properly leverage what it can do.
  • The system can be slow. If you "ask" it to do too many things at once, it can get hung up and do the spin of doom.
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Likelihood to Renew
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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Talkwalker
Love it! In most cases, Talkwalker is a no-brainer: I can confidently recommend it to clients.
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Usability
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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Talkwalker
Despite all the functionalities available on the platform, I never felt overwhelmed or confused
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Performance
Meltwater
No answers on this topic
Talkwalker
Talkwalker gets the job done at a basic level. It performs regular indexing of existing webpages and tracks the instances in which a particular brand or company is mentioned. Especially for being free, this is an awesome resource. However, it should be said that this product does not perform nearly at the level of the paid options.
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Support Rating
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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Talkwalker
They are very helpful, but can sometimes be a little too quick and not explain things in as great a depth as we would like. They have great staff and programs, and we don't really have any other major complaints. Support is very responsive and helpful when need be.
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In-Person Training
Meltwater
Again, really in-depth and helpful for a program that is really easy to use.
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Talkwalker
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Meltwater
Walked step by step through program. Very informative on a program that doesn't require much training.
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Talkwalker
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
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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Talkwalker
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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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Talkwalker
I have yet to find another tool that would provide me with such a detailed information per query. It's such a find! Plus, I get separate emails per a search query and I'm able to archive those emails to the appropriate folders and always have a way of looking back. It's very useful for building monthly reports.
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Return on Investment
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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Talkwalker
  • The free tool is a no-brainer. It absolutely helps ferret out mentions on social media that I wasn't aware of before.
  • Now, I can use the tool for clients, too, so for consultants, it can be a great way to help stay on top of what's being said about them online, as well.
  • Using the paid version would help delve into even more insights for your business.
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ScreenShots