Brandwatch vs. Mention: Which Is the Right Choice? (2025 review)

Choosing the right social listening tool can transform your brand’s online engagement strategy. This article compares Brandwatch and Mention, two leading platforms with distinct approaches to social media monitoring and analytics.

We’ve analyzed both tools using publicly available platform documentation, help center resources, and verified user reviews to assess their capabilities, limitations, and value propositions objectively.

Our comparison examines crucial factors including data sources and coverage, core and advanced features, pricing structures, and overall user experience. Rather than declaring an outright winner, we’ll highlight where each platform excels and where it might fall short.

Whether you prioritize comprehensive data access, intuitive dashboards, advanced analytics, or budget-friendly options, this guide will help you determine which solution best meets your specific needs. Read on for our detailed analysis of how Brandwatch and Mention compare.

Pricing & Plans

Pricing Structure Comparison

Brandwatch offers custom enterprise-level plans with no public pricing, while Mention provides tiered options ranging from $41/month (Solo) to $149/month (ProPlus) with a custom Company tier for larger needs. Mention offers flexible monthly or annual billing options, providing potential savings with annual commitments. In contrast, Brandwatch operates exclusively on annual billing cycles, which requires a larger upfront commitment from customers.

Free Trials & Demos

Mention provides a free trial that allows potential customers to test its features before committing financially. The trial offers limited access to core functionalities including basic monitoring capabilities. Brandwatch doesn’t offer a free trial option, but does provide comprehensive demos upon request, allowing prospects to see the platform’s enterprise capabilities in action before purchasing.

Add-ons & Extras

Mention offers several add-ons to enhance functionality, including historical data access, LinkedIn monitoring, API connectivity, and additional alerts/mentions for users who need more capacity. These add-ons create flexibility for scaling services as needs grow. Brandwatch focuses on custom enterprise solutions rather than itemized add-ons, incorporating needed features into tailored packages based on specific business requirements.

Payment Options & Billing

Both platforms accept standard payment methods including credit cards, with Brandwatch also accepting PayPal for added convenience. Mention accepts wire transfers exclusively for Company plan subscribers, while Brandwatch makes this option available across all packages. Mention’s monthly billing option offers greater flexibility for businesses with fluctuating budgets, though Brandwatch’s annual-only approach likely provides enterprise stability.

Refund Policies

*Brandwatch maintains a strict non-refundable policy* for its annual subscriptions, with fees invoiced upfront with no cancellation options unless specifically noted in the contract terms. Mention similarly doesn’t offer refunds for partial usage or remaining subscription time, instead downgrading canceled accounts to free versions. Both companies implement relatively rigid refund structures, making the initial purchase decision particularly important.

Mention offers more transparent pricing and flexibility ideal for small to medium businesses with growing needs, while Brandwatch targets enterprise clients requiring comprehensive social intelligence capabilities with custom solutions and longer-term commitments.

Features

Dashboard Comparison

Brandwatch’s dashboard features a clean, analytical layout with data visualization tools prominently displayed. The interface appears focused on delivering comprehensive data insights with multiple panels for tracking various metrics simultaneously. Mention’s dashboard, in contrast, offers a more streamlined approach with a modern interface that emphasizes ease of use while maintaining robust monitoring capabilities.

The visual organization differs significantly between the two platforms. Brandwatch’s design caters to advanced users who need extensive data analysis tools accessible at once, while Mention presents a more intuitive layout that balances functionality with user-friendly navigation. Both dashboards provide quick access to key metrics, but with distinct approaches to information density and visualization.

Alert Creation Process

Brandwatch offers a sophisticated alert creation system using boolean operators (AND, OR, NEAR), source operators (site:example.com, author:username), and country operators to refine alerts and reduce noise. This approach provides extensive customization for power users who need precise monitoring parameters.

Mention provides three distinct alert types: Basic (requiring primary, secondary, and excluded keywords), Standard (supporting up to 10 keywords per query block with a maximum of 4 blocks), and Advanced (utilizing boolean language operators). Mention adds practical features like estimated mention volume before creation, the ability to block up to 1,000 URLs and sources pre-launch, and country-specific monitoring. The platform generates results within seconds of setup, streamlining the monitoring process.

Metrics & Filters

Brandwatch tracks comprehensive metrics including website details, social network data, author information (including profile images for X/Twitter), content previews, publication dates, reach and impressions for specific platforms, sentiment, emotion analysis for English mentions, location data, and language information. Users can filter by keywords, platforms, sentiment, emotion, gender, author, tags, language, location, X account types, and mention types.

Mention monitors sentiment, emotion, reach, source, influence score, social shares, country, language, net sentiment score, similarity detection, and highlights. Its filtering system encompasses time periods, sources, influence scores, languages, countries, tags, emotions, sentiment, status, folders, and group mentions, with the added benefit of saving filter combinations for future use. Both platforms provide robust data analysis capabilities, though they emphasize different metrics and filtering approaches.

Data & Sources Coverage

Sources: Brandwatch covers an extensive range of platforms across social networks (X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Flickr, LinkedIn own pages), blogs (Ameba, WordPress, TMZ, IGN, Business Wire, Business Insider, TechRadar), forums (Yahoo Answers, Gamespot, MyFitnessPal, Goodreads, Investopedia), review sites (Google Reviews, Booking.com, Open Table, BestBuy, HomeDepot, TripAdvisor), and news sources (CNN, ABC, BuzzFeed, Guardian, GoogleNews, Washington Post, MSN, BBC). The platform also uniquely monitors radio and TV content.

Mention’s coverage includes social media (X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Reddit, Medium) and web sources including review sites (G2, Trustpilot, Capterra, Booking), news sites, forums, blogs, HackerNews, and GitHub. Brandwatch offers broader coverage across traditional media like radio and TV, while Mention includes platforms like TikTok, Pinterest, and developer-focused sites like GitHub.

Historical Data: Brandwatch provides access to historical data up to 3 years, including Twitter archives and the full Brandwatch database. Mention offers historical data up to 24 months across Facebook, Twitter, forums, blogs, videos, news, and web sources. Brandwatch’s longer timeframe provides greater historical context for trend analysis.

Languages: Brandwatch supports 165 languages, while Mention boasts broader coverage with 249 languages, monitoring any ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code. This significant difference in language support gives Mention an advantage for global brand monitoring across diverse linguistic regions.

Sentiment Analysis

Brandwatch employs Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Transformer Architecture Language Models to analyze sentiment across 40 languages. Their system delivers 60-75% accuracy, providing a solid foundation for trend analysis. In contrast, Mention supports 31 languages with an AI model containing 278 million parameters trained on a 2.5TB dataset and fine-tuned by Machine Learning engineers. Mention claims a significantly higher accuracy rate of 82% (F1 score) and offers manual sentiment adjustment capabilities. Both tools track emotions, though Mention specifically identifies seven distinct emotion types.

Reporting Tools

Brandwatch offers no predefined report templates but provides export capabilities in multiple formats including email alerts for spikes and new mentions, PDFs, JPEG, and CSV files. Users can export up to 5,000 mentions in CSV format but are limited to 100 in PDF exports. Report scheduling is restricted to Dashboards with a single search parameter. Their reports include comprehensive metrics ranging from mention volume trends and sentiment analysis to demographic breakdowns and geographic distribution.

Mention provides a robust template library including Listening reports, Alert comparisons, Mention lists, and Market Trends templates. Users can analyze connected social accounts across X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, plus create custom reports. Export options include links, PDFs, and PPTX files, with CSV/XLS exports available for Company plan subscribers. These reports can be white-labeled and scheduled (Company plans only), with automatic spike alerts when mention volume suddenly increases.

Collaboration Features

Brandwatch facilitates team collaboration with multi-step approval flows for content, note-sharing capabilities, and channel groups with timezone support. This structure enables efficient workflow management across global teams. Mention offers a more role-based approach with specific permissions for content creators and publishers. Their workspace organization allows account splitting into multiple sub-accounts, creating privacy boundaries between different collaborators or managed brands. The platform includes approval workflows specifically designed for social media management.

AI Features

Brandwatch’s AI capabilities focus primarily on analytical functions including sentiment analysis, emotion analysis, and Iris conversation insights that provide mention summaries. These features emphasize understanding conversation context and emotional nuance. Mention delivers a broader AI toolkit that extends beyond analysis to content creation. Their AI suite includes sentiment and emotion analysis, Alert Overviews summarizing mentions and topics, AI Digest Emails, Cloud Words visualization, and practical content tools like Caption and Hashtag Generators. They also offer AI Highlights to surface key information quickly.

Final Takeaways

Brandwatch excels in data depth with extensive metrics and visualization options ideal for enterprises needing comprehensive analytics across 40 languages. Mention delivers superior accuracy in sentiment analysis (82%) with a more versatile reporting system and practical AI-powered content creation tools that benefit marketing teams seeking both monitoring and publishing solutions.

Customer service

Brandwatch Customer Service

Brandwatch provides an extensive help center organized into twelve categories covering its various products and features. Support is available exclusively in English through multiple channels including in-app chat, request forms, email (with 4-24 hour response times), and their Engage mobile app. The company offers robust training resources through Brandwatch Academy, webinars, reports, and events, giving users multiple ways to build their platform expertise.

Customers receive dedicated account managers regardless of plan level, providing personalized guidance for platform utilization. The comprehensive knowledge base combined with account manager support creates a solid support foundation, though the English-only documentation may limit accessibility for international users. Brandwatch is best suited for enterprises wanting deep product training resources with dedicated account management.

Mention Customer Service

Mention offers a well-structured help center containing 147 articles across ten categories, with documentation available in three languages: English, French, and Spanish. Their support team is accessible via email and live chat, though specific response times aren’t published, and they provide diverse training materials including ebooks, videos, and personalized 1:1 training for specific use cases.

Account managers are provided, but exclusively for customers on Company plans rather than all subscription levels. The trilingual support documentation gives Mention an edge for international teams, while their 1:1 use case training demonstrates a commitment to helping customers solve specific business challenges. Mention’s customer service is ideal for global teams needing multilingual documentation with personalized training opportunities for complex use cases.

Customer testimonials

Brandwatch

Brandwatch earns a blended rating of 4.35/5 from 895 total reviews across platforms (4.4 on G2 from 661 reviews and 4.2 on Capterra from 234 reviews). Users appreciate its intuitive interface and comprehensive tools: “Its query builder is clean and simple, as are the Brandwatch Academy resources which teach junior colleagues how to use it. The Quick Search function rivals Google Trends in being a ‘pick up and play’ insight finder. The dashboard templates, equally, are great for both seasoned pros and novice users.” However, some users encounter technical issues: “Too much of online news and approx (3 to 5)% of them do not open or show errors. The keyword backfilling fails even after multiple attempts. Sometime data loading takes too much of time.”

Mention

Mention receives a slightly higher blended rating of 4.45/5 from 709 total reviews (4.3 on G2 from 439 reviews and an impressive 4.7 on Capterra from 270 reviews). Users value its affordability and ease of use: “Mention was an instant match for us. In addition to offering an easy-to-use solution, the pricing is aligned with our needs. Obviously, we looked at other players. But Mention was the best value for money.” However, some users note configuration challenges: “Without proper configuration of searches, you can miss a lot of essential mentions.”

Based on user testimonials, Brandwatch’s biggest strength is its robust functionality and user-friendly interface that accommodates both beginners and experts, though it sometimes suffers from technical performance issues. Mention stands out for its excellent value proposition and simplicity, but requires careful setup to capture all relevant data effectively.

Mention vs Brandwatch: Final Verdict

Brandwatch excels in comprehensive data analysis with enterprise-grade capabilities, robust API access, and extensive historical data archives that appeal to large organizations with complex monitoring needs. Mention, on the other hand, offers an intuitive interface with streamlined workflows, competitive pricing, and integrated publishing tools better suited for small to medium businesses seeking operational efficiency.

For teams needing extensive historical data and custom analytics, Brandwatch provides the depth and customization required, though at a higher price point and steeper learning curve.

If real-time monitoring and actionable alerts with straightforward implementation are dealbreakers, Mention delivers these capabilities while maintaining accessibility for teams without dedicated analytics staff. Both platforms have trade-offs – Brandwatch may overwhelm smaller teams with features they won’t utilize, while Mention’s more focused approach limits some of the advanced customization options that enterprise users might expect.

If you’re looking for a balance between comprehensive monitoring and operational simplicity without the complexity of enterprise-level tools, Mention effectively addresses this gap. Experience the streamlined workflow and actionable insights with a free trial today, or schedule a demo to see how Mention’s intuitive dashboard and integrated publishing capabilities can deliver the monitoring efficiency your team needs without unnecessary complexity.