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

Choosing the right social listening tool can significantly impact a brand’s ability to monitor online conversations and track digital performance. Meltwater and Mention stand out as popular options, but determining which platform better suits specific business needs requires careful consideration.

This comparison examines how these platforms perform in essential areas, from their data coverage and core functionality to pricing structures and user interfaces. All insights presented derive from publicly available platform documentation, help center resources, and authenticated user testimonials. Let’s get started!

Pricing & Plans

Meltwater offers three tiered plans (Essential, Suite, and Enterprise) with custom pricing available only through sales consultation, while Mention provides transparent pricing starting at $41/month for Solo, $83/month for Pro, $149/month for ProPlus, and custom pricing for Company plans. Both platforms offer annual billing, but Mention provides more flexibility with monthly payment options. Meltwater requires annual commitments with a strict “no refunds under any circumstance” policy, whereas Mention automatically downgrades canceled subscriptions to free accounts without refunding unused time.

Free Trials & Demos

Mention offers a free trial across all plans, allowing users to test features before committing. Meltwater doesn’t provide a free trial but compensates with comprehensive demos. Both companies offer demos to showcase their platforms’ capabilities, with Meltwater emphasizing their “24/7 individualized training course access” particularly for their Essentials plan.

Plan Features & Limitations

Mention’s plans are clearly differentiated by usage limits: Solo includes 2 alerts and 5,000 monthly mentions, Pro expands to 5 alerts and 10,000 mentions with multi-user support (up to 10), ProPlus offers 7 alerts and 20,000 mentions with unlimited users, while the Company plan provides 10+ alerts and 100,000+ mentions. Meltwater’s plans focus on scalability and integration rather than specific usage metrics, with Essentials targeting smaller teams, Suite offering cross-department functionality, and Enterprise providing global solutions with unified pricing.

Add-ons & Customization

Mention offers specific add-ons including historical data access, LinkedIn monitoring, API access, and additional alerts/mentions for all plans. Meltwater emphasizes custom plans for their Enterprise tier but doesn’t specify add-on pricing on their website. This creates better predictability for Mention users who can calculate total costs upfront, while Meltwater’s pricing remains negotiation-based.

Payment Methods

Mention accepts credit/debit cards across all plans, with wire transfers available for Company plans. Meltwater’s payment methods aren’t publicly disclosed. Lack of payment flexibility could be a consideration for businesses with specific accounting requirements.

For budget-conscious small businesses needing transparent pricing and flexible payment terms, Mention offers a more accessible entry point, while enterprises requiring extensive customization and global solutions might find Meltwater’s consultation-based approach better suited to complex needs despite its stricter refund policies.

Features

Dashboard Comparison

The Meltwater dashboard presents a comprehensive monitoring interface with detailed analytics visualization capabilities. Its layout emphasizes extensive data representation with multiple panels for tracking various metrics simultaneously. In contrast, Mention’s dashboard offers a cleaner, more streamlined approach with intuitive navigation elements. Mention prioritizes user-friendly visualization with quick access to metrics, while Meltwater focuses on delivering more complex data relationships and deeper analytical insights at a glance.

Alert Creation Process

Meltwater employs a sophisticated alert creation system featuring advanced boolean operators (AND, OR, NEAR) and specialized operators including Source, Proximity, Social Media, Entity, and Visual Analytics Operators. Results can be case-sensitive, offering precision but requiring a learning curve. While comprehensive, mastering Meltwater’s alert system takes time due to its complexity.

Mention provides three distinct alert types: Basic (primary, secondary, and excluded keywords), Standard (up to 10 keywords per query block with a maximum of 4 blocks totaling 40 keywords), and Advanced (boolean language operators). Mention delivers immediate value with features like estimated mention counts before creation, the ability to block up to 1,000 URLs/sources pre-launch, country-specific monitoring, and rapid data gathering that begins within seconds of setup.

Metrics & Filters

Meltwater tracks a comprehensive set of 10+ metrics including Posts, Influencers, Engagements, Engagement Rate, Reach, Potential Impressions, EMV (estimated media value), Sales, and Conversions via Clicks/Coupon Codes. Their filtering system allows sorting by source type, language, location, keyword, sentiment, author, and custom categories.

Mention monitors 11 key metrics including Sentiment, Emotion, Reach, Source, Influence Score, Social Shares, Country, Language, Net sentiment score, Similarity Detection, and Highlight. Their robust filtering capabilities include time period, sources, influence score, languages, countries, tags, emotion, sentiment, status, folders, and group mentions. Mention also offers the ability to save filters for future use.

Actions on Mentions

Meltwater provides basic mention management with options to view, hide, download, email, and modify sentiment of captured mentions. These functionalities support streamlined workflow and basic mention organization.

Mention offers more extensive mention management capabilities with 11 different actions: adding to favorites, assigning mentions, moving to archive/trash/spam, copying direct links, sending by email, opening in new tabs, sharing, and blocking domains. This comprehensive suite of actions provides greater flexibility for mention organization and team collaboration.

Data & Sources Coverage

Meltwater delivers exceptional breadth with 20+ monitored sources across social media (X/Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitch, KakaoTalk, LINE Voom, Reddit), web content (blogs, forums, product reviews, news, comments), broadcast media, podcasts, and Chinese social media. This extensive coverage makes it particularly valuable for comprehensive brand monitoring across diverse platforms.

Mention monitors 15+ sources including social media platforms (X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Reddit, Medium) and web sources (review sites like G2/Trustpilot/Capterra/Booking, news sites, forums, blogs, HackerNews, and GitHub). While offering fewer sources than Meltwater, Mention includes valuable platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, and developer communities that Meltwater doesn’t cover.

Historical Data Access

Meltwater provides 15 months of rolling historical data for social content, while editorial content dating back to January 1, 2009, is available. This extensive historical coverage allows for long-term trend analysis and comprehensive retrospective research.

Mention offers historical data access for up to 24 months across Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Blogs, News sites and the rest of the Web.

Sentiment Analysis

Meltwater’s sentiment analysis leverages an adapted pre-trained Google BERT model, supporting an impressive 242 languages with full sentiment analysis available for 218 languages and dialects. This extensive language coverage gives Meltwater a significant advantage for global brands monitoring multilingual conversations.

Mention employs a sophisticated sentiment analysis model containing 278 million parameters, trained on a 2.5TB dataset and fine-tuned by their Machine Learning engineers. While it supports fewer languages (31 including major ones like English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian), Mention claims 82% accuracy (F1 score) and offers a distinctive emotion tracking feature that categorizes mentions into seven emotional types. Mention also allows users to manually modify sentiment classifications when needed.

Reporting Tools

Meltwater provides comprehensive reporting templates including Audience Insights, Brand, Benchmark, Campaign, Coverage, and Blank Dashboard options. Their specialized Earned Media Measurement and Social Media Overview reports deliver detailed analytics. Reports can be exported as links, PDFs, PPTX files, Google Slides, or email digests. The scheduling functionality allows for daily, hourly, or yearly digest report delivery.

Meltwater reports contain extensive elements such as cover slides, executive summaries, custom summaries, media exposure metrics, share of voice analysis (by reach and volume), competitive media exposure, tonality assessment, key messages, mScore positioning, social media exposure, broadcast and print exposure, AVE, website impacts, geographic presence breakdowns, top publications, top influencers, and language analysis.

Mention offers tailored reporting capabilities with templates focusing on alert data analysis (Listening report, Alert comparison, Mention list, Market Trends) and connected social account analysis for X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Their competitive analysis feature allows comparison between any social media pages. Reports can be exported as links, PDFs, or PPTX files, with CSV/XLS exports available for Company plan subscribers. Mention’s reports can be white-labeled, and the platform sends automated spike alerts when mention volumes suddenly increase.

Mention reports showcase mention volume trends by day, sources, sentiment, emotion, countries, languages, main topics, hashtags, top influencers, reach metrics, share of voice analysis, word clouds, time of activity data, and tags. Report scheduling is available for Company plan subscribers, while exports are accessible across all plans except Solo.

Collaboration Features

Meltwater offers collaboration feedback specifically for influencers’ content, enabling teams to coordinate their influencer marketing efforts more effectively.

Mention delivers a more comprehensive collaboration suite with an approval social media workflow, detailed role management capabilities, and workspace organization features. Teams can assign specific roles (social media post creator only, or creator and publisher) and split accounts into multiple sub-accounts to maintain privacy between different collaborators or brands they manage.

AI Features

Meltwater incorporates AI throughout its platform with an AI search assistant, AI explainer for alert data, AI Contextual Analysis Cards, AI Tagging, sentiment analysis, Daily Digest AI Overviews, and AI-Powered Influencer Discovery. These features help streamline workflows and extract meaningful insights from complex data sets.

Mention’s AI capabilities include sentiment analysis, Alert Overview (summarizing mentions and discussed topics), AI Digest Emails, Emotion Analysis, Cloud Words, AI-powered Caption/Hashtag Generator, and AI Highlights. Their emotion analysis stands out as a differentiator, allowing brands to understand not just whether conversations are positive or negative, but the specific emotions driving those sentiments.

Final Takeaways

Meltwater excels in multilingual monitoring with support for over 200 languages and offers enterprise-grade reporting capabilities ideal for global organizations needing comprehensive media intelligence across diverse markets and languages.

Mention delivers superior collaboration tools and emotional intelligence with its unique emotion tracking capability and 82% sentiment accuracy. Its workspace organization features make it particularly valuable for agencies managing multiple brands or teams needing clear separation between different client accounts.

Customer service

Meltwater Customer Service

Meltwater provides comprehensive support with an extensive knowledge base containing 371 articles across 17 categories, covering everything from basic FAQs to specialized tools like Radarly and Scoop.it. Their help center supports 7 languages (English, Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese), making it accessible to global users. The standout feature is their 24/7 support via both live chat and email, complemented by robust training resources through Meltwater Academy, webinars, and e-books.

Customers receive dedicated account managers regardless of plan tier, ensuring personalized guidance for complex use cases. Meltwater’s customer service infrastructure is clearly designed for enterprise-level clients who need both immediate assistance and in-depth resources for multiple team members across different regions.

Mention Customer Service

Mention offers a more streamlined help center with 147 articles organized into 10 practical categories focusing on core platform functions like alerts management, monitoring, and analytics. Their documentation is available in three languages (English, French, Spanish), providing good coverage for Western markets but less support for Asian users. Support comes through email and live chat (though without specified hours), and training resources include e-books, videos, and personalized 1:1 training for specific use cases.

Account managers are provided, but only for Company plan subscribers, indicating a tiered support approach. Mention’s support system appears designed for efficiency rather than breadth, making it particularly suitable for small to medium businesses that need focused guidance on essential features without overwhelming resources.

Customer testimonials

Meltwater

Meltwater has earned a solid reputation with users, achieving a blended rating of 4.00/5 stars across an impressive 2,283 reviews on G2 and Capterra. The platform maintains consistency with a 4.0 score on both review sites.

“Meltwater provides us with invaluable data and insights. With the Explore function, we can monitor online conversations about our organization and related areas, while also comparing those discussions to competitor activity and analyzing trends over different time periods.” – Megan D., Marketing and Communications Manager. However, users have noted some challenges: “Although the interface is user-friendly, there is still a learning curve to fully utilize all the advanced features. It can take some time to get accustomed to the various tools and functionalities available.” – Troy W., Senior Product Manager.

Mention

Mention has garnered strong user satisfaction with a blended rating of 4.45/5 stars from 709 total reviews across platforms. The tool scores particularly well on Capterra with a 4.7 rating, while maintaining a solid 4.3 on G2.

“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.” – Terry Kyle, Co-founder @WPX Hosting. Despite the praise, users have identified limitations: “Without proper configuration of searches, you can miss a lot of essential mentions.” – Karl P., Lead Front-End Developer.

The verdict from user feedback shows Meltwater excels in providing comprehensive data analysis capabilities despite a steeper learning curve, while Mention stands out for its user-friendly interface and value pricing but requires careful setup to avoid missing important mentions.

Mention vs Meltwater: Final Verdict

Meltwater excels with comprehensive global media coverage and enterprise-grade analytics, positioning it as the go-to solution for large organizations requiring extensive data processing capabilities. Mention stands out with its user-friendly interface, social media engagement features, and competitive pricing structure that makes advanced monitoring accessible to smaller teams. Both platforms offer robust sentiment analysis, but users will need to weigh Meltwater’s deeper historical archives against Mention’s more intuitive reporting system when making their selection.

For teams prioritizing data breadth and advanced analytics capabilities, Meltwater provides unmatched coverage across traditional and digital media sources. However, this comes with a steeper learning curve and higher price point that may be prohibitive for smaller organizations. If budget flexibility and ease of use are dealbreakers, Mention delivers core monitoring functionality without overwhelming users, though its historical data access and some advanced filtering options aren’t as extensive as what Meltwater offers.

If you’re looking for a balanced solution that combines comprehensive monitoring with straightforward usability and more accessible pricing, Mention could be the right fit. Their platform addresses the complexity issues found in enterprise tools while still delivering professional-grade monitoring capabilities. Experience the difference yourself with a free trial or schedule a demo to see how Mention can provide the monitoring power you need without unnecessary complications.