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

Choosing the right social listening tool can significantly impact your brand’s online presence and audience engagement strategy. This article examines two popular platforms—Hootsuite and Mention to help you determine which solution better aligns with your specific needs.

Our analysis draws from official platform documentation, pricing pages, help center resources, and verified user testimonials to provide an objective comparison. We’ll explore each tool’s data sources, core functionality, pricing structures, and user experience without unnecessary technical jargon.

Whether you prioritize comprehensive analytics, streamlined workflow integration, or budget, this guide offers the essential information needed to make an informed decision. The following sections break down each platform’s strengths and limitations across critical areas that matter most to social media professionals.

Ready to discover which tool delivers the best value for your unique requirements? Let’s explore the capabilities of Hootsuite and Mention to find your ideal social listening solution.

Pricing & Plans

Hootsuite and Mention offer different pricing structures, with Hootsuite starting at $99/month for its Professional plan (1 user, 10 social accounts) and scaling to $249/month for its Team plan (3 users, 20 social accounts), while Mention begins at a more affordable $41/month for its Solo plan (1 user, 4 social accounts) and increases to $83/month for Pro and $149/month for ProPlus. Both platforms provide annual and monthly billing options with typical discounts for annual commitments.

Free Trial & Demos

Both services offer free trials and demo options, giving potential customers hands-on experience before committing. Hootsuite’s trial includes core features but limits access to advanced social listening capabilities, which requires a paid add-on. Mention’s trial provides access to its monitoring capabilities but caps the number of alerts and mentions you can track, with limitations varying by plan level.

Add-ons & Extensions

Hootsuite offers several critical add-ons including Advanced Listening, Advanced Analytics, Advanced Inbox, and Employee Advocacy, which can significantly increase costs for users needing comprehensive functionality. Mention provides add-ons for Historical Data (particularly valuable for trend analysis), LinkedIn monitoring, API access, and additional alerts/mentions when you exceed plan limits. Mention’s ProPlus plan includes unlimited users, offering better scalability for growing teams.

Payment Methods & Billing

Hootsuite accepts a wider range of payment options including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, JCB, PayPal, checks, wire transfers, and AC. Mention limits payment options to credit/debit cards for standard plans, with wire transfers available only for Company (enterprise) plans. Both platforms offer monthly and annual billing cycles, with annual commitments typically providing cost savings.

Refund Policies

Neither platform offers generous refund terms. Hootsuite officially states “We do not offer a refund,” though they do have a case-by-case consideration process. Mention’s policy is similarly strict, automatically downgrading canceled subscriptions to free accounts without issuing refunds for unused subscription time. These non-refundable policies make the free trial period particularly important for evaluation before purchase.

For budget-conscious users needing primarily social monitoring capabilities, Mention offers a more affordable entry point, while Hootsuite provides a more comprehensive social media management toolkit at a higher price point with extensive integration options.

Features

Dashboard Comparison

Hootsuite’s dashboard features a clean, compartmentalized layout that emphasizes social media management, with visually distinct sections for monitoring different platforms. The interface appears to focus on consolidated social media activity viewing, enabling users to track multiple networks simultaneously.

Mention’s dashboard takes a different approach with a more analytics-focused interface. It emphasizes mention tracking and data visualization, providing users with immediate access to conversation metrics. The design prioritizes mention monitoring and engagement tracking across various platforms in a single view.

Alert Creation Process

Hootsuite offers comprehensive Boolean capabilities for alert creation, including proximity-based, content-related, URL-based, social platform-related, author-related, demographic-related, and metric-related operators. Users see mention volume before finalizing the alert, allowing them to gauge potential data flow. The system supports complex queries through various operator combinations.

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), and Advanced (Boolean language operators). The platform offers pre-creation features including estimated mention counts, the ability to block up to 1,000 URLs and sources, and country selection filters. Mention alerts activate quickly, gathering data within seconds of creation.

Metrics & Filters

Hootsuite tracks several key metrics including engagement, engagement rate, potential reach, trending score, and net sentiment. The platform offers filtering capabilities by text, sentiment, media types, countries/regions, languages, and demographics.

Mention provides a more extensive metrics suite including sentiment, emotion, reach, source, influence score, social shares, country, language, net sentiment score, similarity detection, and highlight features. Its filtering system is more robust, allowing users to refine by time period, sources, influence score, languages, countries, tags, emotion, sentiment, status, folders, and group mentions. Mention also enables users to save custom filters for future use.

Data & Sources Coverage

Hootsuite, powered by Talkwalker, monitors 150 million data sources across over 30 social networks including Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, and LINE. Coverage extends to blogs, forums, online news, print and broadcast media, and review sites. The platform supports historical data ranging from 28 days to 12 months and can process content in more than 60 languages.

Mention covers major social media platforms including X (Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Reddit, and Medium. Its web monitoring extends to review sites (G2, Trustpilot, Capterra, Booking), news sites, forums, blogs, HackerNews, and GitHub. The platform offers historical data up to 24 months for Facebook, Twitter, forums, blogs, videos, news, and web sources. Mention’s language capabilities are extensive, supporting 249 languages with monitoring for any ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code.

Actions on Mentions

Hootsuite’s documentation doesn’t provide visual examples of mention actions in their help center, limiting insight into their specific capabilities in this area.

Mention offers comprehensive mention management options including adding to favorites, assigning mentions to team members, archiving, trashing, marking as spam, copying direct links, sending by email, opening in new tabs, sharing, and domain blocking. These features create a robust workflow for managing incoming content across monitored platforms.

Sentiment Analysis

Hootsuite’s sentiment analysis leverages deep learning, neural networks, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning to recognize an impressive 186 languages. Their system isn’t trained on customer data, which can help avoid industry-specific biases. Hootsuite claims up to 90% accuracy in sentiment detection, positioning it as a highly reliable tool for global brand monitoring.

Mention’s sentiment analysis supports 31 languages including English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. Their model contains 278 million parameters and was trained on a massive 2.5TB dataset before being fine-tuned by machine learning engineers. Mention achieves an 82% F1 score for sentiment accuracy. A standout feature is their emotion tracking capability, which identifies seven distinct emotion types. Users can also manually modify sentiment classifications when needed.

Reporting Tools

Hootsuite offers reports in multiple formats including PNG, PDF, CSV, XLS, and PPTX. Their reports include all data and visualizations from their Listening tools. Hootsuite’s Spike email alerts notify users when there are changes in new results, volume, engagement trends, sentiment, or viral results.

Mention provides comprehensive report templates for various analysis needs. These include Listening reports, Alert comparison, Mention lists, and Market Trends analysis. Users can also analyze connected social accounts (X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) and compare any social media pages. Reports are available as links, PDFs, or PPTX files, with CSV/XLS export options for company plan subscribers. Reports can be white-labeled, and Mention sends spike emails for sudden increases in mentions. Scheduled reporting is available for Company plans, while exports are accessible for all plans except Solo.

Mention’s reports contain detailed metrics including mention volume trends by day, sources, sentiment, emotion, countries, languages, main topics, hashtags, top influencers, reach, share of voice, word clouds, time of activity, and tags.

Collaboration Features

Hootsuite features Inbox 2.0, team permissions, and approval processes for streamlined team collaboration. These tools help teams manage social media presence efficiently with appropriate oversight and workflow management.

Mention offers a social media approval workflow system alongside granular role management. Teams can assign specific roles such as “social media post creator only” or “social media post creator and publisher.” Their workspace organization allows splitting accounts into multiple sub-accounts, maintaining privacy between different collaborators or brands under management.

AI Features

Hootsuite implements AI for mention forecasting, helping brands anticipate trends and prepare appropriate responses to potential spikes in online conversation.

Mention provides a broader suite of AI capabilities including sentiment analysis, Alert Overview (summarizing alert mentions and discussed topics), AI Digest Emails, Emotion Analysis, Cloud Words, AI-powered Caption/Hashtag Generator, and AI Highlights. These features help automate content creation and provide deeper insights into audience engagement.

Final Takeaways

Hootsuite excels in language coverage with sentiment analysis across 186 languages and higher accuracy rates, making it ideal for global brands monitoring diverse markets. Mention offers superior reporting flexibility with customizable templates, white-labeling options, and a broader range of AI-powered features that extend beyond analytics into content creation assistance.

Customer service

Hootsuite Customer Service

Hootsuite offers an extensive help center with 14 detailed categories covering everything from basic setup to advanced features like Social Listening and Sparkcentral. Support is available in six languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German) with specified business hours across multiple time zones, though direct support communication is limited to English, French, and Spanish via email. Hootsuite provides robust training through its Academy, webinars, and Social Media bootcamp programs.

Users can access support directly from their dashboard, contact their account representative (Enterprise plans only), or submit a ticket as a last resort. The time-zone specific availability (covering Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Americas) demonstrates Hootsuite’s commitment to global customers, though 24/7 support isn’t available. Hootsuite’s primary strength lies in its comprehensive self-service resources and structured learning paths, making it ideal for organizations with diverse teams seeking in-depth social media education.

Mention Customer Service

Mention’s help center is more streamlined with 147 articles organized into 10 categories covering core functions like Alerts Management, Monitoring, Analytics, and Conversation Management. Support is available in three languages (English, French, and Spanish) via email and live chat, though specific operating hours aren’t clearly defined. Mention supplements its help resources with ebooks, training videos, and offers personalized one-on-one training for specific use cases.

Company plan subscribers receive dedicated account manager support, making advanced assistance accessible at lower subscription tiers than Hootsuite’s Enterprise-only offering. While Mention provides fewer self-service resources than Hootsuite, its live chat option and customized training approach suggest a more direct, personalized support model. Mention’s customer service approach is best suited for businesses seeking responsive, hands-on assistance with specific monitoring and analytics needs rather than comprehensive social media education.

Customer testimonials

Hootsuite

Hootsuite maintains a solid reputation with a blended rating of 4.29/5 across 8,713 reviews (4.2/5 on G2 from 4,927 reviews and 4.4/5 on Capterra from 3,786 reviews). Users particularly value their customer service and evolving platform capabilities.

“The customer service is focused on the success of their clients. Not on how much money clients must spend to get quality services—a common practice among some of Hootsuite’s competitors. We feel confident with our social media success because we feel supported by Hootsuite’s amazing employees every step of the way. Plus, the platform continues to evolve. I love the new Listening feature on Hootsuite, which helps us understand about sentiment as a whole. I can’t say enough good things about Hootsuite, and please ignore all the shade its competitors try to throw at it.” – Jeff C., Online Content Specialist. However, some users face limitations: “The social listening tool doesn’t work for a company like us, althought we’re paying for this service, which is annoying. Our industry is very niche and our brand name is a common name depending on the country, which makes it difficult to filter, so we can have results relevant to us.” – Wanda C., Marketing Manager

Mention

Mention scores slightly higher with a blended rating of 4.45/5 across 709 reviews (4.3/5 on G2 from 439 reviews and an impressive 4.7/5 on Capterra from 270 reviews). While Mention has fewer reviews overall, its users consistently rate it higher than Hootsuite.

“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. However, some users note configuration challenges: “Without proper configuration of searches, you can miss a lot of essential mentions.” – Karl P., Lead Front-End Developer

The testimonials reveal Hootsuite’s strength lies in customer support and comprehensive features despite some limitations with niche listening capabilities, while Mention stands out for its value proposition and user-friendly interface, though it requires careful setup to maximize its effectiveness.

Mention vs Hootsuite: Final Verdict

Hootsuite stands out with its comprehensive social media management capabilities and scheduling tools ideal for content-heavy teams, while Mention excels in brand monitoring, analytics, and competitive intelligence with its powerful listening features. Businesses prioritizing multi-platform social posting and team collaboration will find Hootsuite’s workflow solutions valuable, though its pricing structure can be prohibitive for smaller organizations. Mention offers superior sentiment analysis and influencer identification, but may require supplementary tools for advanced social publishing needs.

For teams seeking a balanced solution, the choice depends on primary objectives. Hootsuite delivers stronger results for content calendars and cross-platform publishing with extensive integration options. Meanwhile, Mention provides deeper market insights and reputation management with more granular data filtering capabilities. Both platforms offer mobile access, though Hootsuite’s app functionality tends to be more comprehensive for on-the-go management.

If comprehensive listening capabilities and competitive intelligence are dealbreakers for your strategy, or if you need more affordable scaling options without sacrificing data quality, try Mention. Their platform provides an intuitive interface for teams of all sizes. Start your free trial to experience enhanced brand monitoring capabilities, or schedule a demo to see how their sentiment analysis and advanced filtering can transform your social intelligence strategy.