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

Choosing between social listening tools like Mention and Sprout Social can significantly impact your social media strategy’s effectiveness.

Both platforms offer distinct approaches to monitoring conversations, tracking brand mentions, and gathering competitive intelligence—but which one truly aligns with your organization’s needs?

This comparison dives into what sets these platforms apart, examining their data sources, core capabilities, pricing structures, and user experiences. The following sections break down each platform’s strengths and limitations, allowing you to weigh factors most relevant to your specific requirements.

Whether you prioritize comprehensive analytics, intuitive interfaces, or budget-friendly solutions, understanding the nuances between Mention and Sprout Social will help you make an informed decision.

Let’s explore what these social listening powerhouses offer and where they might fall short for your particular use case.

Pricing & Plans

Mention offers four pricing tiers starting at $41/month for the Solo plan and ranging up to a custom-priced Company plan, with all plans available on monthly or annual billing cycles. SproutSocial’s pricing begins much higher at $199/seat/month for the Standard plan, scaling to $399/seat/month for Advanced, plus custom Enterprise options, with its core social listening functionality requiring a substantial $999/month add-on regardless of plan level.

Free Trial & Demos

Both platforms provide free trials and demo options to explore their features before committing financially. Mention’s trial gives access to basic monitoring capabilities across its platform, offering a realistic preview of the service. SproutSocial’s trial similarly allows testing of core features, though it notably excludes the $999 social listening add-on, which may prevent comprehensive evaluation for brands prioritizing monitoring capabilities.

Plan Features & Limitations

Mention’s plans scale progressively, with the Solo plan ($41/month) offering 2 alerts and 5,000 monthly mentions for single users, while the Pro plan ($83/month) expands to 5 alerts, 10,000 mentions, and supports 10 users. The ProPlus tier ($149/month) provides 7 alerts, 20,000 mentions, and unlimited users, while the Company plan offers 10+ alerts and 100,000+ mentions with unlimited users and social accounts. SproutSocial’s per-seat pricing model makes it significantly more expensive for teams, with social listening functionality completely separated as an add-on rather than integrated into progressive tiers.

Add-ons & Extra Costs

Mention offers several add-ons including historical data access, LinkedIn monitoring, API access, and additional alerts/mentions capacity. SproutSocial charges $25 for each extra social profile beyond plan limits, but its most significant add-on is the $999/month social listening package—a critical consideration for brands focused on monitoring since this functionality isn’t included in any base plan.

Payment Methods & Billing Flexibility

Mention accepts credit/debit cards for all plans and adds wire transfer options for Company plans. SproutSocial offers more payment flexibility with credit cards, PayPal, check, wire transfer, and ACH transfer options available. Both platforms provide monthly or annual billing cycles, with SproutSocial also offering custom billing arrangements for Enterprise customers.

Refund Policies

Neither platform offers refunds for partial service periods or unused subscription time. Mention automatically downgrades canceled subscriptions to free accounts but doesn’t issue partial refunds. SproutSocial maintains a similarly strict policy, requiring payment of all fees for the remainder of any subscription term even after cancellation, with no refunds or credits for prepaid services.

For budget-conscious teams needing social listening capabilities, Mention offers a more accessible entry point with integrated monitoring features, while SproutSocial presents a significantly higher investment better suited for larger enterprises requiring comprehensive social media management with the budget to accommodate costly add-ons.

Features

Dashboard Comparison

Both platforms offer distinct dashboard interfaces that reflect their monitoring priorities. Mention’s dashboard presents a clean, organized view with immediate access to monitoring data. The interface prioritizes quick alert creation and real-time monitoring capabilities, allowing users to immediately see mention volume and sentiment analysis. SproutSocial’s dashboard takes a more comprehensive approach, focusing on broader social analytics with prominent visualization tools and trend analysis capabilities. The layout differences highlight Mention’s focus on immediate mention tracking versus SproutSocial’s emphasis on deeper social analytics.

Alert Creation Process

Mention offers three distinct alert types to accommodate different monitoring needs. The Basic setup requires entering primary, secondary, and excluded keywords. Standard alerts allow up to 10 keywords per query block with a maximum of 4 blocks (40 keywords total). For complex monitoring, Advanced alerts utilize Boolean operators for precise targeting. Mention provides estimated mention volumes before launch, allows blocking up to 1,000 URLs, and offers country-specific monitoring. Alerts activate within seconds of creation.

SproutSocial streamlines alert creation through pre-built templates for specific monitoring scenarios like Brand Health and Competitive Analysis. Their AI-assisted query builder supports Boolean operators and can track specific elements including words, hashtags, cashtags, user mentions, and proximity matches. Users can exclude noise categories like sales listings and cryptocurrency mentions. While Mention starts gathering data in seconds, SproutSocial takes 3-5 minutes to display initial mentions but provides volume previews during setup.

Metrics & Filters

Mention tracks a comprehensive set of 11 metrics including sentiment, emotion, reach, influence score, social shares, country, language, net sentiment score, and similarity detection. These metrics provide both quantitative and qualitative insights into brand mentions across platforms. The platform offers robust filtering options including time period, sources, influence score, languages, countries, tags, emotion, sentiment, status, folders, and group mentions. Users can save custom filter combinations for future use.

SproutSocial organizes metrics by platform, tracking different engagement types across each network. For X (Twitter), it monitors tweets, replies, mentions, and retweets; for Facebook, it tracks posts and comments on public pages; for Instagram Business, it follows hashtag posts. The platform offers sophisticated filtering through multiple tabs including Performance, Conversation, Demographics, and Themes. Each tab provides unique insights such as word clouds, related keywords, smart categories, demographics, and technology usage. The granular filter menu allows refinement by network source, sentiment, content type, and various demographic factors.

Data & Sources Coverage

Mention provides extensive social media monitoring across nine platforms: X (Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Reddit, and Medium. For web coverage, it monitors review sites (G2/Trustpilot/Capterra/Booking), news sites, forums, blogs, HackerNews, and GitHub. This comprehensive coverage allows brands to track mentions across both mainstream and niche platforms. Mention offers historical data access up to 24 months on Facebook, Twitter, forums, blogs, videos, news sites, and general web sources.

SproutSocial covers seven social platforms: X (Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn (limited to owned pages), Instagram Business, Tumblr, Reddit, and YouTube. Web coverage includes blog posts, forum posts, and news articles, but notably excludes reviews, general web pages, and paywalled content. Historical data availability varies significantly by platform: X data dates back to Twitter’s inception, Facebook offers up to two years (with limitations on high-volume accounts), YouTube since 2006 (with decreasing coverage for older content), Tumblr since 2007.

Sentiment Analysis

Mention employs a sophisticated sentiment analysis system supporting 31 languages including English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. Their model contains 278 million parameters and was trained on a 2.5TB dataset before being fine-tuned by machine learning engineers. Users can manually modify sentiment classifications when needed. The system also tracks seven different emotion types, achieving 82% accuracy (F1 score).

SproutSocial utilizes a Deep Neural Network (DNN) for its sentiment analysis capabilities. However, unlike Mention, SproutSocial doesn’t disclose specific accuracy metrics for their sentiment analysis system, making it difficult to compare performance directly. The platform includes sentiment summary and Net Sentiment Score in its reports.

Reporting Tools

Mention offers comprehensive reporting options including Listening reports, Alert comparisons, Mention lists, and Market Trends. Users can analyze data from connected social accounts (X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) and compare any social media page. Reports are available in multiple formats: Link, PDF, PPTX, and CSV/XLS exports (Company plan only). Reports can be white-labeled and include mention spike notifications for sudden increases.

SproutSocial provides Custom Reports (exclusive to Premium Analytics), Cross-Network Reports, Profiles by Network, Paid Network analysis, Competitor analysis, Twitter Analysis, Internal Performance, and Reviews. Reports can be distributed to up to 25 people via email in PDF format or shared via link. The platform allows for 10,000 mentions to be exported in CSV format and includes spike email alerts alongside weekly/monthly scheduling options.

Report Insights

Mention’s reports include mention volume trends by day, sources, sentiment, emotion, countries, languages, main topics, hashtags, top influencers, reach, share of voice, word clouds, and time of activity metrics. Tags are available to organize mentions.

SproutSocial reports feature total topic volume, average messages per day, topic potential impressions, average potential impressions per day, total engagement (shares, comments, likes), sentiment summaries, Net Sentiment Score, sentiment trends, network overviews, word clouds, common hashtags and keywords, demographics, categories discussed, location data, influencer overviews, and raw mention data.

Collaboration Features

Mention provides an approval social media workflow system with comprehensive role management that allows assigning specific roles to team members (social media post creator only or social media post creator and publisher). Their workspace organization feature enables splitting accounts into multiple sub-accounts to maintain privacy between collaborators or brands.

SproutSocial offers message approval workflows, internal comments functionality, the ability to open cases for specific mentions, and role assignment capabilities. These features facilitate team coordination when managing social media communications.

AI Features

Mention integrates AI throughout its platform with AI sentiment analysis, Alert Overview (summarizing mentions and discussed topics), AI Digest Emails, AI Emotion Analysis, AI Cloud Words, AI-powered Caption/Hashtag Generator, and AI Highlights to identify key content.

SproutSocial implements AI for industry themes identification, mention summarization and analysis, Optimal Send Times prediction, ViralPost feature to maximize content performance, and Smart Categories for organization. Their AI tools focus primarily on workflow optimization and content performance.

Final Takeaways

Mention excels in multilingual sentiment analysis with quantifiable accuracy metrics and emotion-tracking capabilities across a wide range of languages. Their white-labeled reporting and workspace organization make it particularly valuable for agencies managing multiple brands.

SproutSocial delivers strong cross-network analytical capabilities with detailed engagement metrics and comprehensive demographic insights. Their collaboration tools focus on streamlining approval processes and case management for social media communications.

Customer service

Mention

Mention’s help center offers 147 articles organized into 10 categories covering core platform functions like monitoring, analytics, and publishing. Support is available in three languages (English, French, Spanish), making it accessible for teams in multiple regions. Customer assistance comes through email and live chat channels, complemented by training resources that include ebooks, videos, and personalized 1:1 training for specific use cases.

Account managers are provided, but only for customers on Company plans, potentially limiting hands-on support for smaller teams. Mention’s customer service approach works best for organizations that value multilingual documentation and personalized training over 24/7 availability.

SproutSocial

SproutSocial’s help center features comprehensive categories covering all major social platforms (Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest) and core functionalities like publishing and analytics. While officially only available in English, the site can be translated using Google Translate for international users. Support runs Monday through Friday on a 24-hour basis with multiple contact options including live chat, phone support, and ticket-based assistance.

Training resources focus on pre-recorded webinars and product guides rather than personalized training sessions. SproutSocial provides account managers to all customers regardless of plan level, making it ideal for organizations seeking consistent hands-on guidance across multiple social channels with round-the-clock weekday support.

Customer testimonials

Mention

Mention receives solid ratings across review platforms with a blended score of 4.45/5 from 709 total reviews. On G2, it holds a 4.3 rating from 439 reviews, while on Capterra it scores higher with 4.7 from 270 reviews.

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

Sprout Social

Sprout Social maintains a comparable rating with a blended score of 4.40/5, though from a substantially larger pool of 4,411 total reviews. It scores 4.4 on G2 (from 3,818 reviews) and 4.4 on Capterra (from 593 reviews).

“Sprout has everything you could possibly need from a social scheduling and reporting tool. It’s fully fleshed out with so much opportunity. It helps both our social media specialist but also our brand campaign initiatives and we can pull reports for specific campaigns or topics – it’s a huge step up from the manual way we were doing prior.” – Alyssa L., Brand Manager. Yet onboarding issues have been noted: “Our onboarding was horrendous. It took over 2 months to schedule the meetings, and our rep changed in the middle without notice or much communication.” – Alyssa L., Brand Manager.

Based on user testimonials, Mention stands out for its value proposition and straightforward interface, making it ideal for businesses prioritizing budget-friendly solutions, while Sprout Social excels in comprehensive feature depth and advanced reporting capabilities but may require patience during the implementation process.

SproutSocial vs Mention: Final Verdict

Mention stands out with its detailed media monitoring and comprehensive influencer identification capabilities, while Sprout Social excels in its unified social management hub and powerful analytics dashboard. For organizations prioritizing wide-ranging content discovery across social and web mentions, Mention delivers superior tracking with customizable alerts. Teams seeking an all-in-one solution for managing multiple social accounts with scheduling and workflow tools will find Sprout Social’s integrated approach more suitable.

The choice ultimately depends on your team’s primary objectives. If external brand monitoring and competitor analysis drive your strategy, Mention’s powerful monitoring capabilities provide the insights you need.

However, if comprehensive social media management with robust publishing tools is your priority, Sprout Social offers a more unified experience. Keep in mind that Sprout Social’s higher pricing tier may pose challenges for smaller teams, while Mention’s more focused approach might require additional tools for complete social management.

If you’re seeking a solution that balances powerful monitoring with actionable insights without enterprise-level pricing, Mention effectively addresses this gap. Its flexible plans and focus on brand monitoring provide the essential tracking capabilities many teams need without unnecessary complexity. Experience the platform’s comprehensive monitoring capabilities with a free trial today, or schedule a demo to see how Mention’s approach to brand intelligence can transform your digital presence monitoring strategy.