Brand24 vs Mention vs Awario: Budget Social Listening Compared

Spending $500/month on social listening isn't an option for every team. Brand24, Mention, and Awario all promise affordable brand monitoring, but their entry-level plans differ sharply in what you actually get. This comparison breaks down what each budget social listening tool delivers at its lowest price points and where all three fall short.

Introduction

Small marketing teams and solo practitioners face a difficult tradeoff: enterprise social listening platforms like Brandwatch and Meltwater deliver deep insights but start at $800/month or more. Free tools like Google Alerts catch a fraction of mentions. The middle ground—budget social listening tools priced between $40 and $100/month—is where Brand24, Mention, and Awario compete.

Each platform markets itself as the affordable alternative to enterprise social listening. But "affordable" means different things when the feature sets diverge significantly at each pricing tier. This Brand24 vs Mention vs Awario comparison examines what you actually receive at each price point, where the limitations hit hardest, and whether these tools genuinely serve budget-conscious teams or just offer a diluted version of what you need.

Pricing Breakdown: What You Actually Pay

Pricing is the primary filter for budget-conscious teams, so let's start with the numbers that matter.

Three things stand out. First, Awario offers 10x the mention volume of Brand24 at its starter tier, making it the strongest value on raw volume. Second, Mention is cheapest at entry but caps you at just two keywords, which limits monitoring to essentially one brand plus one competitor. Third, Brand24 is the most expensive starter option but includes historical data and sentiment analysis that the others reserve for higher tiers.

Feature Comparison: Where Each Tool Excels

Brand24: Best Dashboard Experience

Brand24's strength is its polished interface. The dashboard surfaces mention volume, sentiment trends, and share of voice in clear visualizations that require minimal configuration. For teams that need to present social listening data to stakeholders, Brand24 produces the most report-ready output at the budget tier.

The platform covers blogs, forums, news sites, podcasts, and social platforms including Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Its "Influence Score" metric ranks mentions by the author's estimated reach, helping teams prioritize which conversations to join.

Where Brand24 falls short at the Individual tier: the 2,000-mention cap is restrictive. A moderately discussed brand can exhaust that quota in days. Boolean search—essential for filtering noise—requires upgrading to the Team plan at $199/month, effectively tripling your cost to access a core feature.

Mention: Best for Real-Time Alerts

Mention built its reputation on real-time alerts, and it delivers well on that promise even at its lowest tier. The platform monitors web, social, forums, and news sources with minimal delay between publication and alert delivery. Its browser extension and mobile app make it easy to respond quickly to mentions.

Mention's interface favors simplicity. The feed-style layout works like a social media timeline for your brand mentions, making it intuitive for teams without dedicated analysts. The Solo plan includes basic scheduling features, positioning Mention as a lightweight all-in-one tool.

The limitations are significant, though. Two keywords at the Solo tier means monitoring is extremely narrow. There's no sentiment analysis below the Pro plan ($83/month), no historical data access, and competitive analysis is locked behind the ProPlus plan at $149/month. Mention vs Awario comparisons often note that Mention's strength is speed of alerts, while Awario wins on analytical depth.

Awario: Best Volume for the Price

Awario's 30,000 mentions per month at $49/month gives it the best mention-to-dollar ratio among affordable social listening tools. More importantly, Awario includes Boolean search at its Starter tier—a feature that both Brand24 and Mention gate behind higher plans.

Boolean search matters because raw keyword monitoring generates noise. Being able to construct queries like ("brand name" OR "product name") AND (review OR feedback) NOT spam dramatically improves signal quality. For teams monitoring in competitive or high-volume niches, this alone could justify choosing Awario.

Awario also includes its "Leads" feature at all tiers, which identifies social posts where users ask for product recommendations in your category. It's a lightweight social selling feature that neither Brand24 nor Mention offers at comparable price points.

The tradeoffs: Awario's interface feels less polished than Brand24's, and its real-time alert speed doesn't match Mention's. The platform's data sources lean heavily toward web and social, with thinner coverage of forums and news compared to Brand24.

The Shared Limitations of Budget Social Listening

While each tool has individual strengths, all three share fundamental limitations that become apparent as monitoring needs mature.

Shallow engagement data. All three tools tell you that a mention happened and estimate its reach. None of them tell you who specifically engaged with that mention, whether those accounts are authentic, or how they're connected to each other. You see volume without understanding the network driving it.

Limited platform depth. Budget social listening tools typically monitor surface-level mentions across many platforms rather than providing deep intelligence on any single platform. Want to analyze the full comment thread on a viral post about your brand? Want to trace how a negative review spread through retweets and quote tweets? These tools flag the mention but can't map the conversation.

No authenticity verification. Bot activity and inauthentic accounts inflate mention counts across all three platforms. A Brand24 pricing review might show 2,000 mentions, but without authenticity scoring, there's no way to know what percentage represents genuine human discussion versus automated noise.

Keyword-centric architecture. All three tools organize monitoring around keywords, which creates blind spots. Conversations about your brand that don't use your exact tracked terms—misspellings, abbreviations, contextual references—often slip through. With only 2-3 keyword slots at budget tiers, coverage gaps are inevitable.

How Xpoz Addresses These Gaps

Xpoz takes a fundamentally different approach to social intelligence. Rather than monitoring keywords across broad but shallow source coverage, it provides deep platform-level intelligence on Twitter/X and Instagram—the platforms where most brand conversation happens.

Network-level intelligence. Where budget tools tell you a mention occurred, Xpoz reveals who's behind it and how they're connected. Querying a brand mention with getTwitterPostInteractingUsers returns the actual accounts that commented, retweeted, and quoted the post, along with their follower counts, verification status, and engagement history. Following up with getTwitterUserConnections maps the relationships between those accounts, showing whether engagement comes from a genuine community or a coordinated cluster.

Authenticity scoring. Every Twitter account analyzed through Xpoz includes isInauthentic and isInauthenticProbScore fields, providing bot detection that no budget social listening tool currently offers. When 40% of your mentions trace back to accounts flagged as likely inauthentic, that fundamentally changes how you interpret your monitoring data.

Boolean search without tier restrictions. Xpoz supports full boolean queries—exact phrases, AND/OR/NOT operators, complex nested conditions—at every access level, including the free tier of 100,000 results per month. No upgrading to unlock essential search functionality.

Volume that scales. Instead of caps measured in thousands of mentions, Xpoz's free tier provides 100,000 results per month across Twitter and Instagram. That's 33x Brand24's Individual plan mention cap at zero cost.

Practical Examples

Scenario: Monitoring a Product Launch

With Brand24 ($79/month): Set up your product name as one of three keywords. Receive alerts as mentions appear. View sentiment trend in dashboard. Hit 2,000-mention cap by day three of a successful launch, losing visibility for the rest of the month.

With Xpoz (free tier): Use getTwitterPostsByKeywords with "product name" OR "launch hashtag" to capture mentions. For each high-engagement post, call getTwitterPostInteractingUsers to identify who's amplifying the conversation. Use countTweets to track mention volume trends over the launch period. Profile the top amplifiers with getTwitterUser to assess their authenticity and influence.

Scenario: Competitive Brand Monitoring

With Awario ($49/month): Track competitor brand names using Boolean search. See mention volume, basic sentiment, and source breakdown. Know that your competitor received 5,000 mentions this week.

With Xpoz (free tier): Track the same mentions via getTwitterPostsByKeywords with "competitor name" AND (review OR opinion OR complaint). Then go deeper—use getTwitterPostInteractingUsers to profile the audience engaging with competitor content. Discover that 60% of their most engaged followers also follow accounts in your industry niche. Identify potential customers who are actively evaluating alternatives.

Scenario: Influencer Vetting

With Mention ($41/month): Find mentions from high-follower accounts. Evaluate based on follower count and post engagement.

With Xpoz: Pull the influencer's full profile via getInstagramUser including follower count, engagement metrics, and post history. Analyze their audience quality through getInstagramUserConnections. Check recent posts via getInstagramPostsByUser to verify engagement patterns are consistent, not artificially inflated.

Key Takeaways

• Brand24 offers the best dashboard experience for budget teams but caps mentions at 2,000/month and locks Boolean search behind the $199/month tier—a serious limitation for the price.

• Mention delivers the fastest alerts at the lowest entry price ($41/month) but restricts you to two keywords with no sentiment analysis, making it better for reactive monitoring than strategic intelligence.

• Awario provides the best value at the budget tier with 30,000 mentions and Boolean search for $49/month, though its interface and data coverage trail behind Brand24.

• All three tools share fundamental gaps in network analysis, authenticity detection, and user-level engagement data—limitations that Xpoz's intelligence-first architecture directly addresses with 100,000 free results per month.

• The most effective setup for budget teams pairs a monitoring tool for broad alerts with an intelligence platform for deep analysis when mentions warrant investigation.

Conclusion

Brand24, Mention, and Awario each solve a specific slice of the budget social listening problem. Brand24 gives you the cleanest reports. Mention gives you the fastest alerts. Awario gives you the most data per dollar. None of them give you the depth to understand who's behind the conversation or whether the engagement is genuine.

For teams serious about social intelligence on a budget, the practical path forward isn't choosing one tool to do everything. It's combining a monitoring layer for breadth with an intelligence layer for depth. Use Awario or Mention to catch mentions across the web, then use Xpoz to investigate the ones that matter—mapping networks, verifying authenticity, and profiling the accounts driving conversation around your brand. With Xpoz's free tier covering 100,000 results per month, the combination costs less than Brand24's Individual plan while delivering significantly deeper insight.