Meltwater alternatives at a glance
One short card per tool: what it is, what it costs, who it suits. AyeWatch first, Talkwalker Alerts for free.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom · Editorial team
· 3 min read
Looking at Meltwater alternatives and short on time? Here is each option on one card: what it is, what it costs, and who it suits. AyeWatch comes first because it fits the most people who leave Meltwater. Prices are from each vendor's site in October 2026.
Why people look
Meltwater is a full intelligence suite for PR, comms and marketing: media monitoring, social listening, AI visibility tracking, a media database and influencer marketing. It has no public prices, no self-serve trial, and most contracts are annual with a 12-month minimum. Teams that mainly used its alerts often want something lighter.
Card 1: AyeWatch
What it is: an AI monitor. Write what you want to follow in one sentence, and it alerts you with a short summary when news, blogs, forums, a specific web page or social posts match by meaning.
Price: Free Preview with no card (three runs), then Pro $9 a month, Pro+ $19, Max $39, Ultra $99. Monthly, cancel any time. Checks use credits, so faster schedules cost more of a plan.
Good to know: apps for web, iOS and Android. Slack, email, Discord, a daily digest, webhooks and an API on paid plans.
Suits: founders, in-house comms, analysts and developers who want alerts, not a contract.
Not for: journalist lists, press releases or share-of-voice reports.
Example monitor: "Product launches, price changes and new hires at our two biggest rivals, but not their stock news." One sentence like that replaces a long Boolean query.
Card 2: Brandwatch
What it is: a consumer intelligence and social media management suite, affiliated with Cision. Conversations from 100 million unique sites, plus the Iris AI assistant.
Price: not published. Book a demo.
Suits: large brands that want another enterprise suite with deep audience research.
Card 3: Brand24
What it is: self-serve social listening with AI sentiment on every plan.
Price: from $199 a month billed yearly ($249 monthly) for 3 keywords. 14-day free trial. API costs $149 extra.
Suits: agencies and growing brands that want sentiment charts and a known price.
Card 4: Awario
What it is: a budget listening dashboard where each topic holds unlimited keywords.
Price: from $29 a month billed yearly ($49 monthly) for 3 topics and 30,000 mentions. Free trial.
Suits: small teams that want mention counts and PDF reports cheaply.
Card 5: Talkwalker Alerts
What it is: free keyword alerts from news, blogs, forums and X, by email, RSS or Slack, in 22 languages.
Price: free.
Suits: anyone who needs a basic nudge while deciding. Expect to sort the results yourself, since there are no summaries or charts.
What moving looks like
Nothing needs exporting. Take one Meltwater search at a time and write it as a sentence, for example "trade press stories about our company, minus stock-price roundups and reposted releases". Add a second monitor for any page you used to check by hand, like a rival's pricing page or a regulator's notices. Send urgent monitors to Slack and the rest to the daily digest. Then run both tools until your renewal date and compare what each one caught.
Check your contract dates and any notice period before you start. Most of its deals are annual with a 12-month minimum, which gives you time for a fair test.
Quick pick
| If you need | Pick |
|---|---|
| Alerts with summaries, monthly | AyeWatch |
| Another enterprise suite | Brandwatch |
| Sentiment and reports, public prices | Brand24 |
| The cheapest dashboard | Awario |
| Free email alerts | Talkwalker Alerts |
| Journalist database and distribution | Stay with Meltwater |
One last thing
If you are not sure, start with the free option that does the most. The AyeWatch Free Preview needs no card, so you can rebuild one Meltwater search as a monitor and see what it sends. More detail sits in the AyeWatch guide to Meltwater alternatives.