Social listening answers one question: who is talking about you, where, and in what tone. It is a reputation and monitoring job, and the tools built for it are priced accordingly. Below is what each one costs, what that price actually covers, and which to buy for which situation.
Tool
Best for
Starting price
What that price covers
Free plan
Brand24
brands tracking mentions, sentiment and reputation
from ~$199/mo
1 user, 3 keywords, billed annually
Free trial
Sprout Social
teams managing and publishing across owned social accounts
from ~$79/seat/mo (annual), $99 monthly
1 seat, billed annually ($99 monthly)
Free trial
Hootsuite
scheduling and managing your own social accounts
from ~$99/mo per user
1 user
Free trial
ViralHunt
discovering viral content and turning it into posts, as a team
from $29/mo
1 user (Creator). Studio: $99/mo for up to 4 users and 4 projects, no per-seat charge
Yes, and it never expires
Every price was read off the vendor's own pricing page. We show no G2 or Capterra ratings because we are not listed there, and an invented rating would destroy the only thing these pages have, which is that all of it can be checked.
Brand24
from ~$199/mo
Social listening
Brand24 is a social listening tool that monitors mentions of your brand or keywords across social media, news, blogs and forums in real time, with sentiment analysis, AI summaries and anomaly detection. It is built for reputation tracking and share-of-voice, great for knowing what people say about you, but not designed to discover viral content you can repurpose, and it has no content workflow.
Pros
Real-time mention tracking with sentiment
AI summaries + anomaly detection
Slack and CRM integrations
Cons
Listening-first, not a viral-discovery engine
No editorial workflow or board
Priced by mention volume
A team of five:
$299/mo (annual) (the Team tier, the first with unlimited users).
Read off their own pricing page on 2026-09-02.
Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management suite: scheduling, a unified inbox, analytics and, on higher tiers, social listening. It is built around managing and publishing to your own social accounts. It is powerful and polished, but expensive (priced per seat, with listening as a paid add-on) and is not designed to discover what is going viral across networks.
Pros
Full publishing + smart inbox + analytics suite
Strong reporting and approval workflows
Social listening on higher tiers
Cons
Expensive, priced per seat
Social listening costs extra
Not a cross-network viral-discovery tool
A team of five:
$395/mo (5 seats on Essentials, their cheapest plan).
Read off their own pricing page on 2026-09-02.
Hootsuite is one of the best-known social media management tools: schedule and publish posts to your own accounts, manage a unified inbox, run analytics and basic social listening from a single dashboard. At its core it is a scheduler built around the accounts you own, not a tool for discovering viral content across networks or surfacing trends you do not already follow.
Pros
Mature scheduling + publishing across many accounts
Unified inbox and analytics
Basic social listening included
Cons
Scheduler-first, not viral discovery
Per-seat pricing adds up fast
No cross-network viral radar
A team of five:
$495/mo (5 users on Standard, priced per user).
Read off their own pricing page on 2026-09-02.
ViralHunt is not a listening tool and does not track mentions of your brand. We watch posts rather than mentions, which is the opposite direction: what is performing right now regardless of whether anyone said your name. If reputation monitoring is the job, buy one of the tools above.
The dashboard, one section per network. This is the screen the tools above do not have, because none of them watches other people's posts.
Every price above was read off the vendor's own page and dated. ViralHunt has a free plan that does not expire, so you can check ours the same way.
Most comparison pages are written from marketing copy. This one is not.
each of these tools's pricing was read off their own pricing page, not from a third-party roundup.
Every capability we call partial says partial. We do not turn an almost into a tick.
Where each of these tools does something we do not, the table says so.
What we did not check, and why
We have not run each of these tools daily for weeks. We verify pricing, seat terms and documented capability; we do not publish an opinion on their interface that we have not earned.
Enterprise tiers behind a custom quote are out of scope, because there is no public figure to verify.
And one that cost us: for months this table said Ahrefs starts at $129/mo. It starts at $29, and they also run a free tier. We were overstating a competitor's price by 4.4x, in the direction that flattered us. We found it while verifying and corrected it. If you spot another one, it is a mistake rather than a tactic.
Frequently asked questions
How were these tools chosen?
They are the tools we are most often compared against in this category. Every figure comes from the vendor's own pricing page, read on the date shown on each comparison page, not from a third-party roundup.
Is this list ranked?
No. Ranking tools that answer different questions produces a number rather than an answer. Each entry says what it is the better buy for, and the section at the end says which to pick for which situation.
Where does ViralHunt sit?
ViralHunt is not a listening tool and does not track mentions of your brand. We watch posts rather than mentions, which is the opposite direction: what is performing right now regardless of whether anyone said your name. If reputation monitoring is the job, buy one of the tools above.
See what is viral in your niche right now
2.7 million posts measured across 12 networks. Free plan, no card, and it does not expire.
