Mentionlytics vs Brand24 vs Awario: Budget Social Listening Compared

TL;DR: Of the three, Awario is the cheapest by mention volume — $49/month for 30,000 mentions — but it has zero TikTok coverage. Mentionlytics matches Awario's entry price for full-platform coverage including TikTok, but caps out at 5,000 mentions a month. Brand24 covers TikTok with the deepest video features — transcription and event detection — but its entry tier starts nearly 4x higher, at $199–249/month.

Every "budget" social listening tool claims to be affordable. Fewer of them tell you what that price actually locks you out of. If you're comparing Mentionlytics, Brand24, and Awario for a lean marketing team, the sticker price is the least useful number on the pricing page.

The real decision hinges on what each entry tier includes — and what it quietly excludes. Pick wrong and you either overpay for mention volume you'll never use, or you build a monitoring setup with a structural blind spot on the platform your audience actually lives on. That's a bigger risk than it sounds: TikTok is where a lot of unboxing, review, and complaint content happens first, before it ever reaches a hashtag search on X.

This piece breaks down what these three tools cost at entry level, which one actually tracks TikTok, how their AI and sentiment features get gated by tier, and which type of team each one fits. A social listening platform is only as useful as the data it can see — so we start with what "budget" actually buys.

What Do Budget Social Listening Tools Cost at Entry Level?

At entry level, Awario gives you the most mentions per dollar, Mentionlytics gives you the most platform coverage per dollar, and Brand24 costs the most but includes TikTok video-specific features the other two don't touch.

Budget tier: for this comparison, budget tier means entry-level, self-serve plans — no sales call, no custom quote, priced under $250/month.

Here's how the three stack up on their cheapest self-serve plan:

(Source: Mentionlytics Pricing, 2026; Brand24 Pricing, 2026; Awario Pricing, 2026)

Two things jump out. First, Awario's mention allowance dwarfs the other two — 30,000 new mentions a month against Mentionlytics' 5,000 and Brand24's 2,000 — for the lowest annual price of the three. Second, none of them bundle API access into their cheapest plan. Mentionlytics pushes API access all the way to its $499/month Pro tier; Brand24 treats it as a flat $149/month add-on regardless of plan; Awario just includes it at Starter, free.

If you scale up, the gap holds: Mentionlytics Essential runs $169/month for 15,000 mentions, Brand24 Team runs $299–349/month for 10,000 mentions, and Awario Pro runs $89–149/month for 300,000 mentions. Awario is consistently the cheapest way to buy mention volume — a detail that matters a lot less once you ask what those mentions actually cover.

Which Tool Actually Covers TikTok?

Awario does not monitor TikTok at any tier — Starter, Pro, or Enterprise — while both Mentionlytics and Brand24 include TikTok on their cheapest plan.

This is the tradeoff that the price tags alone don't show you. Mentionlytics tracks X/Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Bluesky, Threads, plus news, blogs, forums, and reviews — on Basic, its $49–69 entry tier (Source: Mentionlytics Pricing, 2026). Brand24 covers a similarly broad set — Facebook, Instagram, X, News, Blogs, Reddit, LinkedIn, Medium, Quora, YouTube, TikTok, Reviews, Twitch, Newsletters, and Podcasts — on Individual, its $199–249 entry tier, and adds TikTok-specific depth: video transcription that catches spoken mentions your caption search would miss, plus an Events feature that flags mention spikes (Source: Brand24 Pricing, 2026; Brand24 TikTok Tracker, 2026).

Awario's video coverage, by contrast, is limited to YouTube and Vimeo. This isn't a rumor or a gap buried in fine print — it's confirmed on Awario's own features page, and it's a widely discussed limitation across third-party comparison coverage (Source: Awario Features, 2026; corroborated via search aggregation, 2026). We covered this same TikTok coverage cliff in more depth across 8 tools compared if you're specifically shopping for an Awario replacement.

So the real fork in the road is this: if TikTok doesn't matter for your brand, Awario's mention volume is unbeatable at the price. If it does, Mentionlytics gets you TikTok coverage at essentially the same entry price as Awario — you're just trading mention volume (5,000 vs. 30,000) for platform breadth. Brand24 gets you TikTok with more video-specific tooling, but you're paying close to 4x more to get it.

How Do Sentiment and AI Features Compare Across Tiers?

All three include basic sentiment analysis on their cheapest plan, but each vendor gates its more advanced AI capabilities — video analysis, emotion detection, anomaly detection — behind a materially higher tier.

Mentionlytics includes sentiment analysis (claimed 96% accuracy, multiple languages) from Basic onward, but locks emotion detection and translation to Essential ($169/month), and anomaly detection, mention clustering, and comment summarization to Advanced ($299/month). The detail that matters most for a TikTok-focused strategy: image recognition and video/audio content analysis are Pro-tier only, at $499/month — meaning Basic-tier TikTok coverage catches mentions and captions, not what's actually said or shown inside the video (Source: Mentionlytics Pricing, 2026).

Brand24 follows a similar shape. Sentiment analysis is included from Individual onward, but AI Insights, AI Topics, Brand Assistant, and Events Detection all sit at Pro ($399–499/month). A separate "AI Visibility" module — tracking how a brand shows up in LLM answers, distinct from social sentiment — is a $99/month add-on at any tier, and only becomes bundled at Enterprise (Source: Brand24 Pricing, 2026).

Awario takes a flatter approach: sentiment classification (positive/negative/neutral) is available, but it isn't marketed as a tiered AI product the way the other two present it — Awario's pricing page simply doesn't break out AI capability by plan. No emotion detection, clustering, or video/audio analysis features appear on its features page at all (Source: Awario Features, 2026).

Net effect: if your team needs anything beyond directional sentiment — video-level analysis, anomaly alerts, AI-generated summaries — budget for the mid-tier plan from day one. The entry-tier price on any of these three is a starting point, not the real cost of the AI features vendors lead with in their marketing.

Which Budget Social Listening Tool Fits Your Team?

Awario fits teams that don't need TikTok and want the most mention volume for the lowest spend; Mentionlytics fits TikTok-first teams on a tight budget; Brand24 fits teams that need TikTok video depth and can absorb a higher entry price.

A few patterns worth noting on how teams actually experience these tools. Mentionlytics reportedly runs around 4.8–4.9 out of 5 on G2 across roughly 95 reviews, with complaints clustering around cost at higher mention volumes rather than accuracy — directionally a strong signal, though G2 blocked direct verification and this figure is search-aggregated (Source: search aggregation, 2026). Brand24 sits around 4.6 out of 5 with the largest review base of the three, roughly 330–356 reviews depending on snapshot date (Source: search aggregation, 2026). Awario comes in lowest and smallest at 3.9 out of 5 across 48 reviews (Source: G2 — Awario, 2026).

Put those pieces together and three rough profiles emerge:

• Pick Awario if your monitoring scope is text-and-YouTube (news, blogs, forums, X, Reddit) and mention volume matters more than platform breadth.

• Pick Mentionlytics if TikTok visibility matters but budget is the binding constraint — you get it at Awario's price point, with a lower mention ceiling.

• Pick Brand24 if you need TikTok video transcription and event-spike detection specifically, and $199–249/month is within reach. Teams outgrowing Brand24's limits, or wanting to see the fuller alternative landscape, can check our Brand24 alternatives breakdown.

Worth naming directly: all three vendors gate real video understanding behind a tradeoff. Awario skips TikTok video entirely. Mentionlytics needs its $499/month Pro tier before video and audio content actually get analyzed rather than just mentioned. Brand24's video depth is strong but TikTok-specific, not built across every short-form platform a brand shows up on. If your budget conversation is really a video-coverage conversation, it's worth looking at Syncly Social, a listening platform built video-first rather than retrofitted for it — it doesn't publish a flat SaaS price, since deployments are scoped to your query and platform coverage, but it's the kind of alternative worth a free trial if video is the actual gap you're trying to close.

Key Takeaways

• Awario offers the most mentions per dollar ($49/month for 30,000) but has no TikTok coverage at any tier — a structural gap, not a documentation oversight.

• Mentionlytics matches Awario's entry price while covering TikTok, X, LinkedIn, and seven other channels, but caps mentions at 5,000/month on Basic.

• Brand24 covers TikTok with the deepest video-specific tooling (transcription, event detection) but starts at $199–249/month, roughly 4x Mentionlytics and Awario's entry price.

• API access is unbundled from every entry tier except Awario's, where it's included free from Starter.

• Real AI depth — video/audio analysis, emotion detection, anomaly alerts — sits one or two tiers above each vendor's cheapest plan, not inside it.

None of these three tools is wrong — they're just optimized for different tradeoffs, and the entry-tier price tag hides which one you're making. Awario wins on raw mention economics, Mentionlytics wins on coverage-per-dollar, and Brand24 wins on TikTok-specific depth if you can pay for it. The actual question isn't "which is cheapest" — it's whether your brand's blind spot is mention volume, platform breadth, or video understanding, because that's the constraint your budget is really buying around. If video is the gap, book a demo of Syncly Social to see what full video-native coverage looks like next to these three.