Monitoring brand mentions splits into a problem that is basically solved and a problem that is not. Detection is solved and cheap: a free tool like F5Bot alerts you to Reddit and Hacker News mentions within minutes, and around thirty to fifty dollars a month buys Syften across Reddit, X and public communities with roughly a one-minute delay on Reddit. Above that, listening suites like Brand24 start near two hundred dollars a month and add dashboards, sentiment and history. The catch is coverage: only Reddit and X are realistically searchable for mentions through official channels in 2026, and even they are gated - Reddit requires a contract for commercial data use and X now meters its API by usage with a two-million-read monthly ceiling. Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn have no usable public keyword-search API, so broad monitoring of them is simply not possible, and private Discord and Slack communities are closed by design. That is the easy half. The hard half is everything after the alert fires: a common brand term buries the one urgent mention under a hundred irrelevant ones, sentiment classifiers are imperfect, and consumers expect a response within about a day. The tool that finds the mention is not the tool that decides who answers it or drafts the reply, and that gap is where brand monitoring actually lives or dies.
Catch every mention that matters.
Detection is cheap. Getting it to a human is the job.
You can be alerted to a Reddit thread within a minute for nothing. Whether the right person sees the one that matters, out of a hundred that do not, before the customer gives up, is a different and much harder question.
The short answer.
| At a glance | |
|---|---|
| Is detection the hard part? | No. Detection is cheap and largely solved. F5Bot is free for Reddit and Hacker News; Syften is roughly $30 to $50 a month across Reddit, X and public communities. The hard part is noise, routing and speed after the alert fires. |
| What can you actually monitor? | Realistically Reddit and X, plus the open web and news. Both are gated: Reddit requires a contract for commercial data use, and X meters its API and caps reads at 2 million a month before you are forced onto Enterprise. |
| What is impossible via official API | Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn keyword monitoring. None offers a usable public keyword-search API - TikTok's is research-only and excludes commercial use, Instagram is hashtag-scoped, LinkedIn has no content-search API. Private Discord and Slack are closed by design. |
| Reddit's own option | Reddit Pro Trends is a free, first-party keyword tracker covering public, English, safe-for-work content, but it delivers weekly email summaries rather than minute-level operational alerts. Good for awareness, not for fast response. |
| How fast are you expected to respond? | Within about a day. Sprout Social's index reports most consumers expect a response within 24 hours or sooner. A mention found on day three is often a mention you failed to answer. |
| The legal catch | Public does not mean unrestricted. Reddit's terms require a contract for commercial data use, and storing usernames is processing personal data under GDPR, so a mentions database needs a deletion path. Automated replies at scale breach X's rules. |
| Biggest mistake | Buying detection and calling it done. The alert is the start. Without deduplication, triage and a named human on the clock, a monitoring tool just delivers noise faster. |
Last reviewed 2026-07-30 View as Markdown
Side by side.
Five ways to watch for mentions, and the questions that decide between them. Read the coverage and the noise rows first: a tool that covers everything but drowns you is worse than one that covers less and routes well.
| Capability | F5BotFree | Syften~$30-50/mo | Brand24 etc.$199+/mo |  BeagleUs | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free or near-free | Yes5 keywords | PartlyFrom ~$30/mo | YesNative, in beta | NoFrom ~$199/mo | YesFree tier, then credits |
| Fast enough to respond same-day | YesEvery few minutes | Yes~1 min Reddit | NoWeekly email | YesReal-time on higher tiers | Yes |
| Covers beyond Reddit | NoReddit and HN | YesX, communities | NoReddit only | YesMany networks | YesWhere it can reach |
| Cuts the noise for you | NoRaw alerts, daily caps | PartlyAI filtering on higher tier | No | PartlySentiment, imperfect | YesTriage and context |
| Drafts the reply | No | No | No | No | YesHeld for approval |
| Routes to the right human | NoEmail to you | PartlySlack channel | No | PartlyAssignment in-app | YesIn your channels |
What each one actually is.
From free to enterprise. The honest split is that the first three find things and the fourth adds dashboards, but none of them decides who answers - which is the part that actually matters.
F5Bot
Ten minutes. FreeWhat you getA free service that watches Reddit, Hacker News and Lobste.rs and emails you within minutes of a match. For a small team watching for an uncommon product name, it is genuinely all you need to start, and it costs nothing.
Where it stopsFree tier is five keywords with daily alert caps, email only. F5Bot itself warns it suits uncommon phrases, not a very popular brand name, because the volume caps truncate high-frequency terms. Paid tiers add keywords and a Slack or Discord destination.
Syften
An afternoon. Roughly $30 to $50 a monthWhat you getBroader than F5Bot: Reddit, X, Hacker News, forums, blogs, GitHub, YouTube, public Slack communities, Bluesky and Mastodon, with a Slack destination and AI filtering on the higher tier. It targets a one-minute delay on Reddit and up to fifteen minutes on X.
Where it stopsIt explicitly does not cover Discord or LinkedIn. Filters and result caps scale with the plan, so a noisy term can hit limits, and the AI filtering that cuts noise is a higher-tier feature rather than the entry one.
Reddit Pro Trends
Minutes. Free, in betaWhat you getReddit's own first-party keyword tracker, part of the free Reddit Pro suite. Because it is native, it touches nobody's API terms, and it surfaces where and how your keywords are discussed across public Reddit, with AI summaries.
Where it stopsIt is awareness, not operations: delivery is a weekly email summary, and it covers only public, safe-for-work, English content, excluding private, NSFW, quarantined, chat and deleted material. It will not get an urgent thread to you within the hour.
A listening suite like Brand24
A day to set up. From about $199 a monthWhat you getThe step up to dashboards, history, sentiment scoring and many networks at once - Brand24 covers Reddit alongside X, Facebook, Instagram, news, blogs, reviews and more, with no minimum contract and real-time updates on higher tiers. This is what you buy when monitoring becomes a reporting function, not just an alert.
Where it stopsCost climbs with keywords and mention volume, sentiment classification is imperfect and needs human review, and the coverage of closed networks is bounded by what each platform actually licenses. The dashboard tells you what happened; it still does not answer anyone.
An AI teammate that closes the loop
Minutes. Any Slack or Teams workspaceWhat you getThe part the monitoring tools leave undone. Beagle brings mentions into the channel where your team already works, cuts the noise with context rather than a raw keyword match, drafts a reply using what it can pull from your stack, and routes it to the right person - who approves and posts.
Where it stopsIt is not a licensed firehose and will not manufacture coverage of a platform that has no API. Where a network is genuinely closed, Beagle is as blind as everything else here. It closes the response loop; it does not repeal the platforms' access rules.
Step by step.
Set up detection in an afternoon, then spend your real effort on the half nobody sells you: what happens after the alert.
Decide which platforms are even possible first
Save yourself the disappointment up front. In 2026 the platforms you can realistically monitor for mentions through official channels are Reddit, X, and the open web and news. Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn have no usable public keyword-search API, and private Discord and Slack communities are closed. Scope your plan to what is actually reachable rather than promising leadership coverage that no tool can deliver.
RealityInstagram, TikTok, LinkedIn: no keyword monitoring via official API
Start with the free or cheap detector
Do not over-buy at the start. For an uncommon brand name, F5Bot is free and covers Reddit and Hacker News within minutes. If you need X and public communities too, Syften at roughly thirty to fifty dollars a month adds them with a one-minute Reddit delay. Only step up to a two-hundred-dollar listening suite when you actually need dashboards, history and sentiment, not before.
NoteF5Bot warns it suits uncommon terms; a common brand name overruns its caps
Tune the query before the noise trains you to ignore it
A common brand term is the enemy. Match it raw and you get a hundred irrelevant hits for every one that matters, and the predictable result is that the team stops reading the alerts within a fortnight. Add context terms, exclude the obvious collisions, and separate the urgent signals - a complaint, a competitor comparison, a support question - from ambient chatter into different destinations.
Route to a channel, not an inbox
An email to one person is where mentions go to die when that person is on holiday. Send alerts into a shared Slack or Teams channel the responsible people already watch, so triage is visible and nothing depends on a single mailbox. Most of the cheap tools can post to Slack on a paid tier; use it.
Assign an owner and a clock
Decide, before the first real mention, who answers and how fast. The expectation is concrete: Sprout Social's index reports most consumers expect a response within about a day. Name the owner, set the target, and make the clock visible, because a monitoring system with no response SLA is just a faster way to feel bad about mentions you did not answer.
BenchmarkMost consumers expect a response within 24 hours or sooner
Write the reply where the context already is
The slow step is not finding the mention, it is writing a good answer to it - which needs the doc, the changelog, the known issue. Draft the reply somewhere your team can pull that context fast, rather than starting cold. This is the step the detection tools do not touch, and it is where most of the response time actually goes.
Post as a real person, disclosed, never at scale
Replies go out from a real account, disclosing the relationship where the person is speaking for the company. Do not wire up automated replies at volume: X's rules prohibit bulk or aggressive automated replies and mentions, and it is a fast route to suspension. The automation belongs in detection and drafting, not in hitting send.
RuleX prohibits bulk or duplicative automated replies
Store the data lawfully, with a delete path
A mentions archive is a personal-data store. Under GDPR a username is an online identifier, so keeping posts and handles is processing personal data and must support erasure requests. And remember the terms: Reddit requires a contract for commercial data use, so scraping it for brand monitoring outside an agreement breaches its terms even though the content is public. Use the sanctioned tools rather than a home-grown scraper.
What trips people up.
The things that turn a monitoring setup into either silence or noise, in the order teams hit them.
Finding out someone mentioned you is the cheap part now. Being the company that noticed, and answered, before they moved on is still rare.
Or skip the build.
The detection tools stop at the alert. Beagle is built for the expensive half: turning a mention into an answered mention, in the channel where your team already is.
It brings the mention to where you work
Rather than an email to one inbox, Beagle surfaces the mentions worth acting on in your Slack or Teams, where triage is visible and nothing waits on a single person being online.
It cuts the noise with context, not just keywords
Beagle weighs a mention against what it knows about your product and your customers, so the urgent complaint rises and the ambient chatter does not page anyone. That is the difference between a filter and judgement.
It drafts the reply with what a good answer needs
It pulls the relevant doc, changelog or known issue and drafts a response in your voice, so the slow step - writing something worth posting - is most of the way done before a human looks.
A human approves and posts
Every reply waits for a person, who edits, approves and posts from a real account. Beagle never fires automated replies at scale, because that breaks the platforms' rules and the trust you were trying to build.
Plugged into your stack.
OAuth in, every read scoped to the teammate who asked.
Common questions.
What is the cheapest way to monitor Reddit for mentions?
F5Bot, which is free. It watches Reddit, Hacker News and Lobste.rs and emails you within minutes of a keyword match, and for a small team tracking an uncommon product name it is genuinely enough to start. Its free tier is five keywords with daily alert caps and email-only delivery, and it warns that it suits uncommon phrases rather than a very popular brand name, because high-frequency terms overrun its volume caps. If you also want X and public communities, Syften starts around thirty dollars a month. Reddit's own free Reddit Pro Trends tracks keywords too, but delivers a weekly email rather than fast alerts.
Can I monitor Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn for mentions?
Not for keyword mentions through official APIs, and it is better to know that up front. TikTok's Research API is restricted to academic and non-profit research and explicitly excludes commercial use, Instagram's API offers only hashtag-scoped search rather than general keyword search, and LinkedIn has no public content-search API at all. Private Discord servers and private Slack workspaces are also closed to outside monitoring by design. The platforms you can realistically monitor in 2026 are Reddit, X, and the open web and news; anyone promising full Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn mention coverage is either scraping against the terms or overstating what they do.
How much does the Reddit or X API cost for monitoring?
Both are gated, in different ways. Reddit requires a contract for any commercial use of its data, and moved to approval-gated developer access, so there is no casual commercial free tier for brand monitoring. X switched to metered pay-per-use, charging per post read and capping reads at two million per monthly billing cycle before you are pushed onto an Enterprise contract. For most small teams the sensible path is a managed tool like F5Bot or Syften that handles the API relationship for you, rather than building directly against either API.
How fast do we actually need to respond?
Within about a day, by consumer expectation. Sprout Social's index reports that most consumers expect a brand to respond on social media within 24 hours or sooner, and that a large majority value how quickly a brand replies. That is the real design constraint behind a monitoring setup: it is not enough to detect a mention within a minute if the alert then sits in an inbox for three days. The speed you need is on the human response, not just the detection, which is why routing and ownership matter more than shaving seconds off the alert.
Is it legal to store the mentions we collect?
It is, if you do it properly, and there are two constraints to respect. Under GDPR a username or handle is an online identifier, which makes it personal data, so a database of posts and usernames is processing personal data and must support erasure requests. And the platforms' terms apply even to public content: Reddit requires a contract for commercial data use, so scraping it for brand monitoring outside an agreement breaches its terms regardless of the content being public. The clean approach is to use the sanctioned monitoring tools, keep only what you need, and have a deletion path.
Why is detection not enough on its own?
Because detection is the easy, cheap, largely solved 10% of the problem. The other 90% is everything after the alert fires: cutting the noise so a common brand term does not bury the one urgent mention, deduplicating the same event arriving at different times across sources, correcting sentiment scores that are confidently wrong often enough to matter, routing the mention to the person who should answer, and drafting a good reply fast enough to beat a one-day expectation. A team that buys a detector and stops has simply arranged to receive noise faster. The value is in closing the loop to an answered mention.
