13 Top Brand Monitoring Software for PR Managers Compared (2025)

Brand monitoring software helps track online brand mentions to assess public perception, pinpoint trends, uphold reputations, and evaluate PR campaigns for your brand's online presence.

Understanding who's discussing your or your client's brand, knowing their sentiment, remaining well-informed, swiftly addressing issues, and fostering a positive brand image are key tactics in PR. 

Prowly is the best brand monitoring software that ticks all the boxes, but there are plenty of other solid choices. In this article, we take a look at the best brand monitoring software for PR professionals, agencies, and in-house communication teams:

1. Prowly
2. Semrush
3. Brandwatch
4. Brand24
5. Sprout Social
6. Mention
7. Google Alerts
8. Talkwalker
9. Hootsuite
10. BuzzSumo
11. Awario
12. Keyhole
13. X Pro

In the second part of this article, you'll find answers to the following questions:

• How do you monitor a brand?
• How to choose a brand monitoring tool?

What is brand monitoring software?

Brand monitoring software is a tool that helps businesses keep track of how their brand is being mentioned and perceived across various channels. It collects and analyzes brand mentions from sources such as:

• news sites
• blogs
• social media
• forums
• and other online sources

Such software typically includes media monitoring, social listening, and journalist tracking features.

It can identify when your brand is mentioned, flag emerging stories or narratives, and analyze the tone and sentiment behind each mention, whether positive, neutral, or negative.

Brand monitoring software is especially useful for understanding consumer perception, spotting potential PR risks early, and identifying media or influencer relationships worth pursuing. It allows brands to stay informed and control how they are talked about in public.

Key features to look for in top brand monitoring software

When evaluating brand monitoring tools, look for features beyond basic tracking. The best platforms offer a combination of speed, depth, and workflow support. Here are the most important ones to consider:

What to monitor for your brand (and why)

To understand how your brand is performing, it’s important to track more than just mentions. Here are some of the most valuable brand metrics to keep an eye on:

• Share of voice – How often your brand is mentioned compared to competitors
• Sentiment – Whether mentions are positive, neutral, or negative
• Media reach – The potential audience size of your coverage
• Top sources and channels – Where your brand is getting the most attention
• Key topics and narratives – What themes are consistently linked with your brand
• Audience engagement – Likes, shares, and comments on brand-related content

These metrics help you measure visibility, reputation, and relevance over time. For a full breakdown, check out this guide on brand metrics.

Top brand monitoring software to try in 2025

Now that you know which features you need to measure brand awareness, stay on top of industry trends, and improve your overall brand health, let's discuss the best brand monitoring tools you can choose in 2025.

1. Prowly

• Price: starting from $258 monthly
• Free trial: Yes, for 7 days
• All-in-one PR tool: Yes
• G2 rating: 4.2/5 (103 reviews)

Prowly is the only tool on our list that's focused entirely on a PR specialist's needs. It covers your entire PR workflow - with an online newsroom, media database, AI press release creator, and, of course, tracking brand mentions.

Prowly offers fast onboarding, with a clean user experience, allowing anyone to track their brand mentions online without a steep learning curve.

Prowly's data is powered by Semrush, which means it's accurate and up to date. It also offers cutting-edge features such as advanced email analytics and AI-powered journalist discovery.

Track brand mentions

Prowly's Media Monitoring helps you track brand mentions and analyze metrics that are PR-specific, like AVE, SOV or outlet reach. Together with regular metrics, like reach or sentiment, you can estimate the effects of each campaign.

Prowly’s AI detects the context, sentiment, and over 15 other attributes of every press hit and social mention. Leverage this data to establish tailored filters for viewing only the mentions that matter most to you.

Examples of filters:

• Keyword combinations & context
• Topic of each mention and website (1000+ available)
• Estimated mention reach
• Region and language
• Platform (Instagram, X, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube)

Build custom reports

The top brand tools make your life easier with clean and neat reports. In Prowly, you can generate a coverage report whenever you need it to sum up a particular month or a full campaign. Create coverage reports tailored to what you need with multiple metrics, chart types, and filters. Show how your outcomes correlate with business objectives and save the time usually needed to fill the report manually.

2. Semrush’s Brand Monitoring App

• Price: $79 for the add-on
• Free trial or demo: Yes, you can try the tool for free and schedule free training
• All-in-one PR tool: No
• G2 rating: 4.5/5 (2651 reviews)

Semrush is a comprehensive tool for online marketing — from SEO and content to paid promotion and PR. It's often chosen by agencies and huge players, and that's why it made our list.

If you work for an agency or a big company, chances are you already use Semrush. If your company already uses several marketing tools, you might consider switching to an all-in-one solution.

Then, for brand monitoring purposes, you can add the Brand Monitoring App, developed by Prowly. It covers the entire media monitoring functionality of Prowly's original platform.

💡 Tip: When choosing a media monitoring service, make sure it's tailored to local media — for example, the UK market.

3. Brand24

• Price: starting from $119 monthly
• Free trial or demo: Yes, for 14 days
• All-in-one PR tool: No
• G2 rating: 4.6/5 (296 reviews)

Brand24 is focused solely on your brand's online presence. You can analyze all publicly available data coming from web pages, social media, or - and this is pretty unique - podcasts and newsletters.

With sentiment analysis, estimated awareness metrics, social media monitoring tools and alerts, you'll be the first to find out about an upcoming crisis.

If you're looking for more tools that can help you with crisis prevention, check out this Best PR Crisis Management Software Comparison.

4. Brandwatch

• Price: pricing available upon request
• Free trial or demo: you can book a meeting
• All-in-one PR tool: No
• G2 rating: 4.4/5 (635 reviews)

Brandwatch is one of the most advanced brand monitoring software offerings on our list. Brandwatch tracks brand mentions in both online and offline areas. For example, you can access paywalled news, broadcasts, YouTube, or TikTok - with datasets going back more than 10 years.

You get advanced analytics solutions to manage this impressive list of data sources, backed by machine learning algorithms. Also, you can track your data and brand management efforts on real-time dashboards.

However, if you're looking for a tool that can monitor not only online media but also print and broadcast (meaning radio and TV programs), Prowly is a great choice.

With Prowly's print and broadcast monitoring, you can track mentions not just online but across newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV, ensuring you never miss important coverage. While manual tracking might work for a small client, securing comprehensive media insights—both nationally and internationally—requires automation.

Prowly streamlines this process, combining digital and traditional media monitoring in one powerful platform so you can access all your relevant mentions.

5. Sprout Social

• Price: the Social Listening add-on starts from $999 monthly
• Free trial or demo: Yes, you can try it for 30 days or get a demo call
• All-in-one PR tool: No
• G2 rating: 4.4/5 (4,181 reviews)

Sprout Social is a complex social media management platform. It offers social listening features, such as profile or location monitoring, that you can use to monitor brand reputation, collect customer feedback, or monitor your marketing campaigns.

For each query, it retrieves all historical data, so you can start your analysis right away. With complex queries and filters, you'll get valuable results.

For PR purposes, you can also use trend identification and influencer recognition.

💡 Learn how to create effective media monitoring queries using Prowly from this article based on real-life examples.

6. Mention

• Price: starting from $41 monthly 
• Free trial or demo: Yes, there's a 14-day free trial available, and you can book a demo call
• All-in-one PR tool: No
• G2 rating: 4.3/5 (440 reviews)

Mention is another tool for social media management, combining social listening with post-scheduling. You can track brand mentions from blogs, online news, social media channels, and videos (including YouTube and TikTok).

Moreover, you can track chosen review pages (like Booking or G2) and social media accounts to ensure you don't miss new content.

Mention also lets you evaluate each hit with sentiment, reach, and influence score. In higher-priced plans, it offers insights and more advanced analytics.

7. Google Alerts

• Price: free
• All-in-one PR tool: No
• G2 rating: N/A

Google Alerts is the only free tool on our list. It's popular, easy to use, and (again) free, but you might struggle with getting actual value out of it.

When Google indexes a new page that mentions a phrase you wish to observe, you get an email notification. And basically, that's it. But it can be enough if you need a simple tool or are just getting started.

For professional PR purposes, it's pretty limited. You get the results with a delay, it doesn't cover sources like social media channels, and it might not send you all relevant results. Plus, you don't get analytics, like sentiment info, reach, or trends in your data.

To learn more, check out our article on Google Alerts alternatives. It covers in detail why it is worth making a switch.

8. Talkwalker

• Price: available upon request
• Free trial or demo: No free trial, but you can book a demo call
• All-in-one PR tool: No
• G2 rating: 4.3/5 (132 reviews)

alkwalker is one of the most comprehensive brand tracking tools on the market. It covers over 30 social media channels and 150 million data sources, giving insights into even the most niche topics.

It provides your PR campaigns with sentiment, reach, and engagement analytics. You can use the advanced Boolean search to get only relevant resources. Moreover, Talkwalker tracks visual content, meaning you get information from images and videos too.

You can compare your brand reputation with the competition based on sentiment, engagement and reach. Also, the tool will assist you in finding appropriate influencers.

💡 Tip: If you want to make your PR strategy truly robust, read these articles to learn how to manage your brand reputation and protect its reputation.

9. Hootsuite

• Price: starting from $99 monthly, though Social Listening is an add-on and not included in the main product
• Free trial or demo: Yes, a free 30-day trial (or up to 60% off the plans if you skip it)
• All-in-one PR tool: No
• G2 rating: 4.2/5 (6,216 revie

Hootsuite was created for social media management, with post scheduling, indicators of the best time for posting, and a social media inbox. And it does offer some social listening options that can help with brand monitoring.

Hootsuite analyzes most major social media sites and monitors mentions, keywords and hashtags. It also integrates with other brand monitoring tools, like Talkwalker and Brandwatch.

10. BuzzSumo

• Price: starting from $199 monthly 
• Free trial or demo: Yes, a free 30-day trial
• All-in-one PR tool: No
• G2 rating: 4.5/5 (103 reviews)

BuzzSumo gives you tools to generate buzz about your company or client, either via PR or marketing strategies. It offers a wide range of tools to generate content ideas, spot influencers, and support content research.

In terms of brand monitoring, you can track brand mentions for yourself or your competitors. You can also get alerts when given authors or outlets publish something new. This option can prove valuable if your PR outreach strategy involves engaging with specific people.

11. Awario

• Price: starting at $39 monthly 
• Free trial or demo: Yes, free trial available
• All-in-one PR tool: No
• G2 rating: 4.0/5 (41 reviews)

Awario is a full-time brand monitoring tool. Its web crawler analyzes over 13 million pages and social media channels daily. You can look for results in given locations and use the Boolean search to refine your query.

To analyze the data, you get a simple dashboard with the crucial information on hand. In higher priced plans, you can download white-labeled reports with brand mention analysis.

12. Keyhole

• Price: starts at $179 monthly
• Free trial or demo: Yes, free trial available
• All-in-one PR tool: No
• G2 rating: 4.3/5 (69 reviews)

Keyhole was designed for social media platforms. It lets you analyze profiles, hashtags, or phrases across different channels.

This solution is your ally if you run many PR campaigns on social media channels. You can get insights on your performance, see the most engaging post for your searched term, or find the best influencer for your campaign. What's more, it comes with detailed reports and comparisons.

Apart from the social listening options, you can use it as your social media planning tool. With scheduling and profile analytics, Keyhole helps you squeeze more from social media — both for marketing and PR.

13. X Pro (formerly TweetDeck)

• Price: only available in the X (Twitter) Premium subscription
• Free trial or demo: No
• All-in-one PR tool: No
• G2 rating: 4.3/5 (653 reviews)

Formerly called TweetDeck, XPro was one of the most useful free tools for heavy Twitter users. It lets you open a few X threads on one screen and follow the conversations simultaneously.

Although it's not full-time brand monitoring software, we decided to include it here for those who already spend hours on X threads. It's a nice addition to keep the conversations flowing!

Nevertheless, it won't be enough for more advanced insights. For example, it lacks social media reach and sentiment analysis.

Right now, it's available only with an X Premium subscription.

P.S. Discover more ideas and inspiration by exploring this guide to brand awareness campaigns, complete with examples to spark your creativity.

How do you monitor a brand?

Brand mention monitoring effectively means turning raw mentions into usable insights. Here’s a simple 5-step process to follow:

1. Choose your monitoring tool
   Pick a platform that fits your needs across PR, marketing, or customer teams. Prowly helps automate this process by integrating monitoring with outreach and analytics.
2. Set up keyword and brand name alerts
   Include your brand name, product names, key personnel, relevant hashtags and common misspellings.
3. Track mentions across media types
   Make sure your tool scans online news, blogs, forums, podcasts, review sites, and social platforms for full coverage.
4. Analyze sentiment and reach
   Use built-in AI tools to understand the tone and audience size behind each mention, helping you assess overall brand perception.
5. Take action
   Respond to the press, engage with customers, flag PR risks, and compile internal reports. With tools like Prowly, you can do all of this in one place.

What is a brand tracking tool?

What are brand tracking and monitoring tools? They are based on crawlers - robots that go through (crawl) the Internet, looking for specific information. Depending on the tool or technology it uses, you may access varied sources, such as forums, websites, social media, or offline news, in search of people mentioning your brand.

When you set up a project, choosing keywords, geographical area, or other factors that are important for you, the brand tracking software starts to gather information. In most online monitoring tools, you can get alerts when relevant brand mentions are found.

Most monitoring tools give you access to analytics. These often consist of one main brand tracking dashboard and more detailed views. This way, you can easily compare data for given campaigns or timeframes.

Beware, though, that keeping data for a long time is costly. That's why some news monitoring tools gather data only after you set up a project and store it only for a fixed period. Tools that let you go way back in time usually reflect it in higher pricing.

What is a brand monitoring tool used for? 

Brand monitoring software supports several high-impact use cases across PR, marketing, product, and customer teams. Here’s how companies typically use it:

• Track media mentions
  See where your brand appears across online news, blogs, and media outlets. Tools like Prowly help PR teams identify the best media opportunities and track who’s covering their brand.
• Detect potential PR crises early
  Real-time alerts and sentiment analysis help you catch negative mentions before they escalate into larger issues.
• Analyze brand sentiment
  Understand how your audience feels about your brand over time and spot changes in tone across key channels.
• Measure earned media performance
  Evaluate which media placements delivered the most value in terms of reach, tone, and alignment with campaign goals.
• Monitor campaign impact
  The best brand monitoring tools track how brand mentions increase during campaigns and where your message is landing.
• Identify journalist sentiment and relationships
  Understand which journalists are writing about you, how they frame your brand, and where to build stronger connections.
• Support cross-functional insights
  Sales, product, and support teams can spot patterns in customer feedback and market perception through brand conversations.

Tools like Prowly combine monitoring with outreach and reporting features, making them especially valuable for PR professionals looking to connect insights with action.

Choose your solution

The choice might be difficult, but it's well worth implementing a brand monitoring tool in your daily work. With this kind of intel, you'll be empowered to make better decisions and improve the quality of your PR results.

Read a few more comparisons, try a few chosen platforms yourself, and get the benefits rolling in from brand monitoring. Good luck!