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An Alternative To Sprout Social For Social Listening on Reddit, Linkedin, X (Twitter) And More: Try KWatch.io

Sprout Social is nice social media management platform, but it has limited social listening capabilities being very costly. So we made a comparison between Sprout Social and KWatch.io for social listening on Reddit, Linkedin, X (Twitter), Quora, Hacker News..., so you can easily understand the difference.

KWatch vs Sprout Social

KWatch.io VS Sprout Social: Pricing Comparison

Sprout Social is an established brand in the social media management industry. This platform enables companies to manage and measure their presence online. Having so many features in one platform has a cost. This is why their pricing starts at $249 per month:

Sprout Social Pricing

The problem is that these expensive plans do not even include social listening! In order to monitor social media with Sprout Social you will need to subscribe to an additional "premium" addon:

Sprout Social Pricing For Social Listening

You need to contact their sales team in order to get this social listening addon, and here is the pricing they will give you: $999 / months to monitor 3 keywords (they sometimes agree to discount this plan to $690 / month) and $1,499 / month to monitor 5 keywords (they sometimes discount this plan to $999 / month).

This is prohibitive for many customers. As a comparison, on KWatch.io you can monitor 20 keywords on Reddit/Hacker News, 2 keywords on X (Twitter), 2 keywords on Quora, and 1 keyword on Linkedin, for $19/month. On our Enterprise plan you can monitor 500 keywords on Reddit/Hacker News, 50 keywords on X (Twitter), 50 keywords on Quora, and 25 keyword on Linkedin for $199/month!

It's also worth noting that Sprout Social does not propose any Free plan while KWatch.io does propose a Free plan that allows you to monitor Reddit and Hacker News.

Which Social Media Platforms Does Sprout Social Monitor?

Sprout Social monitors the following social media sources:

Sprout Social Monitored Sources Sprout Social Monitored Sources

As a comparison, here are the platforms we monitor at KWatch.io, as of this writing:

As you can see, there are some important differences. Maybe the most important difference is how we handle Linkedin: on Sprout Social you can only monitor the Linkedin pages you own, while on KWatch.io you can monitor ALL posts made on Linkedin by anyone! We don't monitor Youtube, Facebook and Instagram yet, but we are working on it.

What Is The Sprout Social's Refresh Rate?

Sprout Social does not refresh their data in real-time. For example they listen to Linkedin only once per day and to Reddit once every 8 hours.

Sprout Social Refresh Rates Sprout Social Refresh Rates

Depending on your use case, these refresh rates can be a problem. For example if you rely on social listening to be the first to comment on a Reddit or Linkedin post, you cannot use the Sprout Social social listening addon.

On KWatch.io we listen to social media in real-time, which means that you will receive an alert within a couple of seconds (1 minute at worst in case of temporary congestion). Such a real-time scraping system allows our customers to be extremely reactive on social media!

Does Sprout Social Propose Conversation Tracking?

KWatch.io allows you to track specific conversations on social media and be notified in real-time when someone makes a comment in a conversation. Conversation tracking is a very useful feature that can be effectively combined with keyword monitoring.

Sprout Social, on the other hand, does not propose such a conversation tracking feature.

Conclusion

Sprout Social is a public company that offers many social media management features. A part of their platform is about social listening.

However, the Sprout Social features are extremely costly and you will most likely have to pay at least $1,000 per month in order to perform social media monitoring on Sprout Social. It's also important to note that Sprout Social does not perform social listening in real-time, which can be a problem in many situations.

On KWatch.io, our plans start at $19 / month and we monitor X, Linkedin, Reddit, Quora, and Hacker News, in real-time!

Feel free to see for yourself: register on KWatch.io here.

Julien
Product Manager at KWatch.io