The Best Syften Alternative in 2024

In today's digital landscape, staying informed about online mentions of your brand is crucial. People often form their buying decisions online based on what their network or wider community is saying across platforms. Whether there is a rave review for your product, a complaint about you or your competitor, or a discussion of a paint point, you can help address - you’ll want to know. You can turn many online mentions into growth opportunities for your business.

Social listening tools are designed to help you do this. At their core, these tools monitor different online sites for your chosen keywords like your brand name, competitors, or other relevant terms and notify you when it happens.

Syften is a social listening tool that’s geared towards finding customers through community monitoring. It’s designed to help smaller companies participate in online discussions. If you are a larger company, or tracking a few hundred monthly mentions, then Syften is likely not the best solution for you.

A new and alternative tool on the market is Octolens. Octolens is an AI-powered social listening tool tailored to B2B software companies. It is focused on covering platforms for a business audience (e.g., X/Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub, Reddit, and more) in an accurate, fast, and relevance-sorted way to sift out the noise.

Below we compare both tools across several factors.

Octolens is an AI-powered social listening tool designed to monitor platforms crucial for B2B software companies. It sifts through platforms like DEV, GitHub, Hacker News, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and Stack Overflow, providing notifications whenever a specified keyword is mentioned. These keywords can range from your company name to competitor mentions, relevant industry problems, or any other term.

Once it finds these keywords, it will sift out posts that are not relevant at all, and will then tag the posts as High, Medium or low relevance. This is done to save you time, and ensure you get high-signal information, whilst still surfacing all of the relevant information.

Syften is a tool for monitoring online mentions and discussions about a brand, product, or topic. It allows users to track mentions across various platforms such as social media, forums, blogs, and news sites. Syften provides analytics and insights to help businesses understand their online presence and reputation. It’s built for smaller companies, and individuals that have a focus on technology communities.

The tool is built to make use of excluding keywords, rather than utilizing AI to filter out irrelevant content. This leads to more manual work from customers, and a less intuitive interface for managing keywords.

To set-up Octolens you need to follow the steps bellow:

• Signup with magic link, Google, or an email address
• Input your company website and click “Generate company profile” - with AI Octolens surfaces the needed information about your company so it can later understand what posts are more or less relevant to you.
• AI generates keyword ideas for you, which you can edit and add to based on your needs.
• Then within a few minutes you’ll have up to 100 mentions of the last 7-days across your chosen platforms to start looking into.

To set up Syften you need to follow the steps below:

• Signup with an email and password
• Verify your email, and then log in
• Once you are logged in, you can input keywords
• You also have the ability to define the following places to search:
• Then click on the filters at the bottom of the page to see the posts with the filters mentioned

Overall, this signup experience is fast, but requires knowledge on the best syntax, and ways of using Syften to get accurate results. For technical teams this might not be an issue, but for teams that are responsible for growth, marketing, and customer engagement, it may be more cumbersome.

Octolens covers a diverse range of platforms, including social media, community forums, and industry-specific platforms crucial for B2B software companies. With more platforms on the way. In contrast, Syften primarily focuses on web pages, news sites, and blogs, with limited social media monitoring capabilities.

The platforms that are monitored:

• LinkedIn
• X/Twitter
• GitHub
• Reddit
• YouTube
• Hacker News
• Stack Overflow
• DEV
• News sites and blogs (coming soon)
• Podcasts (coming soon)
• Quore (coming soon)

Octolens is consistently adding more data sources and users can easily contact customer service with their requests to be added into the short term roadmap.

Syften tracks various online platforms including social media platforms like Twitter, Hacker News, as well as forums, blogs, news sites, and other websites where discussions and mentions might occur. It’s focus is on technology communities.

Important to note is that Syften is targeted to individuals and smaller businesses, they do not support LinkedIn and provide X/Twitter at a higher cost.

The platforms that are monitored:

• Hacker News
• Forums
• Product Hunt
• DEV
• Newsletters
• Upwork
• Indie Hackers
• News sites and blogs
• Stack Exchange
• Lobste.rs
• Podcasts
• X/Twitter (at an extra cost)
• Reddit

From seamless onboarding, to monitoring, and relevance scoring Octolens makes the most of AI. When it searches platforms, it will screen each post to ensure it's a relevant post in the context of your company. Following that, it will assign a relevance score of either High, Medium or Low so you can get high signal content with as little noise as possible.

With Syften, there is a lot of manual work required. You can see this in the first best practices email you receive when you sign up. Without doing these steps, users experience a lot more noise, and a lot less signal.

There is also no relevance tagging, or automatic filtering done by Syften. If you expect a lot of mentions, this will lead to a significantly higher workload for your team to find the mentions that truly matter.

Octolens is focused on serving one type of customer - B2B software companies. It’s designed with this specific target audience in mind and as a result it searches for mentions on the most relevant platforms like X/Twitter, and LinkedIn because this is where B2B software customers are. Along these lines, it is also able to find and tag the posts that are the most relevant to the B2B software company’s team.

Now that the target company is clear, we can unpack the users and use cases for Octolens below:

Marketers

• Monitor brand mentions, track sentiment, and identify trends.
• Analyze competitor strategies and market positioning.
• Discover content topics, industry discussions, and trending hashtags.

Go-to-Market

• Conduct market research on pain points and product feedback.
• Identify potential leads and engage in relevant conversations.
• Validate product-market fit and refine go-to-market strategies.

Sales

• Monitor target accounts and engage with prospects in real-time.
• Gain insights into customer sentiment and objections.
• Stay updated on competitor activities and market trends.

Customer Success

• Address customer feedback, complaints, and support inquiries promptly.
• Engage with customers on community forums and social media.
• Capture product feedback and facilitate product improvements.

Developer Relations

• Engage with developers, address technical questions, and provide support.
• Advocate for products and establish thought leadership in the developer community.
• Stay informed about developer events, conferences, and hackathons.

Whilst this is not an exhaustive list, it’s focused on helping B2B software companies grow, and over time, the product will become increasingly more valuable for this specific target audience.

Syften is clearly built for more technical teams that are interested in technology focused communities. It’s not made for B2B software companies focused on growth and tracking a lot of mentions online. This is also clear through the platforms they don't track, namely LinkedIn.

Targeted towards the following users and use cases:

Individuals

• Freelancers or independent professionals in technical fields who want to monitor their personal brand or online reputation within niche technology communities.
• Tech enthusiasts or hobbyists interested in tracking discussions and trends related to specific technical topics or technologies across online platforms.

Small technical teams

• Development teams working on technology-focused projects who want to gather insights from discussions and feedback within relevant online communities.
• Open-source project teams interested in monitoring community discussions, feedback, and contributions related to their projects.
• Technical support teams looking to track and address customer inquiries, issues, or feedback across various online platforms frequented by their user base.

Octolens offers competitive pricing plans that cater to different company needs, providing affordable options for startups and scalable solutions for established enterprises. For social listening tools, Octolens is priced competitively, and over delivers on value. It starts at only $19 per month.

Syften’s starter plan is $19.95 and includes all platforms except X/Twitter, and Quora. With it, you can track 3 filters, but you’re also not able to get Slack notifications. For social listening tools, Syften is priced competitively, however it may be considered expensive for the smaller teams it targets.

Octolens boasts an exceptional user experience with an intuitive interface, and AI-driven features to streamline setup and monitoring processes. Octolens provides flexible notification options, including email and Slack alerts with customizable frequency (hourly, daily, or weekly) and content filtering based on relevance.

Overall, Syften, while functional, may feel less intuitive and lacks the advanced features offered by Octolens.

Finding keywords, working with multiple keywords, and refining keyword searches is left in the hands of users. This adds complexity to the platform and poses challenges for non-technical users. The platform gives considerable options for notifications, including email, Slack, RSS, API and Zapier, and Matches.

Syften does a great job of tracking multiple keywords, and finding brand mentions. However, if you get a lot of results it becomes tough to find signal in all of the noise. It’s not built for larger teams, so it's challenging to share this with a teammate or show other members of your company what to monitor.

Octolens is built by a team of people that are passionate about solving problems for B2B software companies. We love hearing from our customers. This could be in the form of negative feedback, feature requests, or to help you get the most out of the product.

We believe that it's important to stay close to customers when building software. This is a core value at Octolens. You can speak to a human, and get help every step of the way.

Syften also has chat support, which gets answered daily and you can email the team on hello@syften.com. This gives users a way to message the team when they have questions, but it’s unclear how quick their response time is.

In conclusion, choosing the right social monitoring tool for your business depends heavily on your specific needs and objectives. While both Syften and Octolens offer solutions for tracking online mentions, they cater to different audiences and priorities.

Syften, with its focus on technology communities and manual keyword management, may suit individual professionals or small technical teams looking to monitor niche discussions within their industry. However, its interface and lack of AI-driven features may present challenges for non-technical users or larger teams seeking efficiency and advanced functionality.

On the other hand, Octolens stands out as a comprehensive solution tailored specifically for B2B software companies. Its AI-powered platform not only streamlines the onboarding process but also provides accurate and relevant insights from a diverse range of platforms crucial for the target audience. With its intuitive interface, customizable notifications, and responsive customer support, Octolens offers a seamless experience for marketers, sales teams, customer success managers, and developer relations professionals alike.