The competitor monitoring tool for what their users say in public

Add competitor brand and product names as keywords — they're a first-class keyword type in Octolens, tracked with the same coverage and AI filtering as your own brand. Every mention across Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, and 10+ more platforms is scored for relevance and sentiment and tagged, then routed to feeds, Slack channels, webhooks, or the API. Setup is self-serve and takes a few minutes per competitor.

Klue and Crayon are competitive-enablement platforms: battlecards, win-loss analysis, and tracking of competitor websites, decks, and job posts — built for dedicated CI and PMM teams on enterprise contracts. Octolens covers the layer they largely don't: what competitors' actual users say in public conversations. Many teams run both; if you have to pick one signal, the conversation layer is where switching moments and unfiltered complaints live.

Track competitor brand names, not category terms. Category keywords ('CRM software', 'feature flags') match thousands of irrelevant posts and are the classic way competitor monitoring dies. Brand-level keywords are specific, and AI relevance scoring reads each match in context — so even common-word competitor names stay quiet until something worth reading appears.

Yes — that's the highest-value alert in competitor monitoring. Track phrases like 'alternative to [competitor]' and 'switching from [competitor]', filter to high relevance, and route the feed to a sales-facing Slack channel or webhook. These threads are usually answered within hours, so real-time delivery matters more here than anywhere else.

Yes. Webhooks fire on new mentions matching your filters, and our Attio integration runs this end to end in production: a switching-intent mention becomes an enriched record in your CRM with the original thread linked, ready for outreach. The same pattern works with any CRM via webhooks or the REST API.

Track your brand and competitors as keywords, then compare mention volume over time — your share of the total is your share of voice, and sentiment per keyword shows whether the conversation favors you. Our free share-of-voice calculator computes it from live mention data if you want a baseline before setting up tracking.

Yes. Launch days produce a mention spike, and reading it tells you what the market actually took away: which features people are excited about, what's confusing, and what's missing. Teams use the same view for their own launches — reception measured in real conversations rather than impression counts.

Monitoring public conversations is both legal and standard practice — everything Octolens collects is publicly posted content, the same threads anyone can read. The line worth holding is in how you engage: answering someone who's actively looking for an alternative is helpful; piling onto a competitor's outage thread is not. Good competitor monitoring is mostly listening.

Selectively. The pattern our customers converge on: never disparage, never pile on when a competitor is having a bad day, and always show up when someone asks for a capability the competitor lacks — with a factual, helpful answer. Done consistently, it builds reputation while winning deals; done greedily, it backfires.

Reddit (posts and comments), X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Hacker News, GitHub, Stack Overflow, YouTube, TikTok, Bluesky, dev.to, Medium, Product Hunt, podcasts, newsletters, news sites, and review and comparison pages across the web. Competitor conversations concentrate on Reddit, HN, and X for developer tools, and on LinkedIn and review sites for B2B SaaS.

Keywords are the unit: Pro includes 10 keywords and Scale includes 40. A typical setup uses a few keywords for your own brand and products, then one or two per competitor. Tracking your brand plus five to ten competitors fits comfortably on Scale; a focused top-three competitor watch works on Pro.

Google Alerts covers indexed news and web pages in daily digests — it structurally misses Reddit threads, X posts, and community discussions, which is where switching conversations actually happen, and it has no relevance filtering or sentiment. It's a fine free baseline for press coverage; it cannot see the conversation layer.

Yes — sentiment is labeled per mention and aggregated per keyword, so brand-versus-competitor sentiment comparison is built in: your positive share against theirs, trended over time, split by platform. It's the fastest way to see whether a competitor's polish is matched by what their users actually say.

Yes — via webhooks, the REST API, or the MCP server, on every plan. Teams run agents that watch competitor feeds, classify switching intent, enrich prospects, draft outreach for review, and compile weekly competitor summaries into Slack. Structured JSON with tags and sentiment means agents act on signals, not raw posts.

Pro is $199/month (15,000 mentions, 10 keywords, hourly refresh, Slack and email alerts, API, webhooks, and MCP included). Scale is $599/month with 50,000 mentions, 40 keywords, real-time refresh, news monitoring, and AI summaries. Full data access on every plan, 7-day free trial, no credit card required.

Add your top two or three competitors as keywords next to your own brand, filter a feed to high-relevance competitor mentions, and route it to one Slack channel the right people watch. Add 'alternative to X' phrases once the base feed is tuned. Most teams see their first switching thread within the first week.