The Best Mention.com Alternative in 2025
Mention is a popular tool for brand monitoring and social media management. Learn how it compares to Octolens, the AI-powered social listening tool for B2B.
Staying informed about online mentions of your brand or critical keywords is crucial. People often form their buying decisions online based on what their network or wider community is saying across social platforms and more. 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.
One such tool is Mention which large brands and agencies use to monitor their brands and manage social media. With Mention, you can monitor sources online, including press articles, review sites, forums, and blogs. Mention also makes it easy to draft, schedule, and publish posts from multiple channels.
A new and alternative tool on the market is Octolens. Octolens is an AI-powered social listening tool tailored to B2B software companies. It focuses on highlighting conversations with buying signals (aka warm leads for your business) across social media like X, LinkedIn, Reddit, Hacker News, and more. Compared to traditional tools like Mention, Octolens is focused on the B2B SaaS growth use case.
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 Reddit, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, DEV, GitHub, Hacker News, YouTube, and Stack Overflow for keyword mentions. These keywords can range from your company name to competitor mentions, relevant industry problems, or any other term.
Octolens finds posts with your keywords, scores them with AI to filter out the noise on their relevance to your business and buying intent, and then notifies you via Slack or email so you can enter the conversation.
You can also use Octolens’s AI-generated replies for inspiration in the comment section. For example, if you are unsure how to answer a question on Reddit. Octolens also provides analytics on mentions of keywords over time.
Mention is a comprehensive social media monitoring tool that helps businesses keep track of their online presence across various platforms. It allows users to monitor mentions of their brand, products, competitors, or any other keywords in real-time, enabling them to engage with their audience effectively and manage their online reputation.
Mention is also a social media management tool, allowing you to publish and schedule posts across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
To set-up Octolens you need to follow the steps bellow:
- Sign up with magic link, Google, GitHub, Mircrosoft or an email address
- Input your company website and click “Generate company profile” - AI surfaces the needed information about your company to 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.
- Within a few minutes, you’ll have up to 100 mentions from the last 7 days across your chosen platforms to start looking into.
- Sign up with email or Google account.
- Input personal details (required).
- Input company details.
- Indicate if you want to be contacted.
- Select a goal.
- Select the type of alert.
- Edit suggested keywords.
- Add keywords to exclude.
- Select sources.
- Select countries and languages.
- Add social pages to monitor.
- Add review websites.
- Create an alert name and details.
- Create tags, tasks, and view activity.
If you value time, and want to get great results quickly with as little effort as possible then this onboarding experience won’t be efficient. It’s time consuming and asks for a lot of unnecessary information, this is in stark contrast to Octolens, which takes minutes to setup. However, if you want very specific research and targeting, then Mention may be a better option.
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, Mention primarily focuses on web pages, news sites, and blogs, with limited social media monitoring capabilities.
The platforms that are monitored:
- X/Twitter
- YouTube
- Stack Overflow
- DEV
- GitHub
- Hacker News
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.
Mention has a comprehensive suite of monitoring capabilities, across a divers amount of platforms. From social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and X/Twitter to more niche platforms like Reddit and Pinterest. They also offer the ability to monitor specific social media pages, to ensure you never miss a post in those communities.
The platforms that are monitored:
- Forums
- Blogs and news
- Review websites
- X/Twitter
- TikTok
- Youtube
- Videos
- Radio
- TV in US & Canada
- Specific social pages
In this list, we can see that there is a broad range of tools and monitoring capabilities available. It does miss some of the more software focused platforms like Hacker News, and Stack Overflow. This indicates that Mention might not be well placed to serve B2B software companies in the way Octolens is.
From seamless onboarding to monitoring and relevance scoring, Octolens makes the most of AI. It screens each post to ensure its relevance in the context of your company, assigning a relevance score (High, Medium, or Low) to filter out noise and deliver high-signal content.
Mention offers sentiment analysis, competitor benchmarking, trend identification, hashtag generation, and post generation. It also features Spike Alert, which detects unexpected increases in mentions and notifies you. Hashtag and caption generation are useful within their social media posting and management capabilities.
Octolens focuses on serving B2B software companies. It is designed to search for mentions on the most relevant platforms like X/Twitter and LinkedIn, where B2B software customers are. It finds and tags the posts most relevant to B2B software teams, ranking posts based on buying intent.
Founders
- Respond to important social media posts & drive founder-led sales.
- Understand where your audience is spending time & how they are experiencing your product, your competitor, your solved pain point.
- Engage in comments, share posts, and build audience.
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.
Marketers
- Monitor brand mentions, track sentiment, and identify trends.
- Analyze competitor strategies and market positioning.
- Discover content topics, industry discussions, and trending hashtags.
Whilst this is not an exhaustive list, it’s focused on helping B2B software companies grow.
Mention empowers larger brands, especially B2C, to leverage the power of social media. Its broad approach benefits SMBs, marketing agencies, PR firms, and large enterprises, offering tools to manage social media, track brand reputation, and engage with customers.
SMBs
- Stay on top of brand reputation by tracking mentions of their brand across the web and social media, allowing them to see how customers perceive them and address any concerns promptly.
- Engage with customers and boost sales. Mention helps SMBs identify and respond to customer comments and questions, fostering positive relationships and potentially leading to increased sales.
Marketing Agencies
- Offer powerful social listening services that agencies can utilize Mention to provide valuable insights to clients. By analyzing social media conversations, they can identify trends, understand customer sentiment, and inform effective marketing strategies.
- Deliver streamlined social media management, allowing agencies to manage social media for multiple clients efficiently. They can schedule posts, track performance across platforms, and respond to comments – all from one central hub.
Public Relations (PR) Firms
- Proactive crisis management. PR firms can leverage Mention to identify potential crises early on. By tracking mentions and sentiment analysis, they can effectively prepare responses and mitigate negative impacts on a brand's reputation.
- Identify influencers and amplify brand reach. Mention helps PR firms discover relevant influencers who can spread brand messages to a wider audience. This can significantly increase brand awareness and drive positive engagement.
Large Enterprises
- Monitor brand mentions across multiple channels. Large enterprises often have a complex social media presence with brand mentions scattered across various platforms. Mention unifies their monitoring, allowing them to track everything in one place and ensure no conversation goes unnoticed.
- Respond to customer inquiries efficiently. With a large customer base, managing inquiries can be overwhelming. Mention helps enterprises streamline communication by centralizing customer inquiries from social media and facilitating prompt responses.
Overall, Mention offers broad social media monitoring services beneficial for SMBs, marketing agencies, PR firms, and large enterprises. However, its generalized approach lacks tailored features for B2B SaaS companies. In contrast, Octolens specializes in serving B2B software firms with features like tracking brand mentions on platforms like Hacker News and Stack Overflow, analyzing competitor strategies, identifying leads, and engaging in meaningful conversations. This targeted approach aligns closely with the specific needs of B2B SaaS companies.
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.
Mention's basic tracking starts at $49, and to get access to LinkedIn, you need to be on an enterprise plan. This is a critical data source for B2B software companies. It is also notable that you can only get real-time email notifications on their enterprise plan. The broad suite of tools is clearly valuable, as Mention has a large customer base.
Octolens Mention Pricing From $19 From $49 Search intervals Up to 10-minutes Not clear from pricing page Mentions feed ✅ ✅ AI relevance scoring ✅ ❌ Analytics ✅ ✅ Data retention ✅ ✅ Email notifications ✅ ✅ Slack notifications ✅ ✅ RSS ❌ ✅ API ❌ - coming soon ✅ DEV monitoring ✅ ❓ GitHub monitoring ✅ ❌ Hacker News monitoring ✅ ❓ LinkedIn monitoring ✅ ✅ - Enterprise plan required Twitter/X monitoring ✅ ✅ Reddit monitoring ✅ ✅ YouTube monitoring ✅ ✅ - Enterprise plan required Stack Overflow monitoring ✅ ❓ News & Blogs monitoring ❌ - Coming soon ✅ Facebook & Instagram monitoring ❌ ✅
In conclusion, the landscape of social monitoring tools offers various options tailored to different needs and preferences. While Mention has long been a staple in the field, Octolens has emerged with a specific focus on serving B2B software companies.
Octolens offers a streamlined onboarding process, AI-powered features ensuring relevance and efficiency, and a competitive pricing structure. Its user-friendly interface and excellent customer support make it a compelling choice for B2B software companies.
While Mention remains a good option for a broader audience, including SMBs, marketing agencies, PR firms, and large enterprises, its generalized approach may not fully address the specific needs of B2B software companies.
Ultimately, for B2B software companies seeking a focused and efficient social monitoring solution, Octolens emerges as a compelling alternative worthy of consideration.