Brandwatch

Pros

This has all the best features of a social media management tool wrapped up into one easy to navigate tool that is sleek, clean, and works well.

Cons

The biggest issue I have is when I publish content natively through a social media site. Sometimes it does not appear in the general calendar on Brandwatch or the analytics available for the post are limited.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Brandwatch

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Brandwatch

Pros

We love all the integration with the different platforms we use but especially WhatsApp.

Cons

There was nothing wrong with Brandwatch for us. It was just a little more then we needed. We are a small business and don't need so much power.

Pros

Brandwatch used to be a solid analytics & social listening tool. The dashboard was well-structured, reporting was comprehensive, & sentiment analysis was useful. It offered valuable insights into brand perception, competitor monitoring, & market trends.

At its core, Brandwatch is a powerful tool, but no level of analytics justifies the kind of predatory business practices I’ve now experienced.

Cons

Deceptive renewal tactics & a customer-unfriendly approach. Brandwatch quietly slipped an auto-renewal clause into what was a manual renewal agreement, locking us into another contract cycle without explicit consent.

Previously, contract renewals were handled with an account manager reaching out—but now? No heads-up, no automated reminder, just a silent renewal & a big invoice. When challenged, they deflected with "standard practice" excuses, despite past renewals being explicitly manual.

If a company relies on fine print trickery rather than product value to retain customers, it speaks volumes.

Pros

Brandwatch is a piece of cake to set up reports and keep an eye on social media conversations.

Cons

Can be a bit of a pain in the neck to use and takes a while to get the hang of, especially for beginners.

Pros

It's a handy tool with very strong social media monitoring and analytics capabilities

Cons

advanced features necessitates some time to learn, else it's perfect

Pros

The tool has great potential, especially with its features that could support social media management and analytics. The integration with various platforms is possible, and the data analysis capabilities offer useful insights, if they work. However, that’s where the positive experience ends.

Cons

The main frustration was the poor onboarding process, which was confusing and poorly communicated. It was difficult to understand how to use the platform effectively, and even after trying to resolve issues, many remained unresolved. The platform is riddled with bugs, such as:
•Inability to like posts and comments directly through Brandwatch, requiring users to do it manually via Instagram.
•Automation features like Assignment disappearing, but continuing to run.
•Continuous error messages when trying to connect Facebook accounts.
•Broken “Send” button in the message writing interface, hidden by the support chat button.
•Missing calendar overview for clients, with confusing links.
•Lack of simultaneous posting across Instagram and Facebook, requiring duplicate planning.
•Glitchy features like deleted comments reappearing immediately and scheduled posts not showing correctly in the calendar.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Brandwatch

Pros

Brandwatch is the best Social Listening tool.

Cons

We can go and go deeper in and Analysis of Conversations.

Pros

Reporting tools are really nice and it's easy to create interesting dashboards that look nice to the client and provide helpful insights. It's also great for market research.

Cons

It lacks lots of features, such as various social media websites used in different countries. It doesn't have Instagram or Facebook posts anymore so it's really limited if you want to research companies based in European countries not using Twitter. Some features are also not really intuitive - for example comparing many companies on one dashboard.

Pros

Ability to setup various different queries which can you help monitor not just your brand, but also competitors and industry trends.

Cons

I have been using the standard package, but it was too expensive

Pros

It helped us identify trending topics in our industry, allowing us to engage more effectively with our audience.

Cons

It occasionally took longer than expected to update our social media analytics.

Pros

It's great how you can automatically analyze sentiment using word clouds or topics.

Cons

Sometimes takes very long time to get the data from a query to analyze conversations

Pros

The firehose access to social media data allows to understands a brand current standing as well as it's evolution through time. Powerful analysis and visualization tools make finding insights a breeze.

Cons

The tool takes too long to load data and the initial monitor set up is cumbersome. If you are setting a forgetting a monitor, it's no problem, but the minute you need to tweak queries to reduce noise, your time goes out the window.

Pros

What really captivated me was his ability to provide a comprehensive and in-depth look at my social media presence. With its extensive set of monitoring and analytics tools, I was able to gain a deep understanding of the conversations and trends relevant to my brand.

Cons

One of the things I disliked the least was the initial learning curve. As a new user it took me a bit of getting used to

Pros

Brandwatch provides data visualization tools that make it easy to analyze and present data in an understandable way and it allows users to customize their dashboards to track and analyze specific metrics that are important to their business.

Cons

Brandwatch can be expensive for small businesses and startups, as it is primarily designed for enterprise-level businesses.

Pros

This platform cuts out hours of time scheduling & customizing posts for multiple social media platforms. It's also a great tool for managing comments/messages for multiple clients in one easy, organized location.

Cons

FB Business Suite now allows you to schedule IG & FB stories, while Falcon still doesn't have that feature. Also we paid for the Advertising feature which allows you to set up FB ads directly through the platform, however I have found that I still end up using FB Ads Manager to maintain my advertising. I was excited about the idea of being able to do everything in one spot initially but the advertising feature is not easy to use, although I'm sure a lot of that has to do with what the FB API allows for third-party apps, and you can't easily set up different types of ads & optimization, so you end up having to move to FB Ads Manager anyway to do anything that isn't a basic "boost."

Pros

First of all, the biggest benefit of Falcon is that it comes in significantly cheaper than the market leader (Salesforce) and 100x easier to use and get started.

While customization may not be as extensible as Salesforce (also without the headaches), there's still a good degree of tuning to be found within Falcon such as setting up automatically generated reports, custom dashboards, and brand monitoring options.

Falcon also works great in a multilingual setting (French and English in our case), though will sometimes report some false-positives in non-English sentiments.

The ability to monitor brand mentions, sentiments, and callouts across all social media platforms and the web in one convenient dashboard is amazing.

Cons

The mobile version of the site, and mobile apps for iOS/Android (Called Engage) are a bit buggy sometimes, and leave a bit to be desired feature-wise. Though, thankfully it appears that the app is regularly updated and maintained, so I'm holding out hope that it grows to be much more serviceable in the future.

Pros

In-depth analytics and word cloud features are neat.

Cons

Customer service is poor and that makes or breaks a company. The queries were not always easy to write and trouble shooting them wasn't easily done within the program.

Pros

Beautiful design, ease of use, fantastic listening tool, 1:1 customer support. The tool was a tremendous help to unify the various social media accounts, passwords, and people across our org.

Cons

Falcon is not as in-depth on social media analytics. I have to 'go native' to get half the metrics needed.

Pros

We appreciate the amount of analytics data that is available inside of Falcon across our channels, as well as the ability to schedule posts across platforms well in advance.

Cons

There are strange limitations and inconsistent behavior using the publish module of Falcon. Our content strategy is video-heavy, and we were disappointed to learn that Falcon was incapable of publishing posts with higher than 1080p video (and even 1080p was not officially supported - we were told to use 720p video) as well as other format and quality limitations that the content platforms themselves (Facebook, Linkedin, etc.) do not restrict. So we found ourselves wondering why we were paying for a service that allowed us to do less than what can be done for free directly on those platforms.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

Platform is easy to learn and use with intuitive capabilities. Calendar feature works very well in centralizing all postings. Building content and approvals process super simple. Growing data capability. Adding new features at a regular clip and support is solid. Pricing is reasonable

Cons

Want the platform to go deeper in the listening capability. But they are making progress

Pros

Thanks to reporting and statistics, I can create a strategy for myself by looking at the data. This is my favorite feature.

Cons

There is no feature that I dislike the most. The fact that it is both convenient and inexpensive makes the application stand out in its field.

Pros

I like the ease of use when assigning messages to my team. I also like the calendar view and the ease with which can reschedule posts.

Cons

My least favorite thing about Falcon is the reporting module, I'd love to see some revenue based KPIs in there as well.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Brandwatch

Switched From

Pros

I liked the dashboard for reporting, however I found it challenging to share the report outside the organization.

Cons

No tagged products functionality for IG or FB. Weak onboarding and CS.

Pros

Falcon is very easy to use for scheduling social media posting and analysing the data and insights. The graphs available when analysing the data are particularly useful and user friendly to interact with and understand and for simple scheduling posts, Falcon makes it very easy to do so. The customer support team is always quick to respond to any queries I might have and usually do a good job of fixing any issue I am having.

Cons

Where Falcon could improve is with it's scheduling system. As it stands, Falcon cannot be directly used on desktop to schedule or post carousels on Instagram. This can be done by using their Falcon Hub app, but is a pain to use, and still rather than schedule posts, it simply populates the necessary fields into the Instagram app itself.

Pros

The collaboration and asset management tools are why we selected this platform. It is perfect for multiple users and permissions, assigning tasks and managing an extensive library of content.

Cons

There are a few features that other social scheduling platforms offer that Falcon doesn't, and they are missed. For example, setting up a feed list of Twitter users or a Twitter list so that you can engage and respond to those tweets directly in the platform. That's not possible with Falcon.

Pros

I like the brand management features
It makes social media monitoring and management easy
It comes with some analytics capabilities

Cons

Brandwatch has handled our needs as required and no issues

Pros

Brandwatch lets you have all the results possible for the queries made.It does not give an estimation of the results, but the actual number of posts that were made on the timeframe selected.It also has a great dashboards panel.

Cons

That it does not support TikTok and Instagram public posts.It also does not have a very good automated sentiment for mentions. We usually have to change it manually.

Pros

I like it because with Brandwatch I can realize how my customers perceive my product and with this data create a marketing strategy. It is also important because it allows integration with various platforms.

Cons

The disadvantage is that it can become slow when there is a lot of data, and it has some limitations that need to be improved.

Pros

The best software for keeping track of your social network accounts. The extra thing I like is the "Queries" commands.

Cons

It's a rather complex piece of software. Don't forget to get professional help at the beginning.

Pros

The ability to collect the corresponding information on the social web, allows us to track products on the market, the trends we face, competitors and the online management of our customers.

Cons

Everything is good and perfect but just what is not yet good is the limitation of sample sizes, the long duration of the analysis of the results.

Pros

I was amazed by the way Brandwatch made it easy to be in total control of my brand, from real time monitoring to their amazing analysis.

Cons

Their plans can be a little expensive, other than that they provide a great service.

Pros

I love his ability to give me a complete and detailed view of my brand perception online. Thanks to its driven sentiment analysis, I was able to understand consumer opinions and reactions deeply and accurately. Furthermore, the platform allowed me to monitor in real time any unusual activity or emerging crisis, allowing me to take quick and effective action.

Cons

Well, since the platform offers a large amount of data and analysis, it took me some time to familiarize myself with all the functionalities and get the most out of it.

Pros

I like it because I can track and analyze everything and see the trends in real time and better understand the opinions and comments of my customers.

Cons

Well it would be great if the speed and efficiency of data processing could be improved to further streamline the workflow.

Pros

What I liked the most is its ability to gather and analyze large amounts of social media data quickly and efficiently.

Cons

The platform can be expensive, which can make it less accessible for small businesses or individual users with limited budgets.

Pros

I love how I can constantly monitor my brand and receive real-time alerts on any unusual activity or emerging crisis. The platform uses artificial intelligence to provide insights into consumer sentiment and reactions online.

Cons

The learning curve can be a bit steep at first. This platform has a wide range of features and capabilities, which can be overwhelming at first.

Pros

One aspect I liked most about Brandwatch was its powerful social media listening and analytics capabilities. The platform's advanced sentiment analysis, real-time monitoring, and comprehensive reporting provided valuable insights into brand reputation, customer sentiment, and market trends.

Cons

One drawback I experienced with Brandwatch was the complexity of the platform, requiring some time and training to fully utilize its features and customize the monitoring parameters. Additionally, the pricing structure could be a limiting factor for smaller businesses or organizations with limited budgets.

Pros

I love the dashboard interface, and the ability to switch from one Client (Project) to another. I absolutely LOVE that my team & I can post for clients on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn & Twitter. We even can map out Instagram stories as a part of the overarching social media strategy. As an agency owner, I like the approval capabilities for my content creator or clients to create posts and for us to be the final approval and last eyes to see a post before it goes live. And last but not least, I am a huge fan of the reporting, easy to generate reports for each platform that we can send or review for clients as frequently as need. Also was extremely helpful for end of year/new year meetings I had in December and January, I was more prepared and educated about our stats than ever before, with just a few clicks.

Cons

Wishing you had Pintrest posting (we use and pay for Tailwind). More education on how to use social listening. More capabilities of the apps (to approve ideally or quick switch out or fix posts). To be able to answer chats/DMs in your app, so we can track our responses through stats.

Pros

Allowed scheduling for LinkedIn before any other platform did. Customer support is very good, despite the product being absolutely terrible.

Cons

Every aspect of this software is terrible. From lack of Reel support to improper data reporting to extra line breaks and "<?>" boxes when you schedule posts, Falcon is an overpriced nightmare that you should avoid at all costs. The product we were promised and the product we wound up with were two completely different things.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Brandwatch

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Brandwatch

Pros

An instinctive and smooth scheduling and approval process was one of the main reasons we first considered Falcon and we then found an array of extra features that helped convince us this was a good move: an on-boarding process, an account manager, analytics that are better than native stats, listening tools, and moderation. Having all of this in one place is a timesaver. In addition to the ongoing development of the tools, such as expanding Instagram and Linked In capabilities, Falcon is a real improvement to daily social media management compared to where we were.

Cons

We're still using native tools for ads, especially Facebook but can see this changing in time.

Pros

100% flexibility and scalability. it can be used by any type of user and it can scale to any company size and need

Cons

to leverage it at fool capacity it require some serious skills in query wirting

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Brandwatch

Pros

The best thing for me is their customer support. Falcon is a very robust software and it takes time to learn it. Having a person available at all times to answer your questions is a very powerful feature and one I've taken advantage of multiple times. They are always available, even if it is to help you locate a specific thing in your dashboard.

Cons

Probably the mobile apps. Since the software is so robust, there are a bunch of different apps that you need to perform all the different tasks. I think this is useful if you have a big team but our team is small, even thou our client is big and having so many different apps makes it quite annoying when trying to manage.

Pros

With the help of Falcon Social, it has never been a problem to control all the company’s social media channels. We believe that the ability to create applications in the program is one of the best features of the Falcon platform. Besides, what we like about the program is its measure function. With its help, we do not face any serious problems and difficulties when creating and analyzing our reports. It is an all-in-one-place solution. Falcon gives us a great number of abilities to work on the content of our company, as well as provide our best practices through various media channels. Besides, the program allows making engagement with clients easier and more natural. All the things considered, it was definitely a worthy investment for our company.

Cons

Even though we did not have an urgent necessity to contact the Falcon support team, we believe it is a drawback not to have a phone hotline. Well, in some cases, it is a must for a customer to solve the problem occurring within the Falcon platform in the shortest time possible. In addition, it would be better for the service to have a more advanced ability for signing up for newsletters. We wish there was a feature of getting the necessary data and information into our company’s database.

Pros

The Publishing tool saves me so much time. Instead of designing a content plan on other software or programs, I can now create my content on Falcon's calendar. I also save time then on briefing our designers, because I send it directly to them for approval where they see exactly what I have in mind and design it accordingly.

Cons

I really dislike that I have to create my audience from scratch every time I set up my ads. I don't want to create an audience from the listening tool, which is the only way you can save an audience. I would like to create an audience from scratch once, save it for that specific channel, and have it ready the next time/month I create my ads.

Also, a recommendation - That you can edit published content as well (sometimes you want to change a small thing in the caption, but now you have to delete the whole post and add everything again).

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Brandwatch

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Brandwatch

Pros

Falcon is really easy to manage multiple social media channels, allowing you to easily post, interact and report. The UI is really easy to digest, meaning you can quickly pick up and get used to the software with minimal training. The customer support staff are always readily available should you need them, offering great advice and checking back to make sure the issue has been resolved. Regular webinars also give key insight into the changes going on in the social landscape, as well as demonstrating new product features.

Cons

Falcon is one of the pricier social media scheduler tools. The value is there with the quality and detail in the social listening/reporting, however it doesn't make the software too accessible for smaller businesses or individuals.

Alternatives Considered

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Brandwatch

Pros

Great program to publish and schedule your social media content - especially if you have a lot of content to publish.

Cons

It is very similar to other programs- but somewhat more expensive.

Pros

Unlimited User Accounts, API Integrations, Excellent Customer Service

Cons

The deep learning curve for the user interface, queries must be carefully written to exclude non-essential and low-quality mentions. No mobile app.

Pros

good idea
many possibilities
option to operate many channels simultaneously
easy way to share accounts within a company
the use of different platforms (FB, Instagram, etc.)
the possibility to interact with the users (to react to posts, to link comments,..)

Cons

very poor reliability !!!
page sometimes (very often) uploads the media very slowly or not at all
left integration difficult
communication with users is difficult - you cannot post or comment on GIF's or images/videos, and instagram does not allow you to interact at all

Pros

Falcon's dashboard is insanely easy to navigate and set up your first monitoring campaign within minutes. The tool does everything from monitoring multiple channels, sentiments, hashtag monitoring, and social media scheduling (priced at a different tier).

Their support is also A1, with quick response times, and genuinely helpful support staff.

The feature set and price makes Falcon.io an easy choice over something like Social Studio, which has less capabilities, for a much higher price tag.

Cons

One major thing that's missing is the ability to schedule exported reports (either in PDF or Excel format would be good). There's no way to set up an automated report to be sent to your inbox at set times/triggers.

Also, sometimes the sentiment monitoring can be a bit off for different languages. We found the the French sentiments we often mislabeled as positive, when they were quite negative. Apparently the system gets better as your correctly label them.

Pros

The calendar overview
Scheduling quite easily
Being able to leave notes
Having a team system

Cons

The approval system and the access that different user roles have.
Preview mode not always being accurate.
Not being able to do things like tagging on pics for Twitter or needing an app to schedule certain posts on Instagram.
Falcon not being able to collate all data from all channels for stats (but i know that's due to the channel permissions and not Falcon)
Falcon sometimes refreshing and not saving posts, taking ages to load images.
Channels being disconnected (again not entirely Falcons fault)

Pros

For us the scheduling tool is most useful. Falcon is very user-friendly. Once implemented we we're able to roll it out to stakeholders with ease.

Cons

When we first started using Falcon we felt that we couldn't use it to the fullest due to API restrictions. Since raising our issues with Falcon their development team have now almost resolved all of the issues. I do feel that the listening tool could be better. We run yearly influencer rankings and need to pull historical data but Falcon only allows you to pull 30 days of historical data when setting up a new listening stream.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Brandwatch

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Brandwatch