Clearcue is the best Octolens alternative for B2B sales teams needing multi-platform intent signals (from €79/month yearly). For budget monitoring, try Buska (~$39/month). Compare all 7 alternatives.
Finding an Octolens alternative requires understanding what you actually need from a social listening tool. Octolens excels at AI-powered brand monitoring for B2B SaaS companies, tracking mentions across X, LinkedIn, Reddit, GitHub, and Hacker News with relevance scoring that filters noise. But it has limitations: no native API, limited to 15 keywords on the Scale plan, and pricing that starts at $69/month for just 3,000 mentions.
Clearcue is the best Octolens alternative for teams focused on LinkedIn buying signals and multi-platform intent detection. While Octolens monitors brand mentions and filters by relevance, Clearcue identifies actual buying behavior through signal stacking across LinkedIn, X, Reddit, news, job postings, podcasts, and events. Clearcue starts at €99/month (€79/month yearly) with 7 signals and unlimited users, offering AI qualification that reveals purchasing patterns rather than just keyword matches.
| Tool | Best For | Starting Price | Key Difference vs Octolens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clearcue | LinkedIn intent signals | €79/month yearly | Signal stacking across platforms, AI qualification |
| Trigify | LinkedIn engagement tracking | $149/month | Deep LinkedIn signal intelligence |
| Brand24 | Comprehensive brand monitoring | $119/month | 25 million sources, sentiment analysis |
| Mention | Social media management | $49/month | Publishing features included |
| Buska | Budget social listening | $39/month | Simple setup, unlimited mentions |
| Sprout Social | Enterprise teams | $199/user/month | Full social media management suite |
| Brandwatch | Large enterprises | Custom pricing | Consumer intelligence platform |
Octolens works well for B2B SaaS companies tracking brand mentions across developer communities. Its AI relevance scoring filters irrelevant mentions and tags posts by sentiment and buying intent. However, several limitations push teams to explore alternatives.
Keyword restrictions: The Starter plan includes only 3 keywords, Pro offers 10, and Scale provides 15. Teams monitoring multiple products, competitors, and industry terms quickly hit these limits.
Mention caps: Plans include 3,000 to 50,000 mentions monthly. High-volume brands or those tracking broad industry terms may exceed these allowances.
No API access: Octolens provides webhooks but lacks a native API, limiting integration options for teams with custom workflows.
LinkedIn depth: While Octolens monitors LinkedIn, it focuses on keyword mentions rather than engagement patterns, job changes, or company signals that indicate buying intent.
Teams looking for deeper intent data, more keywords, or different platform coverage often find better fits among alternatives that specialize in their specific needs.
Clearcue approaches social listening differently than Octolens. Rather than tracking keyword mentions, Clearcue monitors buying signals across LinkedIn, X, Reddit, news, job postings, podcasts, and events. The platform uses AI to identify patterns that indicate genuine purchase consideration.
For a detailed comparison with similar tools, see: Clearcue vs Trigify: Which Intent Signal Tool Is Right for You?
The key differentiator is signal stacking. When the same person or company shows interest across multiple channels, Clearcue surfaces these patterns automatically. A prospect who engages with competitor content on LinkedIn, asks questions on Reddit, and works at a company posting relevant job openings represents a much stronger lead than someone who mentioned your brand once.
Key Features:
AI qualification filters noise by analyzing context, not just keywords. The system distinguishes between casual mentions and genuine buying behavior.
Natural language signal setup means you describe what to track in plain English rather than building complex Boolean queries. Tell Clearcue "companies hiring SDRs in the SaaS space" and it monitors job postings across platforms.
Multi-platform coverage includes LinkedIn engagement, X conversations, Reddit discussions, news mentions, job posting analysis, podcast mentions, and event attendance signals.
Pricing:
Clearcue offers four tiers, all with unlimited users:
| Plan | Monthly Price | Yearly Price | Signals | Audiences |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | €99/month | €79/month | 7 | 1 |
| Pro | €249/month | €199/month | 25 | 5 |
| Scale | €549/month | €439/month | 75 | 15 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Unlimited | Unlimited |
All plans include AI signals, signal stacking, and no limits on lead detection. You pay for signals tracked, not leads found.
Best for: B2B sales teams wanting to identify warm leads through buying behavior patterns rather than keyword mentions. Particularly strong for teams prospecting on LinkedIn who need signals beyond basic engagement tracking.
Trigify focuses specifically on LinkedIn signal intelligence, tracking engagement patterns to identify prospects showing buying intent. The platform monitors who interacts with competitor content, industry influencers, and relevant topics to surface warm leads.
For more details, see: 7 Best Trigify Alternatives for LinkedIn Intent Signal Tracking
Unlike Octolens, which tracks mentions across multiple platforms, Trigify goes deeper on LinkedIn engagement. It captures signals like post likes, comments, content shares, and follower activity that indicate interest in specific topics or solutions.
Key Features:
Social signal tracking monitors over 30 trigger types including job changes, funding announcements, and viral post engagement. The platform identifies when target accounts engage with relevant content.
AI workflows process social listening data to deliver insights and suggested actions. You can automate lead routing based on signal strength and type.
Credit-based system allows flexible usage. Pay-as-you-go pricing starts at $0.012 per credit for teams with variable needs.
Pricing:
| Plan | Monthly Price | Credits | Key Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pay As You Go | $0.012/credit | Varies | Unlimited listening, 6 keywords per search |
| Essential | $149/month | 15,000 | Unlimited social engagement |
| Growth | $270/month | 40,000 | Unlimited workflows |
| Scale | $549/month | 100,000 | Account manager support |
Best for: Sales teams where LinkedIn represents the primary prospecting channel. Trigify excels at identifying high-intent prospects based on social engagement patterns and automating outreach triggers.
Brand24 provides broader source coverage than Octolens, monitoring mentions across 25 million online sources including social media, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, and reviews. The platform emphasizes sentiment analysis and brand health metrics.
While Octolens focuses on B2B SaaS communities like GitHub and Hacker News, Brand24 casts a wider net. This makes it better suited for brands needing comprehensive reputation monitoring rather than targeted lead generation.
Key Features:
AI Brand Assistant offers conversational insights about your monitoring data. Ask questions about sentiment trends, competitor activity, or campaign performance.
Sentiment analysis scores mentions as positive, negative, or neutral with high accuracy. Track how perception shifts over time.
Influencer identification finds voices that drive conversations about your brand or industry. See reach and engagement metrics for each influencer.
Pricing:
| Plan | Monthly Price | Keywords | Mentions | Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Individual | $119/month | 3 | 2,000 | 1 |
| Team | $159/month | 7 | 5,000 | Unlimited |
| Pro | $239/month | 12 | 25,000 | Unlimited |
| Enterprise | $399/month | 25 | 100,000 | Unlimited |
Note: The Individual and Team plans do not include LinkedIn, YouTube, or TikTok monitoring. Pro plan required for real-time updates and advanced AI insights.
Best for: Marketing teams and PR professionals who need comprehensive brand monitoring across many sources. Better for reputation management than sales prospecting.
Mention combines social listening with social media management, allowing teams to monitor mentions and publish content from one platform. This integration makes it attractive for teams that want listening and management in a single tool.
Compared to Octolens, Mention offers broader social media management capabilities but less specialized B2B focus. The platform tracks mentions across social media, news sites, blogs, and forums in 44 languages.
Key Features:
Publish and respond features let you schedule posts and engage with mentions without switching tools. Manage multiple social accounts from a unified dashboard.
Boolean search capabilities enable precise query building for complex monitoring needs. Combine keywords with operators to filter results.
Alert customization sends notifications based on your criteria. Set up different alert rules for different mention types.
Pricing:
| Plan | Monthly Price | Alerts | Mentions | Social Accounts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solo | $49/month | 2 | 5,000 | 5 |
| Pro | $99/month | 5 | 10,000 | 10 |
| Pro Plus | $179/month | 7 | 20,000 | 15 |
| Company | Custom | 10+ | 100,000+ | Unlimited |
Best for: Marketing teams wanting social listening and social media management in one platform. Good for teams managing multiple social accounts alongside monitoring.
Buska offers the most affordable entry point for social listening, with plans starting at $39/month for 3 keywords and unlimited mentions. The platform monitors over 20 sources including LinkedIn, X, Reddit, and Product Hunt.
For startups and solo founders who find Octolens too expensive, Buska provides core social listening functionality at a fraction of the cost. The tradeoff is fewer advanced features and less sophisticated AI filtering.
Key Features:
Unlimited mentions on all plans means you never hit caps regardless of how much conversation happens around your keywords.
Sentiment analysis categorizes mentions automatically, helping prioritize responses to negative feedback.
Slack and Discord integration delivers mentions directly to your workspace for quick response.
Pricing:
| Plan | Monthly Price | Keywords | Users |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pro | Starting ~$39/month | 3 | 3 |
| Ultimate | Starting ~$99/month | 10 | 5 |
| Custom | Contact | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Note: Yearly pricing may offer savings. See buska.io for current pricing.
Best for: Bootstrapped startups and solo founders who need basic social listening without enterprise pricing. Good starting point before graduating to more sophisticated tools.
Sprout Social provides comprehensive social media management with integrated listening capabilities. The platform serves large teams managing multiple brands, accounts, and team members across social channels.
Unlike Octolens, which focuses purely on monitoring, Sprout Social includes publishing, engagement, analytics, and customer care features. This makes it overkill for teams wanting only social listening but valuable for enterprise social media operations.
Key Features:
Unified inbox aggregates messages from all connected social channels for centralized response management.
Custom listening queries let you build complex searches tracking trends, competitors, and industry conversations.
Enterprise reporting provides detailed analytics on social performance, listening insights, and team productivity.
Pricing:
Sprout Social pricing starts at $199/user/month for the Standard plan. Professional ($299/user) and Advanced ($399/user) plans add more features. Enterprise pricing requires custom quotes.
All plans are priced per user, which becomes expensive for larger teams. A 10-person team on Professional would pay $2,990/month.
Best for: Enterprise social media teams needing comprehensive management capabilities alongside listening. Too expensive and feature-heavy for teams wanting only monitoring.
Brandwatch, now part of Cision, provides enterprise-level consumer intelligence capabilities. The platform combines social listening with advanced analytics, AI-powered insights, and comprehensive data access.
Brandwatch sits at the opposite end of the market from Octolens. Where Octolens targets B2B SaaS startups with affordable monitoring, Brandwatch serves large enterprises with complex intelligence needs and substantial budgets.
Key Features:
Image recognition identifies brand logos and products in visual content across social media. Track visual mentions that text-based monitoring misses.
AI-powered analysis surfaces trends, sentiment patterns, and emerging topics automatically. The platform processes massive data volumes to extract insights.
Historical data access provides years of social data for trend analysis and benchmarking. Essential for enterprises tracking long-term brand perception.
Pricing:
Brandwatch requires custom quotes based on data volume, features needed, and company size. Typical contracts start around $800-1,000/month for basic packages and scale significantly higher for enterprise deployments. Annual contracts are standard.
Best for: Large enterprises with dedicated social intelligence teams and substantial budgets. Too expensive and complex for SMBs or most B2B SaaS companies.
Understanding feature differences helps identify the right fit for your specific needs.
| Feature | Octolens | Clearcue | Trigify | Brand24 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn monitoring | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ (deep) | ✓ (Pro+) |
| X/Twitter monitoring | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reddit monitoring | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| GitHub monitoring | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| News monitoring | Coming soon | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Job posting signals | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Podcast monitoring | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ (Enterprise) |
| AI relevance scoring | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Signal stacking | ✗ | ✓ | Partial | ✗ |
| Native API | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Webhooks | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Slack integration | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
The best alternative depends on your primary use case and budget.
Choose Clearcue if: You need LinkedIn buying signals and want to identify warm leads through behavior patterns across multiple platforms. Best for B2B sales teams focused on signal-based prospecting rather than brand monitoring.
Choose Trigify if: LinkedIn is your primary prospecting channel and you want deep engagement intelligence. Good for teams running account-based marketing campaigns on LinkedIn.
Choose Brand24 if: You need comprehensive brand monitoring across many sources with strong sentiment analysis. Better for PR and marketing teams than sales prospecting.
Choose Mention if: You want social listening combined with social media publishing and management. Good for teams managing multiple accounts alongside monitoring.
Choose Buska if: You need affordable social listening and can work with basic features. Best entry point for startups before upgrading to more sophisticated tools.
Choose Sprout Social if: You need enterprise social media management with listening as one component. Too expensive for teams wanting only monitoring.
Choose Brandwatch if: You have enterprise budgets and need comprehensive consumer intelligence capabilities. Overkill for SMBs and most B2B SaaS companies.
Octolens monitors keyword mentions and scores them for relevance. Clearcue identifies buying behavior patterns across platforms through signal stacking. While Octolens tells you someone mentioned your brand, Clearcue tells you someone is showing purchase intent based on their engagement patterns, job postings at their company, and multi-platform activity.
Octolens tracks LinkedIn mentions but does not provide deep engagement intelligence. It monitors when your keywords appear in LinkedIn posts but does not track who engages with competitor content, profile changes, or company signals. Tools like Clearcue and Trigify offer more sophisticated LinkedIn signal detection.
Buska offers affordable plans starting at approximately $39/month for 3 keywords and unlimited mentions. For comparison, Octolens Starter costs around $69/month for 3 keywords and 3,000 mentions. See buska.io for current pricing. Buska provides less sophisticated AI filtering but adequate coverage for basic monitoring needs.
Yes, many teams combine tools for different purposes. A common setup pairs a broad monitoring tool like Brand24 for brand mentions with a specialized intent tool like Clearcue for sales signals. Webhooks and integrations allow data flow between platforms and into CRMs like HubSpot or Salesforce.
Signal stacking identifies when the same person or company shows buying intent across multiple touchpoints. Instead of treating each mention or engagement as isolated, signal stacking tools like Clearcue recognize patterns: a prospect who engages with competitor content on LinkedIn, asks questions on Reddit, and works at a company posting relevant job openings represents higher intent than any single signal alone.
No, Octolens does not offer a native API. The platform provides webhooks for pushing mentions to other systems, which works for many integration needs but limits custom development options. Brand24 offers an API for teams needing programmatic access (see brand24.com). Trigify supports workflow integrations via HTTP request nodes and webhooks.
Octolens serves B2B SaaS companies well for AI-filtered brand monitoring across developer communities. Its strength lies in relevance scoring that surfaces high-value mentions from platforms like GitHub, Hacker News, and Reddit.
For teams needing more than brand monitoring, alternatives offer specialized capabilities. Clearcue provides signal stacking and AI qualification for identifying actual buying behavior across LinkedIn, X, Reddit, news, jobs, podcasts, and events. Trigify delivers deep LinkedIn engagement intelligence for account-based prospecting. Brand24 offers comprehensive source coverage for enterprise brand monitoring.
The right choice depends on whether you prioritize brand awareness (Brand24, Mention), sales signals (Clearcue, Trigify), or budget constraints (Buska). Most B2B sales teams find the greatest value in tools that identify buying intent patterns rather than just keyword mentions, making signal-focused alternatives worth the investment over basic monitoring tools.
Start using Clearcue today and never miss a buying signal again.