Social Listening Software
Brandwatch and Sprout live in platform APIs. AyeWatch watches the public web those suites were not built to read.
Social listening software lives in platform APIs. AyeWatch covers the public web those tools skip. If you need volume, sentiment, and author graphs from X, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok, you are shopping Brandwatch, Sprout, Talkwalker, or something in that family. AyeWatch is not that suite.
The mix-up happens in RFPs. Someone writes "social listening" and means "tell us when people talk about us anywhere." Those are two products. API listening is licensed, rate-limited, and rich on engagement. Web monitoring is pages anyone could open, including the ones social tools treat as a footnote.
What the API suite is good at
Share of voice on platforms. Influencer lists. Comment sentiment at scale. Publishing and reply workflows if you bought Sprout for the inbox. Brandwatch is built for that world. If that is your actual job, buy it, or read a Brandwatch alternative that still speaks those APIs. AyeWatch will not ingest a private Facebook group or a follower graph.
Sprout users who only wanted "alerts when we get mentioned in the press" are overpaying for a social inbox. A Sprout Social alternative for that use case is a web monitor, not another social calendar.
The public web those tools skip
Trade blogs. Company newsrooms. Regulatory pages. Forums that are still HTML. Review sites. Long Substacks. Transcript dumps. Careers posts that name you as the reason someone left. Social suites sometimes add a "news" tab. It is rarely the product they care about, and it shows. AyeWatch is topic and page monitoring on that public web, with a short summary when the topic moves.
Reddit sits on the border. Some listening tools include it. Many still miss the thread that never used your trademark. If Reddit is the market, run a dedicated topic rather than hoping the social dashboard caught it. For the full contrast, see social listening vs AI monitoring.
Start a monitor in under a minute
Free Preview is six lifetime runs across three topics. No card.
Try AyeWatch freeRun both without paying twice for the same mention
Keep the social suite for platform work. Put AyeWatch on news, blogs, and the URLs you already refresh. Do not duplicate the company name in both and then argue about which ping was first. Split the brief. Social: comments and creators. AyeWatch: pages with URLs your counsel can open in a browser.
Limits on each side
AyeWatch Free Preview is six lifetime runs, three topics, Daily or slower, push and in-app. Pro is $9 a month, 50 topics, 6-hour. Pro+ is 150, hourly. Paid adds email, Slack, Discord, webhooks, and API. None of that is a Twitter firehose. Brandwatch will still miss a blog that never posted the link on social. That is why the two exist. Pick the one that matches the page you were late to last quarter.