Mention alternatives for Instagram hashtag monitoring
Published
The best Mention alternative depends on why you are leaving. If you want a self-serve social listening tool with a published price, Awario is the lowest entry point and Brand24 is the fuller dashboard. If the thing you actually use Mention for is watching a few Instagram hashtags and exporting what turns up, a per-post hashtag feed gives you those posts as rows for a fraction of any listening plan. And if you rely on review sites, several networks and a dedicated account manager in one tool, Mention may still be the right place to be.
This guide compares the three shapes on the same rows, says what each one costs as published in September 2026, and ends with how to switch without losing your history.
Why people look for a Mention alternative
Mention is a social listening and media monitoring tool. Its home page describes it as a way to "Monitor the web, analyze online conversations, and manage your social media", and it now carries a banner saying "Agorapulse has acquired Mention". Nothing below depends on that ownership change, but it is worth knowing if you are reviewing vendors.
The reasons people search for a Mention alternative tend to be the same few:
- There is no published price. The pricing page, as of September 2026, lists one Company plan and routes buyers to "Get a demo".
- Historical data costs extra. The same page says historical data access is "Not included in this plan" and is "available as a paid add-on".
- API access costs extra too. It carries the same wording, which matters if you wanted to pipe mentions into your own tools.
- The job is narrower than the tool. A team that only watches a campaign hashtag on Instagram is paying for web, news, review and social scheduling features it never opens.
If none of those apply to you, read the section on who should stay before you change anything.
Mention alternatives at a glance
| Mention | Awario | Brand24 | Per-post hashtag feed | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | enterprise listening with review sites | cheapest self-serve listening | a fuller dashboard with AI analysis | the posts under one Instagram hashtag, as rows |
| Published entry price | none, demo only | $49 a month, $29 billed annually | $249 a month, $199 billed annually | $0.0005 per delivered post |
| Unit of the plan | one Company plan | topics, unlimited keywords each | keywords | posts delivered |
| Networks | Instagram plus web, news, reviews and more | web and social | web, social, reviews, podcasts and more | Instagram only |
| Historical data | paid add-on | within the stored-mentions cap | within the plan | set by your date filter |
| Export | API is a paid add-on | CSV export on every plan | reports and exports | the dataset is the export |
| Sentiment and alerts | yes | yes | yes | no |
Prices are as published on each vendor's own pricing page in September 2026.
Who should stay with Mention
Stay if Instagram hashtags are a small part of what you monitor. Mention's pricing page lists review monitoring across "75+ review sites including Google, Facebook, Trustpilot, Amazon, and Glassdoor", web monitoring of "news, blogs, forums", and social coverage that names Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Reddit, TikTok and Pinterest among others. It also lists a dedicated account manager, custom onboarding and white-label reporting. If your team uses those, a hashtag-only tool replaces a sliver of the product and you would need something else for the rest.
Stay as well if buying through sales suits your organisation. Mention says "Pay yearly and get 2 months free", and an enterprise contract with an account manager is what some procurement teams want.
Awario: the cheapest self-serve listening
Awario is the closest like-for-like swap for a team that wants listening without a sales call. Its pricing page, as of September 2026:
| Plan | Monthly | Billed annually | Topics | New mentions / mo | Stored per topic | Team |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $49 | $29 | 3 | 30,000 | 5,000 | 1 |
| Pro | $149 | $89 | 15 | 300,000 | 15,000 | 10 |
| Enterprise | $399 | $249 | 100 | 1,000,000 | 50,000 | unlimited |
The unit that makes Awario cheap for hashtag work is the topic. In Awario's words, "Every topic can contain unlimited keywords", and the keywords "can be plain text, social media handles, hashtags, or URLs". So a campaign with six related hashtags is one topic, not six.
The limit to plan around is the stored figure, which Awario describes this way:
"The maximum number of results a single alert can contain."
A busy hashtag can fill 5,000 stored results on Starter, after which older results fall out of reach. Awario offers a free trial on the Starter plan and lists data export in .csv on every tier. For a fuller head-to-head with Brand24, see Brand24 vs Awario for Instagram hashtag monitoring.
Brand24: the fuller dashboard
Brand24 costs more than Awario and gives more analysis on top. Its pricing page, as of September 2026:
| Plan | Monthly | Billed annually | Keywords | Mentions / mo | Updates |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Individual | $249 | $199 | 3 | 2,000 | every 12h |
| Team | $349 | $299 | 7 | 10,000 | every hour |
| Pro | $499 | $399 | 12 | 40,000 | realtime |
| Business | $699 | $599 | 25 | 100,000 | realtime |
| Enterprise | from $1,499 | from $1,499 | custom | custom | realtime |
There is a free 14-day trial. Instagram is listed among its sources, and the plans add sentiment analysis, influencer analysis and trending hashtags on top of the mention feed.
The Individual plan is the trap for hashtag work. Three keywords and 2,000 mentions a month, refreshed twice a day, is tight for any tag with real traffic. Team is the realistic starting point if Brand24 is your choice. If you are weighing Brand24 itself, Brand24 alternatives for Instagram hashtag monitoring covers it from the other side.
A per-post hashtag feed: when you want the posts
The third option is the one this site sells, and it fits a narrower reader: somebody who wants the posts from an Instagram hashtag as data and does the analysis in their own spreadsheet, BI tool or notebook.
- You pay per delivered post. $0.0005 per post, with no subscription. A scheduled run that finds nothing new costs nothing.
- A real date filter. "Only posts newer than" stops the walk when the feed reaches your date, and "Only posts older than" bounds the other end, so one week of posts costs one week of rows.
- An exact limit. Ask for 500 posts and 500 is the most you are billed for.
- You bring the Instagram session. Instagram serves hashtag data only to a signed-in session, so the run uses the session cookie of an account you control.
Four thousand posts in a month is $2.00. That figure is not comparable to a listening plan, because it buys something different: rows and nothing on top of them. There are no alerts, no sentiment scores and no other networks, and each run reads one hashtag. If you need the analysis layer, stay on a listening tool. If you were mostly exporting mentions from a dashboard and working from the export, the feed gives you that export directly.
What each row carries, and how to turn it into a sheet, is covered in How to export Instagram posts to Excel. The wider field of data options is in Instagram hashtag tracker options.
Which one fits your job
Match the tool to the question you are answering, not to the category name:
| Your question | Pick |
|---|---|
| What is being said about our brand everywhere, including reviews? | Mention, or Brand24 |
| Which of our campaign hashtags is growing, on a budget? | Awario |
| What is the sentiment and who are the influencers in this conversation? | Brand24 |
| Give me every post under #ourcampaign since the 1st, as a table | a per-post hashtag feed |
| We need all of the above | a listening tool for the dashboard, plus a feed for the raw rows |
The last row is more common than it looks. Some teams keep a listening plan for reporting and pull the raw Instagram posts separately for a dataset, a UGC review or a research sample, because a dashboard's stored cap and export format were never built for that.
How to switch away from Mention
- Export what you need first. Save the reports and mention lists you rely on before the contract ends. Historical data is an add-on at Mention, so do not assume a new tool can reach back to recreate it.
- List your alerts. Write down each alert, its keywords and the report it feeds. On Awario, related hashtags can share one topic.
- Run the replacement in parallel. Awario and Brand24 both offer a free trial, and a per-post feed costs only what it delivers, so compare coverage on your busiest hashtag for a week before cancelling.
- Check refresh on the tag that matters. If you chose Mention for real-time tracking, confirm the alternative's update frequency on the plan you intend to buy.
- Cancel at the renewal date. Annual contracts are paid up front, so the timing is the saving.
If the answer turns out to be "we only needed the Instagram posts", start with one hashtag and a small limit to see the rows before you schedule anything.
Summary
Mention is built for organisations that monitor a brand across the web, social networks and review sites and want an account manager to go with it. For a team leaving because there is no published price or because historical data and API access are extra, Awario is the cheapest self-serve alternative and Brand24 the richer dashboard. For a team whose real job is the posts under an Instagram hashtag, a per-post feed replaces the subscription with a meter and hands you the rows directly.