Looking for a free Mention.com alternative? The honest answer is that nothing free does everything Mention's paid plan does. But if you run a small game, a channel, a shop or a side project and just want to know when people talk about it, $0 gets you further than you might think. Here is what each free or nearly free option actually gives you, with no fine print hidden.
Why "free" became the question
Mention used to be easy to try and cheap to keep. Then Agorapulse acquired it in 2025. Today the Mention pricing page lists one plan, called Company, with no price shown and a button to book a demo. There is still a free trial, but nothing you can stay on for free. API access and historical data are paid extras even on that plan.
So people who used Mention for one brand name and a few alerts are looking elsewhere.
Option 1: AyeWatch Free Preview, then $9
AyeWatch is the pick here, even though its free tier is a preview rather than a forever plan. Here is exactly what the free part includes:
- three lifetime monitoring runs
- up to three topics
- Daily or slower check intervals
- no credit card
- the runs do not renew
That is enough to test whether it catches what you care about. What makes it different from keyword tools is how you set it up. You write a sentence, such as "players complaining about crashes or lag in our game on Reddit or YouTube, not speedruns or memes", and AI reads new posts for meaning. You get a short summary with the links instead of a list of every time your name appears.
If it works for you, Pro is $9 a month with hourly checks. AyeWatch counts usage in monitoring credits, so a topic you check every hour uses more than one you check once a day. You can see the estimated credits per day before you save a monitor.
It covers news, blogs, forums and over a billion sources in total, plus specific webpages and social accounts on X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. Alerts land in the app feed and as push notifications on iOS and Android on every plan, including the preview. Email, Slack, Discord and webhooks need a paid plan.
Option 2: Talkwalker Alerts, free for good
Talkwalker Alerts is the only real forever-free choice in this list. It emails you keyword matches from news, X, blogs and forums, and it accepts Boolean operators like AND and NOT. There are no charts, no sentiment and no social accounts beyond those sources. It matches words, so a common name will bring a lot of noise.
Good for: a unique brand name and low stakes.
Option 3: free trials of the paid tools
Several listening tools let you try before paying. None are free to keep.
| Tool | Free part | Price after |
|---|---|---|
| Brand24 | 14-day trial | $199/mo billed yearly, 3 keywords |
| Hootsuite | 14-day trial, no card | $99 per user/mo billed yearly |
| Mentionlytics | Free trial | $49/mo billed yearly |
| Awario | Free trial | $29/mo billed yearly |
| Mention | Free trial | Price not published |
A trial is useful if you need a one-off check, such as how people reacted to a launch week. Set a reminder to cancel.
So which one should you use?
Pick by how you want to read the results:
- You want to be told what happened, in a few lines: AyeWatch. Start with the preview, move to Pro if it earns its keep.
- You want raw keyword emails and will skim them yourself: Talkwalker Alerts.
- You need charts for one week: a free trial from the table above.
What you give up by leaving Mention
Mention's paid plan tracks more than 75 review sites, scores sentiment and influence, and builds white-label reports. If you need those, the free route will not cover it. AyeWatch does not do sentiment or share-of-voice reports either; it is built for alerts, not dashboards.
For most small creators and makers, though, the useful part of Mention was the ping that said "someone is talking about you". You can try that on AyeWatch with no card and find out in a day whether it is enough.