Is Meltwater free? No, but these are close

Is Meltwater free? No. Meltwater has no free plan and, by its own pricing FAQ, no self-serve free trial either. What it offers is a free demo with one of its product experts and a set of interactive product tours. Every one of its four plans, Starter, Pro, Enterprise and Agency, ends in a "Contact Sales" button, and most agreements run for a year.

That is fine for a global brand with a comms department. It is not much use if you run a small shop, a club, a side project or a game studio and just want to know when someone writes about you. Here is what you can use for nothing, or close to it, all of it in a browser with nothing to install.

What free can and cannot do

No free tool replaces Meltwater's paid features: there is no free journalist database, no free press distribution and no free share-of-voice report. What free tools can do is tell you when your name, a rival or a topic shows up somewhere new. For most small teams, that is the part that matters.

1. AyeWatch Free Preview, then $9

AyeWatch is our pick. It runs in the browser and has iOS and Android apps that stay in sync. Instead of keywords, you describe what you want in a sentence, like "reviews or news stories that mention our game, but not the board game with the same name", and its AI checks new items against that meaning. Each alert comes with a short summary.

The Free Preview costs nothing and needs no card. It gives you three lifetime monitoring runs across up to three topics, at a daily or slower pace, and those runs do not refill. Think of it as a test drive rather than a free plan. If it suits you, Pro costs $9 a month with hourly checks. Usage is counted in monitoring credits, where most checks cost one credit, so checking more often uses more of the month's allowance. You can cancel any time.

What you get on any plan: alerts in a feed and as push notifications. Email, Slack, Discord and the daily digest email come with paid plans. Start the Free Preview to see if it catches what you care about.

2. Talkwalker Alerts, free for good

Talkwalker Alerts is a free email alert service. You pick news, blogs, discussion forums or X results, one of 22 languages, and how often you hear back, including "as it happens". It also sends to RSS or Slack. There are no summaries and no charts, and you will do some sorting yourself, but it never asks for money.

3. Brand24's 14-day trial

Brand24 has no free plan, but it does offer a 14-day free trial, which Meltwater does not. After that the cheapest plan is $199 a month billed yearly, or $249 month to month, for 3 keywords. It is a good way to see what a full listening dashboard with sentiment looks like, as long as you set a reminder before the trial ends.

4. Awario's free trial

Awario also has a free trial on its Starter plan. The paid version starts at $29 a month billed yearly, or $49 month to month, for 3 topics with unlimited keywords each. It is the cheapest dashboard-style option here.

Side by side

So what should you use

If you want something useful that you can keep paying very little for, go with AyeWatch: preview it free, then stay on Pro if it earns its place. If your budget is truly zero, Talkwalker Alerts will do the basics by email. And if you are a large PR team that needs journalist lists and coverage reports, Meltwater is still built for you, free or not.

More detail on how the two compare is in the AyeWatch write-up on Meltwater alternatives.