Best Free Social Listening Tools in 2026, Plus One for TikTok and Instagram

For brand and keyword alerts, Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts, both free with no limits stated. For Reddit and Hacker News, F5Bot. For TikTok and Instagram, the Volume Library, which shows the posts in your niche that beat their account's average; it's paid (from $29.99 a month) and starts with a 3-day free trial. For a quick 7-day snapshot of a topic, Talkwalker's free social search.

Checked November 5, 2026. "Not mentioned" means the tool's own site doesn't say.

The Volume Library shows the TikTok and Instagram posts in your niche that beat their own account's average views by 2.5 times or more, with the hook, format and why each worked, plus Meta ads brands keep running. It comes with Core ($29.99/month) and Pro ($69.99/month), both starting with a 3-day free trial, and your AI agent can search it over MCP, 1,000 searches a day.

Volume's social tools let your agent read live data: comments on any post and Reddit threads (to hear what people complain about), a competitor's recent posts and which beat their average, what's trending on TikTok by country, and one search across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest and more. The trial includes 50 calls in total, Core 1,000 a month and Pro 3,000.

Worth knowing: Volume has no free plan, though its What's working pages are free to read. It doesn't send alerts when your brand is mentioned on the web; use Google Alerts or Talkwalker Alerts for that. Its weekly competitor watchlist, Intelligence, comes with Core and Pro.

Google Alerts emails you when new Google results appear for any topic, as they happen, daily or weekly, by language and region. It's free with a Google account.

Worth knowing: it reads Google results, not social apps, and shows no reach or sentiment.

Talkwalker Alerts sends free alerts on your brand, competitors or topics from news, X, blogs and forums, by email, RSS or Slack. Its Free Social Search (now part of Hootsuite's Lumen) gives seven days of data from a limited set of sources, with engagement, sentiment, reach, trending hashtags and top authors.

Worth knowing: neither page mentions TikTok, and the free search doesn't list which sources it covers.

Social Searcher is a free search of public social mentions, built on Google search, with unlimited searches. It shows no alerts or history.

F5Bot emails you when your keywords appear on Reddit, Hacker News or Lobsters. It's free, with paid plans from $12.99/month for 20 keywords.

• Brand24: 14-day trial, then from $249/month ($199 billed annually). Covers TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, news and more, with competitor comparison and an MCP server for subscribers.
• Mentionlytics: 14-day trial, then from $49/month billed yearly (a limited-time price). Covers TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and the web.
• Awario: 7-day trial, then from $49/month ($29 billed annually). Its channel pages don't name TikTok.
• Hootsuite: 14-day trial; listening is on every plan from $99 per user a month (annual), but alerts and Instagram or Reddit sources need Enterprise.
• Sprout Social: 30-day trial; listening is an add-on from the Standard plan.

Brandwatch, Meltwater, YouScan and the full Talkwalker platform are sold by demo, with no free plan or self-serve trial.

We checked each tool's own site on November 5, 2026 for what's free without a trial clock, which sources it covers (TikTok and Instagram especially), and its prices. Several lists online still say Mention, Brand24 or Hootsuite have free plans; their own pages showed trials only. Volume is our product; it's paid, and we've said what it doesn't do.