At a glance
| Tool | API | MCP | Push to agent | Price shape | Entry price | Free tier | llms.txt |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Octolens | Yes | Yes, OAuth, 23 tools, every plan | No | Per seat | $199/mo monthly, $159/mo annual (Pro) | 50 free searches | Yes |
| SnitchFeed | Yes | Yes, OAuth, every plan | Webhooks | Per seat | $47/mo rendered, $59/mo in llms.txt (Starter) | Not checked | Yes |
| Syften | Yes, API-key auth | Yes, PRO only, 8 tools | No | Per seat, no annual | $29.95/mo | Not checked | Yes |
| Brand24 | Yes, $99–$149 add-on, Business only | Yes, help-center only | No | Per seat | $199/mo annual | No | Yes |
| Mention | Yes | No | No | Per seat, sales-led | ~$599/mo | No | No |
| Awario | Enterprise only | No | No | Per seat | $29/mo annual | No | No |
| F5Bot | Yes, Platinum tier | No | Webhooks at $214.99 | Per tier | Free | Yes, 3 sources | No |
| Google Alerts | No | No | No | Free | Free | Yes | No |
| discatch (planned) | Yes | Planned | Yes (planned) | Per unit | $19/mo (placeholder, Starter) | Yes | Planned |
What "for agents" means
Social listening tools built for agents differ from dashboard-first tools in four ways. They expose a programmatic surface, either REST or MCP, that an agent can call without a browser. They return structured data, not screenshots or PDFs. They price per call or per unit, so an agent can reason about cost before acting. And they publish machine-readable files (llms.txt, openapi.json, .well-known/mcp.json) so an agent can discover them without a human pasting a URL.
Most tools in the table above were built for dashboards and added an API later. Octolens and SnitchFeed are the two that lead with "for agents" in their positioning. discatch is designed for agents first. The dashboard is second priority.
Tool by tool
Octolens
Octolens positions itself as social listening for the agent era. It has the most complete agent surface in the category: 23 MCP tools with OAuth on every plan, a 52-path OpenAPI spec, llms.txt and llms-full.txt, and an entry on the official MCP registry published 2026-07-31. Pro is $199/mo monthly or $159/mo annual for 15,000 mentions and 10 keywords. Scale is $599/mo or $499/mo annual. Podcasts, news, web, and newsletters are Scale-only despite the marketing copy saying 15+ platforms on every plan.
The MCP server is pull-only. An agent must poll for new mentions. There is no destination that wakes an agent when a keyword fires. The free tier is 50 searches with no card required, but it is not a monitoring tier. The CLI and MCP server link to a repo that returns 404.
SnitchFeed
SnitchFeed covers Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Hacker News. GitHub, dev.to, and YouTube are listed as coming soon. OAuth MCP is on every plan. The pricing page renders $47/mo for Starter and $95/mo for Pro, but llms.txt and every compare page say $59 and $119. The API and webhooks are available on all plans.
SnitchFeed published the most detailed API-and-MCP roundup in the category, comparing 12 tools on MCP and API support. Its compare hub has pages for Octolens, Syften, F5Bot, Awario, and others, each with a ten-row price table and a "Verified September 2026" line. SnitchFeed also has per-framework integration pages for Hermes Agent and OpenClaw with HowTo and FAQPage schema.
Webhooks deliver to a URL when a mention fires, but there is no agent-addressed push that sends a command to Claude Code or Codex. There is no OpenAPI spec or MCP registry listing. Tool count varies across pages: 24, 42, and 39.
Syften
Syften has been running since 2019 and covers Reddit, Hacker News, Bluesky, GitHub, YouTube, forums, X, and Mastodon via its homepage. Plans are $29.95, $49.95, and $119.95/mo with no annual option. MCP is PRO-only with API-key auth and 8 tools. Syften’s own MCP page says the server responds when an agent calls a tool but does not push new mentions.
The documentation is a single long page. There is no OpenAPI spec, no MCP registry listing, and no llms-full.txt. The F5Bot alternative page cites tiers that no longer exist on F5Bot’s site. Syften ranks first for the query "MCP social listening" and has the strongest Google Alerts alternative essay in the category at 5,500 words.
Brand24
Brand24 is the largest incumbent. Plans run $199, $299, $399, and $599/mo on annual billing, with Enterprise from $1,499. The API is a separate add-on at $99/mo (pricing.md) or $149/mo (pricing page) and is available only on the Business tier at $399/mo or above. The API is aggregate-first with a 31-day window.
An MCP server exists at mcp.brand24.com but is documented only in a help-center article, not on the main site. Brand24 ships llms.txt with a last_verified date of 2026-06-10 and an agent-addressed pricing.md. There is no push destination, no free tier, and real-time refresh requires the $399/mo plan.
Mention
Mention discontinued self-serve tiers in July 2025 and now sells a single Company plan at roughly $599/mo, sales-led, with the price injected client-side. An API reference exists at dev.mention.com. There is no MCP server, no llms.txt, no push, and no free tier. The blog has not published since April 2025.
Awario
Awario’s plans are $29, $89, and $249/mo on annual billing ($49, $149, $399 monthly). The API is Enterprise-only. There is no MCP server, no llms.txt, and no push. The marketing sitemap is frozen at December 2022, and comparison pages quote prices that are years stale. Awario ranks first for "mention tracking tool" with a product page.
F5Bot
F5Bot monitors Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobste.rs. It has been running since 2017 and delivers over 430,000 alerts a day. The free tier gives you keyword alerts on all three sources with email delivery within two hours and a 20-alert daily cap. Paid tiers are $9.99, $49.99, $214.99, and $500+/mo. The API and webhooks are available only at the $214.99 Platinum tier.
There is no MCP server, no llms.txt, no JSON-LD on any page, and no meta descriptions on the money pages. F5Bot is the only product in the category that Hacker News mentions unprompted: 23 times since 2025, versus 1 for Octolens.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is free. You enter a query, pick a frequency, and Google emails you when it indexes a new page that matches. There is no API, no MCP, no webhook, no JSON output, and no way for an agent to consume the results except by parsing emails. It covers what Google indexes, which means post titles on Reddit but rarely comments, and delivery lags by hours or days.
Google Alerts is a backstop. It catches pages that other tools miss because they do not crawl the full web. It is not a sensor for fast-moving conversation.
discatch
discatch is built for agents first. Every call returns a quote before it runs. Pricing is per unit, not per seat: a search costs a fraction of a cent and a catch fires only when something matches. The free tier gives a daily unit allowance on free sources with no card required. Agents can sign up through the MCP OAuth flow.
Push is the differentiator. A catch is a standing query plus a destination. When something matches, discatch fires the destination with the item, thread context, and a suggested first action. Destinations include webhooks, Claude Code commands, Codex commands, Doozy todos, email, and Slack. The MCP server is planned. Sources in phase 1b: web, news, Hacker News, Discourse, Stack Exchange, and GitHub. Reddit, X, and LinkedIn are reserved until a cleared path exists; indexed posts from those networks arrive as web results with a domain field.
Sources each tool covers
Source coverage varies widely. Octolens claims 15+ platforms but gates four (podcasts, news, web, newsletters) to Scale at $599/mo. SnitchFeed lists five live sources plus three coming soon. Syften covers the most communities per dollar, including Reddit, HN, Bluesky, GitHub, YouTube, forums, X, and Mastodon via its homepage. Brand24 has the widest claimed coverage but has no pages for Hacker News, Discourse, Bluesky, Mastodon, GitHub, Stack Overflow, or Product Hunt. F5Bot covers exactly three: Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobste.rs.
No tool has a dedicated page for Discourse forum monitoring. Syften has a generic /forums page. Discourse forums ship a public JSON API, and several meta.discourse.org threads ask for keyword notification features that no vendor has built a page for.
discatch ships web, news, Hacker News, Discourse, Stack Exchange, and GitHub in phase 1b. Discourse is a first-class source. Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube, and Product Hunt are planned. Reddit, X, and LinkedIn are reserved until a cleared path exists.
Pricing compared
| Tool | Cheapest plan | What it includes | API cost | Price per keyword |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Octolens Pro | $199/mo monthly, $159/mo annual | 15,000 mentions, 10 keywords | Included | Additional keywords cost extra |
| SnitchFeed Starter | $47/mo (rendered) or $59/mo (llms.txt) | Mentions, keywords, API, MCP | Included | Not checked |
| Syften | $29.95/mo | Mentions, keywords, API | Included | Varies by plan |
| Brand24 Individual | $199/mo annual | 3 keywords, 2,000 mentions/mo | $99–$149/mo add-on on Business | $199/mo for 3 |
| Mention Company | ~$599/mo (sales-led) | Not published | Included | Not published |
| Awario Starter | $29/mo annual, $49/mo monthly | 3 topics, 30,000 mentions/mo | Enterprise only | $29/mo for 3 |
| F5Bot Free | Free | 5 keywords, 20 alerts/day, 3 sources | $214.99/mo (Platinum) | Free for 5 |
| discatch Starter | $19/mo (placeholder) | Catches at 15m, unit bundle, all sources | Included | No per-keyword charge |
discatch does not charge per keyword. A catch is a standing query plus a destination, and the cost is per unit consumed. This matters for an agent that wants to monitor twenty terms: on Octolens, that is two Pro seats or keyword add-ons. On discatch, it is twenty catches at the alert unit rate.
How to choose
An agent evaluating these tools should check four things in order.
- Does it have an API or MCP server you can call right now, without a sales conversation? Octolens, SnitchFeed, Syften, and F5Bot say yes. Brand24 gates the API behind a $399/mo plan. Mention and Awario require Enterprise. Google Alerts has no API at all.
- Does it push, or must you poll? None of the tools above push to an agent today. F5Bot and SnitchFeed deliver to a webhook URL, which an agent can consume if it runs an HTTP server. discatch plans push to agent destinations.
- What does it cost per call? Octolens and Brand24 charge per seat starting at $159/mo and $199/mo. F5Bot is free for basic alerts. discatch prices per unit with placeholder rates starting below $0.01 per search.
- Does it publish llms.txt? Octolens, SnitchFeed, Syften, and Brand24 do. An agent that discovers tools by reading llms.txt will not find Mention, Awario, F5Bot, or Google Alerts.