Brand24 alternative: when you only need Instagram hashtags
If you are looking for a Brand24 alternative, the first question is how much of Brand24 you actually use. Brand24 is a social listening tool: it watches for mentions of your keywords across social media, news, blogs, forums, podcasts and reviews, and it is priced for that whole job. If you mostly use it to follow a few Instagram hashtags or a campaign tag, you are paying for a very wide net to catch a narrow thing, and there are cheaper and more focused ways to do it.
This guide covers what Brand24 is and what it costs as of September 2026, who should stay with it, and the alternatives worth trying for the hashtag side of the job. Everything said here about Brand24 comes from its own pages in September 2026. Plans change, so check their pricing page before you decide.
The short verdict
- Stay with Brand24 if you need to know when your brand is mentioned anywhere online, including places that are not social media, and you want alerts, sentiment and reports on top.
- Look for a Brand24 alternative if your real question is about Instagram hashtags: which tags a niche posts under, who creates under a campaign tag, and what those posts look like.
- Use Instagram’s own search if you only need to glance at one tag now and then.
What Brand24 is today
Brand24 describes itself on its home page as an “AI social listening tool”. The pitch is broad:
Get AI-powered access to mentions across social media, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews, and more.
The same page says it gathers insights “from 25 million online sources, tracked in real-time”, with sentiment analysis and reporting on top. Hashtags are one use case among many. Its hashtag tracking page says you can “Track hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, and other websites”, manage contests and campaigns built on hashtags, find influential profiles posting under a tag, and export raw data to Excel or branded PDF reports.
So Brand24 can do hashtag work. It does it as part of a monitoring platform, and you buy the platform.
What Brand24 costs
As of September 2026, Brand24’s pricing page lists four plans, in US dollars, with a 14-day free trial:
| Plan | Monthly billing | Billed annually | Keywords | Mentions per month | Updates |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Individual | $249/mo | $199/mo | 3 | 2K | Every 12h |
| Team | $349/mo | $299/mo | 7 | 10k | Every hour |
| Pro | $499/mo | $399/mo | 12 | 40K | Realtime |
| Business | $699/mo | $599/mo | 25 | 100K | Realtime |
The Individual plan is for one user. Team and above list unlimited users, and the AI features grow with the tier: Pro adds items such as AI Brand Assistant and AI Insights “for 2 projects”, Business raises that to 5.
The number to read twice is the entry price. The smallest plan is $199 a month on annual billing and tracks 3 keywords. If a hashtag or two is what you watch, that is the cost of each one.
Who should stay with Brand24
Be honest with yourself before switching. Brand24 is the right tool if:
- You care about mentions outside social media. News, blogs, forums, podcasts and reviews are where reputation problems often start, and a hashtag tool will never see them.
- You need to hear about it fast. Hourly and realtime updates, with alerts, matter when a complaint can spread in an afternoon.
- Sentiment is part of your reporting. If your manager or client wants positive, negative and neutral split out, Brand24 does that for you.
- You report to other people. Branded PDF reports and unlimited users on the team plans are built for agencies and PR teams.
- You watch several brands or competitors across the web. Keyword slots cover names, products and phrases, not only hashtags.
If most of those describe you, a cheaper hashtag tool is not a replacement. It is at most something you add next to Brand24.
Who needs a Brand24 alternative
- Your keywords are mostly hashtags. You set up tracking for a campaign tag or a niche tag, and the web mentions are noise you scroll past.
- Instagram is the platform that matters. Your audience, your creators and your campaigns live there.
- You want to decide, not monitor. The question is “which tags should we post under?” or “who is already creating in this niche?”, asked once a month, rather than an alert stream.
- The bill does not match the use. Paying for a listening platform to answer a research question every few weeks is hard to justify.
Brand24 alternatives compared
| Feature | Brand24 | Hashtag Ninja | Flick | Instagram search |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Main job | Mentions across the web | Instagram hashtag research | Hashtags for your own posts | Browsing one tag |
| Cost to start | 14-day trial, then from $199/mo annually | Free planner, no account | Paid plans | Free |
| Sources | Social media, news, blogs, forums, podcasts, reviews | Instagram first | ||
| Alerts and sentiment | Yes | No | No | No |
| Starts from | Keywords you track | A sentence describing your question | A hashtag search | One tag at a time |
| Posts behind a tag | Yes, with export | Yes, as a CSV, 500 free rows per account | No | Yes, by scrolling |
Here is what each option is genuinely better for.
Hashtag Ninja: for Instagram hashtag research questions
Hashtag Ninja starts from a sentence instead of a keyword list. You describe what you want to know, such as which tags a niche really posts under, who is creating under a campaign tag, or when those posts go up. The free planner turns that into a collection plan: the tags to pull, how many posts, over what window, and what to look for. Every plan states its assumptions, so you can check them and argue with them.
It is free and needs no account. Being straight about the limits: the planner is open, and turning a plan into a report (the posts themselves, the numbers computed from them, and a CSV) is open too, on the 500 free rows a signed-in account gets every 30 days. Nothing can be bought yet, so 500 rows a month is the ceiling today; the pricing page names the intended paid tier, $9.00 a month for 10,000 rows. If you need more than 500 posts a month today, this is not yet a replacement for Brand24’s hashtag tracking, so read that page before assuming otherwise.
It also does no web monitoring, no alerts and no sentiment. If those are why you pay for Brand24, keep Brand24.
Where it fits best is the questions a listening tool answers only indirectly: Instagram hashtag research, competitor hashtag analysis, finding UGC creators by hashtag and finding micro-influencers by hashtag. There is also a page on Instagram brand mention tracking for the narrower version of the job Brand24 does across the whole web.
Flick: for tags on your own posts
Flick is built around your own account. It offers hashtag search, saved hashtag collections and tracking of how your own posts performed under each tag. That answers a question Brand24 does not focus on: which of the tags you used actually worked for you. It needs your account and your posts. We compared it with free options in the Flick alternative guide.
Instagram’s own search: for a quick look
Free, and always current. Type the tag into Instagram and look at the posts under it. Are they your audience, your language, your market? For one tag, once, this is often all you need. It does not scale to a niche, it keeps no history, and it exports nothing, which is where the tools above come in.
How to switch from Brand24
- List your Brand24 keywords and mark each one. Is it a hashtag, a brand name, a product, a competitor? Hashtags can move. Names that are mentioned on news sites and forums usually cannot.
- Export what you have. Brand24’s hashtag page mentions Excel exports of raw data and PDF reports. Download the history for the tags you plan to move before your plan ends.
- Run the alternative in parallel for a month. Ask the same research questions both ways and compare what each tells you.
- Check any tag in Instagram itself before a campaign depends on it, whichever tool suggested it.
- Downgrade rather than cancel if you still need web mentions. Moving hashtag research elsewhere may let a smaller Brand24 plan cover the keywords that are left.
Picking your Brand24 alternative
Brand24 answers “where are people talking about us?” across a very wide slice of the internet, and for PR and reputation work that breadth is the point. When your question is narrower, such as which Instagram hashtags a niche uses or who creates under a tag, a listening platform is an expensive way to ask it. If that is where you are, start with the planner and describe what you want to know in a sentence. For tag selection itself, our guide to the best hashtags for Instagram walks through building a set you can trust.