While the average person may not want to know everything that’s said about them online, that information is invaluable for any company.
But there’s a lot of chatter out there, so sifting through all of those mentions manually would be an impossible task for many brands.
That’s what sentiment analysis tools are for. They capture everything that’s being said about you and tell you how your audience feels about your brand in real-time.
In this blog, we’ll cover the basics of sentiment analysis tools, and why every company should use them.
Then, we’ll give you a list of the top sentiment analysis tools on the market, including the pros and cons of each tool.
What is a sentiment analysis tool?
A sentiment analysis tool is a piece of software that assesses the intent, tone, and emotion behind a string of text.
In a marketing context, sentiment analysis tools are used to assess how positively or negatively your audience feels about your brand, products, or services. The tools help analyze social media posts, chat messages, and emails.
Sentiment analysis tools are powered by machine learning and natural language processing. These tools scan strings of text for words with positive or negative connotations and then assign a sentiment score to the text.
More sophisticated sentiment analysis tools are able to differentiate positive and negative feelings about different topics within a single sentence. Take this example: “I love their products but I’m not a fan of their recent ads.”
In this context, a sentiment analysis tool would be able to identify that this person feels positive about your products, but negatively about your recent ad campaign. Overall, it would likely classify this as a neutral statement.
Why should you use a sentiment analysis tool?
Without a sentiment analysis tool, candid feedback from your customers is just being lost in the ether. By using an automated system, you can pull everything that’s said about your brand online into a convenient dashboard to track customer feedback.
Without using a sentiment analysis tool, it can be easy for your team to focus on only the most memorable negative or positive feedback. Refer sentiment analysis guide to learn more about the process and best practices.
An automated tool gives you a bird’s eye view of audience sentiment over time, allowing you to directly track your efforts to sway public sentiment.
Now that you understand what makes a sentiment analysis tool so valuable, let’s explore the top tools available.
1. Keyhole
Keyhole is a complete social media analytics and management platform that allows you to track sentiment analysis in real time.
From the sentiment dashboard within Keyhole, you can see the number of positive, neutral, and negative posts mentioning your brand, keyword, or hashtag—filterable by the social media platform.
You can see all posts during a timeframe, sorted by sentiment, and a list of keywords that are most often used in positive or negative posts. Also, you can enter your own positive, negative, or neutral keywords to more accurately track audience sentiment.
On top of sentiment analysis, Keyhole also offers influencer tracking, social listening, and social publishing.
Pro: Its unique hashtag tracking capabilities allow you to track the sentiment around a hashtag or keyword.
Con: Keyhole is a focused social and brand monitoring tool, so it doesn’t offer some of the deep text mining features of enterprise-level solutions—which aren’t needed by the majority of marketers.
Pricing: Custom
Here’s what our customers say about us:
“Keyhole has a great user-friendly dashboard with thorough metrics and a great reporting layout that makes it useful for reporting up. I fully recommend and we use it year-round!”
Luke W, Senior Social Media Manager
“The dashboard encapsulates a detailed overview of your entire campaign and mentions all details and KPIs that you need. The metrics given on keyhole are unmatched and help us in setting KPIs and measuring results accordingly. The layout is also very user-friendly and everything is exportable so that’s wonderful.“
Fatima M, Digital PR Manager
2. Awario
With Awario you can track the sentiment of brand mentions in near real-time. It also includes other social listening tools like influencer tracking.
Pro: Awario has a unique social selling feature that allows you to track people complaining about your competitors, or people looking for recommendations in your niche, allowing you to easily identify leads.
Con: Especially compared to alternatives on this list, Awario has a steep learning curve.
Pricing: $49 – $399 per month
3. Brand24
Brand24 is a brand monitoring tool that allows for 24/7 monitoring of mentions across the web.
It automatically tracks sentiment across social, news, blogs, videos, forums, and reviews, with the option to manually change the sentiment score.
Pro: The platform shows you the influencer weight of each mention, so you know which brand mentions to focus most on.
Con: For the price, you’re not receiving as many features as many of the competitors on this list, and many users report the interface as challenging to use.
Pricing: $99 – $499 per month
4. Social Champ
Social Champ is a one stop shop solution for all things Social Media. It has some very clever features and integrations that make it an excellent tool for 360 degree social media management.
The tool has a sentiment analysis plugin that can help users gauge how their text will sound to their audience. It can tell them whether their post sounds positive, negative, neutral or mixed. The sentiment analysis uses a simple text-to-text AI algorithm to understand the emotion behind a body of text and display it as a percentage of each of the four emotions.
Social Champ also has extensive analytics reports for each social media profile you connect to it and a whole suite of other AI features like text generation and image generation.
Pros: Lots of AI features and integrations, comprehensive scheduling tools, support for 9 different social media platforms.
Cons: No social listening.
Price: Starts at $29 per month
5. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is one of the heaviest hitters in the social media analytics space. With Brandwatch, you can monitor brand mentions, campaigns, competitors, trends and top authors, and audience sentiment. It is available as part of the Hootsuite Insights platform.
Pro: Brandwatch offers impressive image brand mention tracking, where their AI identifies pictures uploaded featuring your brand logo. Also, it offers a boolean keyword search to dive deep into your target keywords.
Con: Unfortunately, it is one of the priciest sentiment analysis tools out there.
Pricing: Starts at $1,000 per month
Since the pricing is so stiff, we recommend having a look at a few Brandwatch alternatives.
6. Zonka Feedback
Zonka Feedback is a popular customer feedback and experience management software with an in-built sentiment analysis tool. It analyzes customer sentiments based on the feedback they share.
Pro: The sentiment analysis platform offers deep insights into the customer’s emotions. It also analyzes text data to give scores and bifurcate data into positive, negative, and neutral.
Con: It only offers advanced functionalities when used as a complete customer feedback or experience platform but cannot be easily used as a social media monitoring tool.
Pricing: Starting at $49 per month.
7. Usersnap
Usersnap stands out as a comprehensive user feedback platform featuring sentiment analysis capabilities to decode user sentiments effectively.
Pro:
Usersnap streamlines communication between users, product managers, and developers with its intuitive visual feedback system, enhancing collaboration and expediting issue resolution. Its seamless integration with popular product development tools like Jira or Azure DevOps ensures smooth workflow integration, optimizing team productivity and project efficiency.
Cons:
While Usersnap offers extensive customization options, some users may find its configuration settings complex to navigate, potentially requiring additional time for familiarization.
Pricing:
Usersnap offers diverse pricing plans, ensuring flexibility to accommodate various business needs.
8. Lexalytics
Lexalytics is a text analytics platform that uses natural language processing for social media sentiment analysis around your brand.
Pro: Their NLP-powered social monitoring tools have been trained on mountains of social data, so they can even understand hashtags, slang, and poor grammar. Lexalytics also tries to identify why your customers feel positively or negatively.
Con: Lexalytics is deep on data, but it’s less of a turnkey solution than the others on this list.
Pricing: Custom
9. Determ
Determ is another social monitoring tool that tracks mentions on websites, review platforms, and social sites. Additionally, it offers social media sentiment analysis as part of its data analysis dashboard.
Pro: With Determ, you have the ability to filter mentions by location and language.
Con: For a fairly bare-bones monitoring tool, the pricing is higher than similar competitors.
Pricing: Custom
10. Mention
Mention is one of the most popular social media monitoring and management tools. In addition, its sentiment analysis feature allows you to filter mentions by source, language, country, keywords, and influence score.
Pro: It is also a social publishing platform, so you can manage your analytics and publishing schedule in one place.
Con: Mention has restrictions on how many mentions you can track per month, so the price can quickly add up if you have lots of mentions.
Pricing: $49 – $179 per month
11. Meltwater
Meltwater is the world’s first online media monitoring company. Since its inception in 2001, the Meltwater suite offers a wide range of services that mainly focus on brand monitoring, social media listening, and sentiment analysis. Meltwater’s sentiment analysis tools help you get a quick view of how people feel about your brand or any other topic.
Tracking sentiment over time means you can easily see trend lines for positive and negative sentiment, allowing you to clearly understand if your campaigns are having the right impact on the perception of your brand.
Pros: Provides sentiment data from all online channels and breaks down each sentiment by specific channel. It can handle 242 languages, offering detailed sentiment analysis for 218 of them. Provides automated alerts and reporting tools to stay ahead of any crisis.
Cons: There is a steep learning curve.
Pricing: Custom
12. MonkeyLearn
MonkeyLearn is a text analysis and data visualization suite that provides sentiment analysis templates customized to different platforms, whether it’s social media, reviews, or email surveys.
Pro: It uses pre-trained sentiment analysis models, but also allows you to train your own model with industry-specific data (without having to know how to code).
Con: MoneyLearn is a little more manual, as you have to upload your data into Google Sheets or connect their platform to your database through their API. It’s also far pricier than a social media monitoring tool.
Pricing: Starts at $299 per month
13. OpenText
OpenText offers many information management and data solutions, one of which includes text mining and content analytics.
Moreover, OpenText goes beyond a typical monitoring tool and allows you to analyze text content from internal documents, emails, social media, web pages, and more.
Pro: If you’re in need of extremely robust data mining, it doesn’t get much more detailed than this.
Con: This is an enterprise-grade tool that won’t be accessible to the majority of marketers.
Pricing: Custom
14. Rapidminer
RapidMiner is another text mining tool that allows you to track sentiment from unstructured data, including social media mentions, online reviews, call center transcriptions, patent filings, and more.
Pro: The platform offers fraud detection by looking for irregularities in spoken and written text.
Con: While RapidMiner is deep in data tools, it’s far less intuitive and convenient for typical social media sentiment analysis.
Pricing: Custom
15. Repustate
Repustate is a robust sentiment analysis tool, offering topic sentiment analysis, aspect-based sentiment analysis, and data dashboards.
Additionally, the platform can pull sentiment from customer data, employee data, or any other platform if you connect it to their API.
Pro: It has multilingual capabilities, and offers the option to program slang or alternate meanings into the AI.
Con: Because Repustate is a pure sentiment analysis tool, it doesn’t offer many of the social media monitoring capabilities of other tools on this list.
Price: Custom
16. Dialpad
Dialpad is an AI-powered customer intelligence platform that offers a range of business communication solutions, including voice, video conferencing, messaging, and meetings. It is designed to provide a unified communication experience for teams and organizations, enabling them to connect and collaborate effectively.
Pro: Dialpad AI customer sentiment analysis provides valuable insights into customer emotions and perceptions. By analyzing customer sentiment, businesses can identify trends, patterns, and areas of improvement, allowing them to make data-driven decisions to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Dialpad’s sentiment analysis can provide actionable feedback to improve customer experiences and drive business growth.
Con: This is a customer support tool and not a social media marketing tool. So you might have to couple this with another brand monitoring tool.
Pricing: Starts from $23/month
17. Emplifi
Emplifi is a powerful all-in-one social media marketing platform that includes social media management, measurement, research, reporting, customer case, influencer marketing, and listening tools. In addition, it offers sentiment analysis across multiple online channels.
Pro: They have pretty impressive collaboration and approval flow capabilities.
Con: Because Emplifi is an all-in-one tool, it’s pricey if you’re just looking for sentiment analysis or social listening capabilities.
Pricing: Custom
18. Statusbrew
Statusbrew is another all-in-one tool for the entire social journey, including social media management, monitoring, analytics, and customer care
Pro: The platform has many useful features for marketing teams, including workflow management, automatic conversation assignment, and campaign management.
Con: Its sentiment analysis features are only available for Professional and Enterprise plans.
Pricing: $299 per month
19. Quick Search by Talkwalker
Quick Search by Talkwalker is a robust social media search tool that allows you to track KPIs like engagement, mention volume, sentiment, demographics, and geographies.
Moreover, as a part of the larger Talkwalker suite, it offers a range of social media analytics.
Pro: Quick Search has content ideation features that allow you to identify trending themes, topics, and emojis that are popular with your audience. Like Brandwatch, they also offer brand image and video recognition.
Con: Talkwalker’s robust feature set comes with a hefty price tag.
Price: Custom
20. Speak
Speak is an AI software platform for individuals and teams to dramatically reduce the time and cost of capturing, transcribing and analyzing meetings, surveys, social data, phone calls and other language data.
Speak currently supports 160+ languages and has a 4.9 rating on G2 with 150K+ users in more than 150 countries.
Pro: Speak’s combination of AI chat, sentiment analysis and customizable theme analysis across audio, video and text makes it a highly valuable tool.
Con: Unless you have an enterprise contract with Speak, you will be responsible for capturing and importing the data into the software for analysis.
Pricing: Highly flexible based on usage and team size
BONUS: Free sentiment analysis tools
If you’re just looking for quick sentiment analysis of a string of text, there are plenty of free tools out there to get the job done quickly, including:
However, you’ll find these tools don’t offer the long-term analytics capabilities that you can get from a true sentiment analysis tracking tool.
Start tracking sentiment analysis today
Tracking sentiment analysis is the first step to crafting a smarter marketing strategy that truly listens to what your audience is telling you.
Keyhole helps marketers make data-driven decisions while streamlining their social media management efforts. On top of campaign tracking, influencer marketing, and social listening, you can also schedule and publish your social media posts, all in one platform.
Our customers report that Keyhole saves them 5 hours a week on gathering and reporting data, which translates into over $7,000 saved every year.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Which is the best tool for sentiment analysis?
One of the best tool for sentiment analysis is Keyhole. From the sentiment dashboard within Keyhole, you can see the number of positive, neutral, and negative posts mentioning your brand, keyword, or hashtag—filterable by social media platform.
Which tools are used for sentiment analysis?
Here's the list of popular sentiment analysis tools:
1. Keyhole
2. Awario
3. Brand24
4. BrandMentions
5. Brandwatch
6. Qualtrics
7. Critical Mention
8. Digimind
9. Lexalytics
10. Determ
11. Mention
12. Mentionlytics
13. Monkeylearn
14. OpenText
15. Rapidminer
16. Repustate
17. Dialpad
18. Emplifi
19. Statusbrew
20. Quick Search
Which algorithms are used for sentiment analysis?
Sentiment analysis tools are powered by machine learning and natural language processing. These tools scan strings of text for words with positive or negative connotations and then assign a sentiment score to the text.
