Mention

What is Mention?

Mention is a real-time media monitoring and social listening platform founded in Paris in 2012. It crawls over a billion sources — social networks (X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok), news sites, blogs, forums, and review platforms — and fires alerts the moment someone mentions your tracked keywords online. The core use case is simple: you set up alerts for your brand, your client’s brand, a competitor, or an industry keyword, and Mention tells you who said what, where, and with what sentiment. It supports boolean search logic (on higher plans), historical data access, sentiment classification, influencer tracking, and downloadable PDF/CSV reports.

At Smart Remote Gigs, we tested Mention specifically through the lens of US-based freelancers — social media managers, PR consultants, and brand strategists managing client accounts. The verdict? It does its core job well: real-time web coverage is genuinely broad, and setup takes under 10 minutes. But Mention has gone through a major pricing restructure in 2025. The self-serve Solo, Pro, and ProPlus plans are now legacy-only (no longer sold to new users as of July 2025). New customers are funneled into the Company Plan, which starts at a custom, contact-us price point. That’s a significant shift that changes the value conversation for freelancers dramatically.

🚀 Key Features for Freelancers

⚖️ Pros & Cons

✅ The Good:

• Genuinely fast real-time alerts — one of the quickest to surface mentions in the mid-market tier
• Clean, no-learning-curve dashboard that non-technical clients can actually navigate
• Boolean search significantly cuts alert noise once configured correctly
• Solid Slack and email integrations that reduce dashboard dependency
• Competitor tracking and share-of-voice metrics are legitimately useful for client deliverables
• 14-day free trial with no credit card required

❌ The Bad (The Catch):

• Self-serve plans (Solo/Pro/ProPlus) are no longer available to new customers as of July 2025 — you’re now looking at a custom-quoted Company Plan, which kills pricing transparency entirely
• Mention caps on legacy Solo plans (5,000 mentions/month) fill up fast for any client with real brand presence — then tracking just stops cold, no overage, no warning
• TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest monitoring are locked behind the top-tier Company Plan only
• No white-label reporting — you cannot add a client logo to exported PDFs, a basic agency need that competitors already solved
• Sentiment analysis struggles with sarcasm and context-dependent language, requiring manual review for high-stakes situations
• Publish/Respond social media features were removed in January 2026, making it a pure listening tool with no scheduling capabilities

💰 Pricing Breakdown (Is it worth it?)

Here’s where it gets complicated. Mention’s original self-serve pricing (Solo at ~$49/mo, Pro at ~$99/mo, ProPlus at ~$179/mo) is now a legacy structure not available to new customers. As of mid-2025, Mention has pivoted to a single Company Plan with custom, sales-team-quoted pricing — similar to what enterprise tools like Brandwatch have always done.

If you’re a new user in 2026, you’re going into a sales conversation, not a checkout page. Existing legacy customers are grandfathered in but cannot change their plan tier. The 14-day free trial is still available and requires no credit card, which is one of the few clean signals left. Bottom line: what used to be a genuinely affordable tool for individual freelancers has moved upmarket. If you’re a solo operator, this pricing structure is no longer built for you.

⚔️ The Kill-Matrix: Mention vs Competitors

Here’s how Mention stacks up against Brand24 and Awario — the two most relevant alternatives for US freelancers in the same budget tier.