F5Bot is still the first thing to try. It watches Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters for your keywords and emails you, for free, with no card. Start there before paying anyone, including us.
Teams outgrow it in predictable ways: the alerts are raw matches, the sources stop at three sites, and Slack or Discord delivery sits on the $49.99 Gold plan. Here are seven alternatives, sorted by which of those problems they solve.
Eko is on this list. Eko is a social listening tool, so yes, we are ranking ourselves: the scoring rubric is published below, and F5Bot keeps its place on merit.
Prices and facts last checked
Quick comparison
F5Bot alternatives compared on 2026-10-01
Tool
Best for
Slack
Discord
Entry price
Eko
Teams who work in chat and want to act on a mention without leaving it
Reads and acts inside it
Reads and acts inside it
$49/month for 10,000 credits
F5Bot
Watching a few keywords on Reddit and Hacker News at no cost
Founders who want cheap, fast keyword alerts and will filter them themselves
Alerts in, one way
Not published
$29.95/month (Slack from the $49.95 Standard plan)
Octolens
Developer-tool brands that want mentions piped into their own systems
Alerts in, one way
Not published
$159/month, billed annually
Awario
Precise boolean monitoring with historical reporting in one place
Alerts in, one way
Not published
€29/month billed annually (€49 billed monthly)
Google Alerts
A first, free tripwire on your own brand name
Not published
Not published
Free, no paid tier published
Brand24
Reporting-heavy monitoring where someone presents the numbers upward
Alerts in, one way
Not published
$199/month billed annually ($249 billed monthly)
Prices change without notice. Every row names the vendor page and the date it was read: check before you decide.
What F5Bot does well
Free, for real. The free tier is permanent, needs no card, and covers the three sites where many developer and founder conversations start.
Simple enough that nobody has to maintain it. You add keywords, you get emails. There is no dashboard to learn and no query language to get wrong.
Cheap paid tiers when you need more: $9.99 a month for 20 keywords with advanced filtering flags, $49.99 for 200 keywords with AI filtering, RSS and JSON feeds, and Slack and Discord delivery.
Where teams hit a wall
Three sources. Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters are where many threads start, not where they all end up: X, LinkedIn, YouTube, review sites, the press and Discord servers are outside its reach.
Matches, not judgement, below the Gold plan. A common word or a brand name shared with something else floods the inbox, and an inbox full of false positives is how alerts end up ignored.
Email first. Getting alerts into the place your team talks costs $49.99 a month, at which point the comparison with paid tools that do more becomes fair.
How we scored these
Where the work actually happens
Almost every tool here can push an alert into Slack. The question is what you do next. If reading the alert sends you to a web app to act, the tool is a notifier and your team still context-switches.
Is Discord a source or a destination?
Most tools that mention Discord mean they can post to it. Reading what is said inside a server is a different capability. Of every vendor checked here, exactly two publish it: Eko and Common Room.
Does it judge, or only match?
A keyword matcher returns everything containing your word, homonyms included. A tool that judges relevance returns fewer things and is wrong sometimes. Which you want depends on whether you have time to sort.
Does it draft the reply?
Finding the mention is half the job. Tools differ on whether they leave you staring at a blank box afterwards.
Breadth of sources
Eko loses this one. The enterprise platforms cover print, broadcast and image recognition, and Brand24 publishes the longest source list of the mid-market tools. If breadth is the requirement, buy breadth.
Historical data and reporting
Eko loses this one too. She is built to catch what is happening now, not to let an analyst slice three years of archive. If you need to present trends to a board, a dashboard tool is the right purchase.
Time to first useful result
Boolean query builders are powerful and they are also why plenty of monitoring seats go unused. Measured from signing up to a result somebody reads.
Is the price on the website?
Four of the tools here do not publish one. That is a real cost: it means a sales call before you can compare, and it is why several rows in these tables say 'not published' rather than a number someone guessed.
The 7 best F5Bot alternatives
1. Eko
Where F5Bot matches, Eko judges: she reads Reddit and Hacker News along with X, YouTube, review sites, the press and your Discord server, keeps the posts that are really about you, and brings them into Slack or Discord with a drafted reply. $49 a month after a 30-day free trial with 2,500 credits and no card. If three keywords on Reddit is all you need, F5Bot's free tier is the better deal.
Runs in:
Slack, Discord and Teams
Entry price:
$49/month for 10,000 credits
Free tier:
30-day trial with 2,500 credits, no card
Best for:
Teams who work in chat and want to act on a mention without leaving it
Kept second because for a lot of people the honest answer is to stay on the free tier. Move to Silver for more keywords, and only look past F5Bot when the noise or the missing sources start costing you.
Runs in:
Email, with Slack and Discord webhooks on the top plan
The natural next step for founders: the same raw-matching spirit across many more communities, including Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, GitHub, Stack Exchange, forums and Slack communities. $29.95 a month with email and RSS, $49.95 for Slack. No Discord.
Runs in:
Alerts by email, RSS, API or webhook, and into Slack from the $49.95 plan
Entry price:
$29.95/month (Slack from the $49.95 Standard plan)
Free tier:
14-day trial on the PRO plan, no credit card. No free plan.
Best for:
Founders who want cheap, fast keyword alerts and will filter them themselves
Better than Eko at:
Price, speed and rawness. It also monitors Slack communities and Discourse forums as sources, which Eko does not. If you want every match with no judgement in the way, it is the cleaner tool.
For developer-tool brands that want relevance scoring and their own pipelines: Slack, email, API, webhooks and an MCP server, from $159 a month billed annually. A big step up in price from F5Bot, and a big step up in coverage and filtering.
Runs in:
A web app, with Slack, webhook and API delivery
Entry price:
$159/month, billed annually
Free tier:
7-day trial on the Pro plan. No free plan.
Best for:
Developer-tool brands that want mentions piped into their own systems
Better than Eko at:
Programmatic access. MCP, API, webhooks and a CLI mean you can build your own workflow on top instead of using ours.
€29 a month billed annually for boolean queries across the wider web with an exportable archive. Choose it if what you miss in F5Bot is control over the query, not the place the alerts land.
Runs in:
A web dashboard you log into
Entry price:
€29/month billed annually (€49 billed monthly)
Free tier:
7-day trial, no credit card. No free plan.
Best for:
Precise boolean monitoring with historical reporting in one place
Better than Eko at:
Boolean query control and a historical archive you can slice and export. If you want to write the query yourself, Awario lets you and Eko does not.
The other free tripwire. It sees what Google indexes, which covers news and blogs well and most community threads late. Pair it with F5Bot and you have a zero-cost setup that catches the obvious things.
Runs in:
Your email inbox
Entry price:
Free, no paid tier published
Free tier:
Free
Best for:
A first, free tripwire on your own brand name
Better than Eko at:
It costs nothing and takes two minutes. Nothing here beats free as a first step.
The broad option if F5Bot's three sources were the problem: eighteen published source types, sentiment and reports, at $199 a month billed annually. Too much for a solo founder, reasonable for a marketing team.
Runs in:
A web platform you log into
Entry price:
$199/month billed annually ($249 billed monthly)
Free tier:
14-day trial, no credit card. No free plan.
Best for:
Reporting-heavy monitoring where someone presents the numbers upward
Better than Eko at:
Presentation-grade reports and the broadest published source list of the mainstream tools, including Twitch, podcasts and app stores.
Computed from the same verified prices as the table above, not a hand-kept list. A tool that does not publish a price cannot appear here, because there is no way to know.
Eko — $49/month for 10,000 credits · 30-day trial with 2,500 credits, no card
Awario — €29/month billed annually (€49 billed monthly) · 7-day trial, no credit card. No free plan.
Syften — $29.95/month (Slack from the $49.95 Standard plan) · 14-day trial on the PRO plan, no credit card. No free plan.
F5Bot — Free forever; Silver $9.99/month, Gold $49.99/month · Free tier is permanent, no card
Mentionlytics — $49/month billed yearly (listed at $69) · 14-day trial, no credit card. No free plan.
Talkwalker Alerts — Free · Free
Google Alerts — Free, no paid tier published · Free
Publish no price at all
All else equal, a hidden price costs you a sales call before you can compare anything. That is not a reason to rule them out, it is a reason to start elsewhere.
Mention — A web and social media monitoring tool, owned by Agorapulse since 2025, that is moving its publishing and reply features over to Agorapulse.
Brandwatch — An enterprise consumer intelligence and social listening suite with deep historical data and advanced analytics.
Talkwalker — An enterprise social listening and consumer intelligence platform known for source breadth and image recognition.
Meltwater — An enterprise media intelligence and PR platform covering news, social and broadcast.
How to choose
Where the work actually happens Almost every tool here can push an alert into Slack. The question is what you do next. If reading the alert sends you to a web app to act, the tool is a notifier and your team still context-switches.
Is Discord a source or a destination? Most tools that mention Discord mean they can post to it. Reading what is said inside a server is a different capability. Of every vendor checked here, exactly two publish it: Eko and Common Room.
Does it judge, or only match? A keyword matcher returns everything containing your word, homonyms included. A tool that judges relevance returns fewer things and is wrong sometimes. Which you want depends on whether you have time to sort.
Does it draft the reply? Finding the mention is half the job. Tools differ on whether they leave you staring at a blank box afterwards.
Frequently asked questions
Is F5Bot still free?
Yes. F5Bot keeps a free tier with keyword alerts by email and no credit card. Above it, Silver costs $9.99 a month for 20 keywords and Gold $49.99 for 200 keywords, AI filtering, RSS and JSON feeds, and Slack and Discord delivery. Read on f5bot.com on 1 October 2026.
Can F5Bot send alerts to Slack or Discord?
On the Gold plan, at $49.99 a month. The free and Silver tiers deliver by email. Note that this is delivery, not listening: F5Bot posts alerts into a channel, it does not read what is said inside Discord servers.
What does F5Bot not cover?
Everything beyond Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters. X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Product Hunt, review sites, the press and Discord servers are out of scope. If your buyers talk there, you need a second tool or a broader one.
What is the best free F5Bot alternative?
Honestly, a combination rather than a replacement: F5Bot's free tier for Reddit and Hacker News, plus Google Alerts for news and blogs. Neither judges relevance, so you do the sorting. Eko offers a 30-day free trial with 2,500 credits and no card if you want to see what judged, channel-native alerts change before paying.
Is this list biased since Eko is on it?
Yes, Eko is first on its own site, and we would rather say it than pretend otherwise. The rubric is published above the ranking with two criteria Eko loses, F5Bot is kept second, and every competitor note names what it does better. Prices come from vendor pages read on a stated date.