Syften is good at one thing and honest about it: fast keyword alerts from Reddit, Hacker News, forums and a long list of communities, from $29.95 a month. For a founder who wants every match and will sort it alone, it is hard to beat.
People look elsewhere for three reasons. The volume of raw matches becomes a second job. Slack delivery starts on the $49.95 plan, not the $29.95 one. And Discord is neither a source nor a destination. Here are seven alternatives, with the prices their vendors publish.
Eko is on this list. Eko is a social listening tool, so yes, we are ranking ourselves: the scoring rubric is published below, and Syften keeps its place on merit.
Prices and facts last checked
Quick comparison
Syften 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
Syften
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)
F5Bot
Watching a few keywords on Reddit and Hacker News at no cost
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)
Mentionlytics
Teams monitoring several languages who want sentiment broken down per market
Alerts in, one way
Not published
$49/month billed yearly (listed at $69)
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 Syften does well
Coverage of the places founders actually talk: Reddit, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Lobsters, Dev.to, Stack Exchange, GitHub, Product Hunt, forums, newsletters, podcasts, Bluesky, Mastodon and a set of Slack communities. Few tools at this price list that many communities.
Speed and rawness. Syften does not decide for you what matters, so nothing relevant gets filtered out by a model that guessed wrong. If you would rather see too much than miss one thread, that is the right trade.
Clear published pricing in three tiers, a 14-day trial of the top plan with no card, and webhooks, an API and an MCP server for anyone who wants to build their own workflow on top.
Where teams hit a wall
You do the sorting. Every keyword match arrives, homonyms and jokes included, and a busy channel quickly teaches a team to skim past the alerts. The tool is cheap; the attention it costs is not.
Slack is not on the entry plan. Syften lists Slack and API access from the $49.95 Standard plan, and webhooks and MCP on the $119.95 PRO plan, so the $29.95 headline price means email and RSS.
Discord does not appear among its delivery channels or its sources. If your community lives in servers, Syften cannot see it and cannot post there.
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 Syften alternatives
1. Eko
The opposite trade to Syften: fewer alerts, judged for relevance, each one arriving in Slack or Discord with a drafted reply your team edits and sends. She also reads your Discord server as a source, which nothing else at this price does. $49 a month after a 30-day free trial with 2,500 credits and no card. Pick Syften instead if you want every raw match, or if Slack communities and Discourse forums are your main sources: she does not watch those.
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 plenty of founders the right answer is to stay. If the complaint is price rather than noise, the $29.95 Entry plan with email alerts is already one of the cheapest serious options in the category.
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.
The free answer for Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters: a permanent free tier, then $9.99 for 20 keywords and $49.99 for 200 keywords with AI filtering and Slack and Discord delivery. If Syften's extra communities are not what you use, F5Bot covers the core for less.
Runs in:
Email, with Slack and Discord webhooks on the top plan
The step up for B2B and developer brands that want relevance scoring and their own pipelines: Slack, email, API, webhooks and an MCP server on every plan, from $159 a month billed annually for 10 keywords. More expensive, less noisy, and still a dashboard first.
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 with boolean queries and an exportable archive. Choose it if you want to write precise queries and keep history, which Syften does not really try to do. Its Slack integration is one way.
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.
$49 a month billed yearly for a listening dashboard with sentiment across languages and BI connectors. Relevant if you need reporting for someone else, not if you want speed.
Runs in:
A web dashboard
Entry price:
$49/month billed yearly (listed at $69)
Free tier:
14-day trial, no credit card. No free plan.
Best for:
Teams monitoring several languages who want sentiment broken down per market
Better than Eko at:
Multilingual sentiment across many markets at once, with BI connectors for Looker and Power BI.
The broad mid-market platform: eighteen published source types, sentiment and presentable reports, at $199 a month billed annually. Oversized for a founder watching Reddit, sensible for a marketing team that has to report.
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
How much does Syften cost in 2026?
Syften publishes three plans: Entry at $29.95 a month (3 community filters and 1 web filter), Standard at $49.95 (20 and 5, plus Slack and API) and PRO at $119.95 (100 and 20, plus webhooks and MCP). The 14-day trial is on the PRO plan, with no credit card. Read on syften.com/pricing on 1 October 2026.
Does Syften work with Discord?
Not according to its own site. Syften lists email, Slack, RSS, API and webhooks as delivery channels and does not list Discord as a source or a destination. A webhook can be wired to Discord with your own glue, but that is something you build, not a feature. Eko reads the Discord servers she is a member of and can post there natively.
What is the cheapest Syften alternative?
F5Bot, which keeps a free tier for Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters keyword alerts and charges $9.99 a month for 20 keywords. Google Alerts is free too, but it only sees what Google indexes, late, so most community threads reach it after the conversation is over. Among paid tools with wider coverage, Awario at €29 a month billed annually is the cheapest published price.
Which Syften alternative filters out the noise?
Tools that judge relevance rather than match strings: Eko and Octolens, plus F5Bot's AI filtering on its $49.99 Gold plan. They return fewer alerts and will occasionally drop one you wanted, which is the honest cost of filtering. If missing anything is unacceptable, stay with raw matching and budget the time to read it.
Is this list biased since Eko is on it?
Yes, Eko is first on its own site, and saying so is better than hiding it. The rubric is published above the ranking with two criteria Eko loses, Syften is kept second, and every competitor note says what it does better. Prices come from vendor pages read on a stated date.