Why we didn't try to beat Brand24 at its own game

The moment we realised we were solving a different problem

Brand24 is genuinely good at what it does. They'll monitor your brand across the web, aggregate sentiment, track competitors. They've been at it for years. But when I started MRVL, I was building apps. My co-founder was shipping SaaS. And we both had the same frustration: our most urgent user feedback wasn't living in the same place.

A bug report came through the App Store at 3pm. A feature request landed on Reddit at 5pm. A customer tweeted their frustration at 6pm. Our product team was checking each of these separately, or worse, not seeing them at all. The generic social listening tools we tried treated app reviews like noise. They were optimised for brand sentiment, not product velocity.

That's when the real conversation started. We weren't trying to build a Brand24 competitor. We were trying to solve for a specific kind of founder: someone running a mobile app or SaaS product who needs to hear what users are saying about it, categorise it quickly, and act on it faster than anyone else.

Five sources instead of five hundred

Brand24 watches the internet. Monitr watches five places: App Store reviews, Google Play reviews, Twitter / X mentions, Reddit posts, and Google News. That's intentional.

When you're shipping an app, you don't need to know what people are saying about your brand on random forums. You need to know that users on the App Store are reporting a crash, that a particular Reddit thread is comparing you to a competitor, that a journalist mentioned you in a news article, or that someone's tweeting your @handle with a complaint.

This focus is a deliberate trade-off. We're not the tool for brand agencies managing reputation across a hundred channels. We're the tool for product teams who want signal, not noise. Every source we monitor plugs directly into how modern app users discover, discuss, and evaluate software.

Classification that matters to builders

Here's where the real difference lives. When a mention lands in Monitr, we don't just tag it positive or negative. Our classifier asks: is this a bug report? A feature request? A PR crisis? Positive feedback? Or just noise?

That matters because the person reading it has a job to do. If it's a bug, it goes to Linear or Jira. If it's a feature request, it goes to your product backlog. If it's a crisis, we alert your team every 15 minutes until you acknowledge it. If it's praise, maybe it goes to your marketing team or your Slack channel. Positive feedback is data too, but it's a different kind of data.

Brand24 gives you sentiment. We give you action. And crucially, we route that action somewhere it will actually be read by the person who can do something about it. Slack, Linear, Jira, GitHub Issues, Trackr, Shpd. Your tools. Your workflow.

Correlation detection at the pace you ship

One of the quieter features that separates what we do is hourly correlation. Every 60 minutes, Monitr groups related signals into a narrative. Five separate App Store reviews about the same crash become a single story. Three Reddit comments about the same missing feature become obvious. A competitor's marketing campaign sparks multiple mentions; you see the pattern.

This sounds small. It's not. The difference between seeing a spike in crash reports as individual noise and seeing them as a correlated pattern is the difference between ignoring a production issue and jumping on it in the first hour.

Scale that maps to how you actually grow

Our pricing reflects how app studios actually operate. The Free tier watches one app with 50 mentions per month. Studio is £99 a month for five apps and 5,000 mentions. Pro reaches 20 apps and 50,000 mentions for £299. Portfolio scales to unlimited apps plus REST API access for £599.

Brand24 operates on a different model. They scale their pricing around the breadth of the web you want to monitor. We scale ours around the number of apps and the volume of signals you're receiving. If you're managing five apps in a portfolio, you buy Studio once and you're done. You're not multiplying seats or upgrading features by department.

Portfolio tier customers also get access to our REST API, which means if you're building your own stack, you can pull Monitr signals directly into your internal tools. A few of our customers have built custom dashboards on top of it.

What Brand24 does that we don't, and why that's okay

Brand24 monitors Twitter, yes. But they also watch Facebook, Instagram, YouTube comments, review sites, industry forums, news, blogs. Monitr pulls Twitter / X, Reddit, Google News, plus the app stores. Brand24 gives you influence scores and demographic data. We give you one thing: is this a bug, a feature request, a crisis, or positive feedback. They do sentiment analysis across industries. We do signal classification for product teams.

If you're a brand agency managing reputation for a hospitality client, Brand24 is the right choice. If you're a product founder trying to hear what users actually think about your app so you can build faster, Monitr is built for you.

Neither of us is trying to be everything. We're just trying to be something specific, and we've learned to be very good at it.