Why we didn't try to be Brandwatch

The moment we decided what we weren't

When we first started building Monitr, we spent three weeks researching every monitoring tool on the market. Brandwatch, Mention, Talkwalker. All of them. What we found was that they're built for a very specific customer: the enterprise brand manager who needs to watch mentions of their company across 40 different sources, track sentiment globally, and produce dashboards for the C-suite.

That's not a bad thing. They do it well. But it's not what our users ask for. In our first month, we got feedback from a dozen app studios saying the same thing: "I don't care about mentions on some obscure forum in Thailand. I care about the reviews hitting my App Store page right now, the bug reports in Reddit's /r/ios, and whether this is turning into a PR crisis." That specificity stuck with us. We realised we had an option: try to be Brandwatch and lose focus, or build the one thing they don't optimise for, which is speed and depth in the channels that actually matter to mobile apps and SaaS founders.

Five sources. One clear signal.

Monitr watches five places: App Store reviews, Google Play reviews, Twitter/X mentions, Reddit posts, and Google News. We chose these because they're where your users, customers, and the internet actually talk about your app. When we ingest a mention, our classifier doesn't just flag it as "sentiment positive" or "negative." It tags it as bug_report, feature_request, pr_crisis, positive_feedback, or noise.

Why that matters: a one-star review saying "app keeps crashing on login" is noise to Brandwatch's sentiment engine. To you, it's a production incident. We route that signal straight to your Slack, Linear, or Jira within an hour, because the team that can fix it needs to know immediately.

Brandwatch will tell you that you have 2,400 mentions of your brand this week. Monitr will tell you that 14 users are reporting the same crash on Android 13, it's happening every hour, and someone in your Discord mentioned it three days ago too. Hourly correlation detection connects those dots. That's the difference between data and action.

Crisis detection that actually wakes you up

We ship crisis alerts every 15 minutes. Not daily. Not weekly. Not a sentiment spike. We look at the pattern. We look at the velocity. If your app suddenly goes from 2 bug reports a day to 12 in four hours, and three of them mention the same feature, you get alerted in Slack before your tweet mentions start piling up.

A competitor monitoring tool will tell you that you're trending up. Monitr tells you what's actually happening and routes the signal to whoever can fix it. I've watched a studio use this to find a database connection leak that was only visible on certain carrier networks. It showed up as 8 separate reviews over 90 minutes. We caught it, routed it to their engineering lead, and they had a fix in production by lunch. Brandwatch wouldn't have flagged that as anything at all.

The integrations they don't focus on

Enterprise brand monitoring tools route to Salesforce, HubSpot, and business intelligence platforms. We route to Slack, Linear, Jira, GitHub Issues, Trackr, and Shpd. That's because our user isn't a brand analyst in marketing. They're the CTO deciding whether to roll back a deploy, the product lead reading the feature requests that came in last night, or the studio head trying to stay on top of reputation across five live games.

This is a choice, not a limitation. If your team works in Linear or Jira, the signal arrives where the decision gets made. No export. No dashboard-check ceremony. It's just there, waiting for action.

Scale when you're ready, not before

Brandwatch's pricing starts at a point that assumes you're an enterprise. Our Free plan gives you one app and 50 mentions a month. It's genuinely free, not a neutered trial. If you're a solo founder or a two-person startup, you can watch your app without paying us anything. Studio tier is £99 a month for five apps and 5,000 mentions. You only pay more when you've actually grown enough to need it.

Competitor monitoring is available from Pro up (monitoring other studios' apps in your category). The Portfolio tier gives you unlimited apps and 200,000 mentions a month, plus REST API access so you can build your own workflows on top of ours. But you don't need to pay for any of that on day one.

What we're not

We're not trying to replace your social media management tool. We don't post replies on your behalf. We don't monitor private channels (your team's Slack, Discord DMs, emails). We watch the public signals that feed your product decisions and your reputation. That's the thing we do obsessively well.

Brandwatch is the right choice if you're a global brand managing reputation across 50 countries and 30 different sources. You need comprehensive, you need beautiful dashboards, you need sentiment at scale. We're the right choice if you're an app studio or SaaS founder who needs to know, in real time, what your users are actually experiencing, and you want that signal routed to the person who can do something about it.