The nine tools, side by side
Every figure below was read from the vendor’s own pricing or home page on 16 September 2026, not copied from another comparison. Pricing in this category changes without notice, so check the date before trusting any of it, including ours.
| Tool | Free tier | Cheapest paid | Top published |
|---|---|---|---|
| F5Bot | Yes, $0 forever | Silver $9.99/mo | Gold $49.99/mo, 200 keywords |
| KWatch.io | Yes, $0 tier | $19/mo | $199/mo |
| RedShip | No, but a $12 one-time 7-day pass | $29/mo billed yearly | $49/mo billed yearly |
| Syften | No, 14-day trial without a card | $29.95/mo | $119.95/mo |
| Awario | No | $29/mo billed annually, $49/mo monthly | Higher tiers published on their pricing page |
| OctoLens | No, free trial | Pro $159/mo billed annually | Scale $499/mo billed annually |
| Brand24 | No | Individual $249/mo, or $199/mo billed annually | Team $349/mo and up |
| Reddit's own search | Yes | Free | Free |
| GummySearch | Closed | Closed | Closed |
IdeaFast is not in this table. It is a research tool with no alerting, so it does not belong in a monitoring comparison. More on that below.
What each one is actually for
F5Bot
Silver $9.99/mo
Covers: Reddit, Hacker News, Lobsters
The free tier gets keyword alerts by email with basic filtering. Silver adds 20 keywords, advanced filtering and full post text. Gold adds AI filtering, RSS and JSON feeds, Slack and Discord. Its own site says it has run since 2017 and sends over 430,000 alerts a day.
KWatch.io
$19/mo
Covers: Reddit, Hacker News, X, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn
At $19 the Reddit allowance is 20 keyword alerts and 2 tracked conversations, with filtering and AI analysis but no API, webhooks or Slack. Those arrive on Business at $79, which raises Reddit to 100 keyword alerts and 10 tracked conversations.
RedShip
$29/mo billed yearly
Covers: Reddit only
The $29 plan covers 1 website, 10 tracked keywords and 3 tracked competitors. The $49 plan covers 3 websites, 30 keywords and 10 competitors. The 7-day pass is the only way to try it without committing to a year.
Syften
$29.95/mo
Covers: Reddit, Hacker News, X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Indie Hackers, Slack, Discourse, Stack Exchange, GitHub, YouTube, Dev.to, podcasts, blogs
Entry is 3 community filters and 100 results a day, with a 7-day archive. AI filtering, API access and Slack start on Standard at $49.95, which also raises the archive to a month. The widest platform coverage of the small tools here.
Awario
$29/mo billed annually, $49/mo monthly
Covers: Broad social listening, Reddit is one source
Starter is 3 topics with unlimited keywords inside each, 30,000 new mentions a month and 5,000 stored per topic, one seat. Boolean search, CSV export and PDF reports are included at that tier, which is unusual this cheap.
OctoLens
Pro $159/mo billed annually
Covers: Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, GitHub, YouTube, and more
Pro is 15,000 mentions and 10 keywords with hourly refresh, AI filtering on every mention, and API, webhooks and an MCP server. Scale is 50,000 mentions and 40 keywords. Priced for a team, not a solo founder.
Brand24
Individual $249/mo, or $199/mo billed annually
Covers: Full social listening suite, Reddit is one source
Individual is 3 keywords, 2,000 mentions a month, one user, and updates every 12 hours. Team at $349 raises that to 7 keywords, 10,000 mentions and hourly updates. Read the mention cap before the feature list; see the volume section below.
Covers: Reddit
No alerts, so it is not monitoring. It is still the honest baseline: if you only want to know whether something is being discussed, check here first before paying anyone. Every tool above is selling you the repetition, not the search.
GummySearch
Closed
Covers: Nothing, it is shut down
Listed because it still ranks and people still find it. Its own home page says it has been closed since 30 November 2025. If a roundup recommends it, that roundup has not been checked recently.
How much Reddit are you asking a tool to watch?
Every comparison page tells you which tool to buy. None of them tell you the thing that decides whether the cheap plan is fine or useless: how much gets written in the communities you care about. So we measured it.
These are Reddit’s own public figures, read on 16 September 2026 with the same code behind our subreddit stats tool. Weekly visitors is how many people looked at the community in the past week. Weekly contributions is how many posts and comments they left.
| Community | Weekly visitors | Posts and comments per week |
|---|---|---|
| r/webdev | 382,161 | 5,076 |
| r/smallbusiness | 323,580 | 11,348 |
| r/Entrepreneur | 266,998 | 2,335 |
| r/SaaS | 241,191 | 12,109 |
| r/startups | 108,045 | 2,476 |
| r/marketing | 64,550 | 861 |
| Six communities | 34,205 |
Six communities, 34,205 posts and comments in one week. Now read the plans again. Brand24’s cheapest tier allows 2,000 matched mentions a month, which is roughly 460 a week. OctoLens Pro allows 15,000 a month. Awario Starter allows 30,000.
Those caps are on mentions that match your keyword, not on the raw volume above, so they are not the same number. What the comparison tells you is how wide a net each vendor expects you to cast. A 2,000-a-month allowance assumes a rare brand name. Point a common phrase at communities producing 34,205 contributions a week and even a one percent match rate will run past it.
The practical order is: pick your keywords first, check how busy the communities are, then pick the plan. Doing it the other way round is how people end up paying listening-platform prices to watch three subreddits, or paying nothing and drowning in an inbox they stop opening.
F5Bot is not free-only any more
Worth flagging on its own, because it is the most repeated claim in this category and it is out of date. F5Bot has been the answer to “what is the free one” for years, and the roundups currently ranking for this term still describe it as a single free product that does one thing without a dashboard.
Read on 16 September 2026, its own pricing says otherwise. The free tier is still there at $0 with keyword alerts and basic filtering. Above it, Silver at $9.99 a month adds 20 keywords, advanced filtering and full post text. Gold at $49.99 a month adds 200 keywords, RSS and JSON feeds, AI filtering, and Slack and Discord delivery. Its own page describes AI filtering as describing what you want in natural language rather than matching exact keywords.
This matters if you were choosing between a free tool and a paid one on the assumption that AI filtering meant paying $30 or more elsewhere. It does not any more.
Monitoring is not research, and the mix-up is expensive
Monitoring answers a forward-looking question: tell me when someone says this. Research answers a backward-looking one: what do people here keep struggling with, and which of those problems is worst.
They feel similar because both read Reddit, but the output is completely different. A monitoring tool hands you a stream of matches in the order they arrived. It will never tell you that the same complaint has come up 40 times this month and ranks above every other complaint in that community, because ranking is not what it does.
Most of the disappointment in this category is someone buying one and needing the other. If your actual question is what to build, or what an audience is frustrated by, the tools on this page are the wrong shelf and the research tools are the right one.
Where IdeaFast sits, which is not in the table
IdeaFast is ours, and it is a research tool. It reads a community’s recent posts, groups the ones describing the same underlying problem, scores each group from 0 to 100 on how acute, frequent and recent it is, and links the original threads under every claim.
It has no alerts, no inbox, no real-time anything, and it never posts. If you came here to be told when your product is mentioned, nothing we sell does that, and one of the nine above will serve you better. We put this page up because the comparison did not exist in an honest form, not to squeeze ourselves into it.
If the research half is what you wanted, the output is published free and without a signup, so you can judge it before deciding anything:
- Scored problems in r/SaaS: a finished result, no account needed
- Subreddit stats: check the weekly volume of any community before you pick a plan
- Social listening tools, real prices compared: the wider category, including the vendors that publish no price
- Reddit research tools compared: the other half of this category
- What happened to GummySearch: why this category rearranged itself
Frequently asked questions
What is a Reddit monitoring tool?
Software that watches Reddit for words you care about and tells you when they appear, usually by email, Slack or a feed. It is an alerting job. It is not the same as research, which asks what a community complains about over time, and not the same as analytics, which measures a community's size and activity.
What is the best free Reddit monitoring tool?
F5Bot still has a free tier at $0 with keyword alerts across Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters. KWatch.io also publishes a free tier. Checked on 16 September 2026. Note that F5Bot is no longer free-only: it now sells Silver at $9.99 a month and Gold at $49.99 a month, and several roundups still describe it as a single free product.
How much does Reddit monitoring cost in 2026?
Anywhere from $0 to $499 a month for what looks like the same job. Read on 16 September 2026: F5Bot free to $49.99, KWatch.io free to $199, RedShip $29 to $49 billed yearly, Syften $29.95 to $119.95, Awario from $29 billed annually, OctoLens $159 to $499 billed annually, Brand24 from $199 billed annually. The spread is mostly about how many keywords and matched mentions you are allowed, not about features.
Do I need a Reddit API key to monitor Reddit?
Not for any hosted tool on this page. They handle Reddit access themselves and you sign in with an email. You would only need your own credentials if you were building something yourself, and Reddit does not hand those out freely any more. A plain unauthenticated request to reddit.com from a script is refused outright, which we confirmed on 16 September 2026.
How many keywords do I actually need?
Fewer than the plans suggest, and the number that matters is how much volume each one catches rather than how many you are allowed. Six startup and business communities on Reddit produced 34,205 posts and comments in a single week when we measured them on 16 September 2026. One common word across that much text will fill a 2,000-mention monthly allowance quickly, while a rare brand name may catch nothing for days.
Is GummySearch still an option for monitoring Reddit?
No. Its own home page says it closed on 30 November 2025. It still appears in search results and in roundups that have not been rechecked, which is a reasonable test of whether a comparison page was written recently or copied.
What is the difference between Reddit monitoring and Reddit research?
Monitoring is forward-looking and continuous: tell me when someone says this. Research is backward-looking and finite: what do people in this community keep struggling with, and which problem is worst. A monitoring tool will not rank recurring problems for you, and a research tool will not wake you up when someone mentions your product. Most people who are disappointed by one had actually wanted the other.
Does IdeaFast monitor Reddit?
No, and that is why it is not in the comparison above. IdeaFast reads a community's recent posts, groups the ones describing the same underlying problem, scores each group and links the original threads. There is no alerting, no inbox and nothing real time. If you want to be told when your keyword appears, pick one of the tools above instead.