After GummySearch closed to new signups on November 30, 2025, founders scrambled to replace one part of their stack: keyword and brand monitoring. We compared 11 Reddit monitoring tools by alert speed, pricing, and whether they actually check comments, not just top-level posts.
For free, reliable keyword alerts on both posts and comments, F5Bot is the strongest pick and it costs nothing to start. For the fastest published delivery speed, Syften claims at most 1 minute. If you want AI relevance scoring for B2B intent, look at Octolens or Redship. For monitoring that ends in a drafted comment or post instead of just an alert, MediaFast adds that layer through Comment Radar and Opportunity Finder, though it is honestly not a pure 24/7 real-time alert monitor the way the tools above it are.
The comparison table and ranked list below cover pricing, free tiers, alert speed where published, and whether each tool checks comments as well as posts, so you can pick by the job you actually need done rather than by marketing copy.
Reddit monitoring tools got more attention in 2026 because one of the category's best-known names disappeared. Here is the timeline, with sources.
Nov 30, 2025
The date GummySearch cut off new signups and renewals. The company said it could not reach a commercial license agreement with Reddit under Reddit's Data API Usage policies. Existing subscribers keep access for up to a year, and Lifetime Deal holders keep access through November 30, 2026, before a full shutdown and data deletion on December 1, 2026.
Read the shutdown notice140,000+ users
GummySearch's own reported figure for how many founders and marketers relied on it before closing. Its research features overlapped with monitoring, so a share of that audience is now specifically shopping for a dedicated Reddit keyword monitor rather than a full research suite.
Source: GummySearchDec 1, 2026
The full shutdown and data-deletion date for GummySearch. Prowlo published its own breakdown of what happened and what to do next, worth reading if you are actively migrating a monitoring workflow off the platform.
Prowlo's GummySearch shutdown breakdown"The TLDR is that we're shutting down to comply with Reddit's API policies, which forbid commercial applications."
GummySearch, closing notice, November 30, 2025Any monitoring tool that reads Reddit data at scale is exposed to the same compliance question. It is worth asking a vendor how they source their Reddit data before you build an ongoing monitoring workflow on top of them, not just what their dashboard looks like.
| Tool | Category | Alert speed | Comment coverage | Starting price | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F5Bot | Free Alerts | Minutes | Posts & comments | Free, Silver $9.99/mo, Gold $49.99/mo | Yes |
| Syften | Real-Time Monitoring | At most 1 minute | Mentions, real-time | Entry $29.95/mo, Standard $49.95/mo, PRO $119.95/mo | 14-day trial |
| MediaFastThis is us | Monitoring + Action | Not a 24/7 alert feed | Threads & comments | Free to start | Yes |
| Octolens | AI-Scored Monitoring | 1 to 2 minutes | Posts & comments | Pro $199/mo ($159/mo annual), Scale $599/mo ($499/mo annual) | 7-day trial |
| Redship | Intent Monitoring | Not published | Posts & comments | Founder $29/mo billed yearly, Company $49/mo billed yearly | No free tier, $12 one-time 7-day trial pass |
| Brand24 | Social Listening | Not published | Mentions | Individual $249/mo ($199/mo annual) up to Enterprise from $1,499/mo | 14-day trial |
| Awario | Budget Listening | Not published | Mentions | Starter $49/mo ($29/mo annual), Pro $149/mo ($89/mo annual), Enterprise $399/mo ($249/mo annual) | Free trial (Starter-tier access) |
| Prowlo | Multi-Source Watchers | Daily Reddit keyword monitor | Daily keyword scan | Standard $19/mo or $190/yr | 14-day trial |
| Linkeddit | Scheduled Scans | Daily, weekly, or monthly scan (engine checks every 15 minutes) | Scheduled scan | Pro $49/mo flat, Lifetime $450 one-time | No |
| Mention | Enterprise Listening | Not published | Mentions | Custom / contact sales | Demo only |
| RedReach | AI Lead Generation | Not published | Indexed posts | Check redreach.ai for current pricing | Unverified |
Starting prices reflect published vendor pricing as of August 2026 and change often. Mention's pricing is not publicly listed since its self-serve tiers were retired, and RedReach's pricing is not independently verified. Confirm current pricing on each vendor site before buying.
Free keyword alerts on posts and comments
F5Bot watches every subreddit plus Hacker News and Lobsters for your keywords, and it checks comments as well as posts, which most free tools skip. Alerts land within minutes over email, Slack, Discord, RSS, or API. The free tier is genuinely usable, and Silver ($9.99/mo, 20 keywords) or Gold ($49.99/mo, 200 keywords plus RSS/JSON and AI filtering) scale it up without a big jump in price.
Pros
Cons
The fastest published Reddit alert speed in this list
Syften monitors Reddit plus 17 other sources and pushes matches through in at most 1 minute by its own published claim, faster than most vendors in this category are willing to commit to in writing. Boolean filtering keeps the feed usable even when your keywords are common words. There is a 14-day trial but no permanent free tier, and pricing climbs quickly from Entry to PRO if you need more keywords or seats.
Pros
Cons
Monitors subreddits and keywords, then drafts the reply for you
MediaFast tracks subreddits and keywords the same way the pure alert tools above do, but its differentiator is Comment Radar and Opportunity Finder. Instead of just telling you a relevant thread exists, it surfaces which threads are actually worth commenting on and drafts the comment or post itself. To be honest about where it sits in this list: MediaFast is not a 24/7 real-time alert monitor the way F5Bot or Syften are, which is why those two keep the top two spots. But weighed on pricing transparency, comment coverage, and the fact that its monitoring directly produces a usable reply instead of one more alert to triage, it earns the third spot ahead of the paid AI-scoring and social-listening tools below.
Pros
Cons
AI relevance scoring across 15+ platforms
Octolens tracks posts and comments across 15+ platforms including Reddit, and scores each mention for relevance, sentiment, and intent so you are not reading a raw firehose of keyword matches. Delivery covers Slack, email, webhooks, API, and MCP, with alerts landing within 1 to 2 minutes per Octolens' own site. Octolens says it has analyzed 522 million Reddit mentions and names Vercel, PostHog, and Prisma as customers, self-reported figures worth noting but not independently verified here.
Pros
Cons
Buyer-intent phrase matching with an AI relevance score
Redship checks every post and comment against your keywords, brand terms, competitor names, and buyer-intent phrases, then attaches an AI relevance score from 0 to 100 so you can sort the queue instead of reading everything. Delivery runs through email, Slack, a dashboard, or webhook. There is no permanent free plan, only a $12 one-time trial pass that buys 7 days of access before you commit to Founder or Company pricing.
Pros
Cons
Established multi-platform listening with Reddit coverage
Brand24 is a mature social listening suite with Reddit confirmed as one of its monitored sources, alongside X, news, blogs, and review sites. It is built for sentiment analysis, reach estimates, and influencer scoring at a brand or PR-team level, not for Reddit-specific keyword speed. The official starting price is $249/mo for the Individual plan (older $79-$249 figures still floating around other listicles are stale), scaling to Team ($349/mo), Pro ($499/mo), Business ($699/mo), and Enterprise (from $1,499/mo).
Pros
Cons
Lower-cost listening alternative to Brand24
Awario covers Reddit alongside the wider web at roughly a fifth of Brand24's starting price. It is a reasonable choice for small teams that want boolean search, reach, and sentiment data without a four-figure monthly bill. The free trial grants full Starter-tier access, so you can test the Reddit coverage before paying.
Pros
Cons
Multi-platform Watchers plus a daily Reddit keyword monitor
Prowlo runs configurable Watchers across Reddit, X, Hacker News, Mastodon, and RSS, plus a dedicated daily Reddit keyword monitor. Results land in an in-app feed, Slack, webhook, or MCP. At $19/mo it undercuts nearly everything else in this list on price. Prowlo also published its own breakdown of the GummySearch shutdown, worth reading alongside the shutdown notice itself if you are migrating off GummySearch.
Pros
Cons
Scheduled scans, not real-time monitoring
Linkeddit is upfront that it is not real-time: it runs scheduled scans on a daily, weekly, or monthly cadence, with its engine checking every 15 minutes internally. If your use case can tolerate a delay, the flat $49/mo Pro plan or one-time $450 Lifetime deal are simple to budget for compared to the tiered, usage-based pricing most competitors run.
Pros
Cons
Broad media monitoring, now enterprise-only
Mention is a broad media-monitoring platform with Reddit confirmed as one of its monitored sources. Its pricing page no longer publishes public numbers after retiring self-serve tiers in July 2025, so treat any specific dollar figure you see elsewhere as third-party estimate rather than confirmed pricing. Contact sales for a current quote if you need it.
Pros
Cons
AI-powered Reddit lead generation across 100,000+ subreddits
RedReach is a confirmed, real AI-powered Reddit lead generation tool that monitors more than 100,000 subreddits and tracks Reddit posts that are indexed by Google, a different angle than the keyword-alert tools above. Its pricing is not independently verified this session: third-party sources cite conflicting figures ranging from a flat $19-59/mo to tiered $19/$39/$79 plans, so confirm current pricing directly on redreach.ai before budgeting for it.
Pros
Cons
MediaFast tracks the subreddits and keywords that matter to your product, then uses Comment Radar and Opportunity Finder to flag which threads are worth a reply and draft it for you. Free to start, no card needed.
Do not pick by feature count. Find the job you actually need done in the left column and start with the pick on the right.
| Your job to be done | Start with | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Free keyword alerts with no budget | F5Bot | A genuinely free tier that covers posts and comments across Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters. |
| Fastest possible alert delivery | Syften | At most 1 minute by its own published claim, the fastest stated delay in this list. |
| AI-scored, high-intent B2B mentions | Octolens or Redship | Both attach relevance or intent scoring so you triage instead of reading a raw firehose. |
| Cross-platform brand monitoring beyond Reddit | Brand24 or Awario | Full social listening with sentiment and reach, not Reddit-only alerts. |
| Turning a monitored thread into a drafted reply | MediaFast | The only tool here that drafts the comment or post once Comment Radar flags the thread. |
| Cheapest multi-source watcher setup | Prowlo | Reddit, X, Hacker News, Mastodon, and RSS in one $19/mo feed. |
Enough to get keyword alerts and a first pass at monitored threads without spending anything meaningful.
The working-founder range: intent scoring, faster delivery, or flat predictable pricing.
Justified when you need AI-scored intent at scale or cross-platform listening beyond Reddit.
We ranked on how well each tool does the monitoring job it is actually hired for, not on total feature count. Five factors carried the most weight:
Real-time coverage
Tools with a published, fast alert speed (Syften, Octolens, F5Bot) ranked above tools with a daily or scheduled cadence (Prowlo's Reddit monitor, Linkeddit).
Comment coverage
Whether a tool checks comments and replies, not only top-level posts. A real share of relevant Reddit conversation happens in comments, so this mattered more than it usually gets credit for.
Pricing transparency
Tools with clear, published pricing (F5Bot, Syften, Prowlo, Awario) ranked above tools with custom or unverified pricing (Mention, RedReach).
Delivery and filtering
Multiple delivery channels (email, Slack, Discord, webhook, API, MCP) and filtering that cuts noise, whether boolean or AI-scored, both counted in a tool's favor.
Honesty about scope
We rated tools on what they actually do, not what their marketing implies. MediaFast ranks third, not first, because F5Bot and Syften still win on raw real-time alert speed, a job MediaFast is not built to do. Its own spot comes from pricing transparency, comment coverage, and turning monitoring into a drafted reply rather than one more alert.
Monitoring tools are lower risk than posting or scheduling tools, because most of them only read public data. The risk profile still varies by what the tool does with what it finds.
Near-zero risk: read-only alert tools
F5Bot, Syften, Octolens, Redship, Brand24, Awario, Prowlo, Linkeddit, Mention, and RedReach all read public Reddit data to generate alerts. None of them post, comment, or otherwise act on your account, so they carry essentially no ban risk on their own.
Low risk, if you stay in the loop: drafting tools
MediaFast drafts comments and posts based on what its Comment Radar flags, but drafting is not the same as auto-posting. The risk stays low as long as a human reviews and edits each draft before it goes live, and follows each subreddit's own self-promotion rules.
Highest risk: fully automated posting or replying
None of the tools compared here auto-post without review, but it is worth stating plainly for anyone building a stack: any tool that publishes to Reddit without a human checking the output first is the fastest way to trigger a spam filter or a shadowban, regardless of which monitoring tool feeds it.
Every tool in this list will tell you a relevant thread exists. Almost none of them tell you whether that thread is actually worth replying to, or help you write a reply that will not get flagged as spam. That gap is where most monitoring workflows quietly stall: a founder gets 40 keyword alerts a week, reads a handful, and lets the rest pile up unread.
Tools like MediaFast try to close that gap by scoring which monitored threads are worth acting on and drafting the reply itself, rather than adding one more alert to the pile. It will not replace a dedicated real-time monitor if speed alone is your priority, but for a founder trying to turn Reddit visibility into actual replies posted, it is the layer most of the tools above stop short of.
Assuming every tool that says 'monitoring' checks comments
F5Bot, Octolens, and Redship explicitly check comments as well as posts. Several others only confirm mention tracking without specifying comment-level coverage, and a real share of relevant conversation happens in replies.
Treating every vendor's 'real-time' claim as the same speed
Syften states at most 1 minute, Octolens states 1 to 2 minutes, Prowlo's Reddit-specific monitor runs daily, and Linkeddit runs scheduled scans. The word 'real-time' means different things across this category.
Stopping at the alert instead of acting on it
A keyword alert only tells you a thread exists. Deciding whether it is worth a reply, then drafting one that will not read as spam, is a separate job most alert tools do not attempt.
Paying for cross-platform listening you do not need
Brand24 and Mention make sense when you are tracking sentiment across many channels. If Reddit is your only real channel, a Reddit-specialized tool gives better signal for less money.
Quoting stale pricing from other listicles
Mention retired its self-serve tiers in July 2025, Brand24's current starting price is $249/mo not the older $79-$249 range, and Syften's real tiers are $29.95/$49.95/$119.95, not the $15/$19.95 figures some blogs still repeat.
Real-time alert
A notification delivered within minutes of a matching post or comment appearing. Vendors define this differently, some mean 1 minute, others mean a daily scan, so check the published delay before assuming.
Comment coverage
Whether a tool checks replies and comment threads, not just top-level posts. Many relevant mentions happen in comments, so post-only monitoring misses a real share of conversations.
Boolean filter
A search syntax (AND, OR, NOT) that narrows keyword matches so common words do not flood your alert feed with irrelevant noise.
Buyer-intent phrase
A phrase pattern that signals someone is close to a purchase decision, like 'looking for an alternative to' or 'worth paying for', as opposed to a generic brand mention.
Relevance score
An AI-assigned number, often 0 to 100, that ranks how likely a mention is to matter, so you can triage a queue instead of reading every match in order.
Watcher
A saved monitoring rule that continuously checks one or more sources (Reddit, X, Hacker News, RSS) for a defined keyword set or condition.
Before paying for any tool on this list, this walkthrough shows how to set up free Reddit keyword alerts, useful for confirming exactly which job you need a paid tool to cover.
"Reddit Keyword Monitoring Tool [Get Alerts for Free!]" by Ivan Palii.
Monitoring is one piece of a wider Reddit workflow. These related guides cover the pieces on either side of it.
The questions founders ask before picking a monitoring stack.
It depends on the job. For free keyword alerts, F5Bot is the strongest pick because it checks comments as well as posts at no cost. For the fastest published delivery, Syften claims at most 1 minute. For AI-scored, high-intent mentions aimed at B2B, Octolens and Redship both attach a relevance score. If you want monitoring to end in a drafted reply rather than just an alert, MediaFast adds that action layer through Comment Radar and Opportunity Finder.
Yes. F5Bot has a genuinely free tier covering keyword alerts on posts and comments across Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters. MediaFast also has a free tier that covers subreddit and keyword monitoring plus its Comment Radar feature. Most of the other tools in this list only offer a time-limited trial rather than a permanent free plan.
GummySearch closed to new signups and renewals on November 30, 2025, after it could not reach a commercial license agreement with Reddit under Reddit's Data API Usage policies. It reported having 140,000+ users. Existing subscribers keep access for up to a year, Lifetime Deal holders keep access through November 30, 2026, and the product fully shuts down with data deletion on December 1, 2026. It matters here because it is the clearest reminder that any Reddit monitoring tool depends on staying compliant with Reddit's API terms, not just on having good features.
It varies more than most buyers expect. Syften publishes at most 1 minute, Octolens publishes 1 to 2 minutes, and F5Bot delivers within minutes. Prowlo's dedicated Reddit keyword monitor runs on a daily cadence, and Linkeddit runs scheduled scans (daily, weekly, or monthly) with its engine checking every 15 minutes internally. Several vendors, including Redship, Brand24, Awario, Mention, and RedReach, do not publish a specific alert speed at all, so confirm this directly with the vendor if speed is your priority.
Monitoring is the narrowest of the three: it means getting alerted when a keyword, brand, or competitor is mentioned. Social listening usually adds sentiment, reach, and trend analysis on top of monitoring, which is what Brand24 and Awario specialize in. Reddit marketing is the broadest term and includes monitoring as one input, alongside subreddit discovery, post drafting, and publishing, which is the layer MediaFast adds on top of its own monitoring.
MediaFast is not a pure 24/7 real-time alert monitor the way F5Bot or Syften are. It tracks subreddits and keywords like those tools, but its Comment Radar and Opportunity Finder features go a step further by surfacing which threads are actually worth commenting on and drafting the comment or post itself. If you only need a keyword alert, a dedicated monitoring tool may be faster. If you want monitoring to end in action, that is where MediaFast is built to help.
