Onclusive alternative: pay per search, not per annual quote

Onclusive sells media intelligence to PR and comms teams: print, broadcast, online news and social in one platform, priced by quote. Vendr's median Onclusive contract is $13,706 a year. Social Fetch sells the social part as an API. Search the networks yourself, or let Monitors check them on a schedule and push new posts to a signed webhook. Prices are on the website, and the first 100 credits are free.

Symphony Technology Group formed Onclusive at the start of 2022 from Kantar's Reputation Intelligence business, PRgloo and the original Onclusive. It bought Critical Mention in May 2022 and the social listening company Digimind in July 2022, then renamed Digimind as Onclusive Social on 29 October 2024. Onclusive says it covers 3M+ online sources, 70K+ print outlets, 6K+ broadcast channels and 25+ social platforms.

The buyer is a PR or comms team that wants coverage, measurement and reporting in one login. Prices are not published. Vendr puts the median contract at $13,706 a year (range $9,539 to $24,585), and Capterra lists Onclusive Social from €15,000 a year.

Onclusive sells a Media API with REST, XML and RSS delivery and says it processes 28 million+ content pieces a day. To get it, you fill in a demo form. There are no public docs, prices or rate limits, and the Onclusive Social product page doesn't mention an API.

Social Fetch publishes everything: docs, OpenAPI spec, credit prices. GET /v1/twitter/search, GET /v1/reddit/search, GET /v1/tiktok/search and GET /v1/instagram/search/hashtags return the full post text, author and metrics as JSON on every request. You can run the same call in the playground on your free credits. What you do with the JSON is up to you: store it, alert on it, or send it to Claude or GPT for sentiment and summaries.

Coverage gaps show up in reviews too. Reviewers on G2 say Onclusive misses some outlets and mentions, which they then add by hand.

One of our customers is a media-monitoring team at a UK PR agency that ran its social coverage through Onclusive on an annual contract of about $16,000. They moved their social keyword tracking to Social Fetch in under two weeks and now spend $225 a month on the Scale plan, running 120 hourly monitors across X search, Reddit search and TikTok search for 40 client keywords. They kept print and broadcast with a licensed provider.

What changed: new mentions now land in their own client dashboard through a signed webhook, and when a client adds a keyword, the team creates the monitor themselves the same day instead of raising a request.

Take 10 keywords on X, Reddit, TikTok and Instagram, checked hourly: 10 × 4 × 24 × 30 = 28,800 checks a month. Each check is one search call at 1 credit. That's 40 Monitors, which fits the Growth plan: $79 a month for 50,000 credits and up to 100 monitors, or $948 a year. Tighten the interval to every 15 minutes and it's 115,200 credits a month on the $225 Scale plan. Vendr's median Onclusive contract works out to about $1,142 a month.

On Instagram, a keyword is a hashtag: the source is GET /v1/instagram/search/hashtags. A check returns one page of results, so a busy keyword can need a tighter interval to avoid missing posts. Set a spendCapCredits limit on any monitor to cap its monthly cost. See Billing for monitors.

Social Fetch has no licensed print, TV or radio content, and it isn't a news monitoring service. If your brief includes newspaper clippings, broadcast transcripts or paywalled trade press, keep a licensed provider for that part.

For open web pages, GET /v1/web/search returns ranked results for a query (with a datePosted filter) and GET /v1/web/markdown fetches a page as clean text. That's useful for checking a blog post or a public article that mentions you. It's web search, not licensed news coverage.

Many teams split the job: a media suite for print and broadcast, Social Fetch for social. If you're weighing other suites for the licensed half, see Social Fetch vs Meltwater.

The standard scenario: track 10 keywords on X, Reddit, TikTok and Instagram, checked hourly: 10 × 4 × 24 × 30 = 28,800 checks a month. Each check is one call to GET /v1/twitter/search, GET /v1/reddit/search, GET /v1/tiktok/search or GET /v1/instagram/search/hashtags, at 1 credit each. 10 keywords on 4 sources is 40 monitors, which needs the Growth plan: up to 100 monitors and 50,000 credits for $79 a month. Checking every 15 minutes is 115,200 credits a month, which fits the Scale plan (150,000 credits, $225 a month). Onclusive publishes no prices, so the Onclusive side uses Vendr's median contract of $13,706 a year (about $1,142 a month) and Capterra's €15,000-a-year starting price for Onclusive Social.

Onclusive is built for PR teams that need print, broadcast, measurement and a journalist database under one contract, and Social Fetch doesn't do any of that. For the social half of a monitoring brief, it's a lot of contract: Vendr's median is $13,706 a year, with no public prices and no public API docs. Social Fetch searches X, Reddit, TikTok and Instagram live, returns every post as JSON, and runs hourly checks on 10 keywords for $79 a month. Keep a licensed provider for print and broadcast if you need it, and move social to Social Fetch.