BuzzSumo Alternatives: What You Really Need To Know

But you didn’t just come here to hear about us, so read on to see how we size up against the competition 💪

1. Ahrefs

2. Mention

3. Sprout Social

4. Social Animal

5. Content Studio

1. Ahrefs vs BuzzSumo

Don’t get us wrong – we 💙 this tool. In fact, we use it ourselves. It is ideal for technical SEO audits and organic search optimization. It allows you to do a full health check of your website, track your rankings over time, and even assess your paid search activity.

Ahrefs is geared towards in-depth SEO analysis, which means it’s an awesome tool to support your search strategy.

Built around traffic insight, it helps you to get to grips with your competitors, keywords and website performance.

BuzzSumo perfectly complements that data, offering deeper social engagement insight, a huge influencer database, and as near to real-time web monitoring as you can get.

You can read more about the speed of our Alerts and PR monitoring here. 

BuzzSumo and Ahrefs crossover in a few ways – but most notably when it comes to content insights.

Content ideas

Ahrefs’ Content Explorer gives you the ability to analyze the performance of 5bn articles for content inspiration and strategic guidance. There’s no doubt it’s a powerful tool.

But BuzzSumo’s Content Analyzer tracks an additional 3bn - with 8bn+ articles in total, and millions more added daily. 

Beyond the Content Explorer, Ahrefs’ content ideas come directly from the SERPs, with keywords, “also rank for” searches, and questions all giving you inspiration for your next bit of content.

BuzzSumo has a full suite of content ideation tools, including:

Content insights

In the Content Explorer tool, Ahrefs provides detailed page-level content insights, breaking performance down by:

• Traffic
• Traffic value 
• Referring domains
• Referring pages etc.

This is great for validating your content approach, and understanding whether you have the ability to beat your competitors’ page-level content in the SERPs.

But Ahrefs doesn’t offer scaled content analysis reports to help you identify patterns and trends in top performing content. 

BuzzSumo’s Content Analysis tab gives you an overview of content trends and characteristics of hundreds, if not thousands of engaging articles. It also lets you compare content across up to 8 domains, steering you in the right direction to create your most engaging piece of content yet. 

Backlinks

Ahrefs provide more detailed backlink insights – with backlinks accrued over time, referring domains, and referring pages – which can really help you to analyze your site’s SEO authority.

BuzzSumo’s backlink alerts, while a little less technical, are thought to be speedier, which is important if near-to real-time monitoring is a high priority – especially if your content is time sensitive. 

Beyond email alerts, you can also build them into your existing workflows with RSS feeds and the ability to integrate with Slack.

Influencers

When it comes to influencers, Ahrefs tracks the top 100 traffic authors alongside your searches in the Content Explorer.

It also shows you the top 100 people “Who tweeted”, allowing you to build lists of your biggest influencer advocates for future collaborations or link requests.

BuzzSumo enables you to analyze as many Author, Twitter, and YouTube influencers as you can find in our database. With 294M influencers, 700K journalists, and access beyond the top 100, these influencer tools are designed to help you find the people with the power to push your content further.

You can make direct contact and get inspired by the content that influential people are sharing. Read more about our Journalists Database here.

What are the main differences?

• AHREFs is all about keyword optimization and technical SEO analysis
• BuzzSumo is fit-to-bursting with content ideas, topics and relationships 

If you’re looking to do some deep-dive SEO analysis, Ahrefs is probably the tool for you, but if you want to build content ideas and connections, then you need to look no further than BuzzSumo.

If you have the budget, Ahrefs doesn’t have to be a BuzzSumo alternative – these tools complement each other perfectly, helping you to create advanced content that dominates both in the SERPs and on social.

2. BuzzSumo vs Mention

Mention is a slick and easy-to-use web monitoring tool, allowing you to track your brand, audience, and market competitors.

Mention is a BuzzSumo alternative in the sense that it provides a similar service to BuzzSumo’s Monitoring tool. 

It monitors your keywords in social conversations as well as content – and even tracks comment sections. 

BuzzSumo Alerts, by comparison, are focused on tracking content and hashtag mentions across the web, to give you a streamlined way of monitoring media mentions in content. 

Combine them with BuzzSumo’s Journalist Database to discover journalist interests and contact details, and BuzzSumo Monitoring becomes the perfect digital PR tool for building important press relationships. 

While Mention references 1bn sources in its monitoring, BuzzSumo tracks an index of 8bn. 

Ultimately, Mention is a single-service offering, providing media monitoring.

By comparison, BuzzSumo is a full PR and marketing suite, offering upwards of 15 standalone tools to help you every step of the way – from content ideas to media coverage.

If you’re a freelancer, consultant or business-on-a-budget looking for a low-cost digital PR tool, or if you’re especially keen to monitor social conversation, Mention could be a good option for you.

But if your priority is thorough coverage, tracking as many mentions as possible, and building an holistic marketing strategy, then BuzzSumo is a solid choice.

Read our list of the top 7 PR tools to use every day in your marketing.

3. Sprout Social vs BuzzSumo

This tool is first and foremost a social media management platform, allowing you to schedule your social posts, analyze their engagement and listen to the conversation around your brand across numerous social media channels.

In that sense it’s a pretty different offering to BuzzSumo, which is a content marketing tool, and was built around scaled web content analysis, monitoring and inspiration.

Sprout Social is all about analyzing and benchmarking page performance of your social media posts. 

BuzzSumo, on the other hand, is more about analyzing website content (ie. articles, videos, podcasts) alongside social media engagement – either on a page-level basis, or scaled up across thousands pieces of content, to reveal market and industry trends.

Users love Sprout Social for its intuitive UI, and a feature-favorite is the recommended posting times for different posts across platforms. Customer support also gets a big tick of approval ✅

If you’re prioritizing your social media strategy, and want to manage your posts, report on page performance and practice social listening, then Sprout Social can do all of that in one tool.

But, it’s not a perfectly aligned BuzzSumo alternative. For scaled content engagement analysis, content ideas aplenty and web content monitoring, BuzzSumo is the better option.

4. BuzzSumo vs Social Animal

Social Animal provides article engagement and influencer insights from within its content database. 

It has some nifty features, like the headline analyzer, and users recommend the tool for its customer support and ease of use. 

The main difference between BuzzSumo and Social Animal is the scale of data. After all, if you want to build an impactful and data-driven content strategy, the quality of the data you’re using to inform your decisions really matters.

A quick search for BuzzFeed.com in Social Animal, over the last year, returns approximately 28k articles at the time of writing. That might sound like a lot, but when you run the same search in BuzzSumo you get 45k articles – 17k more.

BuzzSumo tracks 8bn articles and counting – meaning you’ll never miss out on a content opportunity.

And when it comes to historical data, Social Animal tracks only a single year of data across all packages, while BuzzSumo tracks up to five.

If you’re a one-man-band looking for low-cost access to quick content ideas and influencer insights, then Social Animal could be a great tool for you.

BuzzSumo is better suited to you if you prioritize richer data, value for money, and want access to a greater range of tools, including:

• Question analysis
• Topic analysis
• Keyword research
• Journalist and author insights
• Backlink insights
• YouTube content & influencer insights
• Content, keyword, brand, backlink, author and competitor monitoring