Top 5 BuzzSumo Alternatives For Better Content Marketing Insights
by Mike Khorev
BuzzSumo is certainly one of—if not the—most popular content marketing and influencer marketing tool out there. It’s a very powerful tool to find out what and who are currently trending in the internet, allowing us to plan a strategy around the insight.
However, BuzzSumo is certainly not a perfect-for-all tool, and it’s certainly not cheap. This is why many people are looking for BuzzSumo alternatives, either to get a cheaper option or to get different features where BuzzSumo is lacking.
Here, we will discuss five of the best BuzzSumo alternatives available, but let us begin with a brief discussion about BuzzSumo itself.
Brief Overview on BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a very popular tool among content marketers, and not without its reasons. As a content analytics tool, it has a well-rounded set of features including:
- Brand monitoring: monitoring mentions about your brand across various social media.
- Analytics on your content, especially engagement metrics, and comparison with your competitors’
- Checking trending content and topics
- Backlinks analytics
- Find and analyze influencers
However, BuzzSumo offers two standout core features:
- Content analytics: BuzzSumo is often considered the best in this aspect with various useful features discussed above. It is especially useful to monitor trending content across the internet and various social media platforms, giving you various insights to help you develop the best possible, high-performing content
- Influencers outreach: allowing you to get insights about various influencers in any niche/industry. This is especially useful if you are looking to build an influencer marketing campaign, as well as to get guest posting opportunities.
Pricing: limited free plan available, premium plan starts from $79/month, and the most expensive package is $499+/month
Top 5 Best BuzzSumo Alternatives
There are generally two reasons in looking for BuzzSumo alternatives: you want something cheaper (or, you want to get more value of what you spend). The second common reason is that you are looking for a different set of features to fulfill your needs.
Taking account of those two reasons (and others), here we have compiled five of the best alternatives to BuzzSumo, and why we think they might be a decent pick.
1. Social Animal
Social Animal is often considered the best “cheap” alternative for BuzzSumo. We say “cheap” because the starting plan is only $49/month compared to BuzzSumo’s $79/month, while offering the same core features of BuzzSumo, and slightly more. In fact, SocialAnimal has their own comparison page with BuzzSumo, which you can check here.
It actually offers some useful unique features like headline analytics, the ability to search within articles, advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP),and the feature to compare two keywords in real-time, among others.
Feature Highlights:
- Content analytics: check article keywords, compare top articles, analyze headlines, and check various engagement metrics.
- Content marketing suggestions: optimal content length, optimal headlines and title, suggestion about when to publish, etc. InsipireMe is Social Animal’s unique feature that can suggest any topics that might connect to any keyword, very useful in content development process
- Influencer analytics: similar features to BuzzSumo, suggesting trending influences across various niches and their key metrics
Pricing: 14-day free-trial for all plans, plan starts from $49/month and the most expensive plan is $499/month. In most cases, the cheapest plan is sufficient for 1-user.
Conclusion: more affordable with slightly more features than BuzzSumo, probably the best alternative out there.
2. Ahrefs Content Explorer
Ahrefs is a prominent keyword research tool, among the best of its class. However, Ahrefs also offers a content analytics tool in the form of Ahrefs Content Explorer. You will, however, need to subscribe to Ahrefs’ full package that starts with $99/month, and cannot subscribe only to Content Explorer. However, Ahrefs also offers many useful tools especially about SEO—which is closely related to content marketing anyways—. You can try it for a week for $7.
As a content analytics tool, Ahrefs is very powerful tool that can find thousands of trending topics and millions of pages in real-time, the largest compared to other tools. However, it is fairly limited in its content analytics features, which only focus on backlinks and domain referrals.
Feature Highlights:
- Powerful SEO tools: among the best keyword research tools available today,regarded as the absolute best in the backlinks analytics department. Offer various features that can help you get more backlinks.
- Competitor Insights: similar to BuzzSumo’s feature in finding trending topics and analyze the top competitors on the topic.
- Advanced Searches: various filters to help you in content curation process from the ability to filter posts by traffic, word count, number of social shares, etc.
Pricing: 7-day trial for $7, Lite package with $99/month and Standard package for $179/month
Conclusion: more expensive, but more advanced set features for technical and power users. Best choice if you are going to focus on SEO. Limited influencer analytics features.
3. NinjaOutreach
If Ahrefs is a more advanced alternative for BuzzSumo regarding technical content analytics. NinjaOutreach is the tool to get if you want more influencer outreach features. It’s also important to note that NinjaOutreach is cheaper than BuzzSumo, with the most affordable plan only costs $49/month.
NinjaOutreach offers some content analytic features, like the ability to analyze current trending topics. However, it’s more focused on influencer outreach features, some are unique among other tools on this list.
Feature Highlights:
- Automatic email outreach: automatically send outreach emails to your target influencers. A great, time-saving feature if you are serious about influencer marketing. There are also various email templates to choose from, and all messages are personalized.
- Influencer analytics: over 6.5 million influencers in NinjaOutreach’s database, and simply by entering a keyword, you can find various influencers from bloggers to authoritative companies to press.
- Influencer outreach tracking: track open rate of your email outreach, see which templates are generating the best results, and check reply-rate. You can continuously improve your influencer outreach campaign with these insights.
Pricing: free-trial available for all plans, the basic package is $49/month and the premium package is $149/month
Conclusion: focused on influencer analytics and influencer outreach features, while a little lackluster in the content insights department. An affordable option if you are especially looking for an influencer outreach tool.
4. ShareIt
ShareIt is a content curation-influencer insights tool by SocialPilot, offering the core functions of BuzzSumo for absolutely free.
The free price tag is arguably its best “selling” point, but as expected, it’s not as powerful as BuzzSumo or other tools we have shared above. It is, however, very simple and easy to use: simply enter your keyword or topic, and ShareIt will show you two tabs: one for trending articles on the topic, and another one for the top influencers.
Feature Highlights:
- Free: arguably its best feature, as you can use this tool alongside BuzzSumo or other alternatives to compare insights. Also, obviously it’s a great option for content marketers on a tight budget.
- Simplicity: very simple to use with clean interface.
- Trending content: although it’s free, ShareIt can show various trending content according to your target keyword. Combined with its ease of use, it’s one of the best BuzzSumo alternatives when you are in a hurry.
Pricing: free
Conclusion: a great free option for those looking just for some basic insights on trending content and influencers.
5. ContentStudio
As the name suggests, ContentStudio is another alternatives for BuzzSumo especially in the content curation department. However, ContentStudio also offers some social media management features making it a good option for those looking to get help in the social media marketing aspect.
A unique feature of Content Studio is how it analyzes social engagement data to predict whether a content will go viral. You can easily setup various automations and filtering options
Also, it’s another affordable option starting at just $49/month.
Feature Highlights:
- Content strategy planner: view your overall content strategy in just a single dashboard, either in a list view or calendar view. Powerful filters to find trending content according to keywords/topics, and great analytics features.
- Automation: can automatically schedule your posts, complete with recycling features, hashtag suggestions, and mention suggestions (which influencer to mention, author mentions, tc.). You can automate content posting according to your preferences.
- SEO optimizer: various suggestions and insights to optimize your content and social media posts.
- Analytics: detailed metrics for any website and social media profiles, including performance analytics of our own content.
Pricing: Starting from $49/month, the most expensive package is $299/month
Conclusion: a relatively affordable option for those who wanted a focused tool on content curation and content development. Not very powerful regarding influencer outreach.
End Words
So which of these BuzzSumo alternatives should you choose? As you can see, no two tools are exactly the same: some are cheaper than others (and even free), some offer better features in one area but lacking on the others. The best approach is to choose the right tool according to your budget and your current needs, and we’ll let you be the judge.
However, in our opinion the best well-rounded tools we have on this list is Ahrefs, while NinjaOutreach is the best regarding influencer outreach. For a free alternative, you might want to try ShareIt.
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Hello Mike! Great reviews! In addition to the methods and tools listed above, I will add a useful tool for analyzing content of competitors – Popsters.com
You can use Popsters as an alternative to Buzzsumo and Buffer for analyzing the content of competitors in Social media. It has free plan and full price per 1 Social media is only $10 per month.
It can easily help you to analyze any pages on popular social networks (like Instagram, Fb, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok for free, Pinterest and others) and find out the most popular and commented publications. You can easily filter and sort posts using multiple filters.
Also, you can analyze the desired profile for more than 20 metrics (and compare with any others pages).
Hope you find this useful!