Marketers and content creators use a lot of tools to research, produce, monitor and amplify online content. And, if you are a person who’s directly or indirectly involved in any of the above-mentioned processes, you will be familiar with Buzzsumo.
BuzzSumo provides social listening, content research, link research and influencer search all in one place. It is for this that the tool is popular and is well sought. But Buzzsumo’s price isn’t exactly budget-friendly.
Here are 15 Buzzsumo alternatives that are relatively cheaper and contain most of Buzzsumo’s features (with some even containing additional uniquely useful features)
Table of Contents:
- Social Animal
- Ahrefs
- SEMrush
- Content Studio
- Feedly
- ShareIt by Social Pilot
- Scoop.It
- Sprout Social
- Oktopost
- Ninja Outreach
- Alltop
- DrumUp
- Zoho Social
- Triberr
- Curata
Social Animal
Social Animal is the closest top alternative that can boast almost all the features of Buzzsumo. It is cheaper and exceeds Buzzsumo in terms of content research. While Buzzsumo lists popular articles based on social shares for any keyword: finding the keyword in its headline, Social Animal looks for keywords within the body of the article and the headlines enabling you to see a wider range of results.
Top Features:
- Article and Influencer Search.
- Content Insights detailing the performance of any keyword or domain over a period.
- Trending Content.
- Engagement Data
- Facebook search.
- Headline Analyzer.
- Sentiment Analysis.
- Find Influencers based on the content they share.
- Daily digest email containing top articles, influencers, posts and competitor mentions.
Sign up for a 14-day FREE trial here.
What can you use it for?
Content Research: Find top articles for any keyword or domain sorted by social shares on different social media platforms. Discover topics and ideas, note optimal content length for top shared articles and analyze sentiments by looking at key phrases that convey specific emotions from over 300+ million articles. Perform headline analysis or compare headlines to see what’s working.
Content Curation: You cannot share anything you see. You’ll need to curate content that is unique, worth reading and shareable. The tool lets you discover and curate content that is already popular or is gaining visibility based on the time filters you pick. You get millions of articles to choose from and share directly or schedule it via Hootsuite or Buffer.
Find When, How and Where to post: Social Animal analyzes millions of articles and looks into how a keyword or a search term has performed. This is used to show the best possible day, title length and the perfect platform for you to post in.
Try to find the best influencers for any topic/keyword here.
Influencer Research: Discover Influencers based on your requirements from a database containing 100+ million influencers. Use filters to look for bloggers, Celebrities, Journalists, Brands or Micro-Influencers. Alternate between finding influencers based on their bio or based on the content they share.
Monitor keywords and competitors: Set up alerts on the tool’s dashboard and view the most recent articles, posts, influencers and mentions for that keyword/competitor.
Create working content and social media strategies: Analyzing your competitor domains can reveal a lot. It can tell you which posts are popular and which platform you need to focus on. Delve deeper by looking at insights and Facebook search.
Pricing:
Social Animal comes with a free 14-day trial.
Starting from $49
Watch this video to understand how Social Animal can be the perfect Buzzsumo alternative.
Also, read this pretty detailed review on Social Animal by Lilach Bullock: How to win at content marketing with kickass content research
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the best Buzzsumo alternatives and is ideal if you want to improve backlinks and keyword positions while tracking content and mentions. This tool has several large indexes of keywords (5.4 billion), backlinks (4.1 million pages crawled a minute), and content (5 million posts discovered a day).
Ahrefs’ content explorer which is similar to Buzzsumo allows you to find thousands of trending topics in your industry. Ahrefs does more for SEO (Search engine optimization) compared to Buzzsumo with as it is mainly used to analyze a website’s link profile, keyword rankings, and SEO health.
Top Features:
- SEO Auditing.
- Keyword research.
- Rank tracking.
- Backlink Monitoring.
- Custom reports.
- Competitor analysis.
What can you use Ahrefs for?
Here’s a complete video guide on how to use Ahrefs.
Backlink analysis: Analyze any competitor’s backlinks or yours to see how you are performing. Use filters like “Do-follow links” or “no follow” to sift through links. Find pages that link to your competitor and possibly might also link to you.
Explore Keywords: This is arguably the best feature of Ahrefs (at least for me) as this feature lets you in on metrics like Keyword Difficulty, Return Rate or how often people search for a keyword more than once, Search Volume, Percentage of people that click on paid vs. organic results and much more.
Look at Organic keywords & Organic traffic: This feature is super helpful and when you type in a domain, you can see the exact list of terms it ranks for.
Explore Content: Ahrefs Content Explorer is designed to show you content that gets lots of social shares and is very similar to Buzzsumo’s content discovery feature.
SEO audits: Ahrefs could be used as a web-based version of the very popular tool “Screaming Frog.” Just type in a domain and let the tool get you a very thorough report.
Find Competitors: With Ahrefs, you can look at competing domains that are trying to rank for the same keyword as you. This feature helps you track new and upcoming competitors.
Pricing: $99 – $999 /mo (This is one of the pricier alternatives of Buzzsumo but with loads of additional features.)
SEMrush
SEMrush is an SEO tool that has features similar to that of Buzzsumo. SEMrush is the go-to tool for a majority of marketers and professional bloggers for keyword and competitor research. One of the most useful features in SEMrush that appeals to Buzzsumo alternative seekers is Link Building. And a unique thing about this feature is, you enter keywords that you want to rank for and SEMrush builds a list that shows “sites that link to the sites that are ranking for those keywords.”
Top Features:
- Organic Search.
- Keyword Research.
- Backlink analysis.
- Competitor Monitoring.
What can you do with SEMrush?
Organic Research: This tells you all the basic metrics of any site plus something called “Traffic cost” which is how much that site’s organic traffic is worth. This is incredibly useful for PPC marketers.
Traffic Analysis: Analyze a site with Traffic Analytics to get an estimate of that site’s overall traffic numbers and not just organic traffic numbers from Google. Also, see stuff like average page views, bounce rate and session duration.
Paid search: SEMrush is a very good PPC tool especially if you want to copy a competitor’s keywords and ad copy. With this, you can see which keywords that your competition bids on.
Find Keyword gaps: Keyword Gap in SEMrush shows you a list of keywords that many of your competitors rank for. This comes in handy when you are trying to perfect your content strategy.
And this is useful because? When you find such a keyword that multiple competitors rank for, you know that you can rank for it too if you try.
Pricing: $99 to $399/mo
Content Studio
Content Studio does most of what Buzzsumo can and also has some other extra features like a place where you can add RSS feeds and a media planner. It is one of the cheaper buzzsumo alternatives that actually integrates a social media planner, a post composer along with content marketing features.
Top Features:
- Content Discovery & Curation
- Viral Content Prediction
- Editorial Calendar
- Auto Scheduling
Pricing: $49 to $299/mo
Feedly
Feedly powered by Google Alerts helps users filter text from feeds, blogs, and online magazines based on the topics and publications you specify. It is basically like an RSS feed but with extra integrations. Feedly is a free alternative to Buzzsumo, but you cannot get all the features you look for. The most practical feature in this tool is that it takes a piece of content and removes ads, popups, other distractions and hurdles until you only have words and images associated with the actual content. Marketers can also use Feedly to monitor social media for brand mentions other keywords. Feedly is great but underperforms when you want a satisfying Buzzsumo alternative.
Top Features:
- News aggregator.
- Personalized Newsfeed.
- Monitor mentions & keywords.
Pricing: FREE
ShareIt by Social Pilot
ShareIt is a free content curation tool that helps you discover, curate, and share the latest content. With Social Pilot, you can schedule content or post directly on social media. It is easy to use and is a great free buzzsumo alternative.
Top Features:
- Content Discovery
- Direct social media sharing
- Find relevant Twitter handles.
Pricing: FREE
Scoop.It
Scoop.It is one of the cheapest buzzsumo alternatives and crawls tons of pages every day to show related relevant content for any keyword. This tool also comes with a Free version with limited access and features. Scoop.It is unlike Buzzsumo, is primarily a platform to find excellent content to curate and doesn’t help much in Influencer discovery.
Top Features:
- Content Suggestions.
- Website integration.
- Social sharing.
- Content curation.
Pricing: $0 to $67/mo
Here’s a quick tutorial outlining the best features of Scoop.it.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management and analytics tool. It also offers social listening and influencer identification. Its features are limited if you want a perfect buzzsumo alternative but it makes up for it with its very own unique additional features. Sprout Social pays more attention to social media than content marketing. It has everything associated with your social media marketing, including content curation, publishing, scheduling, monitoring social engagement, reporting and analytics in one place.
Top Features:
- Social listening.
- Automation.
- Reports and Analytics.
- Publishing Calendar.
Pricing: $99 to $249
Oktopost
B2B marketers will be overjoyed to find this great tool that was built to fit specific requirements tailored to fit them. In addition to content discovery, marketers can add existing RSS feeds to monitor known and valuable sources of content. Oktopost‘s automation helps streamline curation by scheduling posts across social media platforms and services. The tool also has a browser extension for easy scheduling and sharing. Oktopost is a really good alternative to Buzzsumo when it comes to discovering and sharing content.
Top Features:
- Social Analytics.
- Social Media Promotions.
- Social publishing.
- People Database.
Pricing: You’ll have to tailor your package based on your needs and the prices are naturally customized.
Ninja Outreach
In a nutshell, Ninja Outreach is an influencer marketing software that can be used as a prospecting and outreach tool.
The tool is perfect if you want to drive blog traffic and reach out to bloggers and influencers in your niche. One of the core features of the Ninja Outreach is to send emails to your contacts and build relationships with them.
The tool also has email templates to help beginners to get acquainted with blogger outreach. By clicking on the “load a Pre-Written Template” from the drop-down menu gives you access to lots of emails templates from blog post promotion to conversation invite.
Watch this video to get what Ninja Outreach is all about.
Top Features:
- Find Influencers, Bloggers, Journalists etc.
- Find anyone’s email address.
- Custom sales templates.
Pricing: $299 to $499/mo
Alltop
Alltop keeps all the top headlines from popular topics around the web. Here your search criteria will be different because Alltop already has a categorised list. For e.g., if you want to search topic/blog related to “cryptocurrency” then you can directly go to alltop.com/cryptocurrency and check the listed headlines.
Alltop verifies each link/article before listing and you’ll seldom find broken links.
Alltop is a good buzzsumo alternative if all you want is to get trending articles and ideas.
Price: FREE
DrumUp
DrumUp discovers and helps you share great content to your social media accounts. The tool recommends fresh stories most relevant to your audience. It even has a chrome extension to schedule social media posts and discover new content.
Content Marketers also track and measure Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook engagement using DrumUp’s intuitive and deep social media analytics. Some of the tool’s elements are akin to that of Buzzsumo, But it is very limited in its capabilities if you want it as a complete Buzzsumo alternative.
Price: $15 to $79
Zoho Social
Schedule content in multiple ways, monitor mentions, analyze your brand’s performance on social media with Zoho Social. The interface acts like a brand’s social media report card. Zoho’s algorithm monitors social networks and suggests the optimal time to publish a post. Zoho Social is pretty limited when you consider it as a buzzsumo alternative but it is pretty useful if you combine it with any of the above-mentioned tools.
Top Features:
- Publishing schedule.
- Monitor.
- Analyze performance.
Pricing: Starts with $10
Triberr
Triberr is a social media platform where bloggers join tribes, in which tribe members’ RSS feeds display their posts, and people decide whether or not to share them. Triberr is very good if you want to amplify your content reach and helps you connect with “tribes” or people belonging to your niche. It is easy to use and a good alternative to Buzzsumo’s discovery of new and popular articles. But, it does more in terms of promoting content and getting people to share your content.
Top Features:
- Content Discovery.
- Content amplification.
- Influencer Discovery.
Pricing: $20 to $50/mo
Curata
Curata is a content marketing tool that provides both content curation and content management analytics using keywords, news sources, authors, bookmarked or shared content, etc., One of Curata’s unique features include its “Self-learning recommendation engine” which suggests content and prioritizes by relevancy. Though it is a wonderful tool for discovering content, it pales in comparison to Buzzsumo. But it can be paired with Influencer Discovery tools and you get a complete set.
Here’s what Curata is all about.
Top Features:
- Curate Content.
- Discover Content.
- Automatically post content.
Conclusion
Whether you wish to do content research, find influencers or monitor content performance this list of BuzzSumo alternative tools will help you accomplish the task. Of course, some of the tools may not replace all the features of BuzzSumo in full. Nevertheless, all of the above tools are effective and lower-priced (or sometimes even free) solutions worth your attention.
Also Read: The Best Content Curation Tools In 2020
