21 Best Sentiment Analysis Tools for 2021

In this blog post, we’ll look into what sentiment analysis is and how with the right sentiment analysis tools you can, Define your future marketing strategies Improve your customer’s experience with your brand Determine brand reputationAnd much more. Everyone knows that all online communication happens via text – Emails, Social media posts, tweets, live chats...

In this blog post, we’ll look into what sentiment analysis is and how with the right sentiment analysis tools you can,

  • Define your future marketing strategies
  • Improve your customer’s experience with your brand
  • Determine brand reputation
    And much more.

Everyone knows that all online communication happens via text – Emails, Social media posts, tweets, live chats and so on. And, each text carries a sentiment. Now think about the amount of textual data produced every minute on the Internet. 

A minute on a normal day seems ordinary, negligible even but in terms of data production, 

This is what happens,

Source.

Simply put. This is TOO MUCH information. Too much to be happening in one minute. Too many sentiments for any human to process or analyze.

Now, imagine the following scenarios:

  • You just released a new product.
  • You just posted something on your social media page.
  • You just wrote an article.

And everyone’s talking about it on social media.

There are too many comments, reviews, mentions on various social media platforms, tweets and retweets, etc. As a marketer with limited capabilities, you cannot possibly read every single mention, review, or try to make sense of what people actually mean when they engage with your brand on multiple platforms. 

But IT IS important for you to know what THIS engagement means. 

Was the response overwhelmingly positive?

Disastrously negative?

Or just plain neutral.

Why do the sentiments of the audience matter? What is Sentiment Analysis and how do you track these sentiments?

For starters, Sentiment Analysis can be explained as “The process of determining whether a piece of writing is positive, negative or neutral”.

And it can be part of a larger process called social listening.

But what is the point of it? Here’s why Sentiment Analysis is important:

  • It helps you understand what your audience feels about your brand.
  • Tells you what type of posts/strategies are working and what isn’t.
  • Helps you engage better with your audience.
  • Sentiment Analysis is live. It helps you track and stay in the present and in constant touch with your audience.
  • Shows you who loves what you do and puts you in touch with influencers that have the most engagement. 

With the amount of data that is being produced, how do you analyze texts that come in varying forms like posts, emails, headlines, etc?

This is why Sentiment Analysis tools are considered a blessing. 


Social Animal

Social Animal lets you analyze top-performing articles in your niche and get elaborately precise insights and analytical data. You can also monitor your competitors to look at their best content and Facebook strategies.

The tool’s Headline Analyzer analyzes article headlines and tells you their sentiment and the emotional structure of each headline.

This is significant in today’s overcrowded internet space as attractive headlines draw visits while other articles lay forgotten.

Emotional analysis (done by the headline analyzer) also plays a key role as research suggests that headlines are bound to be clicked if they evoke a strong feeling in the reader.

Facebook is one of the most popular platforms used by marketers and thus you’ll feel obligated to create a working Facebook strategy.

To do this you need to know the right sentiment that has driven all the followers to engage with a competitor’s page.

Social Animal’s Facebook Search’s Sentiment Analysis details the use of sentiments on any page. For example, some pages post controversial content that will derive all kinds of comments from its followers. A few might agree or disagree with the page’s posts. This could be a strategy used by pages to increase audience engagement.

Here’s a look at the average sentiment which you can sort by likes, comments etc.

There’s also an additional feature that lets you look at posts that have garnered positive, negative or neutral engagement. This will help you decide what sentiment works best for your page by looking at posts that have performed best.

Quick Search

This tool is a part of Talk Walker which is a social media listening and analytics platform. It is a search engine that gives you an instant overview of your brand online, also offering extensive coverage of social networks – including news sites, blogs, and forums. 

What do you get?

Quick Search analyzes billions of conversations instantly and gives you key stats like engagement, volume, sentiment, themes, influencers, demographics and geographies.

Pros: 

Easy and user-friendly.

Competitor Monitoring and comparisons made easy.

Cons:

Might need training that Talkwalker readily offers to get the full use of the tool.

A bit on the pricier side.

Social Mention

Social Mention is a FREE social media monitoring tool that allows you to track and measure what people are saying about your brand anywhere on the globe, in real-time.

SocialMention is part of BrandMentions, an in-depth brand monitoring tool designed to track and engage in online conversations in real-time.

What do you get?

Add the keywords you want to track and choose the region and language. The tool will provide tons of data on recent mentions, number of shares, sentiment analysis and overall performance.

Pros:

The tool is great for people looking for a general overview of any brand or keyword.

Cons:

All good things aren’t completely free. And so is Social Mention. With the results limited for the free version.

Repustate

Repustate is unique in a way that it can pick up on short-form text and slang like Ttyl, rofl, and smh. The tool also analyzes emojis and determines their intention within the context of a message. 

Repustate uses a concept called Lemmatization to simplify speech and identify key sentiments in different languages.

What do you get?

Repustate’s approach to text analytics is comprehensive, battle-tested and flexible enough to meet the needs of customers. The tool also lets you customize your own API’s rules to have it filter for any languages that are specific to your industry. If there’s slang, you can program those into Repustate’s system.

Pros:

Multilingual sentiment analysis.

Cons:

None.

Keyhole

Keyhole is a tool aimed primarily at Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Keyhole goes a long way in analyzing sentiments and even lets you see how people are responding to your competitors. 

Pros:

You also get access to historical data.

Cons:

Could be considered pricey.

Sentiment Analyzer

This is a free tool that lets you conduct sentiment analysis on virtually any text written in English. The system computes a sentiment score which reflects the overall sentiment, tone, or emotional feeling of your input text.

Sentiment Analysis from Meaning Cloud

Sentiment Analysis API performs detailed, multilingual sentiment analysis on information available from different sources.

The text that is provided is analyzed to determine the kind of sentiment it expresses – positive, neutral or negative sentiment (or sometimes if it is impossible to detect). 

What do you get?

As a user, you can define your own dictionaries and detect sentiments of the elements included.

You can also define your own sentiment model to adapt the analysis to your subdomains.

Integrate it with Excel, Google Sheets and Zapier.

Pros:

Detection of irony. (This is super cool!)

Cons:

This isn’t exactly a tool but an API.

Lexalytics

Lexalytics (formerly Semantria) is a business intelligence (BI)/analytics tool that lets you unlock meaningful insights and sentiment analysis from large amounts of unstructured text.

Lexalytics currently supports 6 languages; English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German & Chinese (Mandarin), all supported by their own native language packs.

What do you get?

Lexalytics uses text deconstruction and natural language processing to evaluate semantics, syntax, and context giving you structured data and insights on your dashboards.

Pros:

Assigns a sentiment score.

Easy visualization through word clouds.

Cons:

Limited transactions for a basic license

Extra pricing for more languages

Sentigem

Sentigem is a platform that offers an easy-to-use sentiment analysis tool for the English language based documents or text blocks. It is currently in public beta which means that you might get to try out new features that are still in development.

Pros:

Capable of analysing large text chunks consisting of tens of thousands of characters in a fraction of a second.

Cons:

Since it’s still in beta, you may run into technical issues from time to time.

Social Searcher

Social Searcher is a free social search engine allowing users to search across all major social media platforms. It effectively allows users to search social networks in real-time, providing analytical reports. It is resourceful for organizations and individuals who would want to monitor public social mentions. 

What do you get?

Along with sentiment analysis, the tool lets you discover popular hashtags and track the actions of influencers.

Pros:

The Free version offers 100 real-time searches per day which is not bad.

Cons:

All that data can be a bit overwhelming when you first look at it.

Clarabridge

The sentiment analysis feature in Clarabridge is part of their CX Analytics and CX Social. 

What do you get?

Clarabridge’s advanced sentiment feature takes into account the grammar, context, industry, and source and doesn’t just give a sentiment score based on a word or text alone.

Example: It understands that “happy” is positive and “not happy” is negative and doesn’t rank it positively just by basing it on a single word.

Taking it a step further, Clarabridge also provides emotion analysis. Looking at the emotion behind customer feedback enables you to ensure you drive the right long term strategy.

Pros: 

A very advanced and well-developed tool for social media analytics.

Cons:

There are so many widgets available and sometimes it can get confusing.

Monkey Learn

MonkeyLearn is an easy-to-use and easy-to-apply AI tool that can help you make sense of your text data in no time. There are different ways to feed data to the MonkeyLearn sentiment analysis model.

  1. To get quick results for short texts, just type into the interface and click “Classify”.
  2. Upload an excel sheet or a CSV file.
  3. Integrate with other apps like Google Sheets, Rapid Miner or Zapier.
  4. If you know how to code, use Monkey Learns’s API.

Pros:

Build your own sentiment analysis model.

Cons:

Might not be suitable for non-technical people.

Wonderflow

Here are some things that Wonderflow does.

  1. Pulls data from different languages, contexts, formats, and forums to make sense of it all.
  2. The tool mines customer data and keeps track of how your products are doing.
  3. Compare sentiments of your brand and your competitors.

Pros:

Analyze data from not only your own website, but also places like Target, Amazon, and Walmart to easily see what customers are saying about your product and the intent behind their feedback.

Cons:

None.

Hootsuite’s sentiment meter

Hootsuite Insights provides an overview of sentiment with an easy-to-read meter. This allows you to quickly see how your brand is doing from a sentiment point of view, and monitor for any changes.

You can also set up Twitter mentions on Hootsuite to scan for tweets containing positive terms like “thank you,” and “amazing.”

What can you do?

Easily filter mentions and sort by sentiment. You can also track sentiments by keywords and set up automated assignments by chosen keywords.

Pros:

Real-time access to data from more than 100 million sources in over 50 languages. 

Cons:

None

RapidMiner

Rapid Miner, A cloud-based data mining tool uses machine learning to perform sentiment analysis. Rapid Miner also features a heatmap for mapped Tweets and a time-ordered sequence to put conversations into context. Although Rapid Miner does struggle with some responses like identifying sarcasm, it is free to use.

With RapidMiner online reviews and social media posts can be analyzed, plus official publications and documents.

Sentiment Viz/NCSU Tweet Visualizer

This tool is handy and free to use. This is VERY useful for extracting data from a week’s worth of tweets. Not only is the NCSU Tweet Visualizer free to use but it is really easy to use too. All you have to do is simply hover your cursor over a dot to see individual tweets and, their position on the sentiment range.

There is also a heatmap that has a grid with mapped tweets – red for more than average number, blue for less.

SentiStrength

SentiStrength is a program that compares social media text against a lexicon-based classifier of sentiments. The tool measures sentiment strength by assigning scores ranging from -.5 to +5. Positive numbers indicate favourable attitudes while negative numbers indicate negative attitudes. The tool also provides a separate score for each word within a sentence thereby giving the average sentiment strength of the content.

Pros:

SentiStrength is very fast and can process 14,000 tweets per second on a standard PC) and is transparent. (shows how its scores were calculated)

Cons:

The interface is too full of data and not exactly user-friendly.

IBM Watson Tone Analyzer

IBM Watson Tone Analyzer is a service that uses linguistic analysis to detect three types of tones from any text: emotion, social tendencies, and language style. The emotions identified include things like anger, fear, joy, sadness, and disgust.

The tool has a very simple setup and lays out clear examples of how to better understand your audience’s view.

This tool’s greatest strength lies in its focus on customer service and support. The Tone Analyzer will report on support conversations to monitor and says whether the phone agents are polite and helpful and whether they truly answered the questions posed by customers. It also tells you the mood of the callers and were they satisfied.

Pros:

The tone analyzer can be built into chatbots.

Cons:

Quite pricey.

Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a Web & Social Media Monitoring tool that tracks mentions to any keyword provided on the entire web. You can get a complete report of what people are saying about your brand on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, News & blogs or ANY other website.

For each mention, you can see the sentiment, the country and the type of mention.

Pros:

User-friendly with a very neat data presentation.

Cons:

Loading mentions takes a while.

Opentext

The sentiment analysis feature within OpenText’s Magellan Text Mining goes beyond basic text processing exposes subjectivity and tonality for each sentence within any piece of text. It looks at text on a document at a sentence level to get the proper context for its analysis. It then records whether a given comment is positive, negative, neutral or mixed.

Its sentiment analysis platform even though is a part of the broader OpenText Content Analytics solution is designed in such a way that it identifies and evaluates subjective patterns and expressions of sentiment. It is powered by machine learning with natural language processing techniques and supports languages like English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Parallel Dots

Parallel Dots lets you understand the social sentiment of your brand, product or service while monitoring online conversations.

The tool provides an analysis of the overall emotion of any text incorporated from Blogs, Articles, forums, consumer reviews, surveys, or from social media platforms like twitter.

Parallel Dots uses Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) algorithms to classify a text blob’s sentiment into positive and negative.

Sentiment analysis is complicated.

However, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be listening to what customers are saying and using that information to guide your business decisions, with so many easy-to-use sentiment analysis tools and solutions on the market.


Other articles you might like:

16 Best News APIs For 2021

The Best Online Reputation Management Tools For 2021

7 Best Content Discovery Platforms In 2021

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Sowndarya Kishore is a Content Marketer at Social Animal. A marketer by day and a reader by night, she loves to discuss herself in the third person. Follow her on Twitter.