Before you move
- Check whether your team uses Brandwatch’s consumer intelligence dashboards. discatch does not replace those.
- Note which sources you actually read. If mainstream social is most of your feed, discatch’s developer-source list is narrower today.
- Try the free tier. Catches that fire nothing cost nothing.
Brandwatch pricing, estimated
| Brandwatch | discatch | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | demo-gated, from about $800/mo per third parties | free, then units |
| API | enterprise package | every plan |
| MCP | no | planned |
| Self-serve signup | no | yes |
| Developer sources | not checked | Discourse, GitHub, HN, Stack Exchange |
The enterprise shape
Brandwatch is built for marketing and insights teams at large companies. Its dashboards, consumer intelligence reports, and Cision integration serve that buyer well. If you are a developer tool company, a solo founder, or an agent that wants to run a few queries a day, the enterprise shape is the wrong fit. discatch is built for that use case: per-unit pricing, an API on every plan, and catches that push to an agent.
What Brandwatch does well
Brandwatch has the deepest historical archive in the category: 1.7 trillion conversations back to 2010. If you need to research how a topic evolved over a decade, nothing else matches it. Official X firehose access means it captures posts that other tools miss through sampling. The Iris AI assistant runs natural-language queries against the archive. Image and logo recognition catches brand appearances in photos and video thumbnails. The Cision merger adds PR distribution and journalist databases in the same contract. For a marketing team at a large company, these are real capabilities that discatch does not replace.
What a switch costs
- Data export. Brandwatch supports data export, but the scope depends on the plan. Export what you need before the contract ends.
- Alert rebuild. Each Brandwatch query becomes a discatch catch. The query syntax is similar: quotes, AND, OR, NOT.
- Seats vs units. Brandwatch charges per seat on an annual contract. discatch charges per unit. A team of ten pays the same as a team of one for the same volume.
- Contract term. Brandwatch contracts are typically annual with auto-renewal. Check the notice period before switching.
How to move in an afternoon
- Get a trial key. No email, no card: `curl -X POST https://api.discatch.com/v1/keys/trial`
- Price a search before running it: `curl -X POST https://api.discatch.com/v1/search -H "Authorization: Bearer $DISCATCH_KEY" -d '{"query": ""your brand"", "sources": ["web", "news", "hackernews", "discourse"], "dry_run": true}'`
- Review the quote. If the price works, run the search without `dry_run`.
- Create a catch for each keyword you monitored in Brandwatch: `curl -X POST https://api.discatch.com/v1/catches -H "Authorization: Bearer $DISCATCH_KEY" -d '{"name": "brand mentions", "query": ""your brand" OR "your product"", "sources": ["web", "news", "hackernews", "discourse", "github"], "interval": "1h", "destination": {"type": "webhook", "url": "https://your-server.com/hook", "secret": "whsec_..."}}'`
- Test the destination before trusting it: `curl -X POST https://api.discatch.com/v1/catches/{id}/test -H "Authorization: Bearer $DISCATCH_KEY"`
- Verify delivery, then let the Brandwatch contract lapse at renewal.
Who should stay
A marketing or insights team at a large company that uses the consumer intelligence dashboards, the Cision PR integration, and the historical archive back to 2010 should stay on Brandwatch. The product is built for that buyer and serves it well. discatch is a different shape for a different buyer: developers, agents, and small teams that want an API, per-unit pricing, and developer sources.