If you want to understand how customers feel about your brand, sentiment analysis is the key.
Sentiment analysis not only tells you what people are saying about your brand (even when they don't tag you) but also if the overall tone of the conversation is good, bad, or somewhere in the middle.
Successful and thorough sentiment analysis is all about monitoring all brand mentions on social media platforms, tracking customer satisfaction, looking out for negative feedback, and listening in on customer conversations to gain insights about public opinion.
But without the right tools, sentiment analysis is a tricky task. To successfully tackle it, you’ll need a powerful and easy-to-use sentiment analysis tool. This will properly track and analyze all those brand mentions, automatically sorting them by customer sentiment.
Fortunately, there are many sentiment analysis tools out there, each designed to make the job of tracking customer feedback a lot easier. Let's take a look at them
What is a sentiment analysis tool?
At their core, sentiment analysis tools crunch textual data (such as social media posts or online reviews) to summarize the emotions and opinions expressed by customers. They're sometimes called text analysis tools.
These tools use natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret the emotions behind written content and provide a sentiment score (positive, negative, or neutral).
The main advantage of using one of these tools is the speed at which they can assess brand perception.
Some advanced tools will even alert users to nuanced changes in sentiment, which might mean that a controversy or crisis is brewing. And that means they can help you avoid brand-damaging PR surprises.
Different types of sentiment analysis tools
Before you decide which sentiment analysis tool to choose, let’s take a look at the main options on the market and how each can transform your approach to customer feedback, make sense of otherwise unstructured data, and analyze customer sentiment with ease.
Enterprise solutions
These are big-name sentiment analysis tools used by some of the world’s leading brands. They come with a subscription cost but offer an impressive array of features, such as in-depth sentiment analysis, natural language processing, and actionable insights.
Innovative newcomers
These emerging tools are powered by new technologies and designed to deliver detailed customer insights and pinpoint pain points. They're powered by AI and use machine learning algorithms to uncover new data patterns.
Free sentiment analysis tools
Though there's not many out there, free sentiment analysis tools can be game changers for small businesses on a limited budget. Their features may be sparse, but they can still do a limited job of scanning social media data and providing a simple sentiment score to inform your marketing campaigns.
The best sentiment analysis tools on the market
With so many sentiment analysis tools to choose from, the choice can sometimes feel daunting.
To help, we’ve compiled a list of the best sentiment analysis tools on the market for 2025.
1. Brandwatch
If you’re looking to take your social media sentiment analysis to the next level, Brandwatch Consumer Research is the tool for you. Brandwatch can handle even the most complex language, slang, and dialects – and it even helps users analyze the emotional context of emojis.
In fact, Brandwatch enables you to delve into emotion distribution analysis, which means it will capture emotions such as anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise surrounding your brand or related topics. This level of precision is great for creating targeted marketing campaigns and addressing specific customer concerns.
You'll access everything through a dashboard that provides a detailed breakdown of sentiment and emotions. You'll also get an overview of all of the emotions related to your brand over time, helping you understand nuanced shifts in customer feelings.
Reasons to choose this tool
Brandwatch is a multilingual sentiment analysis tool that can even analyze sentiment from local slang and emojis, making it ideal for global brands.
It also provides an extra layer of detail by breaking down conversations into specific emotions (for example, you might see emotions like anger and joy rather than just positive, negative, or neutral), which is brilliant for planning highly targeted marketing and PR strategies.
Brandwatch also has state-of-the-art deep learning and NLP techniques under the hood, which means more sophisticated sentiment analysis that handles complex language and slang.
It goes beyond text by using image recognition – with an Image Insights tool that can recognize logos or scenes in images and analyze the sentiment of those image mentions (for example, a photo of your product shared with a sad emoji would count as negative sentiment).
2. Lexalytics
You may not have heard of this tool because it’s not a direct-to-consumer product – rather, it’s a sentiment analysis API that operates behind the scenes.
In fact, the Lexalytics engine powers sentiment analysis in many market-leading tools (including some Microsoft and Cision products).
Lexalytics also offers advanced NLP features like tokenization and part-of-speech tagging, which brands can use to improve their sentiment scoring, categorization, and topic analysis. In other words, it doesn’t just give you a sentiment score – it gives you the building blocks to analyze text in-depth and tailor the analysis to your needs.
Reasons to choose this tool
This tool is available as an API and on-premise solution – so it's more often integrated by product development and engineering teams than used directly by marketers or PR professionals.
It's adaptable to your specific sentiment analysis needs – you can adjust sentiment scoring models, incorporate custom dictionaries or industry terms, and set the scale or categories of sentiment you care about.
One particular plus is that it can be trained on industry-specific data to improve accuracy in niche domains (for example, finance or healthcare). It's one of the few tools that offers aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), which means it's able to attribute sentiment to a specific aspect of a product or service.
3. Brand24
Next up is Brand24, a comprehensive social media monitoring and sentiment analysis tool. It's known for giving a Reputation Score, which gives you a quick snapshot of how your brand is perceived overall at any given time. It's similar to a credit score, and it's particularly useful for getting a quick overview of your financial situation.
Reasons to choose this tool
Brand24 casts a wide net across social media and the web, helping you catch brand mentions (and their sentiment) from places you might otherwise overlook – from mainstream platforms to niche forums.
It also helps you decipher which referral sources are sending positive vs. negative sentiment your way. In other words, you can see if traffic coming from certain sites or platforms is skewing mostly positive, while other sources might be bringing in more negative discussions about your brand.
4. MonkeyLearn
MonkeyLearn is a cloud-based text analysis tool known for its ability to integrate with other software you might already use – such as Zendesk (for support tickets) or Google Sheets – making it easy to pull in text data and push out sentiment insights without heavy lifting.
For a large company with a skilled technical team, MonkeyLearn provides an API that allows you to seamlessly connect these sentiment analysis capabilities to your existing data stack or products.
However, even if you don’t have a tech team or any coding skills, you can still build a custom sentiment classifier using MonkeyLearn’s simple point-and-click interface. In other words, it’s both powerful for developers and friendly for non-developers.
Reasons to choose this tool
MonkeyLearn is a great option if you're looking for an accessible interface where non-programmers can train their own sentiment classifier or use pre-trained models – since there's no coding required to get started.
It integrates well with many other platforms, enabling sentiment analysis to fit seamlessly into your existing workflows. Plus, an API is available for when you want to scale up or build more customized integrations.
5. Hootsuite Insights
Social media management platform Hootsuite has recently announced its acquisition of the social listening specialist Talkwalker.
This means that social listening and advanced sentiment analysis are part of the Hootsuite dashboard – a platform brands use to manage and schedule posts across social networks. Hootsuite has had basic listening and sentiment features for years, but the integration of Talkwalker’s technology is expected to take these capabilities to the next level.
Reasons to choose this tool
While Hootsuite’s advanced sentiment features are brand new and evolving, it's expected that this tool will greatly extend the range of platforms Hootsuite can currently monitor.
It's also expected to provide more nuanced sentiment and context analysis for posts and mentions.
The goal is to minimize the need to learn multiple tools – allowing a unified approach, which means insights are directly connected to actions (for instance, you might see negative sentiment on the dashboard, then immediately respond or schedule a corrective post in the same platform).
6. Talkwalker
You can use Talkwalker without diving into the full Hootsuite suite. It specializes in real-time listening across social media, news sites, blogs, and other online sources.
It also offers trend analysis, image recognition, and more – giving you a detailed overview of public perception.
Reasons to choose this tool
Talkwalker's highly customizable dashboards let you slice data by region, language, or topic, and you can set up instant alerts for sentiment spikes (for example, an alert if negative sentiment doubles within an hour).
It also offers sentiment analysis in a wide array of languages and allows you to analyze sentiment trends over time and compare them against historical benchmarks or competitors’ sentiment scores.
Users can access extensive reporting and collaboration features, making it easier for teams to share meaningful insights and align responses.
7. Qualtrics XM
Qualtrics XM (Experience Management) is a platform geared toward understanding customer experience, and it comes with sentiment analysis capabilities for text feedback.
Unlike pure social media tools, Qualtrics XM is often used to analyze survey responses, customer support conversations, product reviews, and other direct feedback channels.
You can use it to centralize feedback from various sources and automatically gauge sentiment. It can help you understand what drives customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction at different touchpoints of the customer journey.
Reasons to choose this tool
Qualtrics XM will help you gather and analyze sentiment from surveys, support tickets, chat conversations, social media, product reviews, and more – while using advanced NLP to detect sentiment and specific emotions.
You also get some thematic analysis, whereby feedback is automatically grouped into themes (for example, lots of negative sentiment around “billing” or “mobile app”) so you can identify what’s driving sentiment scores.
Customizable CX dashboards will also let you display sentiment trends alongside other experience metrics, allowing you to correlate sentiment with overall customer satisfaction.
8. Sprout Social
Like other sentiment analysis tools, Sprout Social allows users to perform sentiment analysis across major social platforms and review sites. It can also analyze the sentiment of customer feedback via email.
The Sprout Social dashboard identifies and displays the sentiment of incoming messages (positive, neutral, or negative) so teams can check the state of customer opinions at a glance.
Reasons to choose this tool
This tool brings together mentions from social media, reviews, and even email into one place and layers on sentiment analysis – which is great for a holistic view of brand communications.
It also uses AI to instantly flag surges in negative sentiment (including emoji cues), which helps teams respond quickly and appropriately to emerging issues.
You'll see side-by-side sentiment comparisons with competitors so you can spot where you stand in your industry and earmark areas for improvement.
9. Medallia
Medallia is another heavyweight in the customer experience (CX) management space, offering strong sentiment analysis as part of its feedback and experience analytics platform.
Its text analytics engine uses AI to sift through all the comments and conversations, determining not only the sentiment but also the key themes and emotions.
In essence, Medallia helps large organizations continuously listen to what customers are saying and feeling and then take action on those insights in real-time. Its sentiment analysis can automatically highlight unhappy customers or systemic issues from mountains of feedback that no human team could manually review in full.
Reasons to choose this tool
Medallia’s sentiment analysis is part of a larger customer experience platform, providing a comprehensive view — sentiment is tied to specific stores, products, or employees, for example. This makes it easier to know exactly where to act.
It not only analyzes sentiment but also nudges you to respond. With instant alerts for negative sentiment and tools to follow up with dissatisfied customers, Medallia helps close the feedback loop quickly.
10. IBM Watson NLU
IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is an AI service from IBM that analyzes text to extract insights, including sentiment.
Unlike the other tools on this list, Watson NLU is more of a developer-oriented service – it’s an API you can send text to and get structured data back. Essentially, IBM Watson NLU provides the brains for sentiment analysis that you can plug into your own applications or data processing pipelines.
One of the advantages of IBM Watson NLU is its strong support for multiple languages and its ability to analyze not just short social media snippets but also longer documents like articles or reports for sentiment and intent.
It’s part of the broader IBM Watson suite of AI tools, renowned for sophisticated machine learning capabilities.
Reasons to choose this tool
Watson NLU doesn’t just tell you sentiment; it also provides additional context – such as entities, keywords, and emotions – which can be extremely insightful when processing complex texts or trying to understand why something is positive or negative.
It’s a strong choice for analyzing text in many languages and from various sources. Developers can use the same API to analyze everything from a tweet to a full news article.
You can also combine it with other Watson services (like Watson Assistant for chatbots) to create powerful, AI-driven customer experience solutions.
11. SentiStrength
SentiStrength is another tool that differs slightly from the others on this list – it's lightweight, free, and performs basic sentiment analysis.
Unlike online sentiment analysis tools, it’s primarily a downloadable program (for Windows, though it can run on other operating systems via compatibility layers). It is also available as an open-source package and a paid API.
It's designed to estimate the strength of positive and negative sentiment in short texts, especially social media content.
What makes SentiStrength unique is its scoring system: it outputs two scores for a given text – one for positive sentiment and one for negative sentiment. This dual scoring reflects the idea that a piece of text can convey both positive and negative aspects simultaneously.
Reasons to choose this tool
SentiStrength is one of the few sentiment analysis tools that’s free to use for many purposes (especially academic or personal use). There's also no need to upload data to the cloud, which is useful for maintaining privacy or for conducting offline analysis.
For those who need to integrate it into a larger system, a paid API version is available, allowing you to send data to SentiStrength on a server and receive sentiment scores back automatically.
The last word on sentiment analysis
So, there you have it – all the sentiment analysis tools that are worth your attention in 2025.
Whether you’re a small business or a global enterprise, these tools can give you the insights you need to understand customer sentiment at a glance and use that power to make clever business decisions.
Whether you choose Brandwatch or another sentiment analysis system, each tool has its own strengths: some are all-in-one solutions great for comprehensive social listening, and others excel at analyzing direct customer feedback. Although they may be less common, it is possible to access tools with limited sentiment scoring if you're on a tight budget. All will give you an idea of your brand reputation.
As you choose the right sentiment analysis tool for your needs, consider the scale of your data, the channels you care about, your budget, and your team’s technical capability. With the right pick, you’ll be well-equipped to truly understand your audience’s feelings – and that's a must-have superpower in any business strategy.
