13 best sentiment analysis tools (options + pricing)

You know your business needs a sentiment analysis tool. What you don’t need is another jargon-filled landing page promising ‘AI-powered synergy’ and ‘revolutionary customer insights.’

You just want the facts: Does the tool work? What does it cost? Will it actually help you understand if your customers are happy?

The good news is we’ve done the heavy lifting for you. We’ve collected the 13 best sentiment analysis tools for voice, text, and social media data (complete with pros, cons, and pricing) so you can get answers fast.

What is a sentiment analysis tool?

Sentiment analysis tools use AI and machine learning to determine how a person feels during a conversation. They can scan different types of customer interactions — think phone, chat, email, reviews, and social media platforms — and assign overall sentiment scores like ‘positive,’ ‘negative,’ or ‘neutral.’

Not all sentiment analysis tools interpret emotions the same way. For example, OpenPhone uses AI and natural language processing (NLP) to pick up on customer sentiment using data gathered from call transcripts. Other tools scan for keywords like ‘frustrated’ or ‘satisfied,’ then assign sentiment scores.

What can you do with sentiment analysis tools?

Hint: they’re not just for hashtags anymore.

Thanks to advancements in AI and machine learning, sentiment analysis tools can help you:

• Improve customer support: If you’re using a phone system with sentiment analysis, you can instantly label content in calls and see why customers are calling. That way, you can spot negative call drivers like slow response times or repeated questions and look for ways to fix them — like building a better FAQ.

• Prevent churn before it happens: It’s not just what customers say but how they say it. Sentiment analysis picks up subtle cues of an unhappy customer — even if you didn’t notice them — so you can follow up before they leave.
• Manage social media mentions: Worried your brand might be trending for the wrong reasons? Sentiment analysis tools let you track public opinion in real time and respond before issues blow up.
• Build a better product: You’re already talking to customers — why not use those insights? Sentiment analysis helps identify how customers feel about your product and fast track development on commonly requested features.
• Perform market research: If customers are unhappy with a competitor’s service, you have an opportunity to win them over. Sentiment tools help you spot dissatisfied users and show them why your product is better.
• Track brand reputation: Advanced sentiment analysis gathers customer reviews in one place so you can celebrate wins and address issues — without combing through forums or review sites.

13 best sentiment analysis tools

We broke the top sentiment analysis tools down into three different categories:

• Best for phone calls
• Best for text analysis
• Best for social media posts

Best sentiment analysis tools for phone calls

Let’s start with tools for voice call sentiment analysis:

1. OpenPhone: Best for small businesses

Pricing: OpenPhone’s pricing starts at $23 per user per month for a Business plan with AI call summaries and transcripts

OpenPhone is a user-friendly VoIP phone system designed to help small business owners build better customer relationships. Our AI sentiment analysis tools let you tag, summarize, and organize calls — giving you the insights you need to make better decisions for your team and customers.

Smarter call management with AI

With AI call tagging (available on the Scale plan), you can create custom tags that automatically categorize calls by topic or sentiment. Then, use call views to filter and review calls with specific tags (like ‘Billing’ or ‘Negative sentiment’). This helps you identify recurring problems and trends, making it easier to manage customer interactions.

AI call summaries generate bulleted discussion points for each speaker, allowing you to quickly review any call and create action items. This streamlines after-call work — helping your team resolve issues faster and potentially prevent customer churn.

Seamless integrations and automation

Need to connect the rest of your tech stack? OpenPhone integrates with 7,000+ third-party platforms, including Make and Zapier. This makes it easier to automate specific touchpoints, like following up after a negative review.

But OpenPhone offers much more than sentiment analysis. Our Business plan also comes with:

• On-demand and automatic call recording with unlimited storage
• AI call transcriptions for a quick review of long conversations
• Shared numbers so teams can share responsibility for calling and texting
• Shared team inboxes to keep contacts, messages, and sentiment tags organized
• AI-powered text message response generator to help craft responses to tricky messages

Sign up today for a seven-day free trial and experience the power of AI-driven business communication.

2. Dialpad: Best for call centers

Pricing: Dialpad’s pricing starts at $15 per user per month for call transcriptions

Dialpad is a business phone system built for large contact centers. It offers two major sentiment analysis tools: call transcriptions that recap negative and positive feedback and live AI sentiment analysis that monitors calls in real time.

Unfortunately, Dialpad’s base plan (Connect) only includes call transcriptions. For real-time sentiment analysis, you’ll need to upgrade to the Support or Sell plans, which can cost up to $150 per user per month. The base plan also has frustrating limitations, like no way to buy additional numbers or message customers outside the US and Canada.

💡Related: Dialpad SMS limitations

3. Aircall: Best for talk-to-listen ratios

Pricing: Aircall plans start at $30 per user per month plus $9 per license for the AI add-on

Aircall is a cloud phone service offering sales AI for sentiment analysis. You can purchase the AI add-on for $9 extra per user per month or use the AI voice API to customize your own solution. 

Out of the box, Aircall includes built-in coaching tools such as talk-to-listen ratios and customer sentiment scoring. You can also track topics and competitor mentions using call recording AI tools and find opportunities to improve your service.

But as mentioned earlier, Aircall’s AI tools aren’t included on any plan — you’re required to purchase add-on licenses for all sentiment analysis tools. Plus, advanced analytics and unlimited storage aren’t included in lower-tier Aircall plans.

4. SentiSum: Best for multichannel insights

Pricing: SentiSum starts at $3,000 per month for 5,000 conversations

SentiSum is a customer experience analytics platform that uses artificial intelligence to collect, analyze, and report on customer conversations. It integrates with multiple channels — phone calls, text messages, emails, help desk tickets, and survey responses — and identifies key themes behind customer emotions.

For example, SentiSum might flag a spike in customers mentioning long wait times to get appointments. You can use this data to adjust your team’s scheduling process or offer quicker service options to improve sentiment.

But compared to out-of-the-box solutions like OpenPhone, SentiSum might be complex to set up. It can also be prohibitively expensive, especially if you have fewer than 5,000 customer conversations per month.

💡Related: How to use AI to analyze phone calls

Best tools for text-based sentiment analysis

These tools can analyze text from emails, messages, surveys, and more to extract valuable insights.

5. Lexalytics: Best for multilingual analysis

Pricing: Custom quote

Lexalytics is a text analytics API that uses NLP and machine learning to analyze customer feedback, surveys, and other text data. It can also scan documents for sentiment phrases and themes so you can identify areas for improvement — like complaints about ‘slow service’ or ‘unflattering colors.’

Lexalytics is ideal for international businesses, with support for 30+ languages and dialects. This allows data analysts to process large volumes of text — such as social media comments and survey responses — and extract insights in minutes.

That said, Lexalytics may be too complex for smaller teams without a dedicated analyst. Plus, pricing isn’t publicly listed, so be prepared for a potentially high price tag.

6. Medallia: Best for video analysis

Pricing: Custom quote

Medallia is an experience management platform specializing in customer experience, employee experience, and market research. It also offers AI-powered text mining that analyzes feedback from surveys, reviews, and support tickets.

One standout feature is its video analysis capabilities, which can be useful for service-based businesses. Medallia can timestamp key moments, flag negative sentiment for manager review, and analyze facial expressions and on-screen objects to gauge customer reactions.

However, setting up a system like this can be complex, and without an internal IT team, outsourcing setup could be costly. Pricing is also on the higher end, with no public rates available — you’ll need to contact sales for a quote.

7. Google NLP API: Best for DIY

Pricing: Varies

Google’s NLP API (also called Cloud Natural Language) is ideal for building AI-powered applications that collect and analyze customer feedback. It delivers high-quality sentiment analysis in the right hands, but unlocking its full potential requires advanced coding skills.

Beyond sentiment analysis, Google’s NLP API offers syntax parsing, entity recognition, and text classification. It also integrates seamlessly with third-party tools and workflow builders like Make.

But as you might imagine, Google’s Cloud Natural Language isn’t very plug-and-play. It requires API knowledge and could take months or even years to train a custom model. If you’re a smaller team or want a simple analysis tool, Cloud Natural Language is likely overkill.

8. Microsoft Azure: Best for unstructured data

Pricing: Varies

Like Google, Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform that offers an API for natural language processing (NLP). If your business manages loads of unstructured text data, you can use Azure to train an opinion mining system that tracks customer sentiment in texts, emails, and online reviews.

Azure works best for teams already embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem since it seamlessly connects with Microsoft Excel, Power BI, and Teams. The downside? It requires intensive technical setup. Plus, pricing can get expensive fast for high-volume users.

Best tools for social media sentiment analysis

You can use these tools for social media monitoring to capitalize on trends and deal with negative sentiments quickly.

9. Brand24: Best for emotion analysis

Pricing: Starts at $149 per month

Brand24 offers real-time social media and web monitoring that detects, tracks, and analyzes mentions of your brand across the web. But its real claim to fame is emotion analysis, which detects specific emotions customers associate with your brand — such as admiration, anger, disgust, fear, joy, and sadness.

With Brand24, you can set up alerts for negative sentiment spikes, allowing you to quickly react when more people than usual are tagging your brand on social media. It also helps you prioritize responses by influence score so you can address negative feedback from influential reviewers faster.

However, Brand24 doesn’t track as much historical data as its competitors since it’s mostly designed to collect real-time insights. Plus, users have reported issues with the software’s ability to filter spam posts, which can skew your results or trigger false alarms.

10. Talkwalker: Best for multimedia mentions

Pricing: Custom quote

Talkwalker, which is a part of Hootsuite, is a consumer intelligence platform for social listening, media monitoring, and social benchmarking. Hootsuite itself does offer sentiment analysis, but Talkwalker listens beyond social media (think news pieces, blogs, and forum posts related to your business).

Want to see how your social media strategy stacks up against competitors? Talkwalker’s benchmarking tools let you compare performance against industry standards. That way, you can make adjustments to better align with your audience and avoid your competitors’ mistakes.

But you should know that Talkwalker doesn’t list its pricing online, and some users say it can be pricey for small businesses. If you’re looking for a more affordable social listening tool, Hootsuite might be the better fit (which we cover below).

11. Sprout Social: Best for notifications and alerts

Pricing: Starts at $199 per user per month plus add-on costs for AI

Sprout Social is a social media intelligence tool that uses deep learning algorithms to track customer opinions. One of its standout features is custom spike alerts, which notify you of sudden changes in volume or sentiment around specific topics or brand mentions.

Like Talkwalker and Brand24, Sprout Social lets you filter messages and posts by sentiment so you can prioritize responses to more urgent conversations. It also offers multilingual sentiment analysis: you can scan posts in multiple languages and respond thoughtfully to everyone in your market.

But Sprout Social is fairly pricey compared to other social listening tools. It’s also missing a few integrations compared to its competitors, including channels like Quora, Twitch, and Medium.

12. Hootsuite: Best for one-person teams

Pricing: Starts at $99 per month

Hootsuite is a social media management company offering sentiment analysis for social media platforms. Its built-in social listening tool lets you see trending topics, track brand mentions, and analyze competitor sentiments. 

Hootsuite integrates with every major social platform, from mainstays like Facebook to newer players like Threads. It’s ideal for businesses already using Hootsuite since sentiment analysis is baked into every plan.

But keep in mind Hootsuite is a management platform, not an AI platform — its sentiment analysis tools lack the depth of tools like Brand24. Plus, its best AI tools (like image recognition and peak detection) are only available as add-ons with undisclosed pricing.

13. Meltwater: Best for PR professionals

Pricing: Custom quote

Meltwater is a consumer intelligence company that focuses on AI-driven brand monitoring and social listening. It’s designed to track user sentiment across social media, news, and blogs so you can keep a close eye on public opinion.

For example, you can use Meltwater to predict and manage potential PR crises, like detecting negative mentions of your CEO. But you can also use Meltwater for positive sentiments, like capitalizing on successful marketing campaigns by reaching out to journalists or influencers in your market.

You should know that Meltwater doesn’t list public pricing either, so you have to contact their team for a custom quote. Online reviewers warn it can be pricey for teams with basic monitoring needs, which means it may not be a fit if you’re only managing a few social platforms.

Start analyzing customer sentiment with OpenPhone

There are dozens of sentiment analysis tools on the market. The question is, which one’s right for you?

If you’re a small and growing business looking to analyze phone calls efficiently, you might consider OpenPhone — the #1-rated business phone system on G2.

OpenPhone makes it easy to understand how customers are feeling with AI tools that organize calls by topic and sentiment in seconds. You can track common trends, dig deeper into customer emotions, and keep an eye on their attitudes toward your business, products, and services.

All that’s left is to peek behind the curtain.

Sign up today for our seven-day free trial to start analyzing customer sentiment in minutes.

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