The Best 18 Sentiment Analysis Tools in 2023

Have you ever received a text from a family member and couldn't tell if they were joking or not?

Text messages — amongst other forms of written communication — often lack the ability to convey emotions and tone, making it challenging to understand the intent behind a message. This is especially problematic for businesses trying to analyze customer feedback.

Sentiment analysis tools can interpret the tone and intent of text messages, allowing businesses to respond effectively to feedback. In this post, we'll explore what sentiment analysis tools are and provide a list of the best options available.

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a way to figure out the emotions and opinions expressed in written text. It uses technology to analyze words and determine if they are positive, negative, or neutral.

By doing this, businesses can learn what people think about their products or services and make improvements based on the feedback. There are tools that help understand how customers feel and use that information to make things better to perform it.

What is a sentiment analysis tool?

A sentiment analysis tool is software that analyzes text conversations and evaluates the tone, intent, and emotion behind each message.

By digging deeper into these elements, the tool uncovers more context from your conversations and helps your customer service team accurately analyze feedback.

This is particularly useful for brands that actively engage with their customers on social media, live chat, and email where it can be difficult to determine the sentiment behind a message.

Benefits of Adopting a Sentiment Analysis Tool

If your company provides an omni-channel experience, a sentiment analysis tool can save your team valuable time organizing and reporting customer feedback.

Rather than going through each tweet and comment one-by-one, a sentiment analysis tool processes your feedback and automatically interprets whether it's positive, negative, or neutral.

Then, it compounds your data and displays it in charts or graphs that clearly outline trends in your customer feedback.

This not only gives your team accurate information to work with, but frees up time for your employees to work on other tasks in their day-to-day workflow.

Now that you know what a sentiment analysis tool is and how it can benefit your business, let's take a look at some of the best tools available.

1. HubSpot's Service Hub

HubSpot's Service Hub tools have a customer feedback feature that helps analyze and understand qualitative survey responses. It breaks down the responses and determines if they are positive or negative using NPS® surveys which clarify the sentiment of the customer's review. The results are displayed on a user-friendly dashboard with charts and graphs that give an overall view of customer satisfaction. 

Additionally, Service Hub allows for individual analysis of customers, integrating with your CRM so you can review survey responses from specific contacts in your database. This helps identify unhappy customers and enables your team to follow up with them after a negative experience. 

Remember, if your company fails to meet customer expectations, 58% of customers may stop doing business with you. This provides an opportunity for your team to intervene and prevent potential customer loss.

Price: $45/month for Starter Plan, $360/month for Professional Plan, $1,200/month for Enterprise Plan

2. Idiomatic

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Idiomatic builds customer sentiment analysis models based on your specific business. Idiomatic's sentiment labels are calibrated to the specific channels of your customer feedback.

For each data source (app reviews, support tickets, etc.) Idiomatic has different sentiment analysis models. As a result, you can track more accurate sentiments by channel.

With Idiomatic, you can also track changes in sentiment by channel and customer segments over time. As a result, you can evaluate channel and customer segment performance and improve issues causing frustration and negative sentiment.

Price: $199/month

3. Talkwalker

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Talkwalker's "Quick Search" is a sentiment analysis tool that's part of a larger customer service platform.

This tool works best with your social media channels because it can tell you exactly how people feel about your company's social media accounts.

Quick Search looks at your mentions, comments, engagements, and other data to provide your team with an extensive breakdown of how customers are responding to your social media activity.

This helps your team plan and produce effective campaigns that captivate your target audience.

Price: $9,000/year for Listening Plan, Analytics Plan pricing available upon request, Research Plan pricing available upon request

4. Reputation

Powered by NLP (Natural Language Processing), the Reputation platform breaks down customer sentiment and analyzes feedback to highlight trends and topics in real-time.

Their advanced text analytics determine what people are commenting on and whether the comments are positive or negative. This allows users to surface customer pain points across multiple digital channels or locations.

Price: Available upon request

5. Repustate

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Repustate has a sophisticated text-analysis API that accurately assesses the sentiment behind customer responses.

Its software can pick up on short-form text and slang like lol, rofl, and smh. It also analyzes emojis and determines their intention within the context of a message.

For example, if I use a ;) emoji, Repustate tells you if that's a positive or negative symbol based on what it finds in the rest of the conversation.

Repustate also lets you customize your API's rules to have it filter for language that may be specific to your industry.

If there's slang or alternate meanings for words, you can program those subtleties into Repustate's system. This way you have full control over how the software analyzes your customers' feedback.

Price: $299/month for Standard Plan

6. Brand24

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Brand24 is a media monitoring tool that automatically performs sentiment analysis around your brand or any topic related to your business.

It collects publicly available mentions from the Internet including social media, blogs, forums, websites, news sites, customer reviews, videos, podcasts, and other places.

Brand24 uses advanced machine learning algorithms and NLP techniques that analyze the text in real-time and assign the appropriate sentiment based on the words used.

With sentiment analysis, you can quickly check which mentions are positive, negative, or neutral. Their robust analytics allow you to see how often people talk about your brand and competitors, social media reach, top influencers, and more.

Price: Free 14-day trial, then $49/month for Individual Plan, $129/month for Team Plan, $179/month for Pro Plan, or $348 for Enterprise Plan

7. Meltwater

Meltwater's sentiment analysis utilizes advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to evaluate the sentiment expressed in social media posts, articles, and other online content.

The Meltwater suite offers comprehensive sentiment analysis providing text processing, lexicon-based analysis, contextual understanding, weighting and scoring, and aggregation and summarization.

There are several advantages to using Meltwater for sentiment analysis: comprehensive data coverage, accurate sentiment interpretation, customizable sentiment analysis, real-time monitoring, comparative analysis, and integrated analytics and reporting.

Price: Book a demo for pricing

8. Lexalytics

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Lexalytics offers a text-analysis tool that's focused on explaining why a customer is responding to your business in a certain way.

It uses natural language processing to parse the text, then runs a sentiment analysis to determine the intent behind the customer's message.

Finally, Lexalytics concludes the process by compiling the information it derives into an easy-to-read and shareable display.

While most sentiment analysis tools tell you how customers feel, Lexalytics differentiates itself by telling you why customers feel the way that they do.

Price: Pricing available on request

9. SentiSum

SentiSum can be used to centralize all your voice of customer insights and make them available to wider teams in the company.

Integrating directly with leading support platforms like Zendesk, Dixa, Hubspot, and Intercom, SentiSum's clever AI learns how your customers express themselves to give accurate insights into customer sentiment.

With a simple one-click integration, SentiSum quickly identifies the top reasons for customer contacts, sentiment, and the true drivers of NPS and CSAT in just a few minutes.

By gaining a deeper understanding of customers' sentiments, you can respond quickly and effectively to their needs, improve their experience, and increase their loyalty.

Price: $1000/month

10. Critical Mention

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Critical Mention is different than the other options on this list because it analyzes news and other publications that reference your business. This way, you can see the sentiment behind stories that are rapidly surfacing to the public.

Since news coverage is now a 24/7 affair, it helps to have software that can monitor the internet and alert you to any buzz your business is making.

Critical Mention can even alert you to stories that appear on television. You can search through video files for mentions of your company and easily clip videos to share with other employees.

If your business gets positively mentioned on a live broadcast, quickly access the video segment and share it on your social media channels. This can help you create effective online content that capitalizes on timely marketing opportunities.

Price: Pricing available on request

11. Brandwatch

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One of the coolest features that Brandwatch provides is its "image insights" tool which can identify images associated with your brand.

For example, say you upload an image of your brand's logo. Brandwatch surfs the web for images that include that logo. Then, it compiles the images into a list and highlights exactly where your brand's logo is appearing.

Additionally, Brandwatch's software provides interesting insights into each image it finds. This includes metrics like mention volume, aggregate followers, and latest activity.

With Brandwatch, your team sees where your brand's images are appearing and how those images are performing with your target audience.

Price: Pricing available upon request

12. Social Mention

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Social Mention is a free social media analysis tool that provides users with one of the best bangs for their buck.

First, users don't have to create an account or download software. Instead, you just need to navigate to their site and search for your keyword like you would with any search engine.

Upon entering your search, Social Mention pulls data about your keyword from every social media site and compiles it into a comprehensive summary.

This summary isn't primitive, either. It can tell you useful things like the ratio of people speaking positively about your keyword versus those who are speaking of it negatively.

It can also tell you what percentage of people are likely to continue mentioning your keyword and how popular your brand is on social media.

While you can't really analyze individual pieces of data, Social Mention is a great option for people looking to get a brief synopsis of their social media reputation.

Price: Free

13. CallRail

CallRail's conversation intelligence software harnesses the power of sentiment analysis to offer businesses more profound insights into their customer phone calls. Their sentiment analysis feature evaluates the emotional tone behind words spoken by customers. By analyzing the words and phrases used in phone call conversations, CallRail's system can determine whether an interaction is positive, negative, or neutral. This allows businesses to proactively identify and address customer pain points and assess their marketing strategies' overall effectiveness.

Through the application of sentiment analysis, CallRail provides businesses with a powerful tool to optimize customer relationships and enhance their sales and marketing strategies.

Price: Free for 14-days, $85/month for Call Tracking and Conversation Intelligence

14. Sentiment Analyzer

Working with Sentiment Analyzer is a breeze. Simply navigate to their site, copy the text you want to analyze, and paste the text into the box. Select "Analyze!" and the website will evaluate your text and give you a "sentiment score."

While that might sound like magic, Sentiment Analyzer uses "computational linguistics and text mining" to determine the sentiment behind your piece of text.

It then compounds and compares its findings to produce an overall score. This makes it a great tool for companies looking to quickly decipher the intent behind a confusing response from a customer.

Price: Free

15. MAXG

MAXG is a HubSpot integration that analyzes customer data found in your CRM.

It uses industry benchmarks to compare your company's information against others in your marketplace, so you know how your business is performing compared to your competitors.

MAXG can analyze a wide range of quantitative and qualitative data, including CTA's, blog posts, and emails.

And, with its insightful recommendations tool, it won't just provide you with a clear look at how customers are interpreting your content, but it'll also make suggestions for how you can improve engagement.

Price: Free for Basic Plan, $29/month for Pro Plan, $99/month for Agency Plan

16. Social Searcher

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Social Searcher is a social media monitoring platform that includes a free sentiment analysis tool.

All you have to do is search for a keyword, hashtag, or username, and Social Searcher will tell you whether or not the buzz surrounding this topic is positive or negative.

It also breaks reports down by social media platforms, so you can see exactly how your brand is performing across different apps and channels.

Price: Free to Start, 3.49 €/month for Basic Plan, 8.49 €/month for Standard Plan, 19.49 €/month for Professional Plan

17. Rosette

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Rosette is great for international businesses because it can review text-based data in over 30 different languages.

This means you won't have to translate conversations before you upload them, which is not only faster but ensures greater accuracy.

Since most customers will use shorthand or slang, third-party translation tools can inadvertently change the meaning of their text.

With Rosette, it's system is built to analyze text in the language that it's written, so you won't lose any valuable feedback even if it's written informally.

Price: $100/month for Starter Plan, $400/month for Medium Plan, $1,000/month for Large Plan

18. MonkeyLearn

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MonkeyLearn is a sentiment analysis tool that's easy to customize.

All you have to do is create categorization tags then manually highlight different parts of the text to show what content belongs to each tag. Over time, the software learns on its own and can process multiple files simultaneously.

MonkeyLearn also provides its customers with a free "Word Cloud" tool that tells them what words are used most frequently within each categorization tag.

This can help businesses discover common customer roadblocks by looking for repeat mentions of specific products or services.

If you notice one product is consistently listed under a negative categorization tag, this would suggest there's an issue with that product that customers are unhappy about.

Price:Starts Free, $299/month for Team Plan, $999/month for Business Plan

We hope you found this list useful as you embark on your sentiment analysis journey.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

Editor's note: This article was originally published February 2021 and has since been updated for comprehensiveness.