Is Exploding Topics a Good Buzzsumo Alternative?

Buzzsumo is a useful research tool when you want to promote your trend-related content to different media outlets or track your brand mentions online — but what if your goals require a different level of information?

Exploding Topics is a great Buzzsumo alternative to use when you want to conduct targeted research related to product trends, industry shifts, and more. In this guide, I’ll explain how Exploding Topics works and when you might want to consider it as an alternative — or complement to — Buzzsumo.

Quick Comparison: Exploding Topics vs. Buzzsumo

	Exploding Topics	Buzzsumo
Best For	E-commerce product development, digital marketing, market research, competitor analysis	Brand monitoring, content planning, digital PR, influencer marketing
Data Sources	Social media platforms, news outlets, online forums, blogs, websites, Google results, and more	Social media platforms, news outlets, websites, Google results
Unique Features	Trend forecasts that show you how a trend's popularity is expected to change over the next year	A large database of journalists and influencers who can help you amplify your brand's message
Price	Free for limited use; Pro plans starting at $39 per month when billed annually	Plans starting at $159 per month when billed annually

What is Exploding Topics?

Exploding Topics is a trend spotting platform that lets you identify current (and future) trending topics — all while providing much more information than Google Trends alone.

When using Exploding Topics, you can:

• Browse all growing and declining trends in your industry
• View trend forecasts for the next year
• Compare trending products on Amazon and TikTok
• See information about popular startups
• Pinpoint upcoming trends based on seasonality
• See how trends relate to each other
• Read expert trend analysis and reports

How Does Exploding Topics Work?

Exploding Topics organizes trends by industry. If you’re interested in beauty trends, but not fashion trends, you can easily view just the topics you want to see.

You can browse a portion of the database and see basic trend data for free. With an Exploding Topics Pro subscription, you can view more comprehensive information including trend seasonality, volatility, forecasts, and more.

The paid app is available through the Semrush App Center, which makes it a convenient choice for marketers and business owners who use Semrush for search engine optimization (SEO). But anyone can sign up for Exploding Topics Pro; you don’t need to be an existing Semrush subscriber in order to use the trend database.

Where Does Exploding Topics Get Its Data?

Exploding Topics gathers data from a variety of sources, including:

• Media outlets
• Podcasts
• Online forums
• Blog posts
• Company websites
• Social media platforms

The company gathers this information using AI-powered technology, but human experts ultimately refine and verify the data and identify top trends for further analysis.

How Much Does Exploding Topics Pro Cost?

Exploding Topics’ paid plans start at $39 per month when billed annually.

Should You Use Exploding Topics or Buzzsumo?

Buzzsumo and Exploding Topics both have their strengths — the following use cases are where one or both trend tools typically shine.

Brand Mentions and Monitoring

Buzzsumo is the best choice for monitoring your brand in the media and improving the frequency or type of mentions you receive.

The platform includes a database of 700,000 journalists that you can directly pitch with news about your business or products. Buzzsumo even shows you how active each journalist is on social media and what the general audience sentiment is toward the articles that person writes.

Exploding Topics doesn’t offer this feature. You can search for a particular brand or item and see how frequently it’s discussed on different social media platforms, but there’s no media database.

Trendwatching and Discovery

Exploding Topics offers the best dedicated trend tracking solution. While Buzzsumo does let you track specific topics, competitors, and product names, Exploding Topics gives you the complete picture of trends across your industry. You can:

• Spot emerging trends
• Identify which trends are most likely to be affected by seasonality
• See how trends relate to each other
• Track trend popularity across different channels
• Read expert analysis about emerging trends
• Get regular trend reports that keep you up-to-date on critical industry changes

Social Listening

Buzzsumo and Exploding Topics are both a good choice for social listening, though the platforms excel in different ways.

Buzzsumo is great when you need to:

• Monitor how well your social media posts perform on different channels
• Track performance via backlinks
• Find influencers and content creators to support your social media campaigns

Exploding Topics is the best choice when you want to:

• Research trends across an entire industry to develop content ideas
• Evaluate how well content marketing efforts focused on a given trend may work based on social media platform
• Plan content based on seasonal trend and algorithm changes
• Spot emerging e-commerce product trends

Content Marketing

Buzzsumo and Exploding Topics are both very useful for content marketing work that includes developing a content strategy and improving content creation.

Buzzsumo is a nice choice if you need to run a complete content marketing and digital PR program. You can use the tool to:

• View content topics organized by how evergreen they’re likely to be
• Conduct basic keyword research
• Get tips on the best places to distribute content focused on a particular topic
• Browse questions related to different content topics
• Connect with influencers and media outlets to promote your content

Exploding Topics is the preferred trend discovery for content marketers who need to:

• Analyze all emerging and falling trends in an industry to figure out the best possible brand positioning
• Access expert insights about industry trends to better understand how they may affect your marketing efforts
• Review historical data about trends that covers the past 15 years
• Evaluate which trends have high viral content potential over the next year
• Research trends specific to e-commerce entrepreneurs using TikTok Shop or Amazon
• See trend data in the same spot as data from an all-in-one SEO tool (in this case, Semrush)

SEO

Exploding Topics is the tool to use if you’re using trends to support different aspects of an SEO campaign including boosting content discovery, optimizing your appearance in search engine results pages (SERPs), and more.

Every trend detail page includes information about search volume related to that topic. And if you want to go deeper into SERP and keyword metrics, you can easily do so with Semrush. Exploding Topics works inside of the Semrush App Center, so you can use Semrush’s paid or free tools to:

• Conduct in-depth on-page and off-page SEO research
• Curate lists of target keywords for your website
• Evaluate competitors' SERP performance
• Adjust your digital marketing strategy with keyword clustering tools
• Audit your website to improve its speed and Google search ranking over time
• Discover the best content type, format, and intent for each trend or keyword

Product Development

Exploding Topics is the tool that you’ll want to use when your work’s focused on product development. Buzzsumo is mostly geared toward marketing the products you create and sell. Exploding Topics, on the other hand, provides up-to-date metrics and information about:

• Competing SaaS startups
• Trending products on TikTok
• Amazon product sales

This information is incredibly helpful when you want to know exactly what products people are interested in now — and what they’ll want to buy next based on seasonality and other factors. You can even see how popular these products are across other channels, too, including Facebook and Reddit.

General Market Research

Exploding Topics is also a great choice when you want to conduct general market research and figure out what kind of business you should build or invest in. You can freely explore the entire database across industries and see what niches are growing, falling, or stagnating.

Once you pick a niche and begin developing your products, you can then consider adding Buzzsumo into the mix to access information about influencers and media outlets.

Try Exploding Topics for Free

You can try Exploding Topics for free and see how it fits into your workflow in place of or alongside Buzzsumo. Getting started is easy — activate your seven-day free trial of Exploding Topics Pro, then grab our exclusive Semrush free trial promo code to add more great marketing data into the mix.