Top 6 GWI Alternatives & Competitors (2024)

GWI helps you segment your potential audience into different demographic segments, isolating the wants and needs of these segments. The result? You’ll know exactly what your brand has to do to appeal to the right people.

Just one teensy problem. Not everyone wants to use GWI.

Maybe you have pricing concerns. Maybe you’re not sure about the usability. Or maybe you simply want different features, exploring beyond audience insights into the trends that are driving your industry.

That's why we've put together a list of the top GWI alternatives in 2024:

1. Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics uses AI to monitor social media platforms, online marketplaces, news outlets, podcasts, and…well, suffice it to say, it monitors a lot.

And it’s always looking for new trends. Our analysts then dissect these AI finds to spot opportunities with long-term business value.

For example, here’s a consumer trend that’s currently seeing quite a bit of traction.

We first discovered this trend in January 2021. Well before it went mainstream.

Why Exploding Topics?

With GWI, you need to play around with audience segmentation features to discover what people are thinking.

But why not go straight to the source? Exploding Topics leverages AI to see what people are already discussing. This brings trend topics to the surface and eliminates any guesswork on your end.

For example, Exploding Topics lets you divide trending topics by their respective industries. What’s trending in one industry, after all, may not be trending in another. Trend categories like software, fitness, gaming, sustainability, social media, technology, and startups help you build additional insight as to where audiences are pointing you—especially in your particular field.

Key Features:

• Track and organize trends by topic
• Set email alerts for new developments in trends
• Identify new audience trends
• Read detailed trend analyses from the Exploding Topics team
• Monitor trend growth with up-to-date data

2. Minitab

Minitab offers data analysis and statistical insights into what audiences are thinking about. It then forecasts trends based on this data.

It’s less about grabbing topics via AI and direct analysis like Exploding Topics.

But as a GWI alternative, Minitab offers a lot of key insights via statistical analysis—which sounds complicated, but delivers results with user-friendly software. Think of Minitab as the analyst who helps do the math behind your audience data so your team doesn’t have to.

Why Minitab?

Minitab has multiple offerings. Minitab connect, for example, is its primary automation offering. This means you can take the Minitab data you receive and plug it into your existing systems. The result is the ability to gauge insights via familiar dashboards.

Key Features:

• Self-service data preparation tools mean you can dig into the data yourself
• Dashboards with real-time data to provide visualizations help you glean your own insights
• Use brainstorming and diagramming tools to strategize your reaction to the latest trends

3. Audiense

Audiense lets you divide your audience into specific groups, driving deeper insights than surface-level trend following of entire demographic segments.

As an alternative to GWI, it particularly focuses on insights you can glean from X and other social media platforms. You can also use its features to segment your audience by interests, which helps prevent you from forming limited assumptions about the audiences you want to track.

Why Audiense?

Audiense’s most appealing feature is the customer profile. The customer profile is a helpful way to build a demographic personality for your general target audience. You can get into specifics, like your ideal customer’s other affinities and interests—for example, a profile on King Charles’s interest in cars might also add “likes dogs.” And these features help you get a clearer sense of not only who your customers are, but the trends they like to follow.

Key Features:

• Customer segmentation to enhance personalization, rather than one-size-fits-all insights
• Machine learning to gather further insights about your audience you might have missed
• Social intelligence tools for identifying social influencers who might be relevant in your niche

4. Resonate

Focused on the AI side of things, Resonate’s goal is to take the large swath of data out there and parse it down so you can turn it into insights. Or, in some cases, you can simply choose to act on the insights their AI reports to you. The key is narrowing down the gaps in what your insights might otherwise be if you were simply gathering this data yourself.

Why Resonate?

One common challenge with making sense of audience insights is that it can be difficult to discern the noise from genuine insights. In fact, how do you know what “noise” is in the first place? Resonate uses AI to put your data into context. This makes you more responsive with your marketing efforts—you can use the data here to power new personalization initiatives to make your sales pitches more compelling.

Key Features:

• AI-powered data reports which help you build a personalized marketing plan based on its insights
• Onboarding previously-owned data to neatly incorporate what you already know with the new insights you glean from signing up
• Insights from the US Consumer Study to get a sense of where market sentiment might point your niche next

5. Jungle Scout Cobalt

This is a unique one. Jungle Scout Cobalt gives you insights into what’s going on in your market—for instance, which product categories are customers trending towards.

It’s especially useful if you sell on large platforms like Amazon, because it will give you a sense of where those trends point DTC companies. You can also use Cobalt to evaluate the performance of specific products you launch.

Why Jungle Scout Cobalt?

Jungle Scout Cobalt is especially good at organizing category and segment trends, which can be critical for anyone selling on major platforms like Amazon. In these cases, a product that meets a trend can be a make-or-break proposition. 

Key Features:

• Sorting by the top 25 products in a specific category helps to analyze existing market trends
• Can track competitor’s rankings to see where products with specific positioning are seeing results in the market
• Can incorporate other data into the Jungle Scout Cobalt API to add more context to the data you review

6. Google Analytics 360

Google Analytics has made waves in recent years. But Google Analytics 360 features robust reporting features that help you make the most of the data you gather from the code you plant on your own website.

Although there are more limitations with Analytics in years past, it remains a viable alternative for getting audience insights from your own traffic.

Why Google Analytics 360?

Google Analytics 360 may not boast the raw data-collection power of previous generations of analytics tools, but it does cull together all sorts of insights with unique tools like custom funnels. This helps brands identify what trends are driving their traffic and their most frequent conversions.

Key features:

• Custom funnels help you designate specific customer journeys to see what’s resonating with customers
• Custom tables help you disseminate data, or use API to merge it with other tools and use your own dashboards for enhanced insights

Finding an Alternative to GWI

The software on this list is wide-ranging when it comes to features. Some (like Resonate) focus more on the AI learning side of things. Others implement a more editorial approach with human input. With Exploding Topics, AI learning meets precise topic monitoring to help you sense exactly what customers are thinking in real-time.

But no matter which software you choose, you’ll find there are plenty of ways to watch what your audience is thinking. Even better, you might have a hint at what they’re going to think tomorrow.