5 Quid Alternatives for AI-Powered Market Intelligence

Quid is an emerging source for companies that want to uncover new market segments, track competitor moves, forecast product disruptors, and understand what consumers are interested in. But it isn’t the only—or even necessarily the best—tool for every application.

If Quid’s AI-powered model isn’t right for you or you’re interested in options at different price points, give one of these five Quid alternatives a try.

1. Exploding Topics: Best For Trend Discovery

If the primary reason you’re interested in Quid is for its trend analysis features, try Exploding Topics instead.

Exploding Topics is a trend spotting platform that combines elements of social listening tools, media monitoring platforms, machine learning, and human data expertise into one.

When you use Exploding Topics, you can:

• See what trends are of growing importance to consumers and businesses in your market
• Understand if a trend has already reached its peak or not
• Discover which social media channels are seeing the most interest in a specific topic
• Monitor topics, e-commerce product prices, TikTok trends, and more all in one spot
• Read in-depth, expert reporting about the biggest trends each week
• See how trends connect to each other with the help of unique meta trends visualizations

When Alexander Rinn Ortiz, e-commerce managing director at Naturecan, noticed that interest in CBD products was waning after 2020, he and his team used Exploding Topics to discover what consumers were likely to focus on next.

“We noticed that longevity supplements, podcasts, and influencers were all trending in the U.S.,” said Rinn Ortiz. “Because many supplement trends that come from the U.S. move to Europe and Japan at some point, we were confident that interest in longevity would spike [there], too.”

This research allowed Naturecan to find and focus on specific longevity-focused niches in the supplement market—and helped the company cement its standing as a profitable and trusted wellness business.

Where Does Exploding Topics Get Its Data?

Like Quid, Exploding Topics sources its data from a variety of sources. These include:

• Social media posts
• News outlets
• Company websites
• Amazon product listings
• Blog posts
• Online forums

The data is collected and processed with the help of artificial intelligence before going through a human review to filter out fads and verify the relevance of a given trend.

I find Exploding Topics to be a sweet spot between user-friendly interfaces and AI-powered insights. All of the AI work happens behind the scenes; I don’t have to figure out how to prompt a chat for a particular result or configure workflows with an MCP server. Finding information in Exploding Topics is as simple as using a search engine.

How much does Exploding Topics Cost?

You can use Exploding Topics for free—a large portion of the trend database is available for anyone to browse without logging in. The company offers a number of free tools for marketing and competitor analysis, too.

Exploding Topics Pro users get access to more features and functionality, including:

• The complete Exploding Topics trend database
• Additional information about channel popularity and trend signals like seasonality
• More in-depth weekly reporting
• On-demand trend analysis
• Amazon and TikTok product insights
• Startup insights
• API access

Exploding Topics Pro subscriptions start at $39 per month.

2. Meltwater: Best For Media Intelligence

If media monitoring is the most essential tool for your needs, take a look at Meltwater.

The Meltwater platform maintains a database of media, social, and consumer trends that are useful for media monitoring—and making associated public relations decisions. When using this tool, you can:

• Track how your brand is mentioned in the media
• Find commonalities across audience groups
• Monitor social media posts for trend interest and brand sentiment
• Assess how well AI tools understand and talk about your brand
• Connect with journalists and influencers

Meltwater also includes Mira, an “AI teammate” that explains how trends impact your brand.

Where Does Meltwater Get Its Data?

Meltwater develops its insights and metrics with the help of multiple data sources including:

• Online news publications
• Social media platforms
• Television news broadcast transcripts
• Scans of print media
• Podcast transcripts
• Forum posts
• Blogs
• Online reviews

How Much Does Meltwater Cost?

Meltwater doesn’t publish its starting prices publicly. While the company does offer three different plan tiers, you’ll need to contact the business directly to request a price quote.

3. Brandwatch: Best For Consumer Intelligence

If you’re interested in getting a better understanding of how your brand is perceived across media and social channels, a consumer intelligence tool like Brandwatch will be useful.

You can use Brandwatch to:

• Understand customer experience
• Conduct sentiment analysis
• Find and partner with social influencers
• Track how your brand is mentioned across traditional and social media
• Plan content campaigns
• Engage directly with your audience to boost sentiment
• Gather better audience insights for data-driven decision-making

Like Meltwater, Brandwatch includes a built-in “AI colleague” called Iris. The company says that Iris helps to explain trend signals and pull insights out of complex datasets.

Where Does Brandwatch Get Its Data?

Brandwatch data comes from sources like:

• Social media platforms
• Digital publications
• Livestreaming platforms
• Broadcast TV
• Radio stations

Brandwatch also offers integrations with internal messaging and analytics tools, such as WhatsApp and Salesforce. This allows you to combine social and media data with customer support messaging, purchase histories, and more.

How Much Does Brandwatch Cost?

Brandwatch is also similar to Meltwater in that the platform offers three different plan tiers—but doesn’t publish any pricing information publicly. Once again, you’ll need to reach out to the Brandwatch team to request a demo and price quote.

4. Contify: Best For Competitor Product Insights

If knowing what products your competitors are planning and launching is most important, though, then you’ll want to give Contify a try.

Contify is an intelligence platform that helps users track their competitors’:

• Product launches
• Product roadmaps
• Software feature releases
• Customer review sentiment
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Sales calls

While Contify isn’t only for product intelligence, the platform’s focus on the complete product lifecycle—from roadmaps to reviews—makes it a strong Quid alternative when your focus is on physical or digital products.

Where Does Contify Get Its Data?

Like Exploding Topics, Contify uses a mix of machine learning and human curation to develop insights for its customers. The platform’s data comes from:

• Third party sources
• Websites
• News publications

You can also add your own internal data into the mix.

How Much Does Contify Cost?

Contify’s pricing isn’t published online; you have to sign up for a free trial to learn more about how much ongoing access will cost.

5. Semrush: Best For Broad Competitor Research

Competitor analysis can take many forms; Quid happens to focus on company investments, headcount shifts, and product launches (information that you can find about startups when using Exploding Topics, too.)

If you want to understand how well your competitors’ marketing efforts are working, though, you’ll be best served by a search engine optimization (SEO) tool: Semrush.

You can use Semrush for research, benchmarking, planning, and even gathering social media analytics. The platform helps you to uncover a variety of details about your competitors, including their:

• Top keywords
• AI share of voice
• Search ad copy
• Backlinks from other sites
• Domain health
• AI brand perception

Semrush will show you all of this information about your own brand, too, organized nicely in an easy-to-read dashboard. The app will even send you notifications when something changes. Any time one of my clients wants to know how their brand stacks up against a competitor online, I turn to Semrush.

Where Does Semrush Get Its Data?

Semrush gets its data from:

• Search engines
• Real, anonymized internet users
• Pay-per-click ad listings
• A proprietary backlink crawler
• Social media platform APIs
• ChatGPT’s search mode (for AI prompt and response information)

The breadth of this database means that Semrush excels at finding information on any of your competitors. As long as the company has a website, you’ll be able to get useful information about its marketing, ads, and more.

How Much Does Semrush Cost?

Semrush has a generous free plan that lets you conduct keyword research and do some basic website analysis. If you want to go deeper into website analytics, or use Semrush to replace some of your other software, you’ll need a paid plan. (The various Semrush toolkits can replace social media management tools like Sprout Social and content optimization platforms like Clearscope.)

Semrush One subscriptions start at $199 per month and include tools for traditional and AI SEO research, plus access to the Semrush MCP server.