Is Rising Trends a True Exploding Topics Alternative?

A reliable trend discovery tool can give you far more information than Google Trends alone. You can track trends, conduct keyword research, request on-demand trend analysis and more. What you get all depends on which tool you choose.

In this guide, I'll take a look at two popular trend analysis tools—Exploding Topics and Rising Trends—and see how each app’s toolkits compare in terms of available data, useful features, and price.

Exploding Topics vs. Rising Trends at a Glance

What is Exploding Topics?

Exploding Topics is a trend spotting website that makes it easy to see:

• Topics and products that are interesting people right now
• Popularity growth related to a specific trend
• Seasonal or emerging trend patterns you should be aware of
• Popular startups and websites by industry
• High-performing products across Amazon and TikTok shop

The entire Exploding Topics database is organized into easy-to-navigate categories, and every trend graph includes information about:

• Search engine optimization (SEO) metrics like search volume
• Historical trend performance over the past 15 years
• Popularity across different social media channels
• Trend seasonality and volatility
• Related topics and search trends

Exploding Topics also happens to be part of Semrush, so you can access the trend tool from within your Semrush App Center. While a Semrush subscription isn’t required to use Exploding Topics, the pairing of both apps makes search engine optimization (SEO) and market trend research a breeze for marketers and entrepreneurs.

What is Rising Trends?

Rising Trends is another trend research tool. The platform tracks topics across a variety of industries, allowing users to see:

• Current popular topics
• Positive or negative trend growth over a five-year period
• Search volume related to a trend
• Popular apps and websites

Like Exploding Topics, the Rising Trends database organizes topics into groups—in this case, by niche. This allows you to easily browse related trends and topics into the database.

How do Exploding Topics and Rising Trends Compare?

Exploding Topics and Rising Trends offer similarly styled trend reports for topics across a variety of industries. The way each platform presents this information differs, though—as does the price.

Trend Database

The Exploding Topics trend database contains information on over one million topics, all organized into micro and macro trends across categories like:

• Business
• Supply chain and logistics
• Technology
• Automation
• Beauty
• Skincare
• Health and wellness
• Nutrition

Each trend includes an overview, popularity data, and search volume information going back for up to 15 years. And if you have an Exploding Topics Pro plan, you can see trend forecasts too, allowing you to spot early trends up to a year in advance.

Rising Trends, however, maintains a library of 24,000 trending topics that are organized by industry and niche. The app provides nice overviews of each trend, and while it does display search volume, this number is aggregated together with data from multiple sub-trends. Historical data is limited to the past five years, too.

Social Media Trends

Exploding Topics contains lots of useful information about how trends perform on different social platforms. You can see a clear breakdown of popularity by channel for every trend:

There’s even a dedicated TikTok Insights report that you can explore if you’re a heavy TikTok user or marketer.

Rising Trends’ data, on the other hand, appears to be primarily focused on search traffic, not social media conversations and posts.

Trending Companies and Startups

While the core of both Exploding Topics’ and Rising Trends’ databases is industry-and-niche-specific trends, the platforms also offer data about other topics.

When using Exploding Topics, you can gather additional information about:

• Trending startups, including where each company is at in its funding journey and how many employees they have
• Trending products across Amazon and TikTok shop, including typical pricing
• Trending websites for the current month as calculated based on search volume, visitor engagement, and bounce rate

Rising Trends offers a different set of reports. Instead of looking at total company valuation or product sales, their platform analyzes:

• Website popularity based on year over year growth, search traffic, domain authority, and industry
• App popularity based on reviews, category, and App Store (iOS or Android)

There are 10,000 trending websites and 4,000 trending mobile apps available in the Rising Trends database.

Price

You can view a large portion of the Exploding Topics database for free; you don’t even need an account to do so.

This access is in addition to the free Exploding Topics newsletter that many marketers and founders find to be a useful addition to their inbox every week.

Full access to the Exploding Topics database is available with an Exploding Topics Pro plan. Paid plans start at $39 per month (billed annually) and give you access to trend tracking tools, the Meta Trends report, and more.

Rising Trends doesn’t offer any of its database information for free, though you can sign up for a free weekly newsletter. If you would like to access the full Rising Trends database, you’ll need a full access plan that costs $97 per year.

The Final Verdict: Should You Use Exploding Topics or Rising Trends?

Exploding Topics offers the most information to its users across all price points, both free and paid. You can simply see more trends, across more years, and with more platform data, on Exploding Topics than you can when using Rising Trends.

That said, there are still some instances where Rising Trends might be the best fit for someone—check out the full table that follows to figure out which tool is best based on your role and need:

The best way to find out, though, is to try out each tool firsthand. Unfortunately, Rising Trends doesn't offer a free trial—but Exploding Topics lets you try the Pro plan at no cost for a full week.