A CrowdTangle alternative for Reddit, set up by a developer

People look for a CrowdTangle alternative for Reddit for two reasons: some want to watch Reddit itself, and some want to ask Reddit what to use now. This post is for the first group. CrowdTangle never covered Reddit; it was built around Meta's platforms and stopped being available on August 14, 2024. If your project, library or product gets discussed in subreddits, here is how to set up the monitoring CrowdTangle never offered, written from a developer's point of view.

What you actually want from Reddit monitoring

For a developer, the useful signals on Reddit are specific:

• Someone reports a bug in your tool before they open an issue.
• A thread compares your project with a competitor.
• A new subreddit post asks for exactly the thing you built.
• A known user, such as a maintainer of a related project, posts an update.

Keyword alerts catch some of this, but they also catch every post that mentions a common word in your project's name. That is the noise problem most developers hit first.

The setup: AyeWatch with plain-English filters

AyeWatch watches subreddits and Reddit users directly, and each monitor takes a filter written as a sentence. It reads new posts and judges whether they match the meaning of the filter, so a project called "Atlas" does not alert you on every post about maps.

Step 1: one monitor per subreddit cluster

Create a Reddit monitor for the subreddits where your users talk. Then write the filter:

Posts where someone reports a problem with the Atlas CLI, asks how to configure it, or compares it with other build tools. Skip posts about maps or geography.

Step 2: a monitor for people, not places

Add a monitor for specific Reddit users whose posts matter to you, such as maintainers of tools you depend on. Filter for release notes or breaking changes.

Step 3: widen beyond Reddit

Developers rarely discuss a project in one place. AyeWatch also has monitors for X profiles, communities and searches, YouTube channels and LinkedIn posts, plus Internet monitors that cover news, blogs and forums. A single Internet monitor such as "new benchmarks or reviews that mention the Atlas CLI" catches blog posts you would otherwise miss.

Step 4: wire it into your tools

Paid plans add Slack, Discord, email, a daily digest and signed webhooks. The REST API lets you create, list, update and delete monitors from code, and each topic.update webhook carries an AI-written summary. Webhooks are signed with HMAC-SHA256, so verify them before you act on the payload. If you work with an AI assistant, AyeWatch's MCP endpoint uses the same API key and exposes tools to list, create, update and delete monitors.

A practical pattern: route bug reports to a Discord channel your maintainers watch, and send comparison threads to the daily digest.

Price and pace

A Free Preview with three runs needs no card, and paid plans start at $9 a month. The apps run on the web, iOS and Android, so a maintainer can read an alert wherever they are.

Auto mode on paid plans speeds up checks while a thread is active and slows down when it goes quiet, which is useful for launch weeks.

What about the other CrowdTangle alternatives

The usual names on CrowdTangle replacement lists do not solve the Reddit case well:

• Meta Content Library covers Facebook, Instagram and Threads, not Reddit, and is limited to approved academic and nonprofit researchers.
• NewsWhip, Lumen by Talkwalker and Brandwatch are enterprise platforms with demo-only pricing. Overkill for watching a few subreddits.
• Awario is keyword-based listening from $29 a month on annual billing for three topics. It works, but you will maintain exclusion lists by hand.

When this is the wrong approach

If you need historical Reddit data for analysis, or counts of upvotes and comments over time, AyeWatch is not built for that. It reports new items that match your rule; it does not store a searchable archive or report engagement numbers.

Try it

Set up one Reddit monitor on the AyeWatch free preview and compare its alerts with a week of manual checking. The full CrowdTangle comparison covers the other platforms if your project lives beyond Reddit.