Sprout Social's Trellis agent and the other way to use AI on social

Sprout Social now sells AI inside its suite as an agent called Trellis, and teams searching for a Sprout Social AI alternative are usually asking a broader question: should AI sit inside the tool you already post from, or should it do the reading for you somewhere else? The two approaches put the model in different places, bill it differently and answer different questions. This piece looks at both, using what the vendors publish.

AI inside the suite: Trellis

Sprout Social describes Trellis as an AI teammate that turns data overload into clarity. On the pricing page:

• Every plan, from Essentials ($79 per seat a month, billed yearly) up, includes 100 AI agent credits per seat each month. The allowance resets monthly.
• Trellis Plus, for heavier use, costs $28 per user a month on yearly billing or $35 on monthly billing.
• Credit use depends on how complex the prompt is and how much data Trellis has to read.

Other AI features are tied to plan levels. AI Assist for writing posts arrives on Professional ($299 per seat). AI Assist for replies and sentiment in the Smart Inbox arrive on Advanced ($399 per seat). The Listening add-on, available from Standard, uses AI for sentiment scoring, Smart Categories and Spike Alerts.

The model here works on data Sprout already holds: your posts, your inbox, your reports and, if you buy it, your listening stream. It is AI as an analyst for your own social operation.

AI that reads the web for you: AyeWatch

AyeWatch puts the model somewhere else. It is an AI monitor: you describe what you want to know in plain English, and the model reads new items from news sites, blogs, forums, government pages, specific URLs, and social sources on X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. It decides whether each item matches your description by meaning, not by keyword, and writes a short summary with sources when one does.

That changes what the AI is for. Instead of answering "how did our posts do last month", it answers "did anything happen that I need to know about", including things that never touch your accounts, such as a competitor editing its pricing page.

The billing is also different. AyeWatch is not priced per seat. Pro is $9 a month for up to 50 monitors at hourly checks, and Pro+ is $19 a month for 200 monitors and ASAP mode, the fastest speed. Usage is metered in monitoring credits: most checks cost one, some platform sources cost more, and the app estimates daily credits before you save a monitor. An Auto mode lets the system raise or lower check frequency per topic as activity changes.

Side by side

Which approach fits

The two are not substitutes for each other. If your team publishes and replies all day and wants an assistant that can summarise its own inbox and reports, Trellis is the natural fit, and AyeWatch has no publishing or inbox to apply AI to.

If what you want from AI is a filter on the outside world, so a person only reads the posts and page changes that matter, AyeWatch is the better design and the cheaper one. Its MCP server also means other AI agents can create and manage monitors directly, which is a different kind of integration from an assistant inside a dashboard.

Plenty of teams will end up with both: Sprout for the owned channels, and an AI monitor for everything outside them. The AyeWatch Free Preview, three runs on up to three topics with no card, is a cheap way to see whether the outside view is worth having.