Heepsy vs YouScan: Which Is Better? (2026 Comparison)
Heepsy is a budget-friendly influencer discovery tool best for SMBs and D2C brands looking to find and vet creators, while YouScan is a premium AI-powered social listening platform designed for enterprise-level visual analytics and brand monitoring. If you need to build an influencer list, choose Heepsy; if you need to monitor brand sentiment and visual mentions across 500M+ sources, YouScan is the superior choice. Explore more Heepsy alternatives or see how they both stack up in our all ShortsIntel comparisons hub.
| Feature | Heepsy | YouScan |
|---|---|---|
| Content Discovery | ||
UGC Discovery | 3/5 | 2/5 |
Brand Mention Detection | 2/5 | 5/5 |
Untagged Content Detection | 2/5 | 3/5 |
| Video Tracking | ||
Short-Form Video Tracking | 3/5 | 2/5 |
| Creator Management | ||
Creator Analytics | 4/5 | 2/5 |
Rights Management | 2/5 | 1/5 |
| Intelligence & AI | ||
Competitor Intelligence | 2/5 | 4/5 |
AI Content Tagging | 3/5 | 4/5 |
| Platform & Integrations | ||
Multi-Platform Support | 3/5 | 5/5 |
Integrations | 3/5 | 3/5 |
| Reporting & Collaboration | ||
Reporting Dashboards | 3/5 | 4/5 |
Team Collaboration | 3/5 | 3/5 |
API Access | 2/5 | 3/5 |
| Usability & Support | ||
Ease of Use | 5/5 | 3/5 |
Customer Support | 3/5 | 5/5 |
Feature Deep Dive
Content Discovery and Brand Monitoring
Heepsy and YouScan approach discovery from opposite ends of the marketing spectrum. Heepsy (3/5 for UGC Discovery) is primarily an influencer search engine. With a database of over 11 million influencers, it allows users to filter by location, engagement, and authenticity. It excels at finding creators who could represent your brand. However, its brand mention detection is limited (2/5), largely restricted to Instagram media monitoring.
YouScan (5/5 for Brand Mention Detection) is a heavyweight in social listening. It monitors over 500 million sources, including TikTok, Google Maps reviews, and niche forums. Its standout feature is Visual Insights—an industry-leading image recognition technology that detects your logo, specific objects, or even the 'scene' (e.g., a person drinking coffee at a beach) in social posts, even if your brand isn't tagged. For teams focused on brand protection, YouScan is the clear winner. If you are comparing these features to others, you might find our Archive vs YouScan or Brandwatch vs Heepsy guides helpful.
Intelligence and AI Capabilities
YouScan is a 'Gartner Cool AI Vendor' for a reason. It features an Insights Copilot powered by ChatGPT, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their data. It also offers aspect-level sentiment analysis, which breaks down opinions into specific product features rather than just a general positive/negative score.
Heepsy provides essential AI-driven metrics like authenticity scores and fake follower detection, which are critical for vetting. However, it lacks the deep conversational AI and granular sentiment analysis found in YouScan. Heepsy’s AI content tagging (3/5) is helpful for basic categorization, but it doesn't match YouScan’s ability to summarize spoken mentions in YouTube videos or analyze the demographics of people appearing in images. For those needing advanced creator-specific data, checking out a Heepsy alternative with stronger outreach features might be necessary.
Creator and Performance Management
When it comes to managing the actual relationship with creators, Heepsy offers more specialized tools for discovery (4/5 for Creator Analytics), including Shopify integration for sales tracking on its Advanced plan. It is built for the recruitment phase of influencer marketing.
YouScan (2/5 for Creator Analytics) is not an influencer CRM. While it can identify which creators are talking about your brand, it lacks outreach tools, contract management, and UGC rights management. Neither tool is specifically optimized for tracking untagged short-form video content with high precision, a gap often filled by tools like ShortsIntel vs Heepsy comparisons.
Usability and Platform Support
Heepsy is widely praised for its intuitive, user-friendly interface (5/5), making it accessible for startups and small agencies. YouScan (3/5) has a steeper learning curve, with some users describing the query-writing interface as clunky. However, YouScan offers superior multi-platform support (5/5), covering a much wider range of the web than Heepsy, which focuses on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch. If ease of use is your priority, you might also look at a Collabstr vs Heepsy comparison.
| Plan Details | Heepsy | YouScan |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing Model | Flat Rate | Flat Rate |
| Free Tier | ||
| Free Trial | 14 days | |
| Pricing Tiers | ||
| Entry Tier | Free$0/moor $0/yr | Starter 3$499/moor $5,988/yr |
| Mid Tier | Starter$89/moor $828/yr | UnlimitedCustom |
| Top Tier | Plus$249/moor $2,388/yr | — |
| Annual Cost (5-Person Team)* | $0 | $5,988 |
| Hidden Costs |
|
|
* Annual cost calculated using entry tier pricing. Per-seat pricing multiplied by 5 users. Actual costs may vary based on specific plan and usage.
The pricing models of Heepsy and YouScan reflect their different target markets. Heepsy offers an affordable entry point for SMBs. Its paid tiers start at $89/month ($828/year annually), though many essential features—like demographic data and sales tracking—are locked behind the Plus ($249/mo) and Advanced ($369/mo) plans. For a team of five people, the Advanced plan would cost approximately $3,588 per year. Notably, Heepsy has a strict no-refund policy, which has been a point of contention for many users.
YouScan is firmly in the mid-market to enterprise price bracket. Its Starter plan begins at $499/month ($5,988/year), which is significantly higher than Heepsy’s most expensive tier. While YouScan allows unlimited users on all plans, the Starter tier is limited to three topics and 15,000 mentions per month. Furthermore, its core differentiators—Visual Insights and Audience Insights—are often sold as paid add-ons on the Unlimited plan. For a large brand, the annual cost of YouScan can easily exceed $10,000 to $20,000 depending on the volume of mentions and features required.
In terms of value, Heepsy is the better choice for individuals and small teams focused on discovery. YouScan offers better value for large organizations where 'unlimited seats' are required and visual brand monitoring is a non-negotiable requirement. For those who find both options outside their budget or too complex, exploring Heepsy alternatives or the YouScan alternative path is recommended.
Who Is Each Product Best For?
Influencer discovery and analytics platform for finding and vetting social media influencers
Best For
- Small to mid-sized businesses and startups
- Marketing agencies managing multiple campaigns
- D2C/eCommerce brands (especially Shopify)
- Entrepreneurs testing influencer marketing
- Budget-conscious SMBs wanting basic influencer search
Not Ideal For
- Enterprise teams needing advanced features
- B2B brands
- Brands needing micro-influencers (<5K followers)
- Users requiring AI-powered automation
- Teams needing deep analytics and reporting
AI-powered social listening with industry-leading visual analytics, image recognition, and conversational AI insights for brand monitoring and consumer intelligence
Best For
- Mid-market brands needing AI-powered social listening with visual analytics
- Consumer brands wanting to detect logo appearances in social media images
- Market researchers requiring aspect-level sentiment analysis
- PR teams needing comprehensive brand monitoring across 500M+ sources
- Teams wanting conversational AI interface for data exploration
- Organizations needing unlimited users without per-seat pricing
- Brands monitoring TikTok and Google Maps reviews
Not Ideal For
- Brands focused on short-form video analytics and UGC campaigns
- Teams needing to track untagged video content (image-only detection)
- Creators and small businesses with budgets under $499/month
- Organizations needing UGC rights management or content licensing
- Teams wanting creator outreach and relationship management tools
- Users needing a mobile app for on-the-go monitoring
- Teams requiring flexible date range comparisons
Choose Heepsy if...
You are an SMB, startup, or D2C brand that needs to find new influencers quickly and affordably. Heepsy is ideal for those who prioritize a large creator database and search filters over deep social listening. It's the right choice if you use Shopify and want to track creator-driven sales on a budget. For more details on its positioning, see our ShortsIntel vs Heepsy page.
Choose YouScan if...
You are a mid-market to enterprise brand, PR agency, or market researcher who needs to monitor brand reputation across the entire web. If your brand relies heavily on visual content and you need to detect your logo appearing in social media images (even without tags), YouScan is the industry leader. It's also the best choice for teams that need unlimited user seats and conversational AI to explore consumer insights. You can see how it compares to other enterprise tools in our Brandwatch vs YouScan analysis.
Neither might be right if...
You are specifically focused on tracking user-generated content (UGC) in short-form video formats like TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. Both Heepsy and YouScan struggle with detecting untagged video content or managing the usage rights for those videos. If your primary goal is to build a library of high-res video assets for ad creatives while automating creator consent, you may want to compare any two tools in this category to find a more specialized solution.
Consider a Third Option
Scale creator marketing with data, not grunt work.
While Heepsy is great for finding creators and YouScan is excellent for brand listening, many modern B2C brands find themselves stuck in the middle: they have creators making content, but they can't track it all, and they certainly can't manage the rights to it efficiently. This is where ShortsIntel offers a specialized third path.
ShortsIntel is purpose-built for the short-form video era (TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts). Unlike Heepsy, which focuses on discovery, or YouScan, which focuses on broad listening, ShortsIntel focuses on UGC Tracking and Rights Management. It claims to detect 30% more content than competitors by using AI to find untagged videos where your brand is mentioned or shown.
Key advantages of ShortsIntel include:
- Automated Rights Management: A magic-link system that handles creator consent and audit trails, something neither Heepsy nor YouScan provides.
- AI Video Analysis: It analyzes videos frame-by-frame to identify winning trends and visual elements, going deeper than YouScan's general image recognition.
- Affordability: At $99/month, it provides enterprise-grade video tracking at a fraction of the price of a YouScan alternative.
If you are struggling to keep up with the volume of video content your fans are creating, or if you need to turn that UGC into licensed ad creative, ShortsIntel is worth considering. You can compare it directly in our ShortsIntel vs YouScan or ShortsIntel vs Archive guides.
Why Choose ShortsIntel
- Purpose-built for short-form video (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) unlike general social listening tools
- Detects untagged content that competitors miss (claims 30% more coverage)
- AI-powered content tagging analyzes videos frame-by-frame for format, visual elements, and trends
- Automated rights management with magic-link consent system and audit trails
Best For
Starting at $99/mo
7-day free trial
Full Comparison: All Three Options
| Feature | Heepsy | YouScan | ShortsIntel Recommended |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content Discovery | |||
UGC Discovery | 3/5 | 2/5 | 5/5 |
Brand Mention Detection | 2/5 | 5/5 | 5/5 |
Untagged Content Detection | 2/5 | 3/5 | 5/5 |
| Video Tracking | |||
Short-Form Video Tracking | 3/5 | 2/5 | 5/5 |
| Creator Management | |||
Creator Analytics | 4/5 | 2/5 | 4/5 |
Rights Management | 2/5 | 1/5 | 5/5 |
| Intelligence & AI | |||
Competitor Intelligence | 2/5 | 4/5 | 4/5 |
AI Content Tagging | 3/5 | 4/5 | 5/5 |
| Platform & Integrations | |||
Multi-Platform Support | 3/5 | 5/5 | 4/5 |
Integrations | 3/5 | 3/5 | 3/5 |
| Reporting & Collaboration | |||
Reporting Dashboards | 3/5 | 4/5 | 4/5 |
Team Collaboration | 3/5 | 3/5 | 3/5 |
API Access | 2/5 | 3/5 | 3/5 |
| Usability & Support | |||
Ease of Use | 5/5 | 3/5 | 4/5 |
Customer Support | 3/5 | 5/5 | 4/5 |
Frequently Asked Questions
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Track UGC, discover creators, and monitor brand mentions across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts.
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Last updated: January 30, 2026