Keyhole vs YouScan in 2026: Muck Rack-gated hashtag analytics vs self-serve visual intelligence
Keyhole's pricing and onboarding now run entirely through Muck Rack's enterprise sales process, with no public numbers on either of its two tiers. YouScan publishes a $499 a month starting price and adds logo detection in photos and videos that text-only tools like Keyhole cannot see.
Keyhole
YouScan- Keyhole has no public pricing on either the Professional or Enterprise tier since its 2024 acquisition by Muck Rack; the keyhole.co pricing page redirects to a Muck Rack demo form.
- YouScan publishes a starting price of $499/month for its Starter 3 plan, which covers 3 monitored topics with API access and Visual Insights included.
- YouScan's Visual Insights detects brand logos and products inside images and video, a capability Keyhole does not offer at all.
- Keyhole's strength is hashtag and campaign aggregation with multi-year historical data and influencer audience quality scoring, workflows YouScan does not focus on.
- API access on Keyhole is locked to the Enterprise tier. YouScan includes API access on its entry Starter 3 plan.
- Neither tool offers white-label delivery for agency client reporting on any tier.
- Keyhole lists enterprise customers including NBC Universal, Billboard, USTA, and WWF, reflecting its post-acquisition positioning toward large accounts with existing Muck Rack relationships.
Keyhole and YouScan both grew up as social listening tools, but they have drifted toward very different buyers. Keyhole built its reputation on hashtag analytics, influencer quality scoring, and campaign aggregation, the kind of workflow a PR or social team runs during a product launch or sponsorship push. Since its 2024 acquisition by Muck Rack, that reputation now comes with a catch: there is no public pricing on either tier, and the keyhole.co pricing page redirects straight to a Muck Rack demo form. YouScan takes the opposite approach on price transparency, publishing a $499 a month Starter tier, but its real differentiator is Visual Insights, an image and video recognition engine that spots your logo in a photo even when nobody typed your brand name. If your monitoring problem is largely text-based and you already have a Muck Rack relationship, Keyhole still does a specific job well. If your brand shows up in pictures more than paragraphs, YouScan is solving a problem Keyhole was never built for.
The tools at a glance
Keyhole
Social media analytics with hashtag tracking, influencer analytics, and campaign measurement, now part of the Muck Rack platform
Keyhole has been in the social media analytics market since 2012, building particular depth in hashtag and keyword tracking, campaign aggregation, and influencer quality scoring. Historical hashtag data spans multiple years on its higher tier, which is useful for benchmarking a campaign against prior years or researching how a topic conversation has evolved over time. The platform holds a top ranking on G2 in the social media analytics category and lists customers including NBC Universal, Billboard, USTA, and WWF.
The bigger story for anyone evaluating Keyhole in 2026 is the 2024 acquisition by Muck Rack. Pricing and onboarding now run through Muck Rack's sales process; the keyhole.co pricing page redirects to a demo request form, and there is no self-serve signup at any tier. This is a real change from Keyhole's earlier model, which included accessible professional tiers for smaller teams.
What Keyhole still does well is bundling three workflows that most tools handle separately: hashtag and keyword monitoring, influencer performance measurement with audience quality scoring, and competitor social account benchmarking. For a brand running a hashtag-anchored campaign across owned accounts, influencers, and partners, that aggregation genuinely saves reporting time. The trade-off is that you now need a Muck Rack sales conversation to find out what it costs.
| Feature | Professional Contact for pricing | Enterprise Contact for pricing |
|---|---|---|
| Hashtag and keyword tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Historical data | Limited | Extended |
| Influencer analytics | ✓ | ✓ |
| Campaign measurement | ✓ | ✓ |
| Competitor benchmarking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Automated reporting | ✓ | ✓ |
| API access | ✗ | ✓ |
| Dedicated account manager | ✗ | ✓ |
YouScan
Social listening with visual intelligence: detects your logo in images and videos
YouScan is a social listening platform built around a feature most monitoring tools skip entirely: visual intelligence. Its Visual Insights engine scans images and video across monitored platforms to detect your brand logo, products, and visual context like store settings or sporting events, capturing mentions where a user posts a photo of your product without ever typing your brand name in the caption.
Beyond image recognition, YouScan offers Insights Copilot, a conversational AI interface for querying monitoring data without building a dashboard, and contextual sentiment analysis trained to handle sarcasm and platform-specific slang more reliably than keyword-based scoring. Real-time monitoring runs across more than one million sources, and competitor share-of-voice tracking is included on every tier.
The cost of entry is real: Starter 3 is $499 a month for just three monitored topics, and the Unlimited tier requires a sales conversation with no published price. There is also no white-label delivery, which limits its use for agencies sharing branded client reports. For a consumer brand with heavy visual presence on Instagram or TikTok, the price is easier to justify than for a brand whose mentions are mostly text.
| Feature | Starter 3 $499/mo | Unlimited Contact |
|---|---|---|
| Monitored topics | 3 | Unlimited |
| Visual Insights (logo detection) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Insights Copilot AI | ✓ | ✓ |
| Contextual sentiment analysis | ✓ | ✓ |
| Competitor tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| API access | ✓ | ✓ |
| Dedicated account manager | ✗ | ✓ |
Head-to-head feature comparison
| Feature | Keyhole | YouScan |
|---|---|---|
| Sources monitored | X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn (social-only) | 1M+ sources: social, news, blogs, forums, review platforms |
| Visual / image recognition | No | Yes, Visual Insights logo and product detection |
| Hashtag and campaign analytics | Yes, multi-year historical data | No |
| Influencer analytics with quality scoring | Yes, with audience quality scoring | No |
| Competitor benchmarking | Yes, on both tiers | Yes, share of voice analysis |
| Conversational AI query interface | No | Yes, Insights Copilot |
| Sentiment analysis | Yes, basic (positive/negative/neutral) | Yes, contextual sentiment with nuance handling |
| Real-time monitoring | Yes (real-time and daily digest) | Yes, real-time across 1M+ sources |
| API access | Enterprise tier only | Yes, on all tiers including Starter 3 |
| White-label delivery | No | No |
| Published self-serve pricing | No, all pricing is sales-led via Muck Rack | Yes, Starter 3 at $499/mo |
| Starting price | Custom (sales-led via Muck Rack) | $499/mo |
Which should you choose?
KeyholeYouScanYouScanKeyholeYouScanYouScanKeyholeThis comparison splits cleanly along two lines: what each tool actually measures, and whether you can find out what it costs without a phone call. Keyhole's hashtag aggregation and influencer quality scoring are genuinely useful for a brand running a coordinated campaign across owned accounts and partners, but the Muck Rack acquisition means you cannot evaluate pricing independently anymore, which rules it out for teams that need to compare options on their own timeline. YouScan solves a different problem, image and video mentions that keyword monitoring cannot see, and it does so with a published price, even if that price is steep for a brand that does not have much visual presence to begin with. Neither tool is a general-purpose replacement for the other.
Bottom line
Choose YouScan if your brand shows up in photos and video as often as it does in text, you want a price you can see before you talk to sales, and $499 a month is workable for three monitored topics. Choose Keyhole only if you already have or are building a Muck Rack relationship and your primary workflow is hashtag campaign measurement with influencer scoring, since there is no other way to access it. For a brand evaluating both from a standing start with no existing vendor relationship and no visual-heavy product, YouScan is the more practical starting point simply because you can actually see what you are buying before you commit.
Frequently asked questions
Is Keyhole still available without going through Muck Rack?
Keyhole's pricing and onboarding now run entirely through Muck Rack's enterprise sales process, following the 2024 acquisition. There is no self-serve signup on either the Professional or Enterprise tier, and the keyhole.co pricing page redirects to a Muck Rack demo request form.
What does YouScan's Visual Insights actually detect that text-based monitoring misses?
Visual Insights scans images and video posted across monitored platforms and identifies your brand logo, products, and visual context such as store settings or event photography, even when the caption never mentions your brand name. This catches unboxing videos, event photos, and influencer content that keyword-based tools like Keyhole cannot see at all.
Is YouScan worth $499 a month for a brand just starting with social listening?
The Starter 3 plan's three-topic limit is enough to cover your brand name, a primary competitor, and one category keyword, which is a reasonable starting configuration for validating the tool before scaling up. For a brand with genuinely visual products, that $499 buys a capability, image and video logo detection, that no comparably priced tool in this comparison offers.
Which tool is better for influencer campaign reporting, Keyhole or YouScan?
Keyhole is the stronger choice for influencer campaign reporting, since it includes audience quality scoring and campaign-level aggregation across owned, partner, and influencer posts sharing a hashtag. YouScan does not offer influencer-specific analytics or hashtag campaign aggregation as a feature.
Do either Keyhole or YouScan offer white-label reports for agency clients?
Neither tool offers white-label delivery on any tier. Agencies that need branded client-facing reports from either platform will need to export the underlying data and rebuild the presentation layer themselves, or evaluate a monitoring tool that includes white-label reporting natively.
Can I get API access on Keyhole's cheaper tier?
API access on Keyhole is restricted to the Enterprise tier, which is quote-only through Muck Rack, so you would need to negotiate for it during the sales process. YouScan includes API access on its entry Starter 3 plan at the published $499/month price, making it the more accessible option for programmatic access.