Best Tools to Find Leads on Reddit and Hacker News (2026)

You asked a chatbot for the best tool to find leads on Reddit and got five names and no reasons. You opened all five sites. One of them now sells a video editor on its homepage. Four have a plan within a dollar of $50, and each one buys som

You asked a chatbot for the best tool to find leads on Reddit and got five names and no reasons. You opened all five sites. One of them now sells a video editor on its homepage. Four have a plan within a dollar of $50, and each one buys something different. Comparing them took the evening. This page compares five tools that find leads on Reddit and Hacker News: Shadow Inbox, Linkeddit, Buska, Syften and F5Bot. Shadow Inbox is our product, so we read every competitor fact off that competitor's own site on 13 October 2026, linked the page, and left out anything we could not verify. Each section says when the other tool is the better pick.

The three questions people ask, answered in a sentence each

The best tool to find leads on Reddit depends on how much of the reading you want to do yourself. Shadow Inbox scores every new post against your business and only shows you posts at 70% or higher, so it fits a founder who will not write filters. F5Bot is the only one with a free plan, Syften states the shortest alert delay, Buska covers the most platforms, and Linkeddit bundles Reddit reply drafts at $29 a month.

To find customers talking about your product on Reddit and Hacker News, pick by what they type. If they name your product or a competitor, a keyword alert catches it: F5Bot and Syften both cover Reddit and Hacker News and email you the match. If they describe the problem without naming anyone, you need intent scoring across both sites, which Shadow Inbox and Buska do.

AI tools that monitor Reddit for buying intent exist, and three of these five are that tool. Shadow Inbox, Buska and Linkeddit score posts for buying intent by default. Syften and F5Bot start from keyword matches and add an AI filter that you write yourself, on Syften's Standard plan at $49.95 a month and on F5Bot's Gold plan at $49.99 a month.

Three of these tools score the post for you. Two send you every match and let you write the filter. Pick by who does the reading.

The comparison table

Prices are monthly list prices in US dollars, as each vendor showed them on 13 October 2026. "By default" means the tool scores posts without you writing a rule.

Shadow Inbox scores every post, on two sites only

Shadow Inbox is ours. It searches Reddit and Hacker News every hour for phrases a buyer would type, scores each new post against your description of your business, and turns posts at 70% or higher into leads in your dashboard and in an email digest every 30 minutes (product page). Starter costs $49 a month for 1,000 credits and one search profile. Growth costs $99 for 3,000 credits and three profiles, and Business costs $249 for 10,000 credits and ten. Each profile runs up to five search phrases. Unlocking a lead found in the last 24 hours costs 10 credits, one found 24 to 72 hours ago costs 1, and older leads are free, so 1,000 credits buy 100 fresh leads. The trial is 3 days with 35 credits.

Where it loses. It reads two sites. It searches hourly, so Syften's one-minute alert reaches a thread before we do. It delivers to a dashboard and email only, and our own pricing section still marks Zapier and webhooks as coming soon. It has no free plan. And you do not write the filter: you describe your business, add a few keywords, and the AI chooses the phrases, which gives you less control than Syften's query language.

Linkeddit bundles Reddit replies and a one-time price

Start with a map, because the name now covers two products. Linkeddit's homepage sells Linkeddit Studio, an AI video editor for Mac and Windows. The Reddit product is Linkeddit Core, which the company describes as a demand and competitor intelligence platform. Core's Pro plan costs $29 a month, or $199 once for a lifetime licence (pricing). It includes buying-intent lead scoring, unlimited lead-gen pipelines, 5 scheduled Reddit monitors with AI reply suggestions, a Reddit content calendar, a Chrome extension for DMs and CSV export. Compete costs $99 a month and adds weekly competitor briefs drawn from G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, Trustpilot and Reddit.

Linkeddit states its own limit. Its monitoring page says it runs scheduled scans, not streaming alerts, on a daily, weekly or monthly cadence, and the matches land in a feed inside the app. The pages we read list Reddit, review sites and the open web as sources. They do not list Hacker News.

Pick Linkeddit instead of us if you sell on Reddit only, you want the reply drafted and the DM workflow in the same tool, or you would rather pay once than monthly. At $29 it is also the cheapest of the three tools that score intent by default.

Buska covers 16 platforms for the same $49

Buska scores each post from 0 to 100 for buying intent, sorts it into HOT, WARM or EXPLORE, and alerts you by Slack, Discord, email or webhook (homepage). Starter costs $49 a month for 5 signals, 2 ICP profiles and 16 sources, which include Reddit, Hacker News, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, GitHub and Quora. Growth costs $99 for 15 signals and 28 sources and adds reply drafts and webhooks. Scale costs $249 for 30 signals, 33 sources and an AI SDR agent that drafts outreach and sends it after you approve it (pricing). The trial runs 7 days with no card.

Check the scan frequency against how fast your threads move. Starter updates leads daily, Growth every 3 hours and Scale hourly. We search hourly on every plan, so if Reddit and Hacker News are all you need, that is the line to compare. Buska also says on its homepage that it is the wrong tool for brand monitoring and points you to its sibling product, Eko.

Pick Buska instead of us if your buyers also post on LinkedIn or X, you want leads in Slack or Discord, or you want software that sends the outreach as well as finding the lead.

Syften states the shortest delay, and you write the filters

Syften monitors Reddit, Hacker News, Bluesky, Mastodon, Indie Hackers, Stack Overflow, GitHub, Lobsters, Dev.to, podcasts, blogs and more, with X and YouTube as paid add-ons at $40 and $20 a month on the Standard and PRO plans (syften.com). It says it aims for a delay of at most one minute on Reddit, and it delivers by email, Slack, RSS, API or webhook. Entry costs $29.95 a month for 3 community filters and 100 results a day. Standard costs $49.95 for 20 filters, 200 results a day, AI filtering and Slack. PRO costs $119.95 for 100 filters, 500 results a day, webhooks and MCP. The trial runs 14 days with no card.

Syften does not score posts by default. A filter is a search query you write, and its buying-intent guide has you split recommendation, competitor and problem phrases into separate filters, then add an AI accept rule in your own words. Its guide draws the contrast with account-level intent data: Syften shows you what a person said, not a score attached to a company.

Pick Syften instead of us if speed decides your deals, your buyers sit in forums, GitHub or Slack communities, or you want exact control over every match. Expect to spend real time on the filters.

F5Bot is free, and below Gold it matches keywords

F5Bot emails you when a keyword appears on Reddit, Hacker News or Lobsters (f5bot.com). The free plan has 5 keywords and 20 alerts a day, alerts arrive up to 2 hours late, and the pricing table marks it for personal use only (tiers). Silver costs $9.99 a month for 20 keywords, with alerts up to 5 minutes late. Gold costs $49.99 for 200 keywords, instant alerts, Slack and Discord, RSS and JSON feeds, and AI filtering that includes the first $10 of token usage each month. Platinum costs $214.99.

Below Gold, F5Bot matches strings. A distinctive product name works well. A word like "CRM" sends you every mention and leaves the judging to you.

Pick F5Bot instead of us if your budget is zero, you track a brand name more than a need, or you want to learn whether your buyers post publicly at all before you pay anyone. If Hacker News is the only site you care about, our five-minute HN monitoring setup builds the same alert yourself for free.

Pick by who does the reading

Every tool on this page finds the post. They differ in who reads it. F5Bot and Syften send you the matches and a filter language, and you decide which stranger wanted to buy. Shadow Inbox, Buska and Linkeddit make that call first and show you the ones that passed.

So start from your own failure mode. If you have never checked whether your buyers post in public, run F5Bot's free plan for two weeks. If the alerts arrive and you stop opening them, the volume is your problem and scoring fixes it. If you lose threads to faster replies, buy Syften's minute. If half your buyers post on LinkedIn, Buska covers it and we do not.

This page covers five tools that watch public posts. For website-visitor tools and the enterprise intent vendors, our ranked list of 20 buyer intent tools scores them on published criteria. And whichever tool pings you, the reply still decides the outcome, so read how to reply on Reddit without getting banned before you answer the first one.

● FAQ

What is the best tool to find leads on Reddit?

It depends on how much of the reading you want to do yourself. Shadow Inbox scores every new Reddit and Hacker News post against your business and only shows you posts at 70% or higher, so it fits a founder who will not write filters. F5Bot is the only one with a free plan, Syften states the shortest alert delay, Buska covers the most platforms, and Linkeddit bundles Reddit reply drafts at $29 a month. Shadow Inbox is our product, so check the table before you take our word for it.

How do I find customers talking about my product on Reddit and Hacker News?

Pick by what they type. If they name your product or a competitor, a keyword alert catches it, and F5Bot and Syften both cover Reddit and Hacker News and email you the match. If they describe the problem without naming anyone, you need intent scoring across both sites, which Shadow Inbox and Buska do. Linkeddit's pages list Reddit, review sites and the open web as sources, not Hacker News.

Is there an AI tool that monitors Reddit for buying intent?

Yes, several. Shadow Inbox, Buska and Linkeddit score Reddit posts for buying intent by default. Syften and F5Bot start from keyword matches and add an AI filter that you write yourself, on Syften's Standard plan at $49.95 a month and on F5Bot's Gold plan at $49.99 a month.

Which Reddit lead generation tool is free?

F5Bot is the only one of the five with a free plan. It gives you 5 keywords and 20 alerts a day, alerts arrive up to 2 hours late, and its pricing table marks the free plan for personal use only. Shadow Inbox, Buska and Syften have free trials of 3, 7 and 14 days, and Linkeddit's pricing page lists paid plans only.

Is Linkeddit still a Reddit lead generation tool?

Yes, under a different name. Linkeddit's homepage now sells Linkeddit Studio, an AI video editor for Mac and Windows. The Reddit product is Linkeddit Core, which the company describes as a demand and competitor intelligence platform, and its Pro plan at $29 a month includes buying-intent lead scoring and 5 scheduled Reddit monitors.