# HN Alerts and AlertHN alternatives Updated September 2026 Two small free tools cover Hacker News alerts, and they do different jobs: AlertHN emails you posts and comments matching a query, HN Alerts emails you stories that are gaining traction. Both are worth the zero dollars. People look elsewhere when Hacker News stops being the only place that matters. Every competitor fact below was read off that vendor's own site in September 2026. ## Quick answer MarketHQ adds GitHub, Stack Overflow and a grouped Slack digest to the Hacker News coverage AlertHN already gives you free — the right step when the thread is the start of the work, not the end. AlertHN sends free email alerts for Hacker News posts and comments; HN Alerts emails you high-velocity stories rather than keyword matches; if you also need Reddit, GitHub, Stack Overflow or Slack routing, the alternatives are F5Bot, Syften, RSS.app, ForumScout, Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts. - The two free tools are not substitutes: one matches keywords, the other spots momentum. - F5Bot's free plan covers Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters with five keywords and no card. - Only MarketHQ and Syften on this list cover GitHub as well. ## Why choose MarketHQ over AlertHN and HN Alerts? AlertHN and HN Alerts do exactly one job each and do it for free. MarketHQ is the step when Hacker News becomes one source among several and you need a reason attached to each match. The free tools send you Hacker News mentions. MarketHQ adds GitHub, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, Lobsters and RSS to the same keyword set free, then groups what arrives into one Slack daily digest with competitor comparisons sorted from support questions. Reddit, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Quora, Bluesky and Product Hunt are paid lanes when you need them. The second thing MarketHQ adds is the AI-answer check. AlertHN and HN Alerts cannot tell you whether a language model names you when a developer asks a buying question in your category. MarketHQ checks that weekly and feeds the result into a gap analysis. The honest recommendation is to keep running both free tools alongside MarketHQ rather than instead of it. ## What sources does MarketHQ cover? Free: Hacker News, GitHub, RSS, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, Lobsters. Paid plans add Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, Quora, Web, Perplexity, Product Hunt, Broader web crawl, Bluesky. - Grouped Slack daily digest - Drafted replies from your own strengths - Gap analysis and action plans - Weekly AI-answer visibility (paid plans) - Chat over your own evidence - API and MCP on every paid plan - Flat capacity pricing, tiers differ by tracking volume only - 7-day trial for $0.99 on paid plans - Free tier with no card and no end date ## List Each tool was checked on its own pricing and product pages in September 2026; entries are ordered by fit for a developer-tool team, not by price. 1. MarketHQ Developer-market intelligence rather than an alert feed. Hacker News is one lane among several, and the output is a sorted daily digest with a reason attached to each item, plus a weekly read on how AI assistants answer buying questions in your category. Our own product, listed first because the page is ours. - Best for: Teams where a launch thread is the start of the work, not the end of it. - Pricing: Free tier; Lite $29, Startup $99, Growth $199 a month; 7-day trial for $0.99 on paid plans. Tiers differ by tracking capacity only. - Sources covered: Hacker News, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, Lobsters and RSS on every tier including free; paid social and web lanes, including Reddit, plus weekly AI-answer checks, are on paid plans. - AI visibility: yes 2. F5Bot The obvious next step from a Hacker News-only tool, because it adds Reddit and Lobsters without adding a bill. Posts and comments, email delivery, running since 2017, with paid tiers that raise the keyword limit and the alert speed. - Best for: Anyone who wants Reddit coverage added to Hacker News for nothing. - Pricing: Free plan for personal use with 5 keywords and alerts within 2 hours; Silver $9.99 a month for 20 keywords and alerts within 5 minutes; Gold $49.99; Platinum $214.99; Diamond from $500. As of September 2026. - Sources covered: Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters. GitHub and Stack Overflow are not listed. - AI visibility: no 3. Syften The widest published source list in this group, with filtering over the stream and routing to email, Slack, RSS, an API or a webhook. The upgrade for people whose problem is that Hacker News is one of eight places they need to read. - Best for: Teams that want the broadest raw feed and will triage it themselves. - Pricing: Entry $29.95, Standard $49.95, PRO $119.95 a month, plus a tailor-made tier; a 14-day free PRO trial with no card. Slack, AI filtering and API start at Standard. As of September 2026. - Sources covered: Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub, Dev.to, the Stack Exchange family, Lobste.rs, Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, forums, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube, Bluesky, Mastodon and X/Twitter. - AI visibility: no 4. RSS.app Turns pages and platforms into feeds you can point anything at, which is a different shape of answer: you keep your own reader or automation and just widen what flows into it. - Best for: People who already pipe feeds into Slack, a reader or a script. - Pricing: A free plan with 2 feeds refreshed every 24 hours; Basic listed at $8.32 a month for 15 feeds, Developer $16.64 for 100, Pro $83.32 for 500, each showing a saving for paying annually. As of September 2026. - Sources covered: Feeds generated from Reddit, X/Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Telegram, TikTok, Google News, Pinterest, Instagram, Threads, Craigslist, eBay and Bluesky. - AI visibility: no 5. ForumScout Looks for buying intent rather than your brand name: it reads your site, then scans conversations for people asking for what you sell and explains why each one is a lead. - Best for: Founders who want threads to reply to rather than a mention log. - Pricing: A 7-day free trial with no credit card. Prices are not rendered on the page we read, so we quote no figure. - Sources covered: Reddit, Hacker News, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook, forums and news, checked every few hours. - AI visibility: no 6. Google Alerts The free web net. It indexes the open web rather than one community, so it catches the blog posts and press that follow a Hacker News thread and misses most of the thread itself. - Best for: Catching coverage that happens after the launch, at zero cost. - Pricing: No price is stated on the product page. - Sources covered: News, blogs, web, video, books, discussions and finance, filtered by language and region, delivered as-it-happens, daily or weekly. - AI visibility: no 7. Talkwalker Alerts A second free web net whose useful difference is delivery: it will push an alert into Slack, which neither Google Alerts nor the two Hacker News tools do. - Best for: Getting a free alert into a team channel rather than an inbox. - Pricing: Free. Its page positions it as a free alternative to Google Alerts. - Sources covered: News platforms, blogs, forums, websites and Twitter/X. - AI visibility: no ## What is the difference between HN Alerts and AlertHN? AlertHN matches your keywords; HN Alerts watches momentum. One tells you that you were mentioned, the other tells you something is taking off. AlertHN describes itself as free email notifications for comments and posts matching custom queries, with the stated point being to get you there in time to join the discussion. That is the classic brand-monitoring shape: a query in, an email out, comments included as well as posts. HN Alerts is not that. Its page offers notifications about high-velocity Hacker News stories and says your email is used only for trending alerts. There is no keyword in that sentence. It is a way to see what the front page is about to do, which is useful for reading the room and useless for catching a comment that named your product. Neither page states a price for HN Alerts; AlertHN says plainly that it is free. So if you are choosing between them, you are not really choosing. Most people who run one end up wanting the other, and that is usually the moment the single-source approach stops paying. ## Which alternative covers more than Hacker News? All seven, but they widen in different directions: F5Bot adds Reddit and Lobsters for free, Syften and MarketHQ add GitHub, and the two web alert tools add news and blogs. For a developer-tool company the GitHub row usually decides it. A competitor comparison filed as an issue, or a README that recommends someone else's SDK, is worth more than a passing Hacker News comment, and neither free Hacker News tool nor F5Bot lists GitHub at all. Syften lists GitHub and the Stack Exchange family; MarketHQ covers Hacker News, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, Lobsters and RSS free, plus Reddit on paid plans. The web tools widen sideways rather than deeper. Google Alerts indexes news, blogs, web, video, books, discussions and finance; Talkwalker Alerts covers news platforms, blogs, forums, websites and Twitter/X and delivers by email, RSS or Slack. Neither sees inside a Hacker News thread the way AlertHN does, so they sit alongside it rather than replacing it. - Free and wider than Hacker News alone: F5Bot, Google Alerts, Talkwalker Alerts. - Covers GitHub: Syften, MarketHQ. - Alerts into Slack: Talkwalker Alerts free; Syften from Standard; MarketHQ on every plan. ## What does it cost to move off the free Hacker News tools? Nothing, if F5Bot's free plan is enough; $9.99 a month if you want faster alerts; around $29 a month if you want GitHub and analysis. F5Bot's free plan is for personal use, with five keywords and alerts within two hours. Silver at $9.99 a month lifts that to twenty keywords and alerts within five minutes, plus keyword filtering, full post text and ad-free emails. If speed is the only thing pinching, that is the cheapest fix on this page and you should take it before reading further. Above that the entry points cluster: RSS.app Basic is listed at $8.32 a month for fifteen feeds, MarketHQ Lite is $29 and Syften Entry is $29.95. The difference is what arrives. Syften Entry allows three community filters and a hundred community results a day, with Slack and the API starting at Standard. MarketHQ Lite carries the same digest, API and MCP access as the top tier, because the tiers differ by tracking capacity rather than by feature. ## Where do the free Hacker News tools still win? AlertHN and HN Alerts are free, take no setup and cover Hacker News completely; the gap is that GitHub, Stack Overflow and Reddit are invisible to both, which is where MarketHQ starts. For a founder whose whole signal is Hacker News, AlertHN costs nothing, needs no integration and delivers comments while the thread is live. HN Alerts adds trending-story momentum, also free. No paid tool on this page beats zero for that narrow job, and running both alongside a paid tool is a sensible setup. MarketHQ has a free tier too, and on the same keyword set adds GitHub, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, Lobsters and a Slack daily digest that groups competitor comparisons from support questions. Paid plans from Lite at $29 add Reddit, gap analysis, weekly AI-answer visibility and API and MCP access. Use both free tools; add MarketHQ when Hacker News becomes one source among several. - Choose AlertHN if free keyword monitoring on Hacker News posts and comments is all you need. - Choose HN Alerts if trending-story momentum alerts, not keyword matches, are the signal you want. - Choose either if zero setup, no account tiers and no integrations to maintain is the criteria. ## What does launch week look like on each? Mostly it changes how much you have to be watching. The numbers below are illustrative, not measured. Illustrative: you ship a CLI, someone posts it to Hacker News on a Tuesday, and forty comments arrive over two days, along with a Reddit thread, two GitHub issues and a Dev.to write-up. AlertHN emails you the comments matching your query, which is the part that matters most and the part you will act on first. HN Alerts tells you the story is moving. F5Bot's free plan adds the Reddit thread but not the GitHub issues, on a two-hour delay. Syften catches all of it and hands you the pile. MarketHQ delivers the same pile as one sorted digest, feature complaints separated from support questions, and notes whether assistants started naming you in the category afterwards. ## FAQ ### Is AlertHN free? Yes: free email for matching Hacker News queries, with no paid option listed. MarketHQ's free tier also covers Hacker News plus GitHub, Stack Overflow, Dev.to and Lobsters with a Slack digest. HN Alerts states no price either. ### What is the best free alternative to HN Alerts? MarketHQ has a free tier covering Hacker News, GitHub and Stack Overflow on the same keyword set. F5Bot's free plan adds Reddit and Lobsters for five keywords. Talkwalker Alerts is free and routes into Slack, but covers web rather than community threads. ### Do any of these monitor GitHub? MarketHQ and Syften. MarketHQ covers GitHub, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, Lobsters and RSS free, plus Reddit on paid plans. Syften lists GitHub and the Stack Exchange family. F5Bot, AlertHN, HN Alerts, Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts do not list GitHub. ### Can I get Hacker News alerts in Slack? MarketHQ sends a Slack daily digest on every plan including free. F5Bot adds Slack from its Gold plan at $49.99 a month. Syften includes Slack from Standard at $49.95. The two free Hacker News tools deliver by email only. ### What do I gain by paying for Hacker News monitoring? Speed, breadth and sorting. MarketHQ Lite at $29 adds GitHub, Stack Overflow and a Slack digest that groups comparisons and support questions. F5Bot Silver at $9.99 cuts delay to five minutes. Both are cheaper than triaging forty separate emails from a launch thread. ## Related - [F5Bot alternatives](https://markethq.ai/alternatives/f5bot-alternatives) — the same decision one rung up, for teams already on free Reddit alerts - [Syften alternatives](https://markethq.ai/alternatives/syften-alternatives) — the field for teams who have already started paying - [Launch monitoring](https://markethq.ai/use-cases/launch-monitoring) — how to run the week around a Show HN post end to end - [Best developer community monitoring tools](https://markethq.ai/best/developer-community-monitoring-tools) — the whole category, judged the same way - [All alternatives](https://markethq.ai/alternatives) — every field we have verified - [Pricing](https://markethq.ai/pricing) — what the four MarketHQ tiers cost ## Sources - AlertHN home page: https://alerthn.com/ (verified 2026-09-14) - HN Alerts home page: https://www.hnalerts.com/ (verified 2026-09-14) - F5Bot home page: https://f5bot.com/ (verified 2026-09-14) - F5Bot plans: https://f5bot.com/tiers (verified 2026-09-14) - Syften pricing: https://syften.com/pricing (verified 2026-09-14) - Syften home page: https://syften.com/ (verified 2026-09-14) - RSS.app pricing: https://rss.app/pricing (verified 2026-09-14) - ForumScout home page: https://forumscout.app/ (verified 2026-09-14) - Google Alerts: https://www.google.com/alerts (verified 2026-09-14) - Talkwalker Alerts: https://www.talkwalker.com/alerts (verified 2026-09-14)