F5Bot is the free baseline. It emails you when your keywords show up on Reddit, Hacker News, or Lobsters. Gorilla is a paid one-shot search across Reddit, X, YouTube and TikTok with LLM-ranked results. Different jobs.
If you only need keyword alerts and you're happy reading raw posts in your inbox, F5Bot is great and free. If you want ranked leads, query expansion, multi-platform coverage, and exportable results, Gorilla earns its $1.99.
| Gorilla | F5Bot | |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | Reddit, X, YouTube, TikTok | Reddit, Hacker News, Lobsters |
| Pricing | $1.99 / run | Free |
| Output | Ranked leads with intent score | Raw email matches |
| Query expansion | 20+ phrasings auto-generated | Exact keyword match only |
| Lead scoring | LLM scored | No scoring |
| One-shot search | Yes | No (alerts only) |
| CSV / JSON export | Yes | No |
| MCP integration | Yes | No |
Budget is zero. You only care about your brand name or a couple of exact-match keywords. You're fine triaging raw posts in email, in your own time.
You don't yet know the right keywords. You want the tool to expand your idea into 20 phrasings and search 4 platforms. You want a ranked, exportable list, not an email feed.
F5Bot rewards founders who already know exactly what to monitor. The trap: most early-stage founders don't. They guess "AI resume builder" and miss "I keep failing ATS screens", "my CV gets ghosted", "is my resume even being read". That's where the real intent lives.
Gorilla starts with your idea in plain English and expands to the language real people actually use. You skip the guess-the-keyword phase.
This is one of the few comparisons where stacking works well. Use Gorilla once a month to find new pockets of demand and refine your keyword list. Use F5Bot to monitor those keywords for free in between runs. Net cost: ~$1/mo.
Stack the free tool with one $1.99 Gorilla run. Best of both.
Try Gorilla