What Twitter Analytics Can You Actually Get in 2026? A Realistic Look at Your Options
The Twitter analytics landscape has been decimated over the past three years. Free tools disappeared. Paid tools got more expensive. Social Blade dropped Twitter entirely. And X's own built-in analytics remain limited to your own account.
If you need to analyze Twitter/X data in 2026, whether for marketing, research, competitive intelligence, or influencer vetting, here's what's actually available, what it costs, and where the gaps are.
What X's Built-In Analytics Gives You (and Where It Stops)
X provides a native analytics dashboard to account owners. With an X Premium subscription, you get:
- Tweet-level impressions, engagements, and engagement rate
- Monthly summary of tweet count, impressions, profile visits, and new followers
- Audience demographics (age, gender, interests, geography) for your own followers
- Top tweets and media tweets by performance
What it doesn't do:
- Analyze anyone else's account (competitors, influencers, industry peers)
- Export data to CSV or any external format
- Track follower growth history with charts and trends
- Detect bots or assess follower quality
- Show individual follower profiles and details
X Analytics is useful for monitoring your own performance but useless for competitive research, influencer vetting, or audience analysis of accounts you don't own.
The Analytics Gap Social Blade Left Behind
When Social Blade removed Twitter support in March 2025, it eliminated the most widely used free tool for one specific task: checking any public account's follower growth over time. Millions of marketers, creators, and researchers used it daily for quick competitive checks.
The reason it disappeared was financial: X's legal team told Social Blade they needed to upgrade from the $200/month API tier to the Enterprise tier starting at $42,000/month. Social Blade, which monetized primarily through display ads on free stats pages, couldn't make that work.
What twtData Covers
twtData was built specifically for the use cases that other tools have abandoned. Here's what's available:
Free Profile Tracker
The closest replacement for Social Blade's core feature. twtData's Profile Tracker records daily follower counts, following counts, and tweet counts for any public X account. You get time-series charts showing growth trends. It's free (adding a profile needs a free twtData account), and there is no limit on how many profiles you track.
On October 9, 2026, 791 accounts were being tracked.
Follower and Following List Exports
Something no free tool ever offered at scale: download a complete follower list as a CSV file. Each record includes the follower's username, bio, location, follower count, following count, tweet count, join date, and verification status.
This is the dataset that powers real audience analysis. In a spreadsheet, you can filter followers by location, sort by follower count to find influential followers, search bios for job titles or keywords, or import the data into your CRM.
Bot Detection and Fake Follower Analysis
The Bot Detector uses machine learning to score accounts on a bot probability scale. It analyzes account age, posting patterns, engagement ratios, profile completeness, username patterns, and content originality.
This matters for influencer vetting (is 30% of their audience fake?), brand safety (are bots engaging with your content?), and research integrity (are your data samples contaminated with bot accounts?).
It is paid per use: a full follower audit starts at $10.98 (the follower data plus the audit), with no subscription.
Follower Analytics Reports
Follower Analytics generates detailed reports on any account's audience: demographics, geographic distribution, interests, professions, and activity levels. This goes well beyond what X's own analytics provides, and it works for any public account, not just your own.
A free demo report is available to see the format and depth of analysis.
Tweet and Timeline Exports
Download tweets from any public account or keyword search. Each tweet comes with full text, timestamps, engagement metrics (likes, retweets, replies), media links, and reply/retweet metadata. Export as CSV for analysis in any tool.
List Members and Spaces Participants
Two niche but valuable datasets: export all members of any public Twitter List, and export participants from Twitter Spaces (speakers, hosts, listeners). These are particularly useful for event-based marketing, community analysis, and industry mapping.
What About the Big Enterprise Platforms?
Tools like Brandwatch, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite still offer Twitter analytics, priced per seat or by quote: Sprout Social lists $79 to $399 per seat a month and Hootsuite $99 to $399 a month (both on yearly billing), while Brandwatch shares prices only after a demo (all checked in October 2026). They're designed for social media management teams at large companies, with features like scheduled posting, multi-platform dashboards, and sentiment analysis.
If you're a brand with a dedicated social media team paying for several seats, those platforms serve a different market. But if you need specific data (follower lists, bot checks, growth tracking, tweet exports) without the enterprise overhead, they're dramatically overbuilt and overpriced for the task.
The Real Problem: X's API Pricing Killed the Ecosystem
The consolidation of the Twitter analytics space is a direct result of X's API pricing strategy. When the free tier existed (pre-2023), hundreds of analytics tools thrived. As pricing escalated to $100/month minimum and then to pay-per-use with no free option for new developers in 2026, the ecosystem collapsed.
The tools that survive are those that either:
- Charge enough to cover API costs (enterprise platforms)
- Operate at scale with efficient API usage (twtData's model)
- Abandoned Twitter entirely (Social Blade, many others)
This is unlikely to reverse. X has made clear that developer access is a revenue center, not an ecosystem investment.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happened to all the free Twitter analytics tools?
Most shut down or dropped Twitter support after X raised API prices. The free API tier, which supported hundreds of tools, was effectively eliminated. Social Blade is the most prominent example, but dozens of smaller tools also disappeared in 2024 and 2025.
Can I see analytics for someone else's Twitter account?
X's built-in analytics only work for your own account. To analyze other accounts, you need a third-party tool. twtData's Profile Tracker (free with a twtData account), Bot Detector (paid per audit) and Follower Analytics (free sample report) all work on any public account without the account owner's login.
What's the cheapest way to get Twitter follower data?
For tracking follower counts over time, twtData's Profile Tracker is free. For exporting actual follower lists with profile details, twtData charges per export with no monthly subscription: $5.99 for 2,000 followers, $15.00 for 25,000 and $52.50 for 100,000. For comparison, the X API charges $0.010 per follower read (X's pricing page, October 2026), so 25,000 followers cost $250 in API credits plus development time.
Is X Premium worth it for analytics?
X Premium gives you access to your own account's analytics dashboard, which includes impressions, engagement rates, and audience demographics. If you only need to analyze your own tweets' performance, it's adequate. If you need to analyze competitors, export data, detect bots, or track other accounts, X Premium's analytics won't help.
How do I track my competitor's Twitter growth?
Add their username to twtData's free Profile Tracker. It records daily follower counts, following counts, and tweet counts. You can track multiple competitors and compare growth trends on the same timeline. This was the core feature Social Blade provided before dropping Twitter support.