Exploding Topics is helpful for discovering curated trends for eCommerce and business opportunities, but it lacks customization, real-time updates, and rich insights.
In this article, we'll cover the top alternatives to Exploding Topics.
Comparison chart
Glimpse
Glimpse is a Chrome extension that blends the best of Exploding Topics and Google Trends into one tool. It has over 150,000 users, is rated 4.9 stars, and is used by companies like Amazon, Coca-Cola, IKEA, Chanel, and The New York Times.
Glimpse helps users discover and track trends in any category, then pull rich insights including absolute search volume, growth rate, and popular long-tail keywords.
Additional insights
Seasonality: Dedicated panel to visualize seasonal patterns and understand what drives them.
Forecast: Predict the next 12 months’ search demand with 87% accuracy.
Channel: View which social platforms a topic is most discussed on.
Topic map: Visually explore related keywords.
Tracking & alerts: Monitor keywords and get alerted when one takes off in popularity.
Pros
Customizable: Deeply explore any trend or category and build your own dashboard.
Accurate: Glimpse is built directly on top of Google Trends and is therefore highly trustworthy.
Real-time: Updates minute-by-minute.
Historical: Data goes all the way back to 2004.
Easy to use: UI is simple and easy to use.
Cons
Limited browser support: Glimpse is only available on Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Brave, and Vivaldi.
Trends, not “trending”: Glimpse won't help us much in detecting fleeting, "trending" news or celebrity events. Rather, it's built to identify and pull insights on emerging, sustainable trends.
No site or technical analysis: Doesn't allow us to input our website and get customized recommendations on how to improve performance.
Price
Free plan provides up to 10 free searches per month, with additional access starting at $49/mo.
Who should use Glimpse?
Glimpse is ideal for someone who wants a customizable trend research and discovery tool.
Get started with Glimpse for free.
Google Trends
Google Trends provides a random sample of aggregated, anonymized, and categorized Google and YouTube searches to measure changes in search interest over time for a particular keyword.
Features
Interest over time: View normalized search interest for a keyword on a 0-100 scale.
Geographic data: Analyze interest in a query or topic from around the globe or at city-level geography.
Related Topics & Queries: See keywords related to our core term that may be growing in popularity.
Pros:
Accurate: Since it’s straight from Google, we can be confident the data is accurate.
Real-time: Search interest is updated on a minute-by-minute basis.
Historical: View data back to 2004.
Free: 100% free to use.
Cons:
No absolute volume: Normalized search interest on a 0-100 scale as opposed to real numbers.
Limited trend discovery: Not great for finding new trends, largely just researching ones we already know about.
Price
Free.
Who should use Google Trends?
Ideal for someone that only wants to see the trajectory of interest in a given keyword over time without a need for absolute volumes or trend discovery.
Pinterest Trends
Pinterest Trends is like Google Trends but for Pinterest. It can help discover emerging trends on the Pinterest platform and pull insights.
Features
Interest over time: View normalized search interest for a keyword on a 0-100 scale.
Discover: Spot growing trends across Pinterest’s categories.
Filter results: Filter by trend type, date, category, keywords, age, and gender.
Search trends: View results for a keyword of your choosing as long as it has already been added.
Compare: Compare keywords’ interest over time.
Popular pins: View the most popular pieces of content for a given keyword.
Pros:
Accurate: Since it’s straight from Pinterest, we can be confident the data is accurate.
Demographic insights: View breakdowns in search interest by age and gender.
Semi-real-time: Search interest is updated on a weekly basis.
Cons:
Pinterest only: Much smaller database than Google, best for visual (beauty, home, fashion, etc.) and female-dominant industries (70% female user base).
No absolute volume: Normalized search interest like Google Trends.
Not fully customizable: Limited to pre-curated keywords, as opposed to fully customizable queries on Google Trends.
Historical limitations: Only provides data up to the past 2 years.
Price
Free.
Who should use Pinterest Trends?
Ideal for someone in a visual industry who needs “trending” topics in particular industries for shorter-term purposes.
Semrush (Keyword Overview)
Semrush is a comprehensive SEO toolkit that provides some trend research functionality via its “Keyword Overview” tool.
Features
Absolute search volume: Absolute search volume for any given month since 2012.
Long-tails: Variations of the seed keyword or keyword phrase in any order.
Difficulty ranking: How difficult it would be for a website to rank organically in the Google top 10.
Intent categorization: Understand the intent behind searches.
CPC: Average price advertisers pay for a user’s click on an ad triggered by the chosen keyword.
SERP analysis: Top 100 Google results that appear for the keyword.
Pros:
Accurate monthly volumes: Provides generally accurate search volumes for the past month on most keywords, including long-tails.
Extensive long-tail results: “Keyword Magic” tool to find an abundance of long-tail variations.
Geographic: Local and global keyword data with high degree of precision, useful for local SEO purposes.
Cons:
Not real-time: Search volumes are updated infrequently. For example, this third-party case study shows how SEMRush showed zero search volume for ChatGPT for more than six weeks after it went viral.
Poor trend discovery: Only provides long-tail data, limiting true trend discovery.
No growth metrics: Difficult to tell how a topic has grown over time, especially with an inaccurate trend graph.
Inaccurate trend graph: As seen with the comparison to Google Trends, Semrush shows inaccurate search interest over time.
Price
Starts at $140/mo.
Who should use Semrush’s Keyword Overview?
Ideal for someone that wants a comprehensive SEO toolkit with long-tail data, geographic precision, and competitor analysis features without the advanced trend discovery of other tools.
Ahrefs (Keyword Explorer)
Ahrefs is an SEO tool that provides some trend research functionality via its “Keyword Explorer.”
Features
Absolute search volume: Absolute search volume on a monthly basis as far back as 2015.
Long-tails: Variations of the seed keyword or keyword phrase in any order.
Difficulty ranking: How difficult it would be for a website to rank organically in the Google top 10.
Traffic potential: Amount of organic traffic that the #1 ranking page for a target keyword gets from all the keywords it ranks for.
CPC: Average price advertisers pay for a user’s click on an ad triggered by the target keyword.
SERP analysis + position history: The top Google results that appear for the keyword and their rankings over time.
Pros
Historical: Data extends as far back as 2015.
Accurate: Generally well-known for having accurate search volume data, confirmed by its mirroring of Google Trends’ trajectory.
Multi-engine: Covers multiple search engines including Google, YouTube, Amazon, and Bing.
Cons
Not real-time: Search volumes are updated on a monthly basis.
Limited trend discovery: Difficult to discover emerging trends, especially on lower plans.
No growth metrics: Cannot easily determine how much a keyword has grown in volume besides eyeballing from the graph.
Price
Limited results for free, paid plan starts at $29/mo.
Who should use Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer?
Ideal for someone with a larger budget who wants extensive keyword research functionality without a need for real-time insights or advanced trend discovery.
Keyword Tool
Keyword Tool offers long-tail keyword suggestions based on Google’s autocomplete and can provide a degree of trend discovery.
Features
Long-tail data: Provides long-tail keyword suggestions based on Google’s autocomplete
CPC and competition: Average CPC and 0-100 competition difficulty ranking.
Pros:
Extensive long-tails: Lengthy list of long-tail keywords to aid ideation.
Multi-engine: Provides keyword data from Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, and other search platforms.
Basic growth metrics: Offers comparison of last month's searches to that month in the previous year.
Cons:
Not real-time: Data is updated on a monthly basis.
Includes unrelated keywords: Since the long-tail list includes results that simply start with our seed phrase, it will consistently return unrelated topics (e.g. “ketoconazole” for “keto”).
Untrustworthy data: Given that it missed the massive spike in September, we should be skeptical of the tool's accuracy.
Price
Limited results for free, paid plan starts at $89/mo.
Who should use Keyword Tool?
Ideal for someone primarily interested in cross-platform, long-tail ideation without the need for accurate, real-time search volumes or advanced trend discovery.