For small brands, influencer marketing is both a huge opportunity and a constant frustration. You know how powerful it is when the right creator talks about your product — instant credibility, proof, trust. But most influencer platforms feel built for agencies with corporate budgets and dedicated influencer managers.
This guide compares the best influencer search tools in 2025. We’ll walk through what each one actually does well, where it’s not a great fit for smaller teams, and how Afleau is approaching discovery in a fundamentally different way using AI.
⭐ Editors’ Shortlist
1. Modash
Modash is one of the most widely used influencer discovery platforms, especially for teams that care about data. It lets you search across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube creators using very specific criteria: audience demographics, engagement rate, location, even fake follower analysis.
This level of control is the main reason people love it. If you already have a clear idea of who you’re targeting (for example, “women 25–34 in California who post about natural skincare”), Modash will help you slice the world down fast.
That said, Modash assumes you already know what you’re looking for. You’re still the strategist. You’re the one typing in the filters, interpreting the metrics, deciding who feels “on brand.” On top of that, pricing typically starts around $199/month on annual billing, which can be a stretch if you’re a smaller brand just starting to test influencer marketing.
In short: Modash is powerful and serious. It’s great for teams that like digging into data and doing their own vetting. It’s less great if you’re hoping the tool will guide you.
2. Upfluence
Upfluence is more than a discovery tool — it’s closer to a full influencer operations platform. You can find creators, reach out to them, track affiliate codes and discount links, and measure sales performance. If you’re running ongoing influencer programs and constantly managing creators, this kind of “all-in-one control panel” is valuable.
A big selling point is the way Upfluence connects to e-commerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce. It can automatically surface influencers who already follow you, buy from you, or mention you. That’s gold if you’re running a scaled gifting or ambassador program.
The catch is that Upfluence is priced and structured for brands that are already doing influencer marketing at volume. Pricing is custom and often lands in the $1,500–$3,000/month range, sometimes more. This is hard to justify if you’re a small skincare brand just trying to find 5–10 creators to talk about your new serum.
So, Upfluence is fantastic if you’re basically acting like an in-house influencer agency and you care about outreach, tracking, and reporting. But if you’re just trying to find good fits, it’s like buying a full CRM before you even have leads.
3. CreatorIQ
CreatorIQ is considered the enterprise gold standard. You’ll see it used by big consumer brands and agencies that manage dozens or hundreds of creators at once. It’s built for compliance, reporting, fraud detection, brand safety, campaign governance, all the stuff large teams get audited on.
It’s extremely sophisticated, and if you’re a global brand coordinating influencers in multiple regions at the same time, it makes sense.
For a small brand, though, CreatorIQ is usually overkill. Pricing often starts in the thousands per month, and the onboarding process feels like adopting enterprise software — because it is.
Put simply: CreatorIQ is the tool you graduate to when influencer marketing is already a major line item in your budget. If you’re still trying to figure out who to work with in the first place, it’s more tool than you realistically need.
4. Collabstr & Social Cat
Collabstr and Social Cat take a different angle. Instead of being search dashboards with heavy analytics, they’re more like marketplaces where creators make themselves available for brand deals, paid UGC, or gifted collaborations.
On these platforms, you can browse creators directly, see what type of content they offer (e.g. “1 TikTok + 3 IG Stories”), and start a conversation. It’s simple, it’s fast, and in many cases, it’s affordable — sometimes you’re sending product instead of money, or doing small-budget UGC for ad creative.
This approach is especially good if your goal is, “I just need content and social proof right now,” not “I need a full long-term ambassador with deep brand alignment.”
The limitation is depth. You don’t necessarily get full audience analytics, and you’re not getting a strategic recommendation engine. You still have to judge brand fit yourself. It’s more like shopping than analyzing.
These platforms are perfect for very early-stage brands that want to experiment quickly without locking into a contract or dropping thousands upfront.
5. Heepsy
Heepsy sits in the “practical and affordable” middle. It’s an influencer search tool with basic analytics and targeting filters (niche, engagement, location), and its entry pricing tends to start around $89/month.
For a lot of small teams, that price point is the main draw. You get structure. You get search. You get a sense of whether a creator’s audience is real. You don’t have to go straight into a $2K/month commitment.
But Heepsy still works like a traditional database: you’re doing the searching, the filtering, the judgment. You’re still asking yourself, “Does this person’s voice match our brand? Would our audience trust them?” The tool doesn’t really answer that for you.
If you’re on a tighter budget and okay with doing the manual screening yourself, Heepsy is a reasonable starting place.
6. Afleau (AI-Powered)
Afleau is built around a different idea: you shouldn’t have to become an influencer strategist just to run influencer marketing.
Instead of dropping you into a dashboard full of filters, Afleau uses agentic AI to act more like a researcher. You describe your product and your brand positioning — or you just paste your website — and Afleau analyzes it. It learns your tone. It understands what you’re selling, who you’re selling to, and what kind of creator would actually feel believable talking about it.
From there, Afleau goes and finds creators that align with that positioning. Not just “skincare influencer with 50K followers,” but “skincare creator who talks about redness, barrier repair, and ingredient transparency in a calm, trustworthy way.” That level of nuance is exactly where small brands tend to win, and exactly where generic keyword-based search tools fall apart.
Because Afleau is conversational, you can steer it naturally. You can say things like:
- “Can you focus on creators with a softer, educational tone instead of loud salesy hype?”
- “Show me women-owned wellness voices who post about healing, not just aesthetics.”
- “Find budget-friendly creators who make product demos on TikTok.”
The point is: you don’t need to know the right filters. You can just talk.
Where Afleau is different from the big platforms is price and focus. There’s no $2K/month enterprise contract. There’s no huge onboarding cycle. The goal is to make intelligent discovery (the hardest part of influencer marketing) accessible to brands that don’t have an in-house team or an expensive agency.
Where Afleau doesn’t try to compete — yet — is campaign management. You won’t get a giant CRM dashboard for managing payments, shipping logistics, and long-term reporting. Afleau is intentionally focused on the critical first question: “Who should we even talk to?” Because if you get that part wrong, none of the rest matters.
7. Final Thoughts
Most influencer platforms were built for people who are already running influencer programs at scale. They assume you know your audience, you have budget, and you want dashboards.
But most small brands aren’t there yet. Most small brands are still asking a simpler question:
“Who, specifically, should we work with — and can we afford them?”
Traditional tools like Modash and Heepsy are great if you’re comfortable doing the research yourself. Upfluence and CreatorIQ are fantastic if you’re already basically operating like an agency.
Afleau is something else: it’s built for the brand that doesn’t have time to figure all that out. It’s built for the founder, the solo marketer, the small team. It’s built to think with you.
If you want influencers who actually match your story — not just a spreadsheet of big accounts — Afleau is the fastest way to get there.
