Best public affairs monitoring tools in 2026: the comparison

Everything stated here about Dixit, Legiwatch, Follaw.sv and Contexte comes from their own public pages, consulted on 31 July 2026: home pages, product pages, pricing pages, terms of sale. Every statement is reproduced with its URL and a verbatim quote in the source list attached to this page.

One convention governs the whole document: when a feature does not appear in a vendor's public materials, we write “not publicly mentioned” and nothing more. That is not a claim of absence. A tool may well offer a feature it does not document on its website, or may have shipped it after our consultation date. The phrase describes the state of the public information, not the state of the product.

We publish no score, no stars and no ranking. A vendor cannot credibly grade its competitors, and French comparative advertising law requires a comparison that is objective, verifiable, limited to material features and free of disparagement. So we stick to factual cells, dated and sourced, that you can reopen one by one.

One last precaution: price lists move. The ones quoted here were recorded on 31 July 2026 on the vendors' own pages; check them at the source before any purchase decision.

Polyfact is an AI-powered public affairs monitoring tool: bill and amendment tracking, timestamped transcripts of debates in the Assemblée nationale, the Sénat and the EU institutions, legislative alerts and stakeholder mapping. The collected perimeter covers Parliament, the executive, Légifrance and the official journal, French regulators and independent authorities, the EU institutions, the press and X.

The first strength is the video layer. More than 17,000 videos from the Assemblée nationale, the Sénat and the European Parliament are indexed, over 10,000 of them transcribed: you search for a sentence, you land on the exact second, you copy the quote together with its source. What most monitoring setups treat as a blind spot — the spoken record, the sitting, the committee — becomes searchable and quotable material.

The second is traceability. Every statement produced by the AI points back to the official document, the amendment or the video timestamp it came from. No black box: a memo stays defensible in front of a board, a client or a journalist.

The third is a single search surface. More than 4 million documents and over a million amendments are queried in the same request, from the Assemblée nationale to Brussels, without switching tools. Amendments are read article by article, with authors, co-signatories, status and successive versions, identical provisions grouped automatically, and export to Excel or Word.

The limits are owned and published. Our coverage is partial: 60 sources are connected out of 489 catalogued institutions, and our coverage page shows country by country what is plugged in and what is not yet. Our pricing is not public either: there is no self-service price list, the perimeter is scoped in a conversation before we send a proposal.

When to choose Polyfact: when your files are decided as much in sittings and committee rooms as in the texts that are filed. If you need to quote precisely what a rapporteur said on a Tuesday evening, retrieve a position taken six months earlier, or cross-reference an amendment, a decree and a hearing in a single query, the timestamped video layer changes the nature of the work. Choose it too if verifiability is a compliance criterion in your organisation, because every line links back to its source.

Dixit presents itself as « The reliable, simple, and efficient AI solution for comprehensive public policy monitoring and strategic influence », and describes a European perimeter on its English pages: European Commission consultations, legislative files, European Parliament activity and Council publications. The site is published in English (dixitplatform.com) and in French (dixitplatform.com/fr), both consulted on 31 July 2026.

The publicly documented strengths are consistent with that positioning. An amendment analyzer builds tracking sheets; alerts can be set by file, committee, consultation or keyword; MEP tracking extends to their networks of amendments, retweets and collaborations; European Parliament meetings are transcribed and translated live, with keyword alerts on the stream. Dixit also monitors MEPs' posts on Twitter/X and BlueSky, automatically translated into English. Its AI summaries cover, in particular, stakeholder contributions to Commission consultations.

The perimeter described on the English pages is European. The French home page additionally announces a national perimeter: « Nous centralisons pour vous l'essentiel : Parlement français, Gouvernement, Journal Officiel, institutions européennes… » (“we centralise the essentials for you: French Parliament, Government, Journal Officiel, European institutions…”, dixitplatform.com/fr, consulted on 31 July 2026). The Assemblée nationale, the Sénat and Légifrance are not named individually there — an observation about the public information available, not a claim about the product.

Pricing: three plans — Essential, Pro and Team — are displayed with no price at all, the first leading to a trial, the other two to a demo request or a sales contact. The free trial runs for seven days, with no card required.

When to choose Dixit: when your centre of gravity is Brussels. For a team whose files are settled in trilogue, in Commission consultations or in comitology, a tool whose product pages are overwhelmingly about the European Union — individual MEP tracking, their networks, the European Parliament live feed — will answer more directly. That is a matter of perimeter, not of quality.

Legiwatch describes itself as « the AI specialised in French parliamentary activity. Sourced, verifiable, French. » The vendor is a French company based in Paris; on 31 July 2026 its pricing page stated: « Launched 3 months ago · more than 30 organisations already use us. »

Their sources page is the most transparent document in the panel. It states that « 13 are available today (parliamentary core and Légifrance), 13 being integrated during 2026 (regulatory extension) », explicitly separating what is connected from what is on the roadmap. The available feeds, according to the statuses displayed on that page on 31 July 2026, cover government and private members' bills, amendments, sitting and committee records, recorded votes, questions to the Government, parliamentary reports, the legislative agenda, member profiles, Légifrance, the HATVP register and political radio breakfast shows. The extension announced for 2026 concerns French regulatory sources: the official journal, implementing decrees, CNIL, ARCOM, AMF, ACPR, ANSM, HAS, the competition authority, the Conseil constitutionnel and the Conseil d'État.

This is the competitor closest to Polyfact on the spoken record. Legiwatch says it automatically transcribes every Assemblée nationale and Sénat video, links each intervention to the relevant member profile and supports search by quote; the vendor claims « 12,000+ hours of sittings transcribed per year with AI attribution ». On amendments, the product page announces full text, explanatory statement, authors, co-signatories and status — adopted, rejected, withdrawn or not moved. On stakeholders, the platform offers a visualisation of political proximities and co-signature circles. Alerts can be set by file, person, stage or keyword, with a 7 a.m. morning recap.

No European source appears on their sources page as of 31 July 2026, neither among the available feeds nor in the extension announced for 2026: the published perimeter is national.

Pricing, recorded on their pricing page on 31 July 2026: Solo at « €450 / month » for one seat, Team at « €380 / month / seat » for two or three seats, Unlimited « on quotation ». The page does not state whether these amounts are exclusive or inclusive of VAT. An annual commitment « corresponds to 10 months of billing for 12 months of use, i.e. two months free ». The page banner announces a « personalised 30-minute demo, then one free trial month on every plan ». Special terms are announced for academic research, independent media and recognised public-interest associations.

When to choose Legiwatch: when your monitoring is strictly national and parliamentary, and transparency about the perimeter matters as much as the perimeter itself. Their sources page, dated and separating what is available from what is on the roadmap, is a practice few vendors take on — it lets you verify before you buy, which is exactly what we ask of a supplier ourselves. Their public price list, rare in this market, also lets you budget without going through a salesperson.

Follaw.sv, published by Saper Vedere, presents itself as « Votre veille institutionnelle et sociétale » (“your institutional and societal monitoring”). The product announces « instant tracking of all legislative information (amendments, questions, bills, etc.) as well as of the public statements of your stakeholders (NGOs, trade federations, associations, etc.) ».

The foundation can be read directly in the contents of their free plan: agendas of the Assemblée nationale, the Sénat, the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister and ministers, legislative files, questions, amendments and official records, access to the official journal, and more than 800 pre-configured thematic watches. Alerts are multi-channel: « Get alerts by email, Slack, Teams or Telegram as soon as a piece of information concerns you! »

It is the only offer in this panel to display a permanent free plan as of 31 July 2026. The price list on their home page has three tiers: Free at « €0 per month », Essential at « €99 incl. VAT per month (billed monthly) » or €999 per year, and Societal at « €299 incl. VAT per month (billed monthly) » or €2,999 per year. The Societal plan adds « 2-hour training · Social media · Petitions ». That is the pillar of their societal promise: the publisher explains that the corpus also covers « the activities of political figures on social networks ».

On the public pages consulted on 31 July 2026, debate transcription, stakeholder mapping and artificial-intelligence features are not mentioned. One confusion is worth avoiding: the free plan mentions « comptes-rendus », which refers to the official records published by the chambers, not to a transcript produced by the platform.

When to choose Follaw.sv: when budget is the first criterion, or when you want to test a practice before funding it. A permanent free plan that already gives access to agendas, legislative files, amendments and the official journal is a rare entry point in this market, and €99 incl. VAT per month for alerts and a personalised watch is the lowest entry ticket among the published price lists in this panel as of 31 July 2026 (Dixit, Contexte and Polyfact display no price). The publisher also emphasises human support, which can matter for a small team with no in-house analyst.

Contexte is first of all a subscription-based professional news outlet, with monitoring tools attached: filing it among pure software vendors would be an analytical mistake. Their corporate page states: « Contexte has been present in Paris and Brussels since the beginning, in 2013. With a newsroom of 50 journalists, 15 of them based at the heart of the European institutions, we are the largest French-language newsroom in Brussels. »

On the tooling side, legislative monitoring — historically known under the Scan brand, now presented on contexte.com in the bills section — lets you « follow the stages of the parliamentary shuttle in real time: filing of the text, amendment tracking, votes, upcoming deadlines ». Following a file triggers a daily email covering all its notable activity. Add to that directories and photo rosters that identify the « roles, past positions and lines of influence » of your counterparts, complete and searchable transcripts of official debates, and, on the most complete plan, AI-generated session records. An AI assistant named Ask is announced in beta.

Amendment tracking and keyword alerts appear from the Avancée plan onwards; AI session records belong to the Intégrale plan. The permanent presence in Brussels since 2013 remains their structural advantage over strictly France-focused players.

Pricing: no price is displayed. The subscription is quoted on request and negotiated at organisation level rather than per user licence — their page claims « pricing suited to every professional structure, from the sole trader to organisations of 100,000 people » — with a rate modulated by the size of the structure, the number of editorial verticals selected and the functional level chosen. Any per-seat price comparison with Legiwatch or Follaw.sv is therefore structurally impossible: the units are not the same. The trial runs for fifteen days, with no commitment and no card required.

When to choose Contexte: when you are buying information as much as tooling. A newsroom of specialist journalists, exclusive documents and daily briefings cannot be replaced by a search engine, however good. If your team needs to understand the political intent behind a text, and not merely follow its procedural path, the subscription is justified first on editorial value, with the tools as a complement. Many teams in fact combine a news outlet and a monitoring tool rather than arbitrating between the two.

Recorded on 31 July 2026 from each vendor's public materials. “Not publicly mentioned” means the feature does not appear on the pages consulted on that date: it is an observation about available information, not a claim about the product. Prices are reproduced as displayed, in each vendor's own billing unit — they are not directly comparable with one another.

A monitoring tool is not chosen from a feature list, but on the fit between what it indexes and what you are accountable for in front of your management or your clients. The seven questions below, asked in this order during demos, usually eliminate most of the market within an hour.

One last reflex, often overlooked: run the trial during a sitting week, not during parliamentary recess. A monitoring tool is judged under load, when three texts move at once and a committee finishes late in the evening. And always test on a real, live file, never on a textbook case: it is the only protocol that exposes coverage gaps.

This comparison does not claim to cover the whole market. Three names come up in buying conversations and do not appear in the table, because we have not audited them as of this date. We would rather state nothing than state something without a source.

These three tools will be added in a future update as soon as we have recorded their characteristics from their own public materials, using the method described above.