X analytics without Premium: what you can still see
X has moved much of its analytics behind a Premium subscription. A surprising amount is still visible for free, though, and one of the most useful numbers, how fast a post is gaining views, was never in X analytics in the first place.
What every account can see
Some numbers are public on every post, whether or not you pay:
- Views, shown under each post.
- Replies, reposts and likes, shown on the action bar.
- Bookmarks, shown on the post's own page. In the timeline X does not put a number next to the bookmark button.
- The exact post time, when you hover the timestamp.
For your own posts, free accounts have generally still been able to open basic activity numbers for an individual post, most reliably in the mobile app.
What Premium adds
The full account analytics dashboard on desktop, with account-level trends and breakdowns over time, is a Premium feature. X announced expanded analytics for Premium subscribers in 2024, and third-party coverage since then describes the desktop dashboard as Premium-only.
If you run an account professionally and need follower growth, profile visits and link clicks over weeks, that dashboard, or a paid social media tool, is the right answer. A browser extension is not a replacement for it.
What neither version shows
X analytics, free or paid, is about your own account. It does not tell you how fast someone else's post is spreading. For a creator, that is often the more useful question: which posts in my niche are taking off right now, and where should I join the conversation?
You can work it out by hand. Take the view count, hover the timestamp, count the hours, divide. Doing that for every post in a timeline is not realistic.
Views per hour on any public tweet, no Premium needed
X Viral Monitor does that arithmetic for every tweet as it loads. It is a free extension for Chrome and Edge and works with a free X account.
- Velocity badge. Each tweet with a view count gets a views-per-hour badge: 🌱 under 1,000, 🚀 from 1,000, 🔥 from 10,000. The thresholds are adjustable. See Twitter views per hour explained.
- Hover details. Views, likes, reposts, replies, bookmarks, the post time and a 0 to 100 viral score that weighs velocity, engagement rate, repost ratio and bookmark ratio.
- Bookmark counts in the timeline. An optional setting puts the number next to each bookmark button.
- Leaderboard. A floating panel ranking the tweets on the current page by speed. See how to find viral tweets.
It works on other people's public posts and on your own. The extension reads the numbers X already sends to your browser when tweets load, so it needs no API key, no Premium, and no connection to your account beyond being logged in to x.com as usual. There are no analytics or tracking pixels in the extension.
Honest limits
- It shows the numbers X shows. It cannot reveal private metrics such as profile visits, link clicks or follower demographics.
- Views per hour is an average since posting, not a live rate. Read it together with the post's age.
- No historical charts. It tells you what is happening on the page you are looking at.
- Posts from before X added view counts in late 2022 have no views, so they get no badge.
A practical free setup
For most individual creators, a free account plus the per-post numbers X already shows covers the basics. Add X Viral Monitor for speed and ranking across your timeline, and check the mobile app for your own posts' activity. If you later need account-level trends over months, that is when Premium's dashboard earns its price.
FAQ
Do I need X Premium to see how many views a tweet has?
No. View counts are public on posts for everyone.
Does X Viral Monitor show my follower analytics?
No. It works with the per-post numbers X shows publicly: views, likes, reposts, replies and bookmarks. It does not have access to private account analytics.
Is X Viral Monitor free?
The badges, leaderboard and bookmark counts are free. Pro, at $2.9 per month or $29 per year, adds a filter that hides slow posts.
Install X Viral Monitor
Free extension for Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Velocity badges, the leaderboard, bookmark counts, AI reply drafts and Markdown copy are all free; Pro ($2.9/month or $29/year, with a 14-day trial) adds the velocity filter.