Hi team, we're diverting from the usual this week as we really wanted to cover a great tool we've had the privilege of using. This review isn’t sponsored and there’s no commercial arrangement behind it. We’re sharing our experience purely from genuine use in live operational contexts.
Over the past few months, we’ve been working closely with Signal, integrating their platform Global Feed into our daily situational awareness and intelligence monitoring. It’s been running alongside our existing workflows, giving us another layer of real-time reporting and source-based verification to work with. The platform has been used to track breaking incidents, validate emerging reports, and feed into both our internal decision-making and external reporting.
While our perspective is shaped by an intelligence and risk focus, this review is written for a general audience. We’ll cover how usable the platform is, how well the design works for fast comprehension, and how reliable the real-time reporting and source grading have been in practice. We’ll also touch on pricing, which is excellent for organisations and agencies, but not realistically aimed at individual consumers.
Let's get into it.
|
Signal's Global Feed is a New Zealand-developed open-source intelligence (OSINT) platform that delivers real-time situational awareness for security and risk management. In this review, we look at how Signal’s Global Feed system performs in terms of live updates, source coverage, accuracy of its AI-generated situation reports, and overall design and usability for a general audience. We also examine its pricing structure – which offers great value for organisations – and why it might be less practical for individual users.
Real-Time Updates and Source Coverage
Global Feed is built to move fast. On any given day it pushes out more than 6,000 real-time situation reports from around the world. Behind the scenes, it’s constantly scanning millions of data points and cross-checking multiple sources for each incident. It’s pulling from everywhere – social media, blogs, official government feeds, forums, and even parts of the deep and dark web – so when something happens, it’s likely to spot it. As soon as an event pops up, the AI pulls the threads together, analyses what’s out there, and pushes an alert within seconds, then keeps updating as new details come in. The end result is that you get timely, actionable intel with broad, multilingual coverage – the kind of feed that genuinely lets you be the first to know, not the last.
Global Feed doesn’t just throw an endless stream of tweets and headlines at you. It takes all that noise and turns it into clear, readable situation reports. Each alert gives you the key points – what happened, where, and when – pulled together by machine learning and natural language processing so you can get the gist in seconds. Every report is backed by transparent sourcing, with direct links to the original posts or articles so you can check the information yourself. In a space where a lot of tools work like a “black box,” Signal stands out by showing you exactly where its intel comes from instead of asking you to just trust it.
The admiralty grading system
To further bolster accuracy, Global Feed grades the credibility of its information using an industry-standard confidence scoring system. The platform incorporates the Admiralty Scale (a method long used in the intelligence community) to evaluate how reliable each source is and how likely the reported info is to be correct. In practice, you’ll see tags like High Confidence on an alert, indicating the system’s assessment of trustworthiness based on source quality and cross-confirmation. This combination of automated cross-referencing and source grading means the intel you get is not only fast but also filtered for credibility. In short, Signal’s sitreps strive to be both immediate and accurate – cutting through misinformation by only reporting what’s corroborated and assigning a confidence level to everything.
One of our favourite views, which is the Map View. We have a dedicated stream that pulls data within the Indo Pacific Region, for all things conflict related. We are then able to pull open mini-SITREPs on a particular event. Very handy!
Usability and Design
From a usability standpoint, Signal is designed to be approachable even for non-technical users. The web-based interface requires no complex setup – it’s advertised as being up and running in minutes, emphasising that it’s easy to use for anyone. The dashboard itself is clean and modern: on one side you have a scrollable real-time feed of incident alerts, and on the other a map visualisation plotting those incidents by location. This dual layout helps orient you instantly – you can see what happened and where it’s happening. Users can easily filter the feed by incident type, location, keyword, date or confidence level to cut out noise and focus on what matters to them. For example, with a few clicks you might display only transportation disruptions in Europe this week or high-confidence alerts within 10km of your assets. Setting up email/SMS notifications is equally straightforward, using those same filters or geo-fenced areas around your facilities to trigger alerts.
Signal’s Global Feed dashboard features an intuitive interface. In this screenshot, a live feed of alerts (left) is paired with an interactive map (right) for geospatial context. Each incident is labeled by category (e.g. severe weather, security, infrastructure) and tagged with a confidence level (here, “High Confidence”), making it easy for any user to scan and understand the situation at a glance.
The layout feels well thought out and makes it easy to get what you need at a glance. Key details stand out visually, with colour-coded icons for different categories and map markers that make it instantly clear how close something is to your locations. There’s also a solid set of built-in analytics and reporting tools giving you interactive charts and custom dashboards right inside the platform. If you want to dig into patterns, like incident trends over time or heatmaps showing where alerts are concentrated, you can do it without having to wade through raw data. It’s straightforward to pick up, even if you’ve never touched an OSINT platform before, and the transparent design means you always know what you’re looking at. In practice, it works a lot like a specialised news dashboard that updates constantly and lets you drill down whenever you need more detail.
Pricing
Global Feed is offered as a subscription service with pricing that reflects its enterprise orientation. For a single-user license, the cost is USD $550 per month (around $6,000 per year). Organisations can opt for a package at $25,000 per year which includes up to five users on the Global Feed, along with all features, unlimited searches/feeds, initial setup, and training support for the team. (A 14-day free trial is available as well for those who want to test the waters.) Unlike many competitors, Signal doesn’t charge per seat beyond these tiers – the organisation license is a flat rate that can cover an entire team of analysts or security personnel, which is a refreshing approach.
When viewed in context, the price point delivers strong value for mid-to-large organisations and agencies. Competing threat-intelligence and OSINT platforms often run into the six figures – it’s not uncommon for enterprise solutions to cost $100,000 a year or more for similar capabilities. Signal, by contrast, positions itself as a cost-effective alternative; even a full-fledged deployment with many users tends to land in the tens of thousands (estimated around $35–60K range for larger implementations, vs. $100K+ for rivals). For companies that measure these tools against the cost of missed incidents or manual intelligence work, Signal’s offering looks quite compelling.
From a value perspective, we believe Global Feed is an extremely cost effective solution for global situational awareness. Standing toe-to-toe with larger enterprise solutions, offering similar functionality at a fraction of the cost. Click here to register for a demo.
While the pricing isn’t designed with casual consumers in mind, at $550 per month for a single user it’s positioned for professional environments rather than everyday personal use. It’s built for teams in corporate security, emergency management, government, or NGOs who need reliable, real-time intelligence at scale. For those audiences, the value is clear – you’re getting enterprise-grade capability at a competitive price point compared with similar tools. For individuals looking for general news monitoring, it’s more capacity (and cost) than you’re likely to need.
The Verdict
Our experience with Signal’s Global Feed has been consistently positive. It’s fast, reliable, and well-designed for both quick scanning and deeper analysis. The real-time coverage, transparent sourcing, and use of the Admiralty Scale for grading give it a level of trust and utility that stands out in the OSINT space. Features like the map view, custom feeds, and confidence scoring have become part of our daily workflow, adding genuine value to both operational decision-making and reporting.
While the pricing clearly positions it for professional teams rather than casual consumers, for organisations needing a capable, enterprise-grade situational awareness platform, the value is hard to beat. Signal delivers much of what larger, more expensive platforms offer, but at a fraction of the cost, and with a user experience that makes it accessible to both technical and non-technical users.
For us, it has earned its place alongside our other intelligence tools – not as a novelty, but as a core part of how we monitor, verify, and respond to events in real time. If you're interested, we highly recommend getting in touch with the team at Signal and getting yourself a demo: https://www.getsignal.info/try-demo
