The best media monitoring tools on the market are enticing and well worth the hype. Knowing well in advance that a story is trending positive or negative is invaluable intel. It allows you to build upon a wave of support and act quickly to avert a communications crisis.
The good news is that there are many media monitoring solutions available. The bad news is that there are many media monitoring services available. No doubt: with so many choices, it can be overwhelming to decide which one is best.
To make it a bit easier to choose the best PR listening tool for your needs, below you’ll find the pros and cons of some of the top media monitoring contenders.
What is media monitoring?
It should be made clear that the term “media monitoring” is an overarching umbrella that includes a few sub-categories:
👉🏼 Media monitoring solutions track general industry news that’s important to you and your clients.
👉🏼 Brand monitoring tools track the specific mentions of your brand.
👉🏼 Social media tracking services monitor conversations about your brand on social platforms and analyze them for trending reactions and customer feedback.
Most PR monitoring tools available on the market will cover all of these types of monitoring in one comprehensive service.
Best media monitoring tools for PR professionals
Please note that some companies don’t publish their pricing and require you to contact them for custom quotes. Therefore, listed prices are estimated from the best data available at the time of writing. Here’s more on media monitoring costs, in case you’re interested.
You can learn all about using social monitoring for PR from The Complete Social Media Listening Guide for Public Relations.
Prowly: From $258 a month
Pros
Prowly not only supports PR professionals in media monitoring, but also in finding the right media contacts and organizing them in a PR CRM, creating aesthetically pleasing press releases, and managing email pitches, just to name a few.
Besides social media and digital monitoring, with Prowly you can monitor broadcast and print.
Broadcast monitoring helps you better understand the media landscape by analyzing your media presence across TV, over the Radio, and in podcasts on both local and global scales.
This gives you the ability to effortlessly monitor mentions in real-time and gain valuable insights into how your brand is being discussed across various media channels. With advanced query building and filtering options, you can customize your searches to capture exactly what you need. Plus, easy-to-use dashboards make it simple to visualize all your media data.
Last but not least - you can enhance your monitoring with print publications to:
- gain instant access to several global, national, regional, and local newspapers, trade publications, consumer magazines, and business journals
- track mentions of your brand, your competitors, and industry trends across domestic and international print and paywalled outlets
- analyze insights consolidated into a single, user-friendly dashboard
- make sure you have access to diverse sources to ensure you track coverage everywhere it appears
While the largest media monitoring solutions require an expensive annual commitment, Prowly offers a similar PR automation experience with budget-friendly monthly subscriptions, a free 7-day trial, and dedicated training. Pricing plans are transparent and available on the company’s website, so there’s no need to connect with a sales team to get started right away.
If you're interested in a customized plan that aligns with your specific goals, or if you want to add print and broadcast monitoring to your toolkit, simply provide your contact information, and we'll handle the rest.
Cons
Despite being backed by Semrush and having nearly a decade of experience in the PR automation software market, Prowly is relatively new to the media monitoring service sector. That's why there are not many user reviews available for media monitoring yet.
And if you're looking for the best social media listening tools, here's another guide, dedicated to them.
Cision: From $7,200 a year (estimate)
Pros
Cision is deeply established in the industry and offers a full suite of PR automation software. Its media monitoring and PR listening tools allow you to track online, broadcast, print, social, and podcast mentions of your company and its competitors.
Cision can reportedly monitor an impressive amount of media contacts. In fact, some PR agencies report tracking 1500 of them!
Cons
User reviews consistently name Cision the most difficult PR software to use. Although a powerful tool, its functionality can be overwhelming.
Their social listening tool has search limits based on your pricing plan, so PRs using Cision recommend confirming your limit when you receive your quote. That way, you can actively avoid hitting your search max quicker than you’d like.
Some users also recommend setting up Google Alerts to capture mentions that the software sometimes misses. Pricing is on the higher end of all options, and there’s no free trial, free dedicated training, or free set-up.
Muck Rack: From $10,000 per year (estimate)
Pros
Well-known Muck Rack offers media tracking services for client and competitor news across social, blogs, online news, radio, TV, and traditional media. Automated alerts bring updates directly to your inbox.
You can easily follow your favorite journalists and their social media activity and create robust coverage reports about who has shared your link.
Reviewers report that media contact accuracy is very good, something that’s worth a lot in the PR industry.
Cons
Reviewers share that its mention monitoring tool is sensitive to outside issues, like when older news articles are republished with new dates. These technical glitches in data can be frustrating and time-consuming to correct.
Reporting is not flexible as many would like: the inability to delete unwanted fields may interfere with the desired look of client reports. While this mention monitoring tool is dynamic, it can take time to learn.
Meltwater: From $8,000 a year (estimate)
Pros
Meltwater has over 20 years of experience in media intelligence and provides media monitoring across online news, print, broadcast, and consumer review sites. The company claims to capture the most content and conversations in the industry.
It monitors over 300,000 online news sources and 300 million blogs.
Its brand monitoring tool tracks selected keywords and aggregates all matching content. Its social listening tool can monitor Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Pinterest, TikTok, blogs, message boards, and discussion forums.
Cons
Some reviewers report inconsistent social media tracking and scheduling, especially around Facebook and Instagram. Social media dashboards from other companies may be needed to cover these gaps in monitoring.
There is no free trial or free training. The need to make an annual commitment instead of a monthly one can be a big drawback to freelancers and smaller PR agencies.
→ Learn more about Meltwater pricing here.
Agility PR Solutions: From $350 a month
Pros
When you distribute a press release with Agility PR, detailed monitoring on press release pick-up is supported. For those seeking a more involved, customized service, media monitoring, and PR measurement assistance are available through their team of media analysts.
The product can generate useful pre-built reports for coverage, the share of voice, and media types.
Cons
Pricing is not available without speaking directly with a salesperson. Features mentioned above appear to be sold as individual products versus a one-stop solution.
There is no free trial available to test the media monitoring solution, and several reviews report media contact data has gaps.
Nexis Newsdesk: From $10,000 per year
Pros
Nexis Newsdesk falls under the renowned Lexis Nexis umbrella, so article access is impressive (think millions). The product allows you to set up media monitoring and social listening across a robust range of media sources. Choose your industry news curation and automate your daily emails. Set up brand and competitor media alerts.
The software includes pre-built analysis charts and data visualizations that help you uncover trends in both traditional press and social media.
Cons
It’s the most expensive option reviewed, so it’s cost-prohibitive for smaller agencies. The website does not allow you to see pricing upfront. Instead, it requires you to contact their sales team for a custom quote.
While reviewers seem happy with the user interface, they admit that there is a long learning curve for new team members and that data visualizations require an experienced analytics background for proper interpretation.
Mention: From $99 a month
Pros
Mention is reportedly easy to set up with a friendly user interface. Its lower cost is favorable for small PR agencies and freelancers. The software can be integrated with Slack, which is great for teams working on that platform. Plus, the ability to exclude keywords helps refine and organize search results.
Cons
Reviewers report needing to weed through the mentions to narrow in on desired results. The product often picks up “spam” mentions, and companies with a common name may find search results are too broad. Some mentions do not come in at real-time like other products.
Brandwatch: From $800 a month
Pros
UK-based Brandwatch allows you to set up keyword queries that monitor industry topics, company mentions, purchase intent, and share of voice.
Users report that product development is ongoing, so they consistently benefit from added features and improvements. Dashboards are helpful and provide in-depth analysis, graphs and visuals are customizable, and a library of training videos ensures you’re getting the most out of the software.
Cons
The tool is sophisticated but not necessarily intuitive, so it requires dedicated training and time to get comfortable with it. Users report a longer onboarding timeframe than other media monitoring solutions. Search queries and rules can be difficult to set up.
Brand24: From $49 a month
Pros
Brand24 is a media monitoring tool used for various purposes, including tracking brand mentions online, measuring the results of your PR campaigns, analyzing the target audience, and gathering insights to improve PR strategy.
The biggest advantage of this tool is that it can categorize your brand/product mentions into positive, neutral, or negative sentiment which will help you in analyzing your online reputation. Additionally, it lets you download nicely designed, professional PDF or Excel reports anytime you need to showcase the value of your work.
Cons
Brand24 is a powerful tool for tracking social media conversations and identifying key influencers, but it does have some limitations. It doesn't monitor traditional media sources like print magazines, which means you may miss some mentions of your brand in those channels.
And if you're looking for other top AI-powered PR tools, check out these two lists of PR and AI marketing options.
Choose from the best media monitoring solutions
Ready to add a media monitoring service to your agency’s toolkit? With excellent options out there to choose from, it’s just a matter of determining which one is best for you and your team.
If you're in doubt, here are the features to consider when looking at media monitoring solutions:
- The number of clients and keywords you’ll need to monitor
- The total number of channels you’ll want to monitor - do you need coverage for media outlets only, or also social media?
- The number of users
- Your agency reporting needs - will the service’s standard ones work, or will you require the ability to build custom reports?
- The free trial - are you able to test the media monitoring tool out before making any commitment?
When you're ready, take the chosen media monitoring tools for a spin or contact their sales teams if there's no free trial available. Best of luck!
Cover photo by Luke Southern
