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.
If you don't feel like going through the long process of comparing journalist databases, Prowly's media monitoring software is completely free for 7 days so you can see if it's a match for you.
What are media monitoring tools?
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.
Top 13 media monitoring tools compared
| Platform | Type | Pricing | Free Trial |
| Prowly | All-in-one PR tool | From $258/month | Yes |
| Cision | All-in-one PR tool | Undisclosed | No |
| Muck Rack | All-in-one PR tool | Undisclosed | No |
| Meltwater | All-in-one PR tool | Undisclosed | No |
| Agility PR | All-in-one PR tool | Undisclosed | No |
| Determ | Media monitoring tool | Undisclosed | No |
| Propel | All-in-one PR tool | Undisclosed | Yes |
| Vuelio | All-in-one PR tool | Undisclosed | No |
| Prezly | All-in-one PR tool | From $240/month | Yes |
| Critical Mention | Media monitoring tool | Undisclosed | No |
| Mention | Media monitoring tool | From $41/month | Yes |
| Brandwatch | Media monitoring tool | Undisclosed | No |
| Talkwalker | Media monitoring tool | Undisclosed | No |
Prowly
Type: All-in-one PR tool
Pricing: From $258/month
Free trial: Yes
Prowly is an all-in-one public relations management platform designed to help teams build media relationships and earn coverage. It offers a media contacts database, press release creator, email pitching tools, and analytics to track engagement.
PR pros can use Prowly to manage journalist outreach, host an online newsroom, and monitor press results all in one place.
Prowly includes integrated media monitoring across digital, social, and traditional channels. Even on its basic plan, users can track online news mentions in real time; upgrading unlocks social listening on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, with enterprise plans adding broadcast and print monitoring.
The platform lets you set up keyword-based “mentions” alerts and provides dashboards for analyzing coverage sentiment (positive/neutral/negative) and reach across web, social, print, and TV/radio sources.
Cision
Type: All-in-one PR tool
Pricing: Undisclosed
Free trial: No
Cision is one of the most established PR software suites, known for its extensive media database and media monitoring capabilities. It’s a comprehensive platform that helps PR professionals target journalists, distribute press releases, monitor media coverage across channels, and measure impact.
Cision offers media monitoring across all major channels – online news, print publications, broadcasts, and social media – integrated into what it calls the Cision Communications Cloud.
Users can set up complex boolean queries and get real-time alerts when their company is mentioned in articles or on TV/radio.
Cision’s monitoring is paired with analytics: you can track sentiment, share of voice, reach, and even tie coverage to business outcomes using their attribution tools.
Muck Rack
Type: All-in-one PR tool
Pricing: Undisclosed
Free trial: No
Muck Rack is a popular PR software platform that combines a media database of journalists with news monitoring and PR reporting tools. It’s known for being more modern and social-media-integrated than legacy databases. For PR pros, Muck Rack offers the ability to find and target journalists, send them pitches (either via the platform or your email), and track coverage and engagement.
Muck Rack has strong media monitoring capabilities, especially for online news. The platform checks millions of online sources continuously. The moment a story mentioning your company or keywords goes live, it often appears in your Muck Rack feed.
You can set up custom alerts for your brand, competitors, industry terms, etc., and get notified in real time when new articles hit. Muck Rack’s monitoring isn’t limited to news websites; it also tracks blogs and can pull in tweets from journalists.
Meltwater
Type: All-in-one PR tool
Pricing: Undisclosed
Free trial: No
Meltwater is a media intelligence platform that helps PR and communications professionals monitor and analyze media coverage and social media in real time.
Known for its powerful media monitoring, it continuously crawls over 300,000 news sources, millions of blogs, and social media platforms to capture mentions of your brand, competitors, or any keywords you specify.
Users can build complex searches with boolean logic and filters (by location, language, source type, etc.), automatically tagging mentions as positive, neutral, or negative – and can detect spikes in volume that might indicate a brewing issue.
Meltwater’s dashboards allow you to visualize media trends (share of voice, sentiment over time, geographic spread of mentions) and it can even integrate with third-party data to correlate media coverage to business outcomes (like web traffic or sales).
Agility PR
Type: All-in-one PR tool
Pricing: Undisclosed
Free trial: No
Agility PR is an integrated PR platform designed to streamline media outreach, monitoring, and reporting workflows. Positioned as a versatile tool for PR professionals, it combines an extensive media database with comprehensive monitoring features, enabling users to efficiently identify relevant journalists, distribute press releases, track coverage, and measure results in one centralized location.
Agility PR provides extensive media monitoring capabilities across multiple media types, including online news, print, broadcast (TV and radio), and social media.
The tool supports real-time tracking, meaning users can quickly identify emerging stories or brand mentions, enabling timely responses. Users can set up keyword-based alerts and receive automatic updates on relevant coverage.
The monitoring dashboard provides intuitive visualization, including metrics like reach, sentiment analysis, share of voice, and coverage comparisons against competitors. Coverage reports can be easily generated and customized, providing PR professionals with insights to evaluate the success and impact of their campaigns.
Determ (formerly Mediatoolkit)
Type: Media monitoring tool
Pricing: Undisclosed
Free trial: No
Determ (formerly known as Mediatoolkit) is an AI-powered online media monitoring platform that provides real-time insights into what’s being said about your brand, competitors, or industry.
It’s essentially a specialized tool for tracking online media and social conversations. Determ allows you to monitor keywords across over 100 million online sources in any language, aggregating all your mentions into a single feed for analysis.
With its AI assistant “Synthia” and smart alerts, Determ aims to help PR and marketing teams make faster, data-driven decisions based on media trends.
Propel
Type: All-in-one PR tool
Pricing: Undisclosed
Free trial: Yes
Propel is a newer PR software platform that focuses on PR workflow and relationship management (often termed a “PRM”). It combines a media database, outreach tools, and tracking in one system. In practice, Propel is like a PR-specific CRM: you can find journalists (Propel offers a database of over 1 million contacts), pitch them directly from your email, and then monitor the results of those pitches.
Alongside its pitching tools, Propel includes a built-in media monitoring module so you can see the outcome of your PR efforts. It monitors over 100 million online sources (news sites, blogs, forums) every day for your chosen keywords.
It also offers social listening across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (tracking 1 billion+ social accounts) so you can catch social media mentions of your brand or campaign. Propel is notable for covering some emerging channels as well – for instance, it touts podcast monitoring, scanning 25,000+ podcasts for mentions of your keywords.
Broadcast monitoring is included too, with the ability to track TV and radio mentions and even play the clip within minutes of airing.
Vuelio
Type: All-in-one PR tool
Pricing: Undisclosed
Free trial: No
Vuelio is a PR and communications software suite popular in the UK and Europe. It offers an extensive media database, press release distribution, media monitoring, and even public affairs tools in one platform.
Vuelio includes a built-in media monitoring service that tracks a broad range of media for mentions of your brand or keywords. This covers online news, print publications, and broadcast in the UK and beyond. Users have noted that Vuelio’s monitoring “misses nothing” in their market – it’s very thorough at capturing coverage, even from smaller regional outlets.
The platform provides daily email alerts with coverage summaries, which is handy for staying on top of news without logging in.
Vuelio’s monitoring dashboard will show you the volume of mentions, top sources, and allows you to drill into each piece of coverage. It may not have the real-time social media firehose of a dedicated listening tool, but for traditional press and online news, it’s robust. The service can also integrate licensed content (like print scans and broadcast clips) – often as an add-on – so you can see everything in one feed.
Prezly
Type: All-in-one PR tool
Pricing: From $90/month (Plus $150/month for media monitoring)
Free trial: Yes
Prezly is a PR software platform that is particularly known for its storytelling and newsroom capabilities. It functions as a PR CRM and publishing tool – allowing teams to manage their media contacts, create and distribute beautiful press releases or stories, and keep track of engagement.
Prezly introduced a built-in media monitoring solution in recent years to round out its offering. This feature allows Prezly users to track online news coverage of their brand and log those mentions under “Coverage” in the platform.
In practice, you set up keywords (like your brand name or campaign keywords) in Prezly’s monitoring settings, and the system will fetch relevant news articles from a database of 200k+ online news sources across 150+ countries.
Prezly’s monitoring is more basic compared to dedicated tools: it's primarily focused on online news mentions. It does not natively include social media listening or advanced analytics on coverage (aside from listing the outlet, date, and providing a link/clip). The philosophy is to give PR users a simple way to track and report on earned media outcomes without needing a separate monitoring subscription.
Critical Mention
Type: Media monitoring tool
Pricing: Undisclosed
Free trial: No
Critical Mention is an advanced, real-time media monitoring platform specifically built for PR professionals who need comprehensive tracking across multiple media channels.
It integrates coverage from television, radio, online news, podcasts, print, and social media into a single, easy-to-use platform. Critical Mention helps PR teams stay informed about their brand's presence, respond quickly to coverage, and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.
It provides instant keyword-based alerts, advanced sentiment analysis, and customizable analytics dashboards that allow PR professionals to track media coverage, understand audience reactions, and swiftly respond to emerging trends or crises.
Mention
Type: Media monitoring tool
Pricing: From $41/month
Free trial: Yes
Mention is a user-friendly media monitoring tool designed for real-time tracking of brand mentions across social media, websites, news outlets, blogs, and forums. It helps businesses of all sizes keep track of their digital footprint, analyze sentiment around their brands, and manage their reputation online efficiently.
Brandwatch
Type: Media monitoring tool
Pricing: Undisclosed
Free trial: No
Brandwatch is a leading consumer intelligence and media monitoring platform focused on analyzing large-scale social media and web conversations. It helps PR professionals uncover valuable insights about brand perception, consumer sentiment, competitive positioning, and market trends.
Brandwatch provides sophisticated monitoring across social media platforms, blogs, forums, news sites, and reviews, enabling detailed consumer sentiment analysis and influence tracking.
Its advanced analytics offer real-time sentiment detection, deep topic analysis, demographic insights, and customizable dashboards. Brandwatch also supports historical data analysis, allowing teams to measure performance over time and inform strategic decision-making.
Talkwalker
Type: Media monitoring tool
Pricing: Undisclosed
Free trial: No
Talkwalker is a powerful media monitoring and social listening platform designed to help PR professionals manage brand reputation and gain strategic insights. It tracks real-time conversations across social media, online news, print, broadcast, blogs, and forums, providing advanced analytics to assess the effectiveness and impact of PR activities.
Talkwalker offers robust, real-time monitoring across online, social media, print, broadcast (TV & radio), and even image and video analysis. It excels in sentiment analysis, trend detection, and predictive analytics.
Talkwalker’s dashboards provide visualized data on reach, engagement, share of voice, and brand sentiment. It uniquely offers AI-powered visual insights like logo recognition, helping brands track their presence beyond traditional text-based mentions.
What to consider when choosing a media monitoring tool
Navigating the vast landscape of media monitoring tools can be daunting.
With so many options offering similar functionality, it's easy to get lost. To help you make the right choice, we recommend considering the following:
All-in-one PR tools vs media monitoring tools
Many media monitoring tools are not limited to just tracking media coverage and offer a complete suite of tools for PR professionals. These all-in-one PR platforms offer other features such as a media database, PR reporting, press release creator, and more.
If you’re not solely looking for a tool that offers media monitoring, it’s worth having a look at what other features are available as part of the whole tool and how they compare to other platforms.
Key points:
- Clarify your needs: Do you require a comprehensive PR suite (media database, press release distribution, outreach etc.) or just media monitoring?
- Cost-benefit analysis: All-in-one tools are often more expensive, but can be cheaper than having to pay separately for multiple tools if you need the extra features.
- Feature overlap: Evaluate if the extra features in an all-in-one tool are genuinely useful or redundant.
Available channels
Media monitoring channels can be broken down into the following:
- Online: news outlets, blogs, forums, reviews, etc.
- Social: Instagram, X, Facebook, etc.
- Print: Magazines, newspapers, etc.
- Broadcast: TV and radio
Most tools will track mentions from similar sources and almost include online and social mentions. More advanced software can cover niche social media platforms, or traditional channels such as print, TV, and radio.
Additionally, the quality of these mentions may differ from tool to tool. If a particular channel is important for you, check with the provider to understand if there any limitations.
Partnerships and data providers
Many media monitoring tools do not gather all of the mentions by themselves but rely on partnerships or data providers to fill in the gaps for certain channels.
If a particular channel is of importance to you, find out where the mentions are sourced from.
As an example, most media monitoring tools have TV mentions through the same provider, TVEyes.
Pricing and subscription length
Your budget will be one of the key factors in choosing the right software. Media monitoring tools can range from $500/yr to over $10,000/yr. This will depend on the channels available and included features.
The more sophisticated the software, the more you’ll have to pay, so it’s important to figure out your requirements beforehand—if you need a basic monitoring tool or a powerful all-in-one PR platform.
This is also true across different plans for the same software. All tools offer multiple plans, which can greatly differ in price and features.
Some questions worth asking yourself include:
- 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 only media outlets, or also social media?
- The number of users
Unfortunately, many tools do not publicly disclose their pricing, requiring that you sign up for a demo to get a quote. It’s possible to find estimates online of how much each tool costs, although this may greatly differ based on your requirements.
Last but not least, while most tools require yearly plans, some provide monthly subscriptions as well. These will be more expensive, with the benefit of not having to commit to an entire year.
Free trial
Some media monitoring tools offer the chance to try out the software first-hand with a trial. The free version will likely be limited, but it’s still a great way to try out the service, check the quality of the mentions, and see if it fits your needs before you commit to a paid subscription.
Media monitoring tools with a free trial:
- Prowly
- Hootsuite
- Brand24
- Sprout Social
- Awario
- Mention
- Google Alerts (free tool)
Enrichment
If you’re tracking online mentions, it’s worth checking the quality of the enrichment data. This will allow you to track metrics such as estimated reach, domain authority, and reach, to assess the importance of your mentions.
For example, Prowly uses Semrush data, a leading data provider to accurately estimate the reach of online mentions.
Paywalls
An increasing number of online news outlets contain paywalls, requiring a subscription to read articles. These can cause online mentions to be missed or displayed incorrectly.
Some media monitoring tools are able to bypass these paywalls.
This information may not always be provided on the website and is worth inquiring about during a demo call.
Time to pick the right tool
The right tool can help you stay ahead of the conversation, measure the impact of your campaigns, and make data-driven decisions. Whether you’re managing a Public Relations of a global brand or a growing business, finding a tool that fits your specific needs and budget is key.
If you're looking for a solution that offers powerful media monitoring combined with intuitive PR tools, consider exploring Prowly's PR software. With features designed to streamline your workflow and maximize your media efforts, it’s a great choice for professionals who want to stay ahead in the competitive PR landscape.
Try Prowly today and discover how it can transform your media monitoring and PR efforts.
