Media monitoring tells you who's written about you, while media outreach is how you get journalists writing in the first place. Most replacements lean towards one of those, so split your needs before you compare anything. Monitoring and listening tools, pitching tools, newsrooms and expert-source networks each cover a different part of what one big suite used to do.
Cision covers media monitoring, journalist outreach and social listening under one name, and if your team only leans on one or two of those each week, a narrower tool may serve you better than a like-for-like swap. The ten here are grouped by the job they do, and the A to Z further down is in no particular order.
The short answer for PR teams moving on
Decide whether your week is mostly listening or mostly pitching. If it's listening, look first at the monitoring and social listening tools, which collect coverage and conversations and turn them into reports. If it's pitching, look at the outreach tools and newsroom platforms, which help you find the right journalist and give them somewhere to find your story.
If you need both at enterprise scale, you'll end up comparing the bigger platforms with each other, and that's a longer process with more people in the room. Smaller teams are often happier with two focused tools than one sprawling one, as long as somebody owns the job of keeping the contact lists in both tidy.
One vendor name, several businesses behind it
This is the detail to check before anything else. The platform you're leaving now presents PR Newswire and Brandwatch as part of its own offer, alongside its main monitoring product. One name covers press release distribution, media monitoring and consumer intelligence, so when you say you're replacing it, be specific about which of those you mean.
It works the other way too. Prowly, a name you'll often see in these comparisons, now describes itself on its own site as the Semrush AI PR Toolkit, which is why you won't find it here under its old name. Before you book a demo with anyone, read the vendor's own homepage as it stands today, not a comparison written a couple of years ago. Product names in PR software move around more than you'd expect.
Monitoring, outreach, newsrooms and expert sourcing
Listening and monitoring
Meltwater and Onclusive are the broad media intelligence platforms here, the kind built for comms teams who report on coverage to senior leaders. Brand24 and Mention sit nearer the social listening end, picking up conversations across social media and the web, and in one case podcasts and reviews as well.
Finding and pitching journalists
JustReachOut and Propel AI are the outreach tools. Both help you find relevant journalists and pitch them, with the second leaning hard on AI and its own media database.
Newsrooms and distribution
Prezly and Mynewsdesk both give you a branded newsroom to publish stories and a place to manage media contacts. Agility PR Solutions adds a newswire to media relations and monitoring, and it's aimed at larger in-house, agency and government teams.
Expert sourcing
Qwoted works differently from everything else here. Journalists say what they need, and experts and PR people respond, which makes it a natural fit for a consultant who'd rather answer requests than chase inboxes.
Ten PR tools side by side
Use this to narrow the field to two or three, then go back to the groups above for the detail.
| Tool | Kind of tool | Main job |
|---|---|---|
| Agility PR Solutions | PR platform for media relations and monitoring | Enterprise, government and agency PR teams |
| Brand24 | Social listening and media monitoring | Tracking brand mentions across many sources |
| JustReachOut | Journalist outreach tool | Consultants pitching journalists |
| Meltwater | Media intelligence and social listening | Comms teams reporting across media and social |
| Mention | Social listening and media monitoring | Sentiment and share-of-voice tracking |
| Mynewsdesk | PR distribution and newsroom software | Releases and a newsroom together |
| Onclusive | Media monitoring and analysis | Monitoring plus a contacts database |
| Prezly | PR software and newsrooms | Teams running their own newsroom |
| Propel AI | Outreach tool built on AI | In-house teams and agencies doing outreach |
| Qwoted | Expert-source and journalist network | Experts responding to journalist requests |
The ten, alphabetically
Alphabetical, so nothing is implied by position. Each line comes from the maker's own description of its product.
Agility PR Solutions
Best for: Media relations, monitoring, social listening and a newswire under one roof, aimed by the vendor at enterprise, government, in-house and agency teams.
Brand24
Best for: Collecting brand mentions across social media, news, blogs, forums, podcasts and reviews; the vendor calls its access AI-powered.
JustReachOut
Best for: PR consultants who want to find relevant journalists and pitch them faster, in the vendor's own words.
Meltwater
Best for: Turning media coverage, social conversations and AI-generated content into monitoring and reporting, which the vendor frames as one intelligence platform.
Mention
Best for: Topic tracking across social media and the web, with sentiment analysis and share-of-voice reporting on top.
Mynewsdesk
Best for: Press releases, an online newsroom, audience management and media monitoring kept in one PR product; the vendor's line is all your PR in one place.
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Onclusive
Best for: Monitoring, a media contacts database, social listening and analytics for PR and comms professionals.
Prezly
Best for: Publishing stories in your own newsroom, managing media contacts, sending pitches and tracking coverage from one place.
Propel AI
Best for: In-house teams and agencies wanting an AI-first PR platform with a media database and workflows; the vendor calls it the first LLM built for PR.
Qwoted
Best for: Experts and PR people answering journalists' requests through a network they can join with a free account.
Where a small comms team goes from here
Don't try to replace every part of a big suite on day one. Move the job your team does most often first, and keep the rest running the old way until the new tool feels routine. If your leadership mainly sees coverage reports, that job is probably monitoring.
Keep your media lists in a format you own, too. A contacts database that only lives inside one vendor is the hardest thing to bring with you next time. For more options in this category, see my guide to the best PR software, and if listening is the bigger job, my roundup of media monitoring tools goes wider.
Pitch one real story through two tools
- Take a real announcement you're working on, even a small one.
- Shortlist two tools from the group that matches your main job.
- Build the same media list in each, and note how many of the suggested journalists you'd trust with the story.
- Send or schedule the same pitch, and set up monitoring for the story's key terms.
- After a week, compare what each tool caught and how easy the coverage report was to share.
Keep the one that left you with the shorter list of workarounds, and only then start moving your contacts across.
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Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between media monitoring and social listening?
Media monitoring tracks coverage in news and online publications. Social listening tracks what people say on social platforms and forums. Many tools now do some of both, so check which sources each one covers.
Do I need a press release distribution service?
Only if wire distribution is part of how your stories reach journalists. Many teams pitch directly and publish on their own newsroom instead, so look at how your recent coverage came about.
Can I bring my media lists with me?
Export them from your current system before you leave, in a spreadsheet format you can open anywhere. Then ask each new vendor how it imports contacts and whether it keeps notes and history.
Are there tools for experts who want to be quoted?
Yes. Expert-source networks connect journalists with people who can comment, and at least one here lets experts and PR people join with a free account.
How long does it take to move PR software?
Setting up monitoring can take an afternoon. Rebuilding media lists, newsroom pages and report templates takes longer, so give yourself a few weeks of overlap.
Is an AI PR tool worth trying?
It's worth testing on a real pitch. Judge it on whether the journalists it suggests are relevant and whether the drafts sound like you, not on how many features it lists.
