With all the PR software available in today’s market, choosing the best one for your needs is tough.
If you’re looking for advice, here’s a side-by-side Muck Rack vs Cision vs Prowly comparison—the most popular PR software platforms on the market—to help you choose the best tool for your needs.
Overview
| Prowly | Cision | Muck Rack | |
| Pricing | From $258/mo | $7,200/yr (estimate) | $10,000/yr (estimate) |
| Contract Length | Monthly or annually | Annually | Annually |
| Media Database Size | 1M+ | 1.4M+ | 250k+ |
| Press Release Creator | ✔ | ✔ | ✖ |
| Press Release Distribution | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Online Newsroom | ✔ | ✔ | ✖ |
| Media Monitoring | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| PR Reports | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Ease of use | Easy | Hard | Easy |
| Free, dedicated training | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ |
| Free Trial | Try Prowly for free | ✖ | ✖ |
Pricing comparison
One of the main factors in choosing a PR software provider is the price. And with some companies charging over $10,000 per year—it’s not surprising.
Muck Rack and Cision both offer only annual plans and are quite pricey. Although they, unfortunately, do not publically list their pricing, we estimate Muck Rack pricing to cost around $10,000 per year and Cision pricing cost around $7,200 per year.
| Prowly | Cision | Muck Rack | |
| Pricing plans provided on website | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ |
| Pricing | From $258/mo | $7,200/yr (estimate) | $10,000/yr (estimate) |
| Contract Length | Monthly or annually | Annually | Annually |
Depending on the chosen features, media database regions, the size of your team, and other factors, the price can go up dramatically. Unfortunately, the factors that go into the price are also not transparent and publicly available.
Prowly offers monthly and annual plans, with the latter allowing you to save up to 30%. There are 2 different plans available with a list of the features you’ll get—so you know exactly what you’re paying for.
Feature comparison
As already mentioned, PR software features usually affect the pricing of each solution. Here’s how Muck Rack, Cision and Prowly compare in terms of the available features.
Media database
If you’re solely looking for a media database, read the guide to choosing the best media database for PR.
All three providers offer a high-quality media database containing local and international media contacts.
The main differences lie in the number of contacts, update frequency (which means the percentage of up-to-date contact information), and again, pricing.
Cision has the most media contacts available—over 1.4 million. Prowly has around 1 million, and Muck Rack has over 250 thousand.
Keep in mind that for media databases “more is not always better” because the quantity and quality of contacts may vary depending on the location and beat you’re looking for—especially outside of the US.
In this case, the best solution is to ask for a sample or get a free trial, so you can see what’s available and have a look by yourself.
Prowly offers a free 7-day trial with full search access. It’s uncertain if Muck Rack or Cision offer a free trial or sample; their product pages suggest that it’s possible to find out more during a demo call, but it’s not explicitly stated that they actually offer a better glimpse of their contacts.
Media database pricing
Muck Rack, Cision, or Prowly don’t offer their media database as a standalone feature.
Muck Rack and Cision include it in their standard pricing, which we’ve listed above. Prowly offers its media database as an additionally priced add-on which gives a total price of $258/mo—considerably less than Cision’s $7,200/yr and Muck Rack’s $10,000+/yr.
Media monitoring
Muck Rack, Cision, and Prowly all offer media monitoring tools that are critical for tracking news and online media mentions of your company, competitors, or partners. However, Prowly doesn’t offer social media monitoring yet.
Press release creation
Both Prowly and Cision offer the ability to create press releases. Those created in Prowly, though, seem to be much more visual, which makes it easier to get journalists’ attention. Plus, you can keep all of your press releases in journalist-friendly newsrooms that are easy to navigate.
Press release distribution
Other important PR software features include press release distribution (pitching journalists) and email pitch follow-ups. All 3 platforms let you send personalized pitches with analytics and other bells and whistles.
If this is a top priority for you, it might be worth trying how it works in every platform to see which is most intuitive and simple for you and your team.
Unfortunately, to see Cision and Muck Rack in action, you have to commit and pay first. At the moment, only Prowly offers a free trial.
If you’re in search of a UK media database comparison, explore these articles: “UK Media Database Comparison – Pricing & Features” and “Roxhill 2023 Pricing — How Much Does it Cost?“.
Reviews
Without free trials and transparent pricing plans available on Cision’s and Muck Rack’s sites, making the final choice might get easier once you read user reviews. Here’s what users are saying about each platform based on reviews from G2.com.
Muck Rack
Advantages of Muck Rack:
I like that I can build robust coverage reports, get automated daily alerts, and easily follow and pitch to a list of journalists.
Muck Rack’s “coverage reports” and “who shared my link” tools help us track media hits and journalist engagement in ways that we weren’t able to do before. It’s given us access and insight to journalists who we didn’t know covered our company.
Good UX, interface is very very easy to use.
Disadvantages of Muck Rack:
I’ve had some difficulty getting the coverage reports to match what I’ve gotten with other tools; not sure if that’s user error or related to the tool’s back-end functionality.
A little pricey for solo practitioners, I feel like [Muck Rack] is priced very much for the agency level users.
Word tracking often leads to too many emails or updates not thorough enough to catch the important articles.
Cision
Advantages of Cision:
Cision makes it easy to find relevant media to target for pitches and identify who their target demographic and efficiently build lists.
I most like their media monitoring capabilities, as we have over 1,500 individuals whose media hits we monitor and Cision helped us set up this system. It’s by no means perfect, but works much better than what we were previously using.
Disadvantages of Cision:
The information for journalists in Cision can be outdated at times and I’ve come across a number of journalists who are simply not listed. I wish this database was more accurate and up to date.
Building reports to graphically look how you would like is not easy to do as a user, without requesting customer assistance help.
Customer service/account rep is not always the most attentive to your needs. It could take days or weeks to get a response sometimes.
Expensive!
Prowly
I like just how simple it’s to add contacts into a customized media list. The user interface is really user-friendly and also the number of automation capabilities look after a few of the hard work associated with link building for you – individualizing as well as increasing your outreach could not be easier.
Ease of use and that the team is very helpful, there is no upcharge to get help to set up the press release in the most effective way.
Disadvantages of Prowly:
There is a bit of a learning curve, and support is on European time.
I only wish there we more categories in the journalist database!
It is not easy to customize pitch emails when sending a pitch and press release to multiple people.
Conclusion
We hope this Muck Rack vs Cision vs Prowly comparison helped you answer some of your questions and make your process of choosing the right PR software a bit easier.
If you’re ready to start testing PR platforms, you can always try Prowly completely free of charge for 7 days, no CC required, no strings attached.
Cover photo by NeONBRAND
