Muck Rack vs. PRNEWS.IO

Muck Rack has been well suited for me when reporting and providing value add and ROI reporting to clients who are investing in publications. Not only has it been great creating media lists, drafting, sending out, and tracking pitches, but the ability to track coverage and export a report that showcases the reach, impact, and media value has been so beneficial for me. So, if you are working with clients in an external communications capacity, then the Muck Rack tools are very flexible and can fit your needs very well.

Incentivized

PRNEWS.IO is well suited for companies or agencies looking to quickly secure media placements without having to build relationships with publishers. It’s especially useful for PR campaigns, product launches, SEO backlinking, and brand awareness efforts, particularly when time and scale are priorities.

• Muck Rack offers a robust and highly targeted media research tool that allows you to build a customized media list to launch a media relations campaign.
• Muck Rack's customer support team is quite good and is very responsive.
• Muck Rack's sales team does a great job of explaining how their solution will effectively address the needs of the organization.

Incentivized

• Easy-to-use interface — you can quickly find media outlets by category or region
• Clear pricing with no hidden fees
• Responsive and friendly support team
• Great for building brand awareness and authority

• Creating coverage reports is time-consuming and it is difficult to filter out unrelated coverage with the Boolean operator-driven functionality
• Muck Rack does not integrate with our other monitoring and reporting tools, so for sharing reports everything needs to be manually exported and added to our reporting software.
• Muck Rack does not include broadcast coverage monitoring in its normal package, and the functionality of the added broadcast tool is limited compared to other coverage monitoring tools.

Incentivized

• Could use more advanced filters when searching for publications

It's the best tool we've found for this type of product. It is not 100% critical to our daily responsibilities, but as a corporate tool made available to us, it is something we leverage on a weekly basis.

Little training was required to leverage the tool. It is a very intuitive platform. The only troublesome aspect of the tool has been the email integration features, but that may be more of a security/IT issue with our corporate requirements than a Much Rack problem. Overall, it is a tool that anyone can leverage without much effort.

The platform is intuitive and easy to navigate, even for first-time users. Everything from selecting sites to placing orders is streamlined. A point is lost only because more advanced filters could improve search precision.

I'm sure it's fine. I have never used their customer support, not even when a list does not save. I just figured there isn't much they can do since it was a search. They do have live chat to get answers quickly but most of the time I'm working on lists after hours (since it's a lot of admin and I can do it front of the TV) and no one is available.

Incentivized

I was not involved with the implementation.

Cision Media Contact Database. Honestly, it has been a long time since I used it, but I do remember being unhappy with the service. I thought its UI/UE was clunky at the time, but I didn't complain because I had free access to it.

Incentivized

It offered a better user experience and more efficient publishing workflow, which helped save time and scale link-building efforts more easily.

• It's hard to measure ROI but I can say this: I have discovered and build relationships with media I may have had a hard time locating before. MuckRack has probably increased my efficiency by 50 percent and doubled my effectiveness.
• I haven't looked a media databases in about 2 years but it is a much more cost effective media database than the big, traditional ones that everyone else has.

Incentivized

• Improved brand visibility through faster media placements
• Boosted SEO with high-quality backlinks
• Saved time on manual outreach and negotiations