The 10 Best Public Relations Software to Use in 2024

Every $1 invested in PR earns $5.50 on average. Such a huge return on investment leads to one conclusion: you can’t ignore public relations. But how do you use the full potential of your PR actions? You need the best public relations software.

A few years ago, Nielsen Media Research found that PR can be even 90% more effective in driving sales conversions than advertising. Seems unbelievable?

Well, look at it this way.

When browsing the internet, people might be lazy, but they are not naive. They understand that ads or product placements are direct marketing actions targeting them.

PR is a different thing. It’s a kind of subtle thought inception. No one explained it better than Jean-Louis Gassée, former Apple executive:

“Advertising is saying you’re good. PR is getting someone else to say you’re good.”

Media monitoring, relevant media contacts, sending press releases to news outlets, social media presence, reaching out to journalists and influencers – these are examples of PR efforts. All of them aim to build relationships and improve media coverage.

And that’s not all. Quite the opposite. It’s just the beginning of what public relations is about.

Considering all the above, you simply must support your efforts with PR tools. And not just any tools but the best PR tools available!

Ok, let’s dive in and check them out!

Best Public Relations Software:

1. Brand24
2. Prowly
3. Muck Rack
4. Meltwater
5. Hunter.io
6. Prezly
7. BuzzSumo
8. Cision
9. Crystal
10. SparkToro

01 Brand24

Free 14-day trial.

Brand24 is one of the best and most comprehensive public relations software. In its essence, this media monitoring tool allows you to track all public mentions from multiple sources:

• Social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, Quora, Telegram, Twitch)
• Podcasts
• News outlets
• Forums
• Review sites (TripAdvisor, Yelp, Booking, App Store, Google Play, Trustpilot)
• Other websites

You can easily filter results by sources of mentions, their influence strengths, sentiment (positive, neutral, negative), geolocation, and many more.

But tracking mentions is just the beginning of the nearly endless features this PR tool offers.

51% of PR professionals rate social listening as the second (after customer surveys) most effective method for measuring and assessing a brand’s reputation.

USC 2023 Global Communication Report

Besides tracking the volume and reach of your brand mentions, Brand24 provides you with a detailed sentiment analysis.

You can track if the attitude towards your brand is getting more positive or negative, identify your key communication channels, and spot sudden changes that can impact your overall reputation.

In the case of a sudden storm around your brand, you get an instant email notification informing you about the potential brand crisis.

A great add-on is the Anomaly Detector feature. 

This AI-supported solution analyzes mentions by identifying sudden spikes and drops in popularity or attitude towards the brand. When spots one, the Anomaly Detector investigates the pattern and presents a short conclusion.

The Analysis tab summarises your PR analytics. You can check the most influential mentions about you, the top public profiles talking about your brand, trending hashtags, the most common contexts of discussions about your brand, and so on.

What’s more, the Analysis tab allows you to check people’s awareness and general sentiment towards your brand with two key metrics: Presence Score and Reputation Score.

As you can see below, Rockstar Games is a recognizable brand. But their reputation suffered a lot in the last weeks. I checked it carefully, and many people criticize Rockstar Games for engaging in various court trials.

The Comparison tab gives insights into your performance over time and compares it to your niche competitors. 

Additionally, this tab allows you to check the value of your advertising value equivalency (AVE). This PR metric informs you how much money you would have to spend to get your present media coverage.

Anything else? Sure thing! With Brand24, you can easily identify creators with whom you can cooperate. Just visit the Influencers tab and Influencer Analysis.

A lot of information? No worries, you can gather essential data in customizable reports or allow AI to do it for you.

Key features:

• Tracking the volume & reach of mentions from many sources
• Tracking & analyzing brand sentiment
• Anomaly Detector
• Influencers identification & analytics
• Storm alerts to combat potential reputation crises
• Reputation Score
• Presence Score
• Comparison periods
• Competitor analysis
• AI Insights
• Customizable reports
• Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE)

02 Prowly

Prowly is a public relations tool designed to help PR professionals manage their media relations more effectively. Compared to Brand24, Prowly is a different type of PR software as it’s mostly focused on the communication sphere.

The tool offers numerous interesting features, such as a media contacts database, press release creation and email distribution, basic media monitoring, and campaign analytics to streamline the workflow of PR campaigns.

It is a solid tool to support your everyday media relations management. However, users report occasional issues with incomplete journalists’ contact databases and undelivered emails.

Key features:

• Press releases creator
• Online newsroom
• Media database with over one million contacts
• In-app email sending
• Email analytics
• Customizable and exportable reports

03 Muck Rack

Muck Rack is a Public Relations management software for building media relations. It claims to maintain the most up-to-date media database in the PR tools industry.

While I’m not entirely sure about this claim, I must admit that Muck Rack’s journalists’ profiles include a lot of handy information for PR professionals. These are social media profiles, published articles, media outlets they write for, contact details, and so on.

With Muck Rack, you can also craft media lists, collaborate with your PR team on outreach, and monitor journalists. Besides, this public relations tool allows you to pitch your media contacts.

All these features come with a relatively high price. How much? Muck Rack does not disclose its rates, but online reviews say you must be prepared for a few thousand USD a year.

Key features:

• Automated email sending & scheduling
• Basic media monitoring & alerts
• Customizable media lists
• Media lists collaboration
• Personalized pitching

04 Meltwater

It’s time to introduce you to Meltwater, a multipurpose public relations software that includes social media, media relations, and consumer intelligence features. As we’re discussing PR tools, we limit ourselves to that scope.

As for standard public relations features, Meltwater allows you to generate lists of journalists from your niche, distribute your press releases, and gather your data in customizable reports.

The tool is also helpful for social media management. With solutions such as scheduling posts, community management, and collaboration opportunities, you can support your social media actions with it. Meltwater is also quite handy for finding influencers and if you want to manage relationships with them.

Nevertheless, Meltwater’s reviews uncover that it’s quite expensive software dedicated to large companies with, yeah, large budgets. Besides, some users doubt the reliability of the tool’s social media monitoring features.

Key features:

• Media contact database
• Press release distribution
• Finding & managing relations with influencers
• Social media management
• Social media monitoring
• Advanced reports

05 Hunter.io

Hunter.io is a completely different kind of PR software. It ceased multitasking and focused on mastering a narrow part of public relations – email outreach.

In its essence, Hunter.io is a specialized search engine that allows users to find appropriate email addresses. The tool scans websites and identifies any email addresses and other contact data you might find useful in your media outreach.

What’s more, with Hunter.io, you can create and analyze your cold email campaigns. A worth-to-try tool – especially if media outreach is an important part of your public relations strategy.

Key features:

• Email address finder & analytics
• Email address verification
• Automated cold mailing campaigns
• Multiple integrations

06 Prezly

Prezly is a pretty simple and effective communication software and Contact Management tool dedicated to individuals, PR teams, PR agencies, and marketing agencies. It can help your public relations effort in two ways – content distribution and email campaigns.

With Prezly, you can share your press releases and stories through your own custom-branded online newsroom. As for email campaigns, you can set & manage them directly with the platform. Also, Prezly provides you with real-time campaign analytics.

Key features:

• Contact database
• Press release distribution
• Online newsroom
• In-platform email campaign management
• Email campaign analytics

07 BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a software that can support your public relations efforts from a particular angle. Why? Because, in its essence, BuzzSumo is a content research tool. How can it support your public relations efforts?

Firstly, the tool allows you to discover niche trending topics. These are low-hanging fruits content specialists and PR professionals truly love.

Secondly, with BuzzSumo, you can identify journalists and influencers associated with a defined keyword.

Moreover, BuzzSumo presents insights about your competitors. This feature is helpful to benchmark your brand. Besides, you can uncover and repeat their secrets of success, i.e., optimize content or build a relationship with the right influencer.

If you want to enjoy the tool’s public relations features (like finding the right journalists & social media influencers), you must purchase a Suite plan ($499/mo).

Key features:

• Discover Topics
• Backlink analyzer
• Finding & analyzing influencers
• Monitoring mentions
• Reputation crisis alerts

08 Cision

Cision is a widely recognizable public relations and media monitoring tool. It can help in sending & tracking your press releases, measuring their performance, finding contacts, and evaluating your PR efforts.

The tool provides a large database of media contacts, including journalists, bloggers, and social media influencers. Besides basic contact details, Cision includes social media profiles. Thanks to it, you can decide how to reach your contacts the most efficiently.

Speaking about contacts, you can directly target desired journalists and influencers through a PR Newswire.

Cision is undoubtedly a great PR tool. However, you should bear in mind that such a large database has a lot of outdated journalist contact information. Besides, Cision is perceived as a relatively expensive software, making it a good choice for businesses with big public relations budgets.

Key features:

• Media contacts database
• Press release distribution
• Analytics and reporting
• Influencer identification
• Brand mentions monitoring

09 Crystal

Crystal is a pretty unique solution in a public relations toolkit. This software provides personality insights to help you adjust your communication to a particular person. How is it possible?

Crystal analyses people’s public writings & social media content to assign their personalities according to a DISC model and a personality map.

Thanks to features like writer assistant and personalized communication advice, you can tailor your messages and improve your PR outreach. As you might have guessed, Crystal might be a useful tool not only for public relations but also for marketing, sales, and HR.

Key features:

• Personality assessments and insights
• Writing assistant
• Communication guidance
• Chrome extension

10 SparkToro

SparkToro is an audience research tool that can be a useful support to your public relations actions.

By analyzing data from various online sources, you can identify top content channels for a particular niche. In other words, you can find out which podcasts your audience listens to, which YouTube channels they subscribe to, and so on.

With SparkToro, your campaigns can be more effective by targeting the relevant media and thought leaders.

SparkToro is mostly focused on the US market and, at least for now, offers reliable insights only to high-volume niches.

Key features:

• Advanced audience insights
• Audience comparison
• Reach and influence metrics

What are the most important features of great public relations software? 

There are different types of public relations actions. Strategic communication, media monitoring, maintaining media relations, influencer marketing, social media, crisis management, email PR outreach, and press release distribution are just the most significant examples.

With such a combo of purposes, PR software must vary. And frankly, no single tool can address all the public relations needs.

Considering that, let’s combine the most important features of great public relations software:

• Access to data from various sources (social media, videos, podcasts, blogs, and websites)
• Media monitoring to track news coverage
• Competitor analysis
• Influencers identification & analytics
• Detecting negative brand mentions
• Sentiment analysis to prevent potential crises
• Storm alerts
• Target audience analytics
• Social media management
• Support in creating and automizing press release distribution
• Email marketing automation
• Customizable reporting
• Online newsroom

How to choose public relations software?

Choosing the right PR software strongly depends on the type of public relations actions you plan.

From my experience, the most effective strategy for choosing PR software is picking up one primary tool and supporting it with one or two minor solutions. 

But how do we define the primary one?

Here, I present three simple and actionable steps to decide wisely.

Step 1: Calculate your budget.

PR software is not free, so you must know your limitations. Remember that most tools offer lower prices when you’re ready to pay for a year in advance.

Step 2: Define your core PR efforts.

As discussed before, public relations refers to a wide range of actions. Ask yourself what’s your primary purpose. Is it social listening? Cooperation with influencers? Or maybe writing and sending press releases?

Choose your core PR effort and decide about supplementary. 

Step 3: Test public relations software.

Most PR tools allow to test their features. Sign up for a free trial and check if a particular PR tool really meets your needs.

Conclusion

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking right now. A lot of helpful information. Let’s summarise them.

Final thoughts:

• Nowadays, the scope of public relations efforts requires the support of professional tools and software.
• Public relations software serves various purposes, including communication, media monitoring, building relationships with journalists & influencers, social media management, crisis communication, email marketing, press release tracking, target audience identification, and many more.
• PR professionals perceive media monitoring as critical for building strong brand awareness and brand reputation management.
• When choosing the right PR software, you should calculate your budget, define your core PR actions, and test public relations tools.

Willing to accelerate your public relations effort? Sign up for a 14-day free trial and test the Brand24 tool!