PR Software Comparison: Meltwater vs. Cision

Public relations software plays a crucial role in the modern marketing landscape. Tools that assist with tracking, monitoring, and interacting with content where your brand is mentioned help your marketing team get ahead of negative online impressions and capitalize on positive press coverage. Being able to strategically interact at this level can greatly impact inbound leads and your conversion rates. 

A highly competitive field of software, PR tools range from full end-to-end solutions helping marketing teams address the entire range of media marketing tasks to limited-range tools that are targeted to help professionals address extremely specific tasks in the workflow. In this software comparison, we’ve taken a deep dive into two of the leading PR tools, Meltwater and Cision, in order to show marketing professionals in the field a baseline standard against which they should measure any tools they intend to add to their marketing software stack. 

Why Do You Need PR Software?

Public relations software underpins and supports almost every component of modern marketing strategies. Through PR software, your team can more effectively communicate and interact with your client base and improve customer service standards, helping to establish your organization’s competitive advantage within your industry. Public relations software also improves the impact of your marketing efforts by introducing new services or products to your client base while also helping your team to zero in on ideal buyer personas in the process.  

Knowing how influential PR software can be, let’s dig into these two leading platforms:

• What is Meltwater?
• What is Cision?
• Meltwater vs. Cision Pricing Overview
• Media Database Size 
• Media Monitoring
• Ease of Use
• The Overall Winner
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
• The Overall Winner

What is Meltwater?

Meltwater started its domination of the PR software landscape as Magenta News. Considered one of the first online media monitoring companies, Magenta News was founded by Jorn Lyseggen and Gard Haugen in Oslo, Norway in 2001. In 2005, the company moved to San Francisco and rebranded as Meltwater News. The database that would eventually evolve into the media intelligence platform in 2015 was released in 2010 as Meltwater Press. Through several acquisitions between 2015 and 2020 of other technologies and tools, Meltwater has grown into the powerful online media monitoring tool that it is today. 

The global monitoring tool helps users to:

• Capture mentions and content
• Sort and identify meaningful mentions of your brand
• Compare and contrast your brand’s performance versus the performance of your competitors
• Understand the ROI of your marketing efforts

What is Cision?

Few digital brands operating today can trace their lineage back as far as Cision. The company has roots stemming as far back as the rise of clipping services in the 1860s to 1890s and the start of publicity checking services when in the 1950s, Bacon’s Clipping Bureau evolved into a directory listing of publications and contact info for reporters. A series of acquisitions from the 1970s through to the 1990s and into the 2000s led to the creation of Observer AB, the largest media monitoring company at the time. 

The conglomerate of organizations under Observer AB that include Bacon’s Information, Chicago News, MediaPulse, Media Clips Inc., Multivision, and other media monitoring entities eventually rebranded as Cision in 2007, with the resulting media campaign management software owned by the organization being branded as CisionPoint. Over the next ten years, Cision would aggressively merge with other media monitoring organizations and media groups in order to expand solutions to include communications, database, distribution of content, online monitoring, analytics and ROI, and insights into competitor media activities.

Through the expansive number of brands and products operating under the Cision branding, PR professionals can expect powerful tools for: 

• Media Monitoring
• Relationship Management
• Audience Identification and Attribution
• Analytics and Reporting

Meltwater vs. Cision Pricing Overview

	Meltwater	Cision
Pricing	No concrete pricing is available without first requesting a demonstration.	No concrete pricing is available without first requesting a demonstration.
Free Trial	None Listed	None Listed
Free Options	None	None

 

One of the stand-outs about the category of public relations management software is that it is amongst the more expensive toolsets to add to your marketing technology stack, but the overall return on that investment is extremely lucrative when used properly. In the case of Meltwater and Cision, while hard numbers weren’t available, competitor comparisons and listings across the web paint a picture of a fairly expensive service in both cases.

Meltwater has hidden its pricing model entirely behind a demo request, likely because the platform is modular and the organization wants to ensure that clients are using the right tools for their business and being charged according to their needs. That said, researching competitive pricing through other software platforms reveals that the cost of using Meltwater can start around $4,000 annually, and scale up from there. It is possible that there are annual paid-ahead plans that can bring the cost down, but nothing concrete is stated on Meltwater’s own website. 

Cision’s full pricing is hidden behind a request for a demonstration and a form that asks you to break down what your primary media marketing concerns are. It also asks you to choose a product that’s right for your needs, leading one to believe that plans are customizable and software solutions can be mixed and matched into an appropriate all-in-one or targeted solution. Data found through competitors touting their own solutions have out-of-date pricing models by several years, but it appears that Cision clients can anticipate paying a monthly rate ranging between $500-$600 at a basic rate and that plans increase from there. With add-ons and additional functionality, multiple sources state that Cision can cost upwards of $10,000 annually. 

Because it is difficult to acquire pricing information for these brands without first going through the demonstration process, it is impossible to gauge which offers a more affordable or cost-conscious experience for users. What is clear is that if the pricing listed by the competition by multiple software platforms is accurate, then these two software solutions price themselves as a solution for mid to large organizations that are well established and have the budget for large-scale media monitoring solutions.

Media Database 

One of the core functions of PR software is to create a direct connection between businesses and those who might be writing about those businesses. From bloggers to journalists, content creators, and online influencers, media contacts play a vital role in the PR pipeline. The database that PR software provides to users needs to be robust, but also provide the ability to create targeted media lists of necessary connections for the client’s industry, meaning that it’s not necessary to have the most media contacts, just the best available. 

Meltwater’s Media Database

Meltwater has a robust media contact database, but not the most extensive in the industry. It is lauded for the customizability of the reporting and responsiveness to updates submitted by users. However, it has been noted to have a complicated database, likely stemming from the fact that it requires multiple tools to take full advantage of the data within. It is also one of the more expensive platforms on the market.

 

Pros	Cons
Over 400,000 media contacts	Estimates show an annual cost of roughly $6,000
Users can create customized influencer lists for their industry or brand	Complicated interface with a steep learning curve
Mentioned in multiple reviews as one of the platform’s strongest features	Database is not a standalone product; it requires other tools to get the value from it
Identifies trends in your industry to help you get ahead of competitors	Sometimes misses obvious and prominent website mentions

 

Cision’s Media Database

The Cision media contact database is known to be one of the most extensive on the market, but also one of the most expensive to access. The cost does give users access to an extremely flexible and customizable database, but one that also requires further investment in other tools to access and leverage properly. 

 

Pros	Cons
With 1.4 million contacts in the database, one of the most extensive lists of media contacts available on the market	Many estimates place monthly access to Cision’s core database and services at around $600/mo, making it one of the most expensive on the market
Known for containing contact information for influencers that might not otherwise be found online	Cision requires subscriptions to multiple tools in order to get the most value out of the database
Several online product comparisons and rankings place Cision’s Media Database as one of the top databases on the market.

 

Which Platform is Better?

With the depth and breadth of the database and online sentiment figured in, Cision appears to offer more value. It’s hard to be completely certain without exact pricing for not only the database but the prices of the additional components necessary to take full advantage of the database. 

Media Monitoring

Aside from being able to contact influencers, the other primary role of PR software platforms is to assist your marketing team in identifying and tracking media mentions of your organization across the Internet’s various media channels. 

Meltwater’s Media Monitoring

Meltwater combines a number of tools in order to give its users an industry-leading media monitoring service, which creates a complicated user experience and steep learning curve. Despite the complexity, the Meltwater media monitoring is considered amongst the most effective and useful systems for tracking brand visibility and mentions. 

 

Pros	Cons
Listens globally for and tracks brand mentions across online channels, as well as broadcast and print media	Modular cost models can mean it’s hard to get the depth of monitoring you need without significant investment
Analyzes and provides feedback on trends related to brand mentions, shares, and other instances you can leverage to your advantage	Some reviews refer to the UI as outdated and somewhat clunky, resulting in a steeper learning curve than otherwise necessary
Identifies trends in your industry to help you get ahead of competitors	Sometimes misses obvious and prominent website mentions

 

Cision’s Media Monitoring

Cision is unique in that it breaks down its monitoring tools by platforms and channels, and has a special technology that allows it to analyze and track mentions across podcasts. Though it easily integrates with the brand’s content creation and delivery tools, users point to a reporting system that is difficult to customize. Other issues listed by reviewers and users point to a tool that is inconsistent depending on what region you’re using it in and what industries you’re trying to track. Among the inconsistent experiences are varying degrees of issues with customer service and speed of response.

 

Pros	Cons
Tracks more than 100 million online sources of content ranging from online global news, social media, podcast, print, blogs, and broadcast channels	Modular service plans result in costly service plans to take full advantage of analytics and all channels your brand needs to track.
Monitoring tools integrated with content creation and delivery tools	Inconsistent experiences across industries and regions
	Often out of date listings
	Difficult to customize reporting
	Poor customer service response is often cited by users unhappy with the service

 

Which Platform is Better?

While Cision’s Communications Cloud might have a number of advanced features and track across more channels, the Meltwater platform provides a better analytics interface and user experience, as well as better tools for tracking industry trends to help users create targeted content in a timely manner.