PR Tools: A Complete Guide to the Top 30+ Digital PR Tools (2024)

Using the right tools is more than crucial for any PR strategy in 2024. And it’s not (only) about implementing AI.

We’ve rounded up over 30 leading digital PR tools to give you a clear picture of what’s on the market. You’ll get insights into how these tools can streamline your processes, enhance engagement, and boost your PR outcomes.

And if that’s not enough – we linked lists that dig deeper into particular tool types, where you will find even more examples with full descriptions.

Ready to test out a tool where you can manage all your key PR activities right away?

Read on to get to know all types of digital PR tools:

• Press release creators
• Media & social media monitoring
• AI PR/marketing tools
• Tools for media list building & media databases
• PR reporting tools
• Digital journalism & media coverage tools
• Sending press releases & distribution software
• Tools for PR outreach
• Tools for Media Relations
• Media measurement tools
• Social media management tools
• Online newsroom software

What is Public Relations Software?

As always, let’s begin with a pinch of theory.

Public Relations software is a suite of tools designed to help organizations manage their communication and public relation efforts more effectively. 

It supports PR professionals in key activities and helps streamline processes to maintain and enhance an organization’s public image and relationships.

For example, Prowly is an all-in-one PR tool that supports your daily PR activities at every stage. It also lets you try it for 7 days for free, which is uncommon in the PR tool industry.

#1 Press release creators

Do you need a hand while crafting, formatting, and publishing press releases? 

Press release creators are tools designed to assist you during this process. 

The best of them include:

• ready to use templates
• text editing features
• advice on PR best practices
• AI-powered suggestions

Once you sit down in front of your screen, you’re starting with a blank canvas. You have to develop the structure and formatting. Then you should choose assets, and handle everything independently. Hit a creative block?

That is where press release creator tools like Prowly can make a big difference.

Prowly

• Pricing: starts from $258/month (billed annually)
• Free trial: yes, you can try it for 7 days free

Prowly’s press release creator tool provides a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, simplifying the creation of press releases. Prowly’s UI is designed to catch journalists’ and media professionals’ attention.

For those who don’t know where to begin, there are many templates available. You can choose one and start with a dose of inspiration and a clear structure.

Last but not least – from now on, you have a partner in crime when preparing your press releases:

1️⃣ The AI Assistant is there to help you brainstorm ideas if you’re starting from point zero.

2️⃣ Or creating a draft based on your concept and answers to questions.

3️⃣ Moreover, you can use the AI Assistant for customizing and adding some spice to existing press releases. Just to increase your chances of landing top media coverage.

Hyperuse.ai

• Pricing: starts at $29/month
• Free trial: yes

Although Hyperuse.ai is not a tool dedicated specifically to PR, it could help PR specialists with content. It’s an AI text generator that can support you in delivering content, such as blog articles, product descriptions, and marketing copy.

And you can use it directly for PR purposes. It lets you generate a press release in one step. All you have to do is add your topic and briefly describe it. Then, you can review and make the necessary edits.

🔻 It lacks PR-specific features and understanding though.

Muck Rack: PressPal

• Pricing: not provided on their website (you can check estimates here)
• Free trial: PressPal is free; the full Muck Rack suite doesn’t offer a free trial

Muck Rack is software dedicated to journalists and public relations professionals while PressPal generates AI-powered press releases and pitches in one step.

What is the big pro about it? You don’t have to buy a Muck Rack subscription to use PressPal.

🔻 This one is very simple. Yet, it doesn’t offer extra AI assistance after draft generation. In this case, the whole press release is based on what you type into a single window without in-depth questions.

💡 Find out more tools like this
If you want to learn more about press release tools for any PR need (not only press release creation), check out this Ultimate Guide to Press Release Tools— the Top List for 2024.

#2 Media and social media monitoring

Social media monitoring tools track mentions of specific brand-related terms (you can configure this in the tool) across online media platforms. They then analyze such mentions to provide insights that inform and guide PR and marketing strategies.

Prowly

• Pricing: starts from $258/month (billed annually)
• Free trial: yes, you can try it out here

Prowly’s media monitoring tool scans the whole web. Plus – this tool is designed for PR functions. It can indicate mentions across news websites, blogs, forums, and social media. With it, you can gather relevant data.

Moreover, it leverages artificial intelligence to analyze the context, sentiment, and over 15 additional properties per media mention.

Prowly supports PR-specific metrics like AVE, SOV, domain tiers or outlet reach. It combines these with conventional measures such as reach and sentiment to gauge each campaign’s effectiveness.

🔻 For those who don’t work in PR, the downside is that it’s more than just a media monitoring tool. However, if you need both a PR tool and a media monitoring tool, you get everything you need in one place.

Brand24

• Pricing: starts at $99 per month for three tracked keywords
• Free trial: yes

Thanks to its comprehensive features, Brand24 is one of the top social media listening tools. This platform is established as a clear choice for agencies and marketing specialists. With this software, you gain access to a mentions feed (an effective way to visualize mentions and data), real-time alerts, the capability to export data, and robust filtering options.

🔻 However, it can be relatively costly. Especially, considering the limited number of keywords you can track with the lower-tier plans.

Google Alerts

• Pricing: completely free
• Free trial: –

Google Alerts is a free notification service. You can receive emails when it finds new results that match your search terms. It covers web pages, newspaper articles, and blogs. You can use these alerts to track mentions of your or your clients’ brands, competitors, or industry trends.

🔻 However, since it’s a free tool, it may sometimes miss crucial media mentions that highlight the effectiveness of your PR efforts. Here’s an article that compares Google Alert to paid tools.

💡Find more tools like this
Depending on what you’re looking for, we’ve prepared three specific tool lists. They may help you choose the option that suits you best:
▪️ 13 Best Brand Monitoring Tools for PR Managers Compared
▪️ 20+ Top Sentiment Analysis Tools for PR Pros
▪️ Top 15+ Social Listening Tools for PR Pros

#3 AI PR tools

According to The State of PR Technology 2023, 67.8% of PR professionals surveyed leverage AI for idea generation, press release creation, PR research, reporting, and monitoring.

ChatGPT

• Pricing: ChatGPT 3.5 is free; ChatGPT 4 is $20 per month per seat
• Free trial: no, but you can use the free version

Everybody knows it. Some love it, some hate it.

Even though it’s not a tool designed specifically for PR purposes, ChatGPT is the most popular AI tool with the power to help anyone. You can use it as if it were a PR tool and enhance your workflows, create press releases, and conduct research.

🔻 However, detailed prompts are needed if you want to use it as a tool for PR. Without being guided through the process, it won’t be very helpful (unlike PR tools like Prowly’s AI Assistant).

🔻 While the use of ChatGPT has increased significantly in 2023, users consistently encounter two major obstacles: the production of generic, lower-quality content, and challenges with effectively prompting the system.

Prowly

• Pricing: starts from $258/month (billed annually)
• Free trial: yes, you can try it out here

With the first AI Assistant built specifically for public relations professionals, it can help you navigate the entire process of press release creation and distribution. It works to ensure your content resonates with your intended audience:

• Generate press release drafts: from the idea, where you can spark your creativity by inputting a concept to receive three story angles, to drafting and tailoring your content with suggestions on tone, quotes, and text length.
• Simplify pitching by matching press release keywords with relevant journalists to expand your media contact list. This can help you increase your media coverage. 

• Get personalized recommendations for your email subject line, body, and preview text to enhance open rates and engagement. 

Your sentence is clear, but it can be slightly refined for readability:

To see for yourself how AI Assistant can help you with daily PR tasks, you can try Prowly for free.

Cision One

• Pricing: not provided on the website (you can check estimates here)
• Free trial: no

CisionOne is a platform integrating monitoring, insights, and outreach for public relations using AI technology.

Its key AI features include Narrative Tracking. In other words, it merges various media perspectives with a tool for advanced sentiment analysis. The tool also offers an Outreach component, combining AI and human research to build a comprehensive media database.

💡 Find more tools like this
Want to implement AI solutions into your marketing or PR strategy? Check out the following guides, which include all kinds of tools from press release and written content generation to image and video creation:
▪️ Top 30+ AI Marketing Tools in 2023
▪️ 10 Best AI Tools for Public Relations in 2024

 #4 Social media management tools

Both marketing and PR agencies can include social media management in their offers. To do it fluently and effectively, they need the right tools.

Sprout Social

• Pricing: Starts at $249/month
• Free trial: yes

Sprout Social is a comprehensive suite for social media management.

This one offers tools for scheduling, analytics, influencer marketing, and more. It’s connected to LinkedIn, allowing you to schedule company posts in advance.

Hootsuite

• Pricing: Starts at $249/month
• Free trial: available

Hootsuite is a full suite of tools dedicated to social media management.

It includes scheduling, engagement, and analytics. Moreover, you can schedule posts and get insights into analytics and reporting. It can help you identify optimal posting times, provide social listening, and help manage social inboxes.

Napoleon Cat

• Pricing: Starts at $27/month
• Free trial: yes

NapoleonCat consolidates communication and sales across various platforms into one unified interface.

Its features include a social inbox, automated moderation, content scheduling and publishing, in-depth analytics, and social CRM capabilities.

💡 Find more tools like this:
▪️ for social media management: 45+ Best Social Media Management Tools
▪️ for social media monitoring: Top 10 Social Media Monitoring Tools for PR Pros

Tip: If your toolkit lacks social media monitoring, adding these capabilities is crucial for enhancing the effectiveness of your social media efforts. Keep your finger on the pulse and track public sentiment across accounts and provide insights into key metrics, like engagement.

For example, Prowly offers real-time alerts and summaries that showcase your campaign’s impact. With such info, you can gain an overview of the benefits for showcasing value or planning future efforts.

#5 PR reporting tools

PR reporting tools are used to track and analyze the effectiveness of public relations campaigns. Such platforms usually put all the data into visually pleasing, branded reports.

Prowly

• Pricing: starts from $258/month (billed annually)
• Free trial: yes, you can try it out here

Prowly gives you it all. It is a PR tool that combines reporting with comprehensive system management.

That means you can seamlessly add data, coverage screenshots, and mentions directly from Media Monitoring to show the business value of your PR activities with PR metrics that matter (not only AVE).

All in an eye-pleasing format. And with no extra fees for creating branded reports.

Releasd

• Pricing: from $95/month
• Free trial: no

Releasd features user-friendly, drag-and-drop interfaces for creating reports. It compiles coverage from websites and social media onto one single, easy-to-digest page.

The software automates metrics and highlights its unique coverage impressions metric as a standout feature. You can enhance your PR reports by including further details, such as press releases.

🔻 It’s not an all-in-one PR platform – to cover other areas, you’d need to pay for other tools.

💡 Find more tools like this
Check out this article: The Best PR Reporting Tools Available to You Right Now for more examples and details about each software system.

#6 Digital journalism tools

These tools help in digital PR. With them, journalists and media workers can easily find needed information, as well as create and share stories online. They provide features for keeping up with news in real time, creating multimedia content, analyzing data, and posting on different digital platforms.

Hemingway

• Pricing: Hemingway Desktop App: $19.99; Hemingway Plus (AI): starts from $10/month
• Free trial: no, but there’s a free online version available

Hemingway aids journalists in crafting clearer, more engaging content. It identifies errors and complex sentences to enhance readability. Hemingway offers features like estimated reading time and suggests changes, helping tailor content to audience preferences.

Connectively (ex: HARO)

• Pricing: starts from $19/month
• Free trial: no, but there’s a free version available

We can call it a community for journalists, content creators, PR professionals, and experts to collaborate and enhance brand growth. It features tools for submitting queries, searching for requests from journalists, sending pitches, tracking their progress, and integrating familiar and new functionalities.

#7 Press release distribution software

Press release distribution is vital in public relations. There are two main options for sending out a press release:

• Using a press release distribution website: Services like PR Newswire or Business Wire distribute press releases for a fee.
• Using an all-in-one PR platform: Platforms like Prowly or Meltwater offer comprehensive PR services.

Here are some examples of tools you can use for the first tactic.

EIN Presswire

• Pricing: starts from $99.95/release
• Free trial: no

EIN Presswire provides press release distribution for all business sizes. This public relations software has access to a global media network, tracking and monitoring, RSS feeds, and SEO enhancements.

Newswire

• Pricing: starts from $349.00/release
• Free trial: no

Newswire distributes and monitors press releases locally and globally. It also provides a media database for targeted media outreach. Moreover, you can find analytical tools for strategy refinement.

🔻 It’s worth noting that Newswire’s services are more expensive than others, including the basic offers with only one image and additional charges for videos.

💡Get to know the best free and paid press release websites with all their pros and cons, including a pricing comparison in convenient tables.

#8 Tools for PR outreach

Another, and often more effective, way of reaching out to journalists to cover your story is to pitch them using an outreach tool.

Prowly

Besides personalization emails, follow-up scheduling, and email analytics (like email viewing time, journalist engagement history, delivery & engagement) it provides AI-powered comprehensive help.

The AI Assistant not only supports you when writer’s block looms but also gives you suggestions for catchy titles and picks out journalists from the media database. All well-fitted to your topic.

You also get email evaluations and tips on how to cut down on bounce-backs and stand out from the sea of unread messages in journalists’ inboxes. 

Muck Rack

• Pricing: $10,000/year (estimate)
• Free trial: no

Muck Rack offers personalized outreach where users can tailor pitches with customized text, subject lines, and attachments from the media database. All these actions can help minimize email bounce-backs.

This tool also enables the creation of pitches upon discovering relevant journalists and lets you schedule outreach and manage follow-ups. You can also monitor pitch effectiveness through open and click-through rates.

💡 Read a detailed comparison between leading PR outreach tools:
Muck Rack vs. Cision vs. Prowly

Prowly is the only one of these tools that lets you try before you buy.

#9 Tools for media relations – PR CRM tools

PR CRM tools are specialized software solutions that help public relations professionals manage their relationships with media contacts, track interactions, and analyze the effectiveness of their outreach campaigns.

Thus, with improved brand monitoring, PR pros may even better execute their duties. Here are the tools:

👉🏼 JustReachOut blends PR tools with expert guidance, providing personalized assistance to refine your pitches and achieve PR goals using industry-specific insights.

👉🏼 Meltwater delivers media monitoring, a journalist database, and robust campaign analytics, supporting PR professionals in managing media relations.

👉🏼 Cision provides a comprehensive PR solution. It includes media lists, distribution of press releases, monitoring, and analytics.

👉🏼 Prowly is an all-in-one tool that features media database management, press release distribution, an AI Assistant, PR reporting, and storytelling tools, making it ideal for media relationship management.

👉🏼 Prezly allows users to manage contacts, send press releases, and track engagement while organizing content in brand newsrooms.

💡 Find more tools like this:
▪️ Best PR CRM tools that help manage media relations: TBD
▪️ Cision vs. Meltwater vs. Prowly

#10 Media measurement tools

Such software is used to track and analyze various channels’ performance.

These tools assess a wide range of metrics, such as reach, engagement, sentiment, and the overall effectiveness of communication strategies.

• Google Analytics: Tracks and reports website traffic and user interactions.
• Prowly: Offers media monitoring integrated with a PR reporting tool to help you estimate and show the success of your PR activities more easily and in a more relevant way.
• Meltwater: Provides insights into media coverage with real-time analytics.
• Hootsuite: Monitors social media channels and measures campaign results.
• Nielsen: Specializes in audience measurement for television, radio, and other broadcasting media.
• Kantar Media: Delivers audience research and detailed media consumption metrics.
• Brandwatch: Analyzes social media data to gauge brand sentiment and reach.
• BuzzSumo: Monitors content performance and influencer effectiveness across social media.

💡Find more tools like this:
◾️ 20 Media Measurement Tools You Need to Try in 2024

#11 Online newsroom software

Online newsroom software is a digital platform used by organizations to centralize and manage press releases, multimedia content, company news, and media contacts. It makes it easier to distribute and track when all the relevant information is in one place. 

Prowly

• Pricing: starts from $258/month
• Free trial: yes, you can try it out here

Offers an SEO-friendly newsroom that hosts press releases, blog posts, and visual content. You can set it up easily without any need for coding.

Mynewsdesk

• Pricing: Not transparent – pricing upon request
• Free trial: yes

Provides tools for publishing and distributing your story. It also assists in engaging with your audience and tracking impact.

GlobeNewswire

• Pricing: Not transparent – pricing upon request
• Free trial: no

Offers newsrooms that integrates with Nasdaq’s services to enhance visibility and reach.

Benefits of using PR tools

1️⃣ Enhanced Efficiency

PR tools automate routine tasks such as media monitoring, distributing press releases, and tracking engagement. They could save you hours and allow you to focus on more strategic activities.

2️⃣ Improved Reach

With access to extensive media databases, PR tools enable organizations to distribute their messages widely. And to target specific journalists and media outlets that are most likely to be interested in your story. 

3️⃣ Data-Driven Insights

These tools provide analytics and metrics that measure the impact of PR campaigns. You can get insights into media coverage, audience engagement, and the effectiveness of different strategies. This data helps refine tactics and make informed decisions.

4️⃣ Crisis Management

When it comes to a crisis, it is better to know as early as possible. Real-time monitoring features provide alerts on potential issues or negative publicity early on. Giving you a chance to respond swiftly and manage crises more effectively. Before they escalate.

5️⃣ Relationship Management

PR tools often include CRM functionalities that help manage relationships with key journalists and influencers. These make it easier to build and maintain connections that are crucial for effective media relations.

Choose the all-in-one PR tool that fits you best

PR monitoring, PR reporting, email personalization. PR covers it all and many more. While choosing the best PR tool for your company, think about all the needed features as well as printing, implementation time, and team onboarding. 

Choose a tool that covers all of your requirements. And benefit from comprehensive software that simplifies your daily duties and processes.