Newswire vs. Meltwater vs. Muck Rack

As a general rule, press releases announcing an event are more effective than product or corporate business deals press releases. This may be because events are people-centered and tend to be one of a kind. The interest in a new product, unless it is an upgrade to an existing product line or service, attracts little attention. There are exceptions; if, for example, there is an outbreak of some pathogen and the company is working on a solution, then interest is higher. News has to be related to current concerns.

Incentivized

Meltwater is well-suited for agencies that have an engagement team who is looking to service a variety of client needs such as social media reporting, public relations outreach, and community management. If you're looking to have a platform serve just one need, you can still use Meltwater but will get more bang for your buck if you are needing a variety of tools.

Incentivized

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

• Communication via video calls and emails. They were responsive to any questions we had.
• Provided all the information we needed to make the decision to move forward. They had the materials around what publications and news outlets they could get into for us.

Incentivized

• Media research - you can search for relevant publications and journalists to add to your media list.
• Earned media coverage - you can search for coverage of your brand and find news stories that also include data that may be useful (how many people did the story reach for example).
• Building media lists - if you have no current existing list, you can build and export one in Excel for example.

Incentivized

• 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

• The editorial process was always very hard on our sale releases. Even if we followed the same structure we used to with PR Wire they would flag it as advertorial.
• The option for video is nice but would be better to actually embed it into a part of the release versus just floating at the bottom.
• Would be interesting for them to share more industry-specific releases or give the option to only get emails on specific industries. The E-blasts are always too general.

Incentivized

• The dashboards are not user-friendly, customizable (color, font size, etc.), or worthy of presenting to a client. All of the insights from a dashboard get pulled from the platform and placed into a more client-friendly presentation.
• Paywalls for certain publications connected to who-knows-what. DowJones racket limits media monitoring capabilities and results in manual searches for a growing number of publications.
• TVeyes, the broadcast monitoring arm of the media monitoring capabilities, just needs TLC and to become more client-facing. Currently, the links produced to share clips look sketchy, and they have a relatively short shelf life.

Incentivized

• 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

Newswire is simple to use and the pricing is fair. The company's network for press releases is not as large as some competitors but seems to have the best reach at a comparable price point. Newswire also offers quality support for customers, which can be hard to find in this space.

Incentivized

Meltwater works well for our organization and has allowed us to meet our internal goals. We are always open to new products and services that may be able to provide similar or better features; however, our experience has been that many of Meltwater's competitors are not up to the task.

Incentivized

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.

Simple step-by-step process to get your news out to the world. Easy to understand process and explanation as you go through the steps. Each upgrade does have a charge, but it's pretty visible. Once you get familiar with their platform and systems, it becomes fairly easy to use to get your news published. It's also nice how quickly you are able to get the news out and published in the places you choose.

Incentivized

Once you get some basic training it's pretty easy to use. I would like to see training manuals, or instructional videos to help me explore features I'm not currently using.

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.

It was available for immediate use

Incentivized

It seemed to be okay overall an we plan on continuing to use it as we expand

Incentivized

Any time I’ve had a question or needed assistance, I’ve been able to get in contact with a Newswire representative within a short amount of time. Their attention to customer satisfaction is impeccable, and they definitely go out of their way to ensure they can be of assistance to the best of their ability!

Incentivized

Our account rep at Meltwater went dark for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, our new account manager reached out to set up a meeting. Apparently, they had a big shakeup in the company, and there were some personnel changes. Our new account rep was great in discussing the platform's capabilities that were available to us and even offered to schedule a follow-up meeting with his technical team to introduce our new social media team members to the platform and how it could help them with their jobs.

Incentivized

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

Again, really in-depth and helpful for a program that is really easy to use.

Walked step by step through program. Very informative on a program that doesn't require much training.

It is a very simple product to get started using, particularly for press releases. I have no used the other functionality so I can't say for sure how easy or difficult that might be, but my guess is that the way the platform is built makes it easy for anybody to get started.

Incentivized

You are only allowed 15 users, so make sure you've identified who will have access to use the tool.

I was not involved with the implementation.

Newswire hands-down beats these other platforms based on their unique price-to-feature-set ratio. We couldn't find a better value and user experience on any of these other platforms when we went through our discovery and evaluation process. All in all, we are very happy with the team and platform at Newswire.

Incentivized

I was looking for a full-service option. I did some research. What really sold me was the presentation. They offered products that were helpful, and I wasn’t even aware of them. It is more expensive than the other products that are out there, but you get more. The other companies are good, but Meltwater Media Intelligence is more full service.

Incentivized

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

I did not purchase, I only purchased the per use newswire options

Incentivized

I have not really used this software feature to the level to scale at this point

Incentivized

I did not really use professional services other than the customer support did answer some questions from time to time

Incentivized

• In a new technology area, Newswire has helped us build brand recognition.
• During the pressures put on Healthcare over the past COVID periods our presence in the Marketplace have been difficult to maintain. Newswire has been key in our efforts.
• When medical imaging AI tools exploded on the scene three years ago, there were over 150 vendors at conferences. Those that didn't promote with tools like Newswire and now gone.

Incentivized

• As a PR firm, we rely on the media databases that [Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform] supplies to deliver the media exposure that they expect from us.
• We utilize their tracking of media hits for our overall reporting to our clients.
• Both of these are advantageous in helping us to not only keep our existing clients happy but also to gain new clients (and, in turn - revenue), as well.

Incentivized

• 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