Looks great on the surface, but make sure the results are what you expect before buying
March 26, 2022
Looks great on the surface, but make sure the results are what you expect before buying
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Muck Rack
As a PR agency, we require specific software to do our jobs. Among those requirements are a media database for creating media lists, and a media tracking and coverage reporting suite to capture and share results with clients. Muck Rack offers both of those solutions in one product and is supposed to do it seamlessly.
- 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.
- When using the media research tool, we found that Muck Rack was missing huge swaths of industries and reporters within those industries.
- Coverage reports suffered from the same issue. Although there's a tool that allows you to manually input coverage you're aware of, Muck Rack missed critical, high-value placements that change the entire results picture.
- There's no way to purchase one tool or the other from Muck Rack. It's sold as an all-or-nothing solution. Prior to using Muck Rack, we had two different vendors who did each of these things really well. Upon signing with Muck Rack we traded two vendors for one and excellence for lackluster performance.
- Media research for building media lists.
- Media coverage tool for reporting.
- Those are the only two things Muck Rack does.
- Extracting ourselves from the contract during the six-month on-ramp period, after learning of Muck Rack's shortcomings, cost senior members of our team hours of otherwise billable time.
- There also was a cost to our broader team to learn a new platform that we ultimately did not wind up using.
- It cost many billable hours to do redundant work in order to learn that Muck Rack was not a good solution for us.
Although it is sold as an all-in-one solution, my experience is that Muck Rack does not come close to comparing to the quality of a combination of Cision and Critical Mention. Comparing costs, Muck Rack's price tag is about the same as what we paid for both of the others, so there wasn't any meaningful difference in terms of budget. Muck Rack was aggressive in their sales approach, but that's where they went wrong. Their offer allowed us plenty of time to compare the quality of Muck Rack against the Cision/CM combination in real-time, and it just completely missed the mark. We were sold something that sounded great and then let us down. We ran back to Cision and Critical Mention once Muck Rack finally agreed to release us from the contract.
Do you think Muck Rack delivers good value for the price?
No
Are you happy with Muck Rack's feature set?
No
Did Muck Rack live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Muck Rack go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Muck Rack again?
No