Prowly vs Muck Rack: Which of these PR tools should you choose?

When considering the best PR tools, choosing the right one is a tough task. Especially if you’re stuck between two strong options like Prowly and Muck Rack.

Whether you’re working on building a better media list, managing press releases, or finding a great CRM for PR, going with the best platform can make all the difference in your PR game.

In this article, we’ll dive deep into a side-by-side comparison of Prowly and Muck Rack, breaking down their key features, pricing, and what real users are saying about them. 

By the end, you’ll know exactly which tool to choose, and we’ll even introduce you to an alternative that may just solve all your biggest PR challenges: Prezly.

Prowly has gained traction over the past few years, especially among small and mid-sized teams. Designed to simplify PR work, Prowly helps manage media lists, send out press releases, and track performance.

Prowly’s simplicity and user-friendly interface are really what make it stand out the most. It’s built for teams who want to streamline their PR work without jumping through hoops. 

But, is Prowly perfect? Not quite. While it’s a great option for smaller teams, it might feel limited for larger PR agencies or users. Especially for those who need more advanced reporting features. 

It’s also far more expensive than other modern, user-friendly PR platforms like Prezly – and their focus on broad reach makes it a poor choice if your goal is to build strategic relationships with fans and journalists.

If you’re in the PR space, Muck Rack is a name you’ve likely heard many times. They’re known best for having targeted pitching tools and a robust database of journalists and media contacts (250,000+ contacts). 

What sets Muck Rack apart is that it’s used by both PR professionals and journalists, making it a two-way street for media relations.

Overall, if you’re looking to discover new journalists, and send strong pitches, Muck Rack is a good choice. Their real-time media monitoring also helps you stay on top of mentions, and they provide you with detailed analytics to measure your PR impact.

But, with all of Muck Rack’s power, comes a higher price tag. And for smaller teams, it might feel a bit overwhelming or even unnecessary if you don’t need all their extra features.

All to say, Muck Rack is generally only an ideal choice for larger agencies and organizations that need more advanced features, and are willing to sign up for an expensive annual contract.

Prowly comes loaded with features specifically to make standard, repetitive PR tasks easier for small to mid-sized teams to accomplish.

Here’s a quick breakdown on their tools:

• Media Database: Access a large database of journalists and media contacts (1 million+), making it easier to reach out to new people.
• Media Monitoring: Track all of your online and offline media mentions with social media listening, broadcast monitoring, and print monitoring. 
• Press Release Creator: Create professional press releases with easy-to-use templates, and send them out directly from the platform.
• PR Reports: Keep track of your campaigns with simple reporting tools to measure and share your PR results.
• Online Newsroom: Host your press releases, media assets, and stories in one place, giving journalists a simple place to access everything they need.
• Media Pitching: Pitch journalists and media contacts with personalized 1:1 emails and follow-up sequences. 
• AI Tools: Use Prowly’s AI assistant for help with ideating, drafting, editing, and pitching your press releases. 

Muck Rack comes with a similar suite of tools for PR teams to work with. The main difference being that they offer less features than Prowly, but with deeper functionality behind them.

Here’re all the main features Muck Rack comes with:

• Media Database: Access to a database of 250,000+ media contacts. While smaller than Prowly’s, Muck Rack has been known to have a more reliable, and up-to-date list.
• Media Monitoring: Track your media mentions in real-time across 35,000 digital, print, broadcast, podcast, and social media publications. 
• Media Pitching: Send 1:1 email pitches, and automated follow-ups with access to deeper analytics so you can track results, and your team’s activity. 
• PR Reports: Visually share updates on specific goals and your team’s activities with access to deep analytics and the ability to create dashboards and reports. ​ 
• AI Tools: Use Muck Rack’s AI tools to find topics to write about, journalists to connect with, create reports, and craft pitches.

Prowly pricing →

Focused on being accessible to small and mid-sized businesses, Prowly openly shares their pricing. 

Here’s how the plans break down:

• Basic Plan: At $369/month, this plan is made for small teams or individuals who want to manage basic PR tasks (building a media list, sending pitches, and monitoring online mentions).
• Pro Plan: At $589/month, the Pro plan is more closely designed for in-house teams and agencies. In this, they include deeper features like reporting, social media listening, and automated pitch follow-ups. 
• Enterprise Plan: For larger teams or enterprises with specific needs, Prowly offers a custom plan (billed annually) with access to all of their tools. This includes offline media monitoring, a dedicated customer success manager, and more. 

While Prowly’s pricing looks more affordable when compared to other PR tools, to get access to all for the functionality they offer, you’re still faced with a hefty fee. 

And, if you decide to stick with their basic plan, you’ll still be paying a high price, for what really is a very limited set of features.

Muck Rack pricing →

Muck Rack isn’t upfront about their pricing, which can be frustrating. 

They offer custom pricing based on the size of your team and the features you need, with users reportedly paying anywhere from $3,500 to $40,000+ per year.

Muck Rack also doesn’t offer a free trial or a public pricing page, but you can request a demo to get a better idea of what it might cost for your specific needs. 

If you’re running a larger PR team or agency, it might be worth the investment, but for smaller teams, the cost could be a bit steep.

All things considered, Muck Rack still does shed some light on how their plans shape out. Here’s a quick overview: 

• Starter plan: Made just for small teams or individuals, this plan gives you limited access to their media database, reporting tools, and customer support. You’ll also get full access to their media monitoring features.
• Standard plan: Their most popular plan (made for most PR teams and agencies), this gives you access to nearly everything, but still with limited reporting features.
• Premier plan: This is the most flexible plan, made for large teams and enterprises. Here, you can get access to any of Muck Rack’s features your team needs.
• Add ons: Add-on features like API access, Broadcast monitoring, and more, are also available, though at an additional cost.

For a deeper dive into Muck Rack’s pricing, check out our Muck Rack Pricing Guide.

Prowly has earned a solid reputation among users, with most praise coming from its ease of use, and criticism coming from its customer support and limited functionality. 

Looking at G2, Prowly currently holds a 4.2/5 rating, with 102 reviews. 

Users love how simple it is, while still having a wide variety of functionality to work with.

Positive Review: “Very helpful and a great resource”

However, users have also complained that it isn’t as helpful for actually achieving results with, as it is for just streamlining their work. 

Negative Review: “You can find much better services and most of what Prowly offers is available for free. The paid version of Prowly is far too limiting.”

Overall, Prowly scores well for businesses that need to manage their busy PR workflows better, but not as well for those needing to get results.

Muck Rack is well-regarded, specifically for its media monitoring and extensive journalist database. 

On G2, it has a 4.6/5 rating, with 270 reviews, though many users can feel that it’s geared more toward larger teams with bigger budgets.

Users love how curated and effective Muck Rack can be for them. 

Positive Review: “Straightforward and powerful tool for finding and connecting with the media”

But, users have also noted that it can be hard to pick up at first. 

Negative Review: “It’s a great tool, but the pricing is a bit high for smaller teams. We also found the learning curve a little steep at first.” – PR Manager

Overall, Muck Rack gets a lot of love for its features, but the cost and complexity is still a hurdle for many PR pros.

Prowly is a solid all-around choice for PR teams and agencies that need a swiss army knife-type tool. The platform comes baked with nearly everything a PR team needs to get their work done.

However, from our perspective, this broad approach comes with three big downsides:

1. While you get loads of features and tools to play with, they’re not all as powerful or strategically focused as you’d like them to be (i.e. jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none)
2. To get access to Prowly’s full suite, you’re still looking at paying upwards of $589/month
3. Prowly is still stuck in the age of spray-and-pray PR. Instead of focusing on helping you build strong media relationships, and properly earn media coverage, they’d rather sell you an outdated media database that’s unlikely to get any results

That said, if you’re in the market for a generalist PR platform, and want to avoid the extremely expensive annual contracts and licenses that come with more traditional platforms, Prowly can still be a good fit for you. 

• Open pricing
• Easy sign-up process
• Free trial available
• Easy-to-use interface
• Large set of PR tools

• Customer support issues
• Expensive
• Outdated media database
• Rigid cancellation policy
• Limited email sending

Muck Rack is a strong tool, especially for larger teams that need a deep set of features to work with. 

Really, where we see Muck Rack and Prowly differ is in comparing the breadth and depth of their features. 

Prowly offers a broad range of features, but they aren’t as deep. Meanwhile, Muck Rack offers less features (there’s no press release creator or online newsroom tool), but the ones they do offer have more depth to them.

Muck Rack also has features specifically focused around team collaboration and activity tracking, for larger teams that need it.

Outside of this, the two tools also differ widely when it comes to how their pricing and plans are approached. 

Prowly is quite easy to sign up for, and has open pricing. On the other end, Muck Rack is a more traditional PR platform (to learn about other traditional PR tools, check out our guide on Muck Rack vs Cision). 

Their plans can quickly become incredibly expensive, and using their tool requires going through a full sales cycle. 

So in short, yes Muck Rack is effective, but only if your team has a high budget, needs deep features, and is willing to deal with a steep learning curve. 

• Up-to-date media database
• Deep, established feature set
• Useful in connecting with journalists
• Great for internal team collaboration and tracking

• High pricing
• Contract-based pricing
• Add-on pricing adds up
• No free trial
• Reported customer support issues
• Missing press release creator and online newsroom features

Wrapping everything up, let’s go over some of the common conclusions we reached on how Prowly and Muck Rack compare:

• Pricing: Both tools are expensive. Prowly offers open, monthly pricing, whereas Muck Rack only offers contract, annual pricing. To actually get access to all of the features both tools promote on their marketing sites, you’ll need to pay hand-over-fist.
• Features: Prowly offers lots of easy-to-use features, but with little depth and strategy behind them. Muck Rack is missing features, but the ones they do have are strong (though complex). 
• PR Approach: Both platforms follow a spray-and-pray approach to PR. Meaning, instead of being designed to help you build relationships and earn effective media coverage, they’re centered around helping you blast your stories out to as many people as possible. An approach that in today’s PR space, has proven ineffective.

So, this all begs the question: which tool do I pick if I want a PR platform that’s: affordable, easy-to-use, has a full-suite of high-quality features, and will actually help me earn more media coverage? 

Well, we’d suggest trying out Prezly.

Prezly offers everything a modern PR pro or team needs. This includes:

• PR outreach tool
• PR CRM
• PR reporting & monitoring tool
• Press release creation tool
• PR analytics tool
• And more!

All starting from an incredibly affordable price ($90/mo) with open sign-up and access to a 14-day free trial. 

Curious to know more? We’ve got it all covered in our write-up where we answer “Is Prezly for Me?”

When it comes to choosing between Prowly and Muck Rack, the right option really depends on what you need from a PR platform. 

Prowly is perfect for teams that want a tool they can jump right into, that is packed with features for simplifying their PR workflow. But, it’s still quite expensive, and not ideal if your focus is around having a curated, strategic approach with your public relations. 

Muck Rack, on the other hand, is a great pick for those that are working with a higher budget, and want a more curated, strategic tool. However, this comes at the cost of dealing with expensive annual contracts, and the lack of any online newsroom or press release creation features. 

If neither option feels like the right fit, Prezly is a fantastic alternative. We’ve tirelessly designed the perfect PR platform for earning media coverage. 

One that has a simple interface, powerful features, and affordable pricing. Oh, and our customer support team is pretty awesome, too.

Ready to give Prezly a shot? Start with a 14-day free trial – it takes seconds to sign up, you get access to all of our features, and no credit card is required.