Looking for the best PR tools?

Look no further.

We spent the last six months testing hundreds of tools to bring you the top 25 PR tools. These will help you pitch relevant journalists, and generate backlinks, effortlessly and successfully. Whether you want an alternative to Help a Reporter or just need to get your PR game going this list will help you get your PR game on.

Before moving to the tools, take a look at some public relation activities where you can use these PR tools:

Public Relations Activities That Need PR Tools

Curious about the different public relation activities where you could use PR tools?

Here are the top 7 channels to use them in:

1. Social Media

Social media is the perfect channel to use PR tools to directly interact with journalists as well as determine what they are interested in.

2. Media relations

Media relations or public relations is all about using PR tools and relations with journalists to manage how your company is covered in the media.

3. Advertorials

Advertorials allow you to advertise your brand through news stories or reviews in print media. Use PR tools to gain leverage here as this sort of coverage is looked at with more credibility than a regular advertisement.

4. Business Events

Business events are a great opportunity to personally interact with journalists and build a relationship with them. If you exhibit, it’s a great platform to get them to notice your brand.

5. Speaking Engagements

Speaking engagements are also a good way to build credibility with journalists and interest them in stories or expert quotes.

6. Community Relations

Community relations involves contributing to the community – in terms of monetary contributions or offering a helping hand during drives. Use PR tools alongside them to get a mention with journalists who are covering such events.

7. Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy is the process of getting your employees to actively advocate your brand on social media. It’s a great way to share press coverage on social media.

What are PR tools?

PR tools are used by brands to manage the entire public relations process.

Usually PR tools have a contact database of journalists, a CRM to manage the outreach process, an outreach engine or capability to send the email pitches out.

Fancier tools have templates for email pitches and analytics to help marketers and PR pros figure out which pitch is working best.

One of the most simplest way you can trial and test drive some of these PR tools is by using an interactive demo option where you can run the software virtually to just play around with it a bit. Some vendors offer this on their site, many others have a free trial. 

Now that you know what PR tools are useful for, here are the top 25 PR tools in detail:

1. JustReachOut

The power of AI built into a PR outreach platform

JustReachOut combines robust PR software with the power of AI to help you find relevant journalists and create personalized pitch emails within minutes helping you get the media exposure you need to grow your business. 

JRO not only has AI powered journalist outreach tools, they also have several other tools for both PR and SEO and a PR masterclass to teach you how to build relationships and then pitch the media in the most effective manner possible. 

The JRO software indexes millions of articles written every day on specific trends, topics, niches, industries, or companies. It can be used to find the most relevant journalists for any given topic based on their past writing and send them the perfect email pitch.

To make the PR outreach tool even more powerful our database of journalists is updated with every single pitch that goes out making JRO the best alternative to Prowly. If a journalist’s email bounces, we have a team that find the right email address and then send the pitch out again with the correct info on your behalf. This makes our email deliverability much higher than the other tools on this list.

The software also monitors daily press opportunities (daily queries from journalists to quote an expert in their article) on various platforms such as ProfNet, SourceBottle, Haro, Qwoted, Featured and Twitter to identify the most relevant ones for your business. You can search all of the opportunities by keyword and have them emailed to you daily.

Finally, JRO also has 5 other outreach tools that can supplement your current PR strategies:

• Journalist Pitch Requests Tool – from 6 different sources (reporters looking for pitches)
• Broken Link Building Tool
• Podcast Outreach Tool – the best tool to pitch podcasts for interviews
• Guest Post Outreach Tool
• Unlinked Brand Mentions Tool

Type of tool: Journalist Outreach Tools

Maybe the biggest benefit to using JustReachOut is the price. Compared to the other outreach tools on this list they are far and away less expensive but with most (and some extra) features of the other tools.

Pricing: JRO plans start at just $147/month.

2. PitchPress

PitchPress is a niche PR service that helps fashion brands get product placements in print and digital media.

Most fashion brands fail in their first year.

According to ValueLine, “The apparel industry is fragmented and highly competitive. There are a number of major players, but there are also countless niche stores and private companies that cater to specific demographics.”

How do you navigate through this highly competitive landscape?

Just share your product images, branded line sheets, and dedicated press samples and let the PR team at PitchPress do all the heavy lifting. They connect with fashion journalists, create a media strategy, and amplify your brand’s reach.

One major issue with PitchPress which we found is that they do not have a dedicated PR Coaching service or course.

Type of tool: Journalist Outreach Tools

Pricing: $3000

3. NinjaOutreach

NinjaOutreach helps you find influencer email addresses and automate your PR outreach strategy. It has one of the world’s largest outreach databases with access to over 25 million leads, bloggers, & social media influencers.

All you need to do is type your keywords and you can access millions of profiles and their email addresses. You can then automate your email outreach campaigns for link building, guest posting, influencer marketing, digital PR, and content promotion.

The Contact Relationship Manager is one of its key features. Each strategy would require you to reach out to dozens of bloggers. After creating an email list of possible targets, simply schedule it to keep track of their interactions. Connect Ninjaoutreach with your email id to get notified when a lead has replied or a follow-up is due.

Type of tool: Journalist Outreach Tools

Pricing: Starts at $49/month

4. ProfNet

ProfNet connects you to journalists who are looking for experts in their news releases.

Instead of actively searching out for journalists, let them come to you. 

After you subscribe and set your topic preferences, sit back and wait for media leads. If you are a blogger yourself, you can search through their database to find a qualified expert for your article.

The ProfNet Connect forum gives you access to an interactive online community for journalists, bloggers, and PR professionals. Showcase your expertise and make yourself search-worthy by posting photos and videos and tagging them with relevant keywords. This makes it incredibly easy to stand out and catch the eye of a journalist you’d like to interact with.

Type of tool: Journalist Outreach Tools

Pricing: Starts at $1650

5. HARO

What if you’re not an expert in a particular field?

You can still help a reporter out, with HARO (Help A Reporter Out).

Registered Journalists send out a source request – a brief synopsis of their story, required source qualifications, and a pitching deadline.

After you set up your account, you will receive regular source requests via email (three times a day) that are relevant to you or your industry. You can pitch to these journalists with the answer and your bio with your information. If they are interested, they’ll reach out!

However, that isn’t all.

If you subscribe to their Advanced Plans, you’ll get an awesome perk that gets you to the front of the line. You’ll receive a message the instant the HARO team approves a media opportunity. This way, you’re not waiting for the daily email like everyone else and can start crafting the perfect pitch before anyone else gets started!

Type of Tool: Journalist Outreach Tool

Pricing: Paid plans start at $19/month

6. SourceBottle

SourceBottle operates in a fashion similar to HARO. Journalists and bloggers can post regular ‘call-outs’ for industry sources on their pieces through SourceBottle. 

However, there is one distinction. 

Sourcebottle is more geared toward product reviews and securing sponsorships. If you’re looking for opportunities where you can be featured as an expert, HARO is a better option.

You’ll receive daily ‘Drink Up!’ email alerts that summarize all your relevant call outs for sources. 

You can search for experts and journalists from all fields – nonprofit organizations, tech industries, fashion houses – it’s up to you. Sourcebottle also allows you to choose bloggers and journalists from specific countries.

For added convenience, journalists can select how they wish to be contacted – through phone or email. This makes it easier for you to reach out to them and receive a favorable response. 

Type Of Tool: Journalist Outreach Tool

Pricing: Not available

7. Cision

Cision is another popular tool to connect with journalists from top-tier publications like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN and more.

You can also use the same platform to distribute press releases through PR Newswire – the world’s most trusted press release network.

With Cision’s monitoring feature, you can monitor the latest industry news and keep track of competitors in real-time across millions of stories over online, social, broadcast and print media. 

With their advanced analytics, you’ll be able to see how well your brand is positioned in news media coverage. They arrive at your ‘prominence score’ by figuring out how often your brand and product keywords are mentioned in relevant news pieces. It’s a simple way to determine if what you’re doing is working or not.

Type Of Tool: Journalist Outreach Tool

Pricing: $20/month for basic tools

8. AnswerThePublic

Ever wonder what your audience is thinking about? 

With AnswerThePublic, you’ll be able to take a deep dive into customer minds to find out what they think about.

Just enter a topic, and you will be presented with hundreds of content ideas that you can use to connect with your audience. Use these ideas in your PR campaigns to address what they want and build a stronger connection. For example, you can type in “video games” and find out what your audience is interested in and what they’d like introduced.

AnswerThePublic also supports data visualizations to showcase all possible questions, comparisons, and related topics that can be used in your PR strategy. You can also convert these lists and visualizations into a handy, exportable .csv file. This makes it easy to transfer this data and work on it together with your PR team. 

Type Of Tool: Customer Analytics Tool

Pricing: Paid plans start at $99/month

9. Critical Mention

Is your brand getting the recognition it deserves?

You can keep tabs on your brand mentions in real-time with Critical Mention. Used by brands like VH1, CBS, and McDonalds, it’s one of the leading forces in earned media tracking. The app scours through countless TV channels, radio broadcasts, social media accounts to find mentions of your brand and assess your media coverage. 

For example, if your brand was mentioned on a radio show, you’ll automatically be informed of where and when it was mentioned. You won’t have to monitor anything manually – the tool does it for you!

You can gain essential media insights by quickly identifying audience sentiment and trends with its in-depth visual reports. Luckily, these reports are easily shareable – making it simple to include clients and team members. As these are also mobile-friendly, you can share them on the go.

Type Of Tool: PR Tracking Tool

Pricing: Starts at $29/month

10. Mention

Mention is one of the most user-friendly tools on this list.

You can use real-time tracking to monitor your brand, PR campaign, target keywords, etc on the web and social media with Mention. With Mention, you won’t have to do anything manually – just log into the app to find out what’s been going on!

As an added bonus, public relations practitioners can also respond to social media mentions directly from the app.

With Mention’s Competitor Analysis, you’ll be able to compare your PR efforts with what your competitors are doing. You can compare key metrics, analyze which competitor has the most share of voice, who’s performing well in a region and so on. 

Keeping tabs on your competitors will inform you of what’s working in your industry and what’s not. You can use this data to shape your PR campaigns for more success.

Type Of Tool: PR Tracking Tool

Pricing: Paid plans start at $25/month

11. Brandseye

Your brand might be trending, but do people really like it?

Brandseye allows you to analyze the public sentiment regarding your brand. The tool gives organizations with an in-depth understanding of what’s causing positive and negative sentiment around them. 

However, algorithms can’t accurately understand human conversation because of tonal subtleties, slang, and sarcasm, right?

That’s why Brandseye uses crowd members to review, verify and categorize the AI’s analysis. You can even use Brandseye to address customer concerns before they become an issue. 

How?

Brandseye can mine tons of user-generated content, and route the right contact opportunity to your customer service team. Your teams can react to the situation at the right time, saving or winning a customer in the process. Remember, word-of-mouth marketing can make or break or your brand – keeping your customers happy will keep your reputation intact.

Type Of Tool: PR Analytics Tool

Pricing: Starts at $10/month

12. Buzzsumo

What’s the best way to create successful content? 

By understanding what topics work in your industry.

Buzzsumo is a tool that can help you find and analyze to top-performing blogs and videos in your industry. You can use the tool’s data to decode what they’re doing and replicate their strategies for yourself.

For example, if a blog has been growing exponentially recently, you can use Buzzsumo to identify the root cause of that. You can then try and replicate that with your blog and achieve similar growth levels.

You can even use this tool to keep tabs on any prominent personalities and blogs in your industry. The moment they publish new material, you’ll be notified of it on your personalized Buzzsumo dashboard. This ensures that you don’t miss out on the latest developments in your field and can always keep up.

Type Of Tool: PR Analytics Tool

Pricing: Starts at $79/month

13. Sparktoro

If you want to make a connection with your audience, you’ll have to understand them.

And what’s the best way to do this?

By understanding what inspires them.

Sparktoro is an audience intelligence tool made by Rand Fishkin – a prolific digital marketer who is the founder of Moz.

Sparktoro lets you discover the websites, blogs, podcasts, social accounts that reach your audience through various search terms. You can build lists of accounts to monitor and track, to spot trends before they happen. 

Sparktoro also has a unique feature to gauge the actual impact of your brand. With the Fake Follower Audit, you’ll be able to identify any fake followers on your channels – be it bots, spam, propaganda or inactive accounts. You can then discount these accounts from your monitoring to analyze who your real customer base is.

Type Of Tool: PR Analytics Tool

Pricing: Not available

14. Subject Line

Your subject line is the most important part of your pitch.

Why?

Around 35% of email recipients open an email based on subject line alone. So it makes sense to spend some time perfecting it, right?

To ensure that you always create a good first impression, use this free email marketing tool. Subject Line can evaluate your subject lines based on ‘clickability’ – this is how attractive it looks to a reader. 

Subject Line will also breakdown your subject line to show you what’s good and what’s not. This can help you identify what aspects of your subject line needs work.

To help you further, the tool will also give you tons of helpful tips to improve your subject line. You can also access its list of trending topics to check out what’s viral at the moment and leverage that in your subject lines.

Type Of Tool: Writing Tools

Pricing: Free

15. Prezly

Prezly is a powerful all-in-one PR software that’ll handle all your media coverage needs. You get a PR CRM, online newsrooms, story editors to create stunning visual press releases and targeted PR campaigns.

Used by companies like Reebok, RedBull, and Shopify, it’s a centralized platform for all your PR needs. 

This is more than just a typical CRM for photographers or consultants  with Prezly you’ll be able to keep track of all your press contacts and instantly identify the best journalists to reach out to. It’s a great place to take stock of your connections and build a useful contact database. 

The story editor can help you create attractive visual press releases that journalists can’t say no to. You can add multimedia to your press releases to accurately convey your message in an easily understandable way. 

You can then use these features together to create a powerful PR campaign that can reach and engage the right people in no time. 

Type Of Tool: PR Campaign Tool

Pricing: Not available

16. Grammarly

Another way to leave a lasting impression on a journalist is by crafting flawless emails. If your emails are written beautifully, you can rest assured that they’ll be taken seriously.

Luckily, Grammarly makes sure that everything you type is clear, effective, and free of mistakes. It can analyze your content on a variety of different criteria such as sentence structure, spelling, punctuation, engagement and more. 

With Grammarly’s plagiarism checker, you can verify if your content is original or not. The tool looks through search engines for millions of websites and academic databases that have matching words and phrases.

It then gives you a plagiarism percentage and a breakdown of where the material has been copied. This is a good way to instantly verify if the work you receive is 100% unique or not.

Type Of Tool: Writing Tools

Pricing: Paid plans start at $29.95/month

17. Crystal

How do you persuade an influential journalist or personality?

By speaking their language (metaphorically speaking).

But how do you know what kind of style a journalist wants?

Just use Crystal.

Crystal analyzes your target influencers’ communication style from their social media posts or sample texts. You can use this information to craft personalized emails and pitches for these targets. By redoing them in a style that the journalist prefers, you’re increasing the chances of them liking your pitch.

Crystal also offers you the unique feature of ‘relationship reports.’ These reports explain the possible dynamics between two people based on their unique personalities, even if they have never interacted before. 

You can use this data to improve and prepare for your interactions with PR professionals and target influencers. Your interactions are bound to go well since Crystal has already walked you through them!

Type Of Tool: PR Analytics Tool

Pricing: Starts at $19/month

18. GlobeNewswire

Tons of companies are now flocking towards new distribution channels such as social media and blogs. It’s up to you to update your press releases to reach all these platforms. However, manually doing this can be difficult.

Luckily, GlobeNewswire is a PR tool that distributes your press release through online newsrooms to give you a huge reach. You can customize which outlets and audiences you want to target. This allows you to only reach out to publications and platforms that align with your aspirations.

If that wasn’t enough, GlobeNewswire allows you to curate custom press release feed for your website with direct-from-source news and content issued on behalf of global companies across all industries.

Type Of Tool: Journalist Outreach Tools

Pricing: Starts at $460/release

19. PR.co

Your PR strategy isn’t solely dependent on your press releases.

You’ll also have to spend time on brand storytelling to truly get your message across. While you can publish visual press releases with PR.co, that isn’t all you can do.

PR.co allows you to create a structured digital newsroom (or landing page) for all your company press releases. This allows readers to tie together different press releases and understand what your brand stands for. 

You can even use the Embargo feature to give certain journalists access to press releases before they go public. This can help keep them updated on everything to ensure that they’re always one step ahead. 

PR.co also supports delegating press releases to local teams to translate announcements to fit their local markets. You can choose to give them full or partial upload access to maintain your security while capitalizing on international markets. 

Type Of Tool: Journalist Outreach Tools

Pricing: Starts at $699/month

20. TrendKite

When it comes to PR Analytics, TrendKite has quite a lot to offer.

You’ll have everything you need to keep up with your PR campaigns with customizable dashboards on competitor analysis, monthly measurements and product insights. 

Instead of spending hours generating PR reports and analyzing your reach, simply click a button and TrendKite has everything ready for you!

TrendKite’s most interesting feature is ‘Attribution.’ It helps you understand your PR’s impact on your website traffic. 

How?

The tool tracks readers from over 4.7 million publications. It also shows you how many of those readers visit your website after reading an article about your organization. This helps you learn the actual results of your mentions – instead of analyzing potential metrics.

Type Of Tool: PR Analytics Tool

Pricing: Not available

21. Onclusive

Companies spend around $30 billion on PR per year!

So it is only fair that executives should be able to see the return on investment, right?

Luckily, with Onclusive (formerly AirPR), this won’t be an issue. The tool helps you gauge your ROI, social amplification, reach and more. You can also discover trends in real-time, including article frequency trends, social amplification, which publications are writing about a topic, etc.

However, that isn’t all. 

Onclusive combines AI, machine learning and data science to give you access tons of detailed metrics such as:

• Brand Awareness
• Brand Reputation
• Narrative Adoption
• Customer Interest
• Sales
• SEO

This way, you get a holistic view of how your digital stories can help you reach your business goals.

Type Of Tool: PR Analytics Tool

Pricing: Not available

22. CoverageBook

Want to show off your PR campaign results to your clients?

CoverageBook combines all of your results and condenses it to visually stunning reports within minutes. Used by over 1000 PR teams, the tool automatically calculates metrics and displays easy to understand figures to woo your clients.

It’ll crank out detailed reports that aren’t just data-rich – but are also easy on the eye. You can add multiple data points to your reports to illustrate campaign effectiveness and results. 

CoverageBook also gives you ‘Accessible Reports.’ This allows them to share a report from any internet-enabled device to make any last-minute changes. It’s the perfect way to always stay prepared for a client meeting. 

Type Of Tool: PR Analytics Tool

Pricing: Starts at $99/month

23. Buzzstream

Your outreach process shouldn’t be a shot in the dark. You’ll have to carefully plan and monitor it to ensure that it’s working.

Luckily, Buzzstream lets you know precisely how well your outreach strategy is faring.

How does it work?

You can use Buzzstream’s outreach reports to identify which team members are outperforming and see the PR gaps that need work.

You can even manage your influencer relationships to identify what stage they’re in, to help yourself prepare for conversion at the right moment.

You can even build your network through Buzzstream by reaching out and connecting with tons of prominent influencers in your niche. You can create targeted templates and personalized emails with their email tool to send powerful pitches to prospects. The tool will also help you nail this process with their tips on ideal subject lines and email structures. 

Type Of Tool: PR Analytics Tool

Pricing: Starts at $29/month

24. Upbeat PR

If you don’t have enough resources for your PR strategy – you can always outsource it.

Partner up with Upbeat to develop a media strategy, launch outreach campaigns, build journalist relationships, get media coverage and more. You’ll get all the expertise you need to craft a successful PR strategy that’ll get you the coverage you deserve.

You get to work with dedicated virtual public relations professionals who are experts at what they do. Upbeat PR will also give you tons of PR tools to help you manage your campaign.

You can even create ‘Press Pages’ on your website for any visiting journalists. The tool can automatically update these pages with your latest coverage to give the journalist an idea of what’s going on. With Upbeat’s extensive journalist network, you’ll have no trouble getting the exposure you want with your press pages.

Type Of Tool: PR Campaign Tool

Pricing: Starts at $2000/month

25. PRGloo

Sometimes you can’t decide which PR tool to use.

Do you need an analytics tool? What about a journalist outreach tool?

Instead of selecting one, why not use all of them in one package?

PRGloo is a complete media relations platform that combines tons of powerful, user-friendly tools. You can build influencer lists, manage contacts and engage with journalists – all in one unified platform.

PRGloo also lets you create and publish media-rich stories with its powerful publication and distribution tools. You can even engage audiences with a customized newsroom that highlights your most recent press coverage.

You’ll also get detailed one-click reporting to monitor what’s been working and how your PR campaign is doing. With the ‘Response Desk’, you can keep track of in-team and external conversations – to keep everyone on the same page. 

Type Of Tool: PR Campaign Tool

Pricing: Starts at $2000/year

26. Hubspot

HubSpot is a well-known company for its award-winning CRM platform that PR professionals can use to keep track of their prospects and outreach when working with different leads, reporters, and companies.

Like other CRMs, HubSpot stores all of your contacts in a central database. As a PR specialist, you can use this tool to create contact profiles and attach their titles, previous works, companies, and brands. What separates HubSpot from other CRMs and PR tools is the ability to sync your contacts with email campaigns, sales pipelines, and more. When creating customer profiles, you can use this contact information and set up automated email campaigns for outreach, blogging opportunities, digital PR, and more.

Since you’re using a CRM, you can also create various segmentations and lists based on different requirements. You can set up separate contact lists for news publications, bloggers, social media influencers and more. The best part is that each list will provide an in-depth analysis on which workflows had the most engagements like open rates, click-through rates, and more allowing you to improve existing workflows and figure out what’s working and what’s not.

Type of tool: Journalist Outreach Tools

Pricing: Free tools available, paid plans start at $45/month

Over To You

Doing your own PR is not difficult. Use these pro tools to get the press coverage that you deserve.

Which ones of these 25 awesome public relations tools would you use for your PR outreach? Let me know in the comments below.