Meltwater is a good product with a price built for large teams. If you mainly need to know who covered your press releases, you're paying for a great deal you don't use – usually on an annual contract.
This guide is for that situation: what Meltwater does well, why teams look elsewhere, five alternatives with their trade-offs, and the sum worth doing before your renewal comes around.
What Meltwater is good at
Credit where it's due. Meltwater covers news, print, broadcast, podcasts and social in one place, with analytics, dashboards and a journalist database on top. For a global communications team tracking a brand across every channel, that breadth is hard to assemble any other way.
The question isn't whether Meltwater is good. It's whether you need all of it.
Why teams look for an alternative
- The price. Meltwater doesn't publish prices. Buyers report annual contracts from around $15,000 a year, rising with modules and seats.
- The contract. You commit for a year up front, whether you send two releases that year or two hundred.
- The fit. Many teams use the news monitoring and the reports, and rarely open the rest.
The per-release sum
Divide what you pay by the releases you send. A team on a $15,000 contract that sends two releases a month is paying $625 for every release it tracks, before a single social or broadcast feature has earned its share.
Send fifty releases a year across several brands and the sum looks reasonable. Send twelve and it doesn't. That's the case for paying per release instead: the cost follows the work, and a quiet quarter costs you nothing.
Five Meltwater alternatives
They run from the closest like-for-like swap to the biggest change. PressMe is ours, and marked as such.
Cision
The other big suite. It makes sense if distribution matters to you as much as monitoring. We've covered it separately in Cision alternatives.
- Price
- Not published. Buyers report a median around $12,700 a year, on annual terms.
- Best for
- Teams that also want distribution through PR Newswire.
- What it misses
- A like-for-like swap: similar contract, similar breadth. Cheaper only in some configurations.
Talkwalker
Now part of Hootsuite. If social listening is what you'd miss most about Meltwater, it's the closest match.
- Price
- Quote-based; the free Talkwalker Alerts costs nothing.
- Best for
- Brands that care most about social listening and analytics.
- What it misses
- It's a move sideways in price, and its strength is social rather than press coverage.
Muck Rack
If you're leaving Meltwater for its database rather than its monitoring, Muck Rack is the natural move. It's cheaper at entry level but the same shape of deal.
- Price
- Not published. Buyers report entry contracts around $5,000 a year, on annual terms.
- Best for
- Teams whose work is mostly pitching – the journalist database is the strength.
- What it misses
- It's still an annual contract, and monitoring is one feature among many.
PressMe
OursOur own tool, so weigh this accordingly. Paste a release and PressMe finds the coverage across news sites, trade titles and blogs, scores each mention for relevance, keeps looking for a week, and gives you a report to send. It does the part of Meltwater most PR teams use, priced by the release.
- Price
- Per release, no annual contract. In early access at an introductory rate.
- Best for
- PR teams and agencies who need the coverage of each release, scored and reported.
- What it misses
- Broadcast, print and social listening at scale. There's no journalist database.
Google Alerts (plus Talkwalker Alerts)
The honest bottom of the market, and better than nothing by a wide margin. Fine for an early warning; thin as a record.
- Price
- Free.
- Best for
- Teams with one or two releases a year and no report to produce.
- What it misses
- Much trade and non-English coverage, relevance scoring and anything you could send a client.
For a wider field, including page monitors like PageCrawl, see the seven best press release monitoring tools.
Before you switch
- 1Find your renewal date and notice period. Annual contracts often renew themselves unless you cancel in time.
- 2Export your past coverage reports while you still have access. A coverage record is worth more the longer it runs.
- 3List which features your team opened in the last three months. That's what you actually need replaced.
- 4Run the alternative on your next release alongside your current tool, and compare what each found.
The comparison in the last step is the only test that counts. Our guide to measuring the results of a press release covers what a fair comparison looks at – outlets, tiers and relevance, not raw mention counts.
Common questions
Is there a free alternative to Meltwater?
For finding coverage, Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts are free and catch the obvious pickups. Neither replaces Meltwater's reports, relevance scoring or broadcast coverage.
What is the cheapest alternative to Meltwater?
Among paid tools, one priced per release is usually cheapest for teams that send fewer than a few releases a week, because you pay nothing in the months you don't send any.
Will I lose coverage by switching?
Possibly broadcast and print, which most cheaper tools don't cover. For online coverage, run both on the same release and see – that settles it faster than any feature table.
Where PressMe fits
You pay for the releases you track, and nothing in the months you don't. PressMe has you covered.