Looking for an alternative to Cision for your social media and media monitoring needs?
Many highly-rated options are out there. Read on for a quick and easy guide to some popular Cision competitors.
Table of Contents
What Is Cision?
Before we look at competitors, let's take a closer look at what Cision is and does.
Cision describes itself as “a comprehensive communications platform enabling more than 100,000 public relations and marketing professionals around the world to understand, influence and amplify their stories.”
Its media intelligence platform is known as CisionOne. It is also well-known for its press release distribution platform, PR Newswire, as well as Brandwatch, a global listening and digital consumer intelligence platform it acquired in 2021.
What Are Cision Alternatives?
The following companies offer solutions that are good alternatives to what Cision is offering.
- Meltwater
- Critical Mention
- GlobeNewswire
- Newswire
- NiceJob
- Prezly
- Prowly
Scroll down to read more about their pros and cons.
| Available Features | Meltwater | Cision |
|---|---|---|
| AI Ethics, Security & Governance:First in the Industry to AchieveISO 42001 certification | Yes | No |
| Unlimited Customer Support and Training | Yes | No |
| Stand-alone Social Listening Offering | Yes | No |
| Consolidated Solution for News Monitoring, Social Listening and Social Media Management | Yes | No |
| Data Security You Can Trust: ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certifications | Yes | No |
| Unlimited News and Broadcast Coverage | Yes | No |
Meltwater
Meltwater is a best-in-class social and media intelligence solution for PR, marketing, communications, and social professionals. From social media analytics and engagement solutions to an all-encompassing influencer marketing platform, Meltwater is designed to solve all the problems and obstacles (and take advantage of all the opportunities!) that come along with modern marketing.
In addition, Meltwater is an industry leader in AI innovation. Our AI-powered integrations empower users to make greater impacts and uncover deeper insights at scale with:
- Instant summary of themes, trends and topics to surface key insights
- AI-powered influencer discovery
- Content generation
- Journalist search
- Mention spike analysis
- Sentiment analysis
And with Mira, your AI powered teammate, AI is seamlessly incorporated into your workflow, increasing efficiency, data accuracy, and productivity.
Meltwater vs. Cision
While Meltwater and Cision have overlapping offerings, key differences stand out, as seen in the table below:
| Available Features | Meltwater | Cision |
|---|---|---|
| AI Ethics, Security & Governance:First in the Industry to AchieveISO 42001 certification | Yes | No |
| Unlimited Customer Support and Training | Yes | No |
| Stand-alone Social Listening Offering | Yes | No |
| Consolidated Solution for News Monitoring, Social Listening and Social Media Management | Yes | No |
| Data Security You Can Trust: ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certifications | Yes | No |
| Unlimited News and Broadcast Coverage | Yes | No |
Meltwater solutions are customizable and easy to use. Plus, clients enjoy having one dedicated customer success team per account. Usability and integration are especially key when it comes to campaign management and long-term marketing strategies.
Insights extracted from media monitoring and social media analytics can be put to good use seamlessly via our social engagement and influencer marketing platforms.
When it comes to media outreach, Meltwater’s media relations solution offers keyword searches for journalists and a "living" media list that uses data cleansing to eliminate double counting.
Importantly, extensive insights don't mean complicated interfaces. The social listening and media monitoring process and UX design is simplified for our clients.
Meltwater also excels in reputation and brand management use cases. With a broad social listening capabilities across numerous channels worldwide, it offers users a comprehensive look at online conversations about their companies and brands. And custom reporting on traditional and bespoke reporting metrics makes analytics and insights easy to communicate across teams and departments.
For brands and companies looking to get into the exploding world of influencer marketing, our solutions facilitate identifying and vetting influencers, managing influencer campaigns, capturing and analyzing results, as well as payment.
Finally, live Meltwater customer support reps are available to clients 24 hours a day, seven days a week, setting our users up for success.
From PR to communications to marketing to social media and every combination in between, Meltwater is a comprehensive, all-in-one Cision alternative.
Other Alternatives to Cision
Meltwater is an excellent Cision alternative, but there are many other options to compare it with. Here's how other competitors match up.
Critical Mention
Critical Mention is a media monitoring platform that helps businesses and brands keep tabs on their earned media mentions and coverage.
While both Cision one and Critical Mention help users collect and monitor media coverage, CisionOne offers added social media management capabilities.
GlobeNewswire
GlobeNewswire offers a suite of PR solutions, including a media contacts database, social listening, media monitoring, and a press release distribution service. One critical difference between GlobeNewswire and PR Newswire is the number of countries they distribute press releases to. GlobeNewswire serves 158 countries as of August 2025, compared to PR Newswire’s 170.
Newswire
Newswire’s press release distribution service and software lets users distribute press releases, find journalists, and monitor media mentions.
Newswire and Cision PRWeb are competitive tools, except when it comes to multimedia. Newswire has add-on charges for embedded video in its press releases, while PR Web offers unlimited media assets.
NiceJob
This reputation marketing software helps business owners manage review generation, referrals, and social media content. Cision does not have a comparable, standalone, reputation management solution. However, Cision offers enterprise-level solutions while NiceJob targets small business owners and localized markets.
Prezly
Prezly describes itself as a modern all-in-one PR suite. According to Prezly’s website, its features differ from Cision’s in a number of key ways. For example, Cision offers media database selling while Prezly doesn’t, and Prezly offers a press release builder while Cision doesn’t.
Prowly
Businesses use Prowly to manage their PR and media relations using its media contacts database, media monitoring, media pitching, and other tools. Prowly offers a free trial, which lets you check out the accuracy (and relevance to you) of its media contacts database.
Cision boasts tons of offerings, but it isn't right for everyone. Want to learn whether Meltwater might be right for your business?
