Media monitoring tools and media databases in the UK, compared

Most UK teams go shopping for "media monitoring" and come back with a database, because here the two are sold together and the database is what you use every day. Pull them apart before you take a quote, because the feeds decide the price while the database decides whether your team will like using the tool.

We started from Roxhill's own list of the top ten UK monitoring tools (12 June 2026), kept the ones whose pricing and product pages we could read on 13 October 2026, and added the database names UK buyers put to us. Brandwatch, Talkwalker and Signal AI are on Roxhill's list and not ours. We haven't checked their pages.

What "monitoring" covers

Monitoring comes in five layers, sold separately, and online is the base everywhere. Print and broadcast arrive through licensed feeds: Roxhill names NLA for national and regional UK newspapers and TV Eyes for TV, radio and podcasts, with single-title licences for the Financial Times, Bloomberg and titles such as Retail Week and The Grocer on top. Those licences are why a contract with print and broadcast in it runs to five figures and one without can be a few hundred pounds. Brand24 built its business on the fourth layer, social, and covers 25 million online sources with no print or broadcast at all. The fifth is AI answers, meaning what ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity say when a buyer asks a question in your category and which publications they cite when they say it. Cision now sells dashboards across nine AI platforms inside CisionOne, Meltwater has AI Visibility Tracking, and Vuelio's Lumina AI View follows the sources Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude cite.

Decide which layers you need before the demo, because the salesperson will sell you all five. A B2B technology team whose coverage is online trade press needs online and social, and the AI layer is getting hard to skip. A consumer brand with a radio campaign needs broadcast.

The UK database question

Two names come up in every UK conversation, and neither publishes a price. Roxhill sells Core, Boutique, Enterprise and Premium packages on a tailored quote, offers a trial of unstated length, and puts its own database at 297,332 journalists across 35,259 outlets, kept by in-house researchers and strongest in the UK, US and MENA, in its own words. Vuelio is modular and quoted, claims 1.3 million contacts across nearly 200 countries, and adds the UK political database that public affairs teams buy it for. Both are built for teams that pitch national and consumer press.

ResponseSource is the UK name with a published price, and it works backwards. Journalists post requests for comment, case studies and products to review, and you receive the ones in your chosen categories, on an annual subscription from £625 per category. Its press release wire is pay-as-you-go from £85 a release. The database it offers is Vuelio's, on quote.

The suites' databases are global. Cision claims 500,000+ journalists and outlets across 190+ countries. Muck Rack calls its database the most accurate in the industry and gives no number. Onclusive's 300,000+ contacts are available in the UK and US. Meltwater's pages give no size at all.

Who should buy which

For UK national, consumer or public affairs work, buy Roxhill or Vuelio, and ask each to show you the fifty journalists you pitch most, because the database is where you'll live. A global comms function that needs print and broadcast in several languages should get quotes from Cision and Meltwater, with Onclusive beside them, and expect a 12-month contract at Meltwater. If you want journalists' requests instead of monitoring, ResponseSource has a published price and a one-week trial. A social-first team should try Brand24, which is free for 14 days without a card and then $199 a month billed yearly. Muck Rack is for the team that wants a large database and will pay by the seat, with print, broadcast and social listening as add-ons.

A B2B technology team whose coverage is online trade press, pitching the same 50 to 200 journalists each month, pays for feeds it won't use in every one of the quoted tools.

Moving your data

Vuelio exports contacts as CSV from search results, saved groups and the contacts module. Meltwater exports articles as CSV, Excel or PDF, up to 30,000 documents a month per account. Muck Rack exports lists to Excel or PDF, with a monthly cap. We found no export documentation for Roxhill or Onclusive. Ask before you sign, and run the old tool and the new one side by side for the last month of the contract.

Where Agentcy fits

Agentcy is ours. Read its row as a claim and the rest as what each vendor publishes. On Pro and Enterprise it monitors online coverage of your brand and logs it for the report, though not print or broadcast, and it's sold at the published price in the table with no annual contract. Its media database holds over 15,000 active journalists and 2,000 influencers, fewer than the specialists list, because it only tracks people who are publishing now. Separately, news intelligence scores your sector's news for relevance, groups it into stories and sends the Morning Briefing before the day starts. We don't publish a source count or an alert-speed figure, because we haven't measured either in a way we'd defend. If your reporting needs print clippings or radio mentions, buy Roxhill, Vuelio or a suite for that part and run it alongside. Media monitoring and the journalist database and CRM have the detail.