Muck Rack's price is set by how many people use it, which suits a large media relations team that will use every seat, but for two or three people who pitch the same trade journalists every month, the per-user quote and the add-ons are where the money goes.
| Tool | Best for | Price | Seats | Stated database |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Muck Rack | Pitching at volume across many beats | Quote; about $13,000 a year (est.) | Priced per user | Size not published |
| Cision | Global reach and a newswire | Quote; about $10,600 a year (est.) | Not published | 500k+ journalists and outlets |
| Roxhill | UK media relations | Quote; four packages | Not published | 297,332 journalists |
| Semrush AI PR Toolkit | A big database at a list price | $149, $279 or $499 a month | Not published | 600,000+ journalist profiles |
| Prezly | A solo communicator's newsroom | €100 a month, billed yearly | 1 on Essential, 2 on Standard | None built in |
| Agentcy | B2B tech teams pitching trade press | Free plan; Core $269/month | 3 on Core, 5 on Pro | CRM of 500 to 10,000 contacts |
Prices in each vendor's own currency. Muck Rack's estimate is Vendr's median (February 2026), Cision's SpendHound's small-business average (updated 1 October 2026); neither is a list price. Database counts are the vendors' own and measure different things.
Sources: Muck Rack pricing; Muck Rack homepage; Muck Rack Generative Pulse; Muck Rack media list export; Muck Rack coverage report export; Vendr on Muck Rack; SpendHound on Muck Rack; CisionOne; SpendHound on Cision; Roxhill database figures; Roxhill packages; Roxhill monitoring providers; Roxhill what's new; Semrush AI PR Toolkit plans; Semrush digital PR; Prezly pricing; Agentcy pricing. Last checked 13 October 2026.
Agentcy is ours. Take its row as a claim and the rest as what each vendor publishes. Each tool here beats Muck Rack on seat pricing, a published price or a specific market.
The database
The database is the reason to stay. Muck Rack calls it "the industry's most accurate media database", searchable across digital, broadcast, print, podcasts, newsletters and social media. It publishes no size and competes on accuracy instead. On its own comparison pages it leads with freshness and support. Its reports pair data with interpretation, which is what a board asks for. A team that pitches hundreds of journalists a month across many beats, and values accuracy above price, should keep paying; for that team the cost per seat is worth it.
Add-ons
Every user you add raises the price, on the Starter, Standard and Premier tiers alike. Then come the add-ons. Print and broadcast monitoring, social listening, press release distribution, API access, media intelligence and Generative Pulse, its AI visibility product, are all sold separately, so the first quote is rarely the final bill.
The alternatives
Cision has the larger stated database, more than 500,000 journalists and outlets in 190-plus countries, plus PR Newswire. It's quote-only too, so you'd pick it for reach and not for price. Cision alternatives covers it.
Roxhill is the UK specialist, with 297,332 journalists kept by an in-house research team and print and broadcast monitoring through NLA and TV Eyes; we found no AI visibility product, and its social monitoring was still launching in June 2026.
The Semrush AI PR Toolkit, formerly Prowly, is the big database at a published price: 600,000-plus journalist profiles. Each plan caps sends, contact exports and monitoring. Check the limits against your volume.
Prezly is a newsroom with pitching attached, for one or two users, and it has no database or monitoring.
Agentcy is built around the journalist CRM, and the seats come with the plan instead of being priced one by one. It doesn't monitor print or broadcast.
Muck Rack against Agentcy
Both are built around journalist relationships. Muck Rack brings the larger database, and print, broadcast and social listening when you pay for them. Agentcy starts from your own list and enriches it. Each journalist is tracked from Never contacted to Friendly, and every send is logged from your own Gmail or Outlook. Monitoring is in every plan and social listening from Core up. The price doesn't grow with each module.
Getting your data out
Do the exports in the first week of a month, because Muck Rack's limits reset on the first and once you hit one the export option disappears until they do. Media lists export as Excel or PDF, not CSV. For coverage, choose Excel and "All rows", which takes every article regardless of filters, up to 10,000 links a report. A large account may need two months.
Questions
How much does Muck Rack cost?
Muck Rack doesn't publish prices, and its pricing page says the quote depends on factors including the number of users. Vendr's median across 80 purchases is $13,000 a year, in a range from $8,000 to $20,860 (February 2026). SpendHound puts the small-business average at $14,492 a year and the enterprise average at $86,223 (updated 1 October 2026). Both are third-party estimates. Print and broadcast monitoring, social listening and Generative Pulse are add-ons priced on top, so ask for each one separately in the quote.
Is Agentcy cheaper than Muck Rack?
Agentcy is cheaper than Muck Rack at three or five seats. A year of Agentcy Core, with three seats, costs less than the bottom of Vendr's Muck Rack range of $8,000 a year (February 2026), and Pro, with five seats and AI visibility tracking, sits close to Vendr's $13,000 median. Agentcy's seats come with the plan, while every user you add at Muck Rack raises the quote. Muck Rack has the larger database and sells print and broadcast monitoring, which Agentcy doesn't offer.
What is Generative Pulse?
Generative Pulse is Muck Rack's AI visibility product, which monitors how ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini describe your brand and feeds the results into the Muck Rack platform. It's sold as a paid add-on on top of the user-based quote. Agentcy's tracker runs ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity every week and grades each answer against the facts you record about your company. Muck Rack covers Claude, which Agentcy's plans don't, and Agentcy covers Perplexity, which Muck Rack's page doesn't name.
Can I try Muck Rack before buying?
Muck Rack offers no free trial to PR teams. Its free tools are for journalists only, and the pricing page offers a demo request instead. Several alternatives let you try first. Prezly gives 14 days without a card, and the Semrush AI PR Toolkit gives seven, although its trial blocks sending emails and viewing or exporting contact details. Agentcy's free plan has no time limit and covers one brand, with monitoring, a 500-contact CRM and 50 tracked sends a month.
What should a solo PR consultant use instead?
A solo PR consultant can replace Muck Rack with Prezly or with Agentcy's free plan, depending on whether the job is publishing news or pitching it. Prezly Essential gives one user a newsroom, up to 5,000 contacts and email campaigns for €100 a month billed yearly, or €150 monthly, with no database built in. Agentcy's free plan gives one user monitoring, a 500-contact journalist CRM and 50 tracked sends a month from your own mailbox, at no cost. It covers one brand, so a consultant with several clients needs a paid plan.
Try it on one brand, free
You can set up one brand in an afternoon and see what it finds. Paid plans are monthly, and you can stop whenever you like.