Muck Rack vs. Prezly

Muck Rack has the potential to be a very powerful tool that can improve PR agency efficiency across the board. The death knell for Muck Rack, and the reason why we terminated our contract early, was that they offered a complimentary six-month on-ramp to win our business. In other words, we had six full months to use Muck Rack while we were still using the other two vendors' products. Multiple team members compared results head-to-head for a wide range of our clients and Muck Rack simply did not stack up. That six-month overlap period proved to be very eye-opening and enabled us to reveal what we found to be severe limitations in terms of the quality of the database and the quality of the reporting.

Incentivized

Since this platform is so easy to use when creating or managing communication workflows, it is recommended to work mostly with scenarios that generally require several processes to complete each group management, for example, to cover from the follow-up of employees within the communications team to the management of the team's communication processes.

Incentivized

• The media alert function is awesome! Google Alerts can't get the detail I need, nor do they filter just for the media. I can set media alerts for particular selection factors such as everyone with "education" as their beat.
• I am liking the notes ability to log interactions with particular media. This helps me not have to track down conversation chains or actions with media.
• The interface screen is modern. I love that if I am running a search in one screen, when I click on a particular person or outlet, it opens ANOTHER screen so that I don't have use the back button. I can open, say 10 people at once and compare their notes.
• I love the PDF summaries from lists. I love the Who shared feature. I LOVE EVERYTHING in MuckRack!

Incentivized

• Organized Contacts / Contact Management
• Engagement Tracking
• CRM

Incentivized

• When you export a media list, it does not include the email address so you have to search for it offline or on the journalist's profile. It's annoying.
• Sometimes when you save a list, not all the contacts you marked are saved and you have to do it over.
• There isn't a "click all" button to add all of the contacts to a list. You have to wait until all the people load - which isn't ideal for productivity.

Incentivized

• Prezly's platform tends to constantly present slowness issues if you are going to work with external flows coming from other platforms, usually while they are loading, or it can lead to the platform itself stopping its use. Our recommendation to deal with this is to simply copy the workflows inside Prezly, without using the original formats.

Incentivized

It's the best tool we've found for this type of product. It is not 100% critical to our daily responsibilities, but as a corporate tool made available to us, it is something we leverage on a weekly basis.

Little training was required to leverage the tool. It is a very intuitive platform. The only troublesome aspect of the tool has been the email integration features, but that may be more of a security/IT issue with our corporate requirements than a Much Rack problem. Overall, it is a tool that anyone can leverage without much effort.

Any time I have had an issue or a question about something on the platform, someone on the chat now function has always answered within 10 mins at most! Everyone I have worked with has been extremely friendly and quick to solve. There is never the inconvenience of having to call, talk to a robot, or deal with an automated email. Customer service is extremely personal and each account also has a designated account manager to oversee the relationship

Incentivized

I was not involved with the implementation.

I previously used Cision PRWeb. It was a good service, but for what I needed it wasn't as affordable and I also found the backend system difficult to navigate and manage. I loved the ease of use and the ability to find out what I needed almost immediately once I logged into Muck Rack. Because I have to think so much already, having a platform that takes the weight off having to do a lot of extra research and ask questions to just use the system effectively and efficiently is a gift.

Incentivized

It's been a while since I evaluated Prezly against Cision. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison because Cision has a lot of additional features, but Prezly has a robust CRM platform and digital newsroom that outflanks the Cision newsroom in look, feel and ease of use, not to mention cost. It has been several years since I did the comparison, so the Cision offerings may have changed in the meantime, to be fair.

Incentivized

• Muck Rack has paid for itself, as the ability to access its media database is essential to the media relations work I do on behalf of my client. By having access, it helps me make strategic choices of which media to pitch for what and when, which ultimately leads to positive client placements in key articles. This in turn leads to happy clients!

Incentivized

• The biggest ROI is in time saved. when sending press releases before Prezly, I used merge emails in Outlook. It took 3-5 hours to refine my list, set up the outlook page, host links of assets, and then run test sends. Prezly can be set up and a release or distribution sent out in 1-2 hours (even less if we copy a previous set up).
• Prezly makes my website press room look amazing. Many media comment on the Prezly press kits I send along and appreciate that the pages are clean, easy to navigate and reliable.
• It is essential to have a contact management system with an opt-out.

Incentivized