Determining the best tools for public relations isn’t always easy: Dozens of digital tools exist to help PR pros improve productivity, scale their teams, and grow their organization’s media footprint and audience awareness.
Indeed, weighing and evaluating all the available digital PR tools out there can easily turn into a full-time job—which is why we’ve gone ahead and compiled this handy list of some of the best digital PR tools in 2024.
Let’s get started.
1. Outreach: BuzzStream
BuzzStream is a PR and content marketing outreach platform that helps speed up the research and creation of qualified contact lists of influencers, journalists, and bloggers through automation tools (although as with any automated tool, always check the results).
The tool offers ready-made outreach templates, conversation tracking features that allow you to save emails and tweets right in the platform, and analytics to measure campaign success, along with real-time collaborative features for remote teams. It also suggests the best websites to inquire about backlink opportunities.
BuzzStream can be had for $24/month (starter package), which allows one user and comes with 1,000 contacts, all the way up to custom plans starting at $999/month (15-plus users and 300,000-plus contacts).
Honorable mentions: Prezly, Pitchengine, Ninja Outreach, Anewstip, Prowly, JustReachOut, MuckRack.
2. Newswires/Contact Databases: Newsfile
Newsfile is a Canadian firm that isn’t quite as well known as many of the honorable mentions below, but is a very effective tool with much more reasonable rates than many of the more well-known newswires.
The platform markets itself as a “one-stop shop” for disclosure requirements (such as SEDAR+, EDGAR, and XBRL filing) and PR distributions. Newsfile also makes strong efforts to connect personally with each of their clients—it’s always a human on Newsfile’s end who approves your press release—and offers comprehensive distribution analytics.
The fact that it was recently acquired by TMX Group indicates that it’s not just us who are impressed with Newsfile’s capabilities.
Newsfile’s costs vary depending on use and application.
Honorable mentions: PR newswire, Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, Accesswire, MuckRack, Cision.
3. AI Tools: It’s a toss-up
Generative large language models (LLMs) such as the many iterations of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot can perform a range of tasks, from creating media lists and scheduling meetings to writing blog outlines or rough drafts of press releases.
Most AI tools offer both free and paid versions, and the latest iterations of many LLMs offer the ability to generate images and video, as well.
While each model scores differently when tested on various utility and performance metrics (like MMLU, DROP, or GPQA), they’re all fairly equal when it comes to outputs for PR applications. In most cases, the effectiveness of your AI model comes down to the quality of your prompts and the examples you can provide.
Pricing depends on which version of which tool you’re looking for, but ChatGPT (for example) offers a free version and a subscription plan for $20/month.
Honorable mentions: Hemingway, Grammarly, Llama, DALL-E, Midjourney.
4. Media Monitoring & Analysis: Fullintel
Fullintel offers a comprehensive media monitoring platform, Fullintel Hub, that includes a coverage dashboard that can either be fully automated or provide a combination of automated news/social and content curated by media monitoring specialists.
The company also provides human-curated daily news and social briefs compiled by experts who understand the language of your industry and company, so they don’t miss important stories or include irrelevant mentions.
Along with its media monitoring and briefing capabilities, Fullintel offers award-winning media analysis and intelligence services including regular reporting powered by proprietary, deep metrics; crisis and issues management; and influencer intelligence reports.
Contact Fullintel to request a demo or learn about pricing.
Honorable mentions: LexisNexis Newsdesk, Critical Mention, Brand24, Talkwalker, Brandwatch, Meltwater, Sprout Social, Cision.
5. SEO & Content Ideation: Ahrefs
Ahrefs was originally designed for backlink analysis but since then has turned into a must-have SEO powerhouse that provides SEO auditing tools, content analysis, keyword ranking analysis, and keyword research tools.
The tool is primarily used by SEO experts and content marketers to track domain health and backlinks, research keywords, and spot content marketing opportunities. But it can also be used by PR professionals as a content ideation tool by identifying the top performing content on your competitors’ or other websites, or to identify compelling ideas with enough search volume for digital campaigns.
Ahrefs offers packages from its Lite version, which starts at $129/month, to Enterprise packages starting at $14,990.
Honorable mentions: Semrush, Moz, MarketMuse.
6. Visuals and Graphic Assets: Canva
At this point Canva has pretty much cemented itself as the go-to design platform for people who aren’t designers (and even those who are). Its web-based, drag-and-drop tools can help almost everyone create great design for social media, blogs, presentations, and other applications without dropping hundreds of dollars on more expensive software platforms like Adobe Creative Cloud or InDesign.
One of the handiest elements of Canva is its ready-made design templates, which can be used and augmented with just a few clicks. It also offers new AI design that creates compelling outputs based on descriptive prompts via its Magic Design tool.
You can use Canva for free or pay $19.99 for Canva Pro.
Honorable mentions: Marq, Pexels, Pixabay, Unsplash, PikWizard, Infogram, Pixlr.
7. Project Management: ClickUp
ClickUp is one of the best free tools for project management thanks in large part to its customizability. But it also offers a range of flexible productivity tools including intuitive task-subtask and Space-folder-list systems to keep things organized and ensure task stakeholders know what’s required of them (and when).
ClickUp also offers native integrations with other software platforms you likely already use, such as Google Calendar and Google Drive, Salesforce, Slack, GitHub, HubSpot, Toggl, Dropbox, and OneDrive.
ClickUp also offers Unlimited ($7/month) and Business ($12/month) plans, along with Enterprise plans (pricing undisclosed).
Honorable mentions: Monday, Asana, Notion, Trello, Slack.
8. Real-Time Data Analytics: Google Analytics (GA) 4
Google Analytics (GA) is a must-have for measuring traffic and engagement across your websites or other applications, offering predictive metrics and cross-platform data integrations.
Google Analytics offers a free version (Google Analytics 4, or GA4) that’s well-suited to small and medium-sized businesses and provides robust traffic and demographics features, along with new core functionality over Universal Analytics (GA4’s predecessor).
Google Analytics 360 is Google’s premium, paid version of GA and offers additional features for a price starting at $50k annually.
Honorable mentions: HubSpot, Tableau, Sprinklr.
9. Email Finders: Hunter
Hunter bills itself as an all-in-one email outreach platform, but one of its most compelling features is its ability to find and verify any professional’s email address by crawling the web, analyzing email formats of specific domains, and pinging email servers.
Once you’ve discovered the correct email formats you can use Hunter’s campaign tools to conduct outreach and send cold emails. Just always make sure you have permission to email anyone you add to any of your lists.
Hunter offers a free version, which allows 25 searches and 50 verifications a month, all the way to its Business plan ($349/month) which comes with 600,000 searches/1.2M verifications per month.
Honorable mentions: ZoomInfo, SellHack, Voila Norbert.
10. Influencer Relationship Management: Traackr
While social media influencers used to primarily be the domain of marketing groups, PR pros have increasingly engaged influencers to help promote their campaigns—and Traackr is regarded as one of the most effective tools to conduct discovery, campaign management, influencer collaboration, and reporting.
Traackr can help PR teams find, engage, and recruit influencers; optimize influencer spending, and manage both influencer and user-generated content relationships through product seeding and content collaborations.
Traackr offers a range of packages starting at $20,000/year for small teams up to $55,000/year-plus for advanced influencer marketing programs looking to scale.
Honorable mentions: Traackr, AspireIQ, HYPR, Influencity.
Fullintel: Your Ultimate Digital PR Tool
Determining the best tools for public relations can be challenging, especially considering the number of tools and applications out there. But no matter which tools you use, PR teams need a reliable and dependable way to track traditional and social media coverage and keep stakeholders informed each day.
Fullintel offers actionable insights through a comprehensive real-time monitoring platform and human-curated daily briefs and analysis services for enterprises that can’t afford to muddle through missing or irrelevant results.
Contact us today to learn about the power of our daily executive news briefs, real-time media monitoring, and award-winning media analysis to demonstrate the value of PR.
