Brand24 vs Muck Rack
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentBrand24 compared with Muck Rack
Different halves of the same job. Muck Rack is a journalist database and pitching platform with monitoring attached; Brand24 is a monitoring platform with no outreach at all. If your problem is finding and contacting the right reporter, Brand24 will not help you. If your problem is knowing what is being said and proving it moved, Brand24 does it for a fraction of Muck Rack's typically five figure annual contract. Many agencies run both.
Choose Brand24 if
In-house comms teams, PR and social agencies, and marketing teams at companies large enough to have a reputation worth watching, particularly those that want conventional media monitoring and LLM visibility tracking in a single subscription and a single monthly report.
Choose Muck Rack if
In-house communications teams and PR agencies with a funded, ongoing earned-media program: teams that pitch journalists most weeks, need defensible coverage reporting for executives or clients, and can commit to an annual contract in the five-figure range.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Brand24 | Muck Rack |
|---|---|---|
| Category | PR | PR |
| Starting price | $199 per month billed annually on Individual ($249 month to month) (14 days trial) | Quote only; reported entry points around $5,000 per year for a single-seat Starter license, with most teams reported near $10,000 per year |
| Pricing model | Subscription priced by keyword count and monthly mention volume, with collection frequency and AI features gated by tier. Seats are unlimited from the Team plan upward. Annual billing is roughly 15 to 20 percent cheaper than monthly. There is no free plan; every tier begins with a 14 day trial that does not require a card. | Quote-only annual subscription. Three published plans (Starter, Standard, Premier) with a public feature matrix but no public prices; the quote depends on seat count and which modules you take. Print and broadcast monitoring, social listening, press release distribution, Media Intelligence services, Generative Pulse and the API are add-ons rather than base features. No monthly billing option. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | 14 days, no credit card required | No |
| Best for | In-house comms teams, PR and social agencies, and marketing teams at companies large enough to have a reputation worth watching, particularly those that want conventional media monitoring and LLM visibility tracking in a single subscription and a single monthly report. | In-house communications teams and PR agencies with a funded, ongoing earned-media program: teams that pitch journalists most weeks, need defensible coverage reporting for executives or clients, and can commit to an annual contract in the five-figure range. |
| Setup time | A first project is running in under fifteen minutes: enter keywords, choose sources, set alert rules. The work that actually determines whether the tool is useful is the following week of pruning false positives out of the query, which takes a few sessions on any brand name that is also a common word. | Days rather than weeks for the core product. Connecting email, configuring saved searches and alerts, and building the first media lists is same-week work. Reporting takes longer to get right because dashboards, tagging conventions and the coverage score need agreement on what counts as a good placement. |
| Learning curve | Low to moderate. The mention feed and filters are self explanatory; the scoring metrics take longer, because Presence Score and Reputation Score are only meaningful as trends and new users often over-interpret a single number. Boolean query design is the genuine skill, and Context Search exists precisely to let people skip it. | Low by the standards of the category; Muck Rack is routinely cited as the easiest of the major PR platforms to pick up. The harder skill is judgment: building tight, evidence-based media lists instead of large ones, and writing pitches the tracking data can teach you to improve. |
| Platforms | Web application, iOS app, Android app, Slack app, REST API, MCP server | Web application, Gmail and Outlook integration, Slack alerts, Mobile web |
| Compliance | GDPR, ISO 27001 | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II |
| Founded | 2011 | 2009 |
| Headquarters | Wroclaw, Poland | Miami, Florida (fully distributed workforce) |
| Ownership | Majority owned by Semrush through its Prowly subsidiary (controlling stake acquired April 2024, later increased to roughly 77 percent); shares remain listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange | Founder-controlled; minority growth investment from Susquehanna Growth Equity (2022) |
Strengths and limitations
Brand24
Strengths
- Very broad source coverage for the price, spanning social, news, blogs, forums, podcasts, and review sites in a single project rather than across several tools.
- AI Visibility tracking across nine LLM surfaces bundled into a listening platform, ahead of most conventional monitoring competitors on this specific capability.
- Unlimited user seats from the Team plan upward, which makes it unusually agency friendly compared with per seat listening tools.
- Storm Alerts and anomaly detection are genuinely tuned for crisis response rather than being a fixed volume threshold.
Limitations
- No free plan and a $199 per month entry point, which puts it out of reach for the smallest businesses regardless of fit.
- Keyword limits apply across all projects combined, so competitor tracking and brand tracking compete for the same small allowance.
- Mention quotas are hard monthly caps; exceeding them halts collection for the remainder of the cycle rather than charging an overage.
- Real time collection is gated to Pro, meaning the entry and mid tiers update on a 12 hour or hourly cycle that is too slow for genuine crisis work.
Muck Rack
Strengths
- Journalist-maintained profiles keep beat and outlet data fresher than databases built purely from scraping and phone verification.
- Search operates over what journalists have actually written recently, so lists are built from evidence rather than stale beat tags.
- Pitching, monitoring and reporting live in one place with a shared team history, which removes the duplicate-pitch failure mode agencies dread.
- Podcast and newsletter monitoring cover channels many competing tools still treat as an afterthought.
Limitations
- No free plan, no self-serve trial, and no monthly billing; every buyer goes through a demo and signs an annual contract, which excludes most small businesses outright.
- Prices are not published at all, so comparable teams are quoted very different numbers for the same feature bundle depending on size and leverage.
- The reporting features that justify the platform to executives (custom dashboards, AI sentiment, auto-tagging, PR Hit Score, Google Analytics tie-in) are Premier-only.
- Capabilities buyers expect to be included are separate paid modules: print and broadcast monitoring, social listening, press release distribution and the API.
Pricing compared
Brand24
Subscription priced by keyword count and monthly mention volume, with collection frequency and AI features gated by tier. Seats are unlimited from the Team plan upward. Annual billing is roughly 15 to 20 percent cheaper than monthly. There is no free plan; every tier begins with a 14 day trial that does not require a card.
- Individual$199
- Team$299
- Pro$399
- Business$599
- EnterpriseFrom $1,499
Judged against the enterprise listening platforms it competes with on capability, Brand24 is inexpensive; judged against what a small business expects to pay for brand monitoring, it is not cheap at all. The honest framing is that the entry plan is priced for a company with a brand worth defending, not for a solo operator, and that most buyers who need the product for crisis response will land on Pro at $399 because that is where real time collection lives. The AI Visibility module is the strongest value argument right now, since buying LLM tracking separately typically costs as much again. Agencies get the best return because unlimited seats from the Team plan upward mean the cost does not scale with headcount, only with keywords.
Muck Rack
Quote-only annual subscription. Three published plans (Starter, Standard, Premier) with a public feature matrix but no public prices; the quote depends on seat count and which modules you take. Print and broadcast monitoring, social listening, press release distribution, Media Intelligence services, Generative Pulse and the API are add-ons rather than base features. No monthly billing option.
- StarterCustom quote
- StandardCustom quote
- PremierCustom quote
Per dollar, Muck Rack is usually the better-liked of the major PR platforms: the interface is markedly cleaner than the legacy incumbents, the journalist data is fresher because journalists maintain much of it, and the reporting is credible enough to survive an executive review. But the entry point is an annual five-figure commitment with no trial, and the analytics that make the reporting genuinely good sit on the top tier. For a communications team with a real budget and a weekly pitching cadence, it is defensible and often cheaper than the incumbent it replaces. For a small business doing PR a few times a year, the math does not work, and a lighter tool with published monthly pricing will do the job.
Editorial verdict on each
Brand24
Brand24 is the most capable listening platform a mid-sized team can buy without entering an enterprise procurement process, and its early bet on LLM visibility tracking is currently its sharpest differentiator: one subscription covers both what the web says about you and what the models repeat. The scoring layer, the unlimited seats above the entry plan, and the export formats explain why agencies keep choosing it. The reservations are concrete rather than stylistic. Keyword allowances are counted across all projects and run out fast, mention quotas are hard caps that stop collection mid-crisis, real time monitoring does not appear until the $399 tier, and there is no free plan to test the fit before committing. It is also monitoring only, with no path from knowing what was said to influencing what gets written next. Buy it if reputation reporting is part of someone's job description and $199 to $399 per month is a defensible line item; look elsewhere if you simply want to know when your name comes up.
Read the full Brand24 profileMuck Rack
Muck Rack is the best-liked of the serious PR platforms for good reasons: journalists maintain much of the database, search runs on what reporters have actually written rather than stale beat tags, the interface does not feel like enterprise software from 2009, and the company has been early and substantive on measuring how AI answers cite the media. Generative Pulse and the AI Visibility Badges built on it are the most credible attempt any PR vendor has made to attach earned media to LLM visibility. The commercial model is the problem for anyone reading this site's usual audience. Nothing is published, nothing is self-serve, there is no free plan and no trial, the contract is annual, and the reported floor is about $5,000 a year for one seat, with the reporting features that make the platform persuasive gated to the top tier and several expected capabilities sold as add-ons. If you have a funded comms function and pitch most weeks, get the quote and negotiate hard on multi-year terms. If you are a small business doing PR a few times a year, this is not your tool yet, and a competitor with a published monthly price will get the same three placements for a fraction of the money.
Read the full Muck Rack profileBrand24 profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Muck Rack last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.