Brand24 vs Prowly
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 assessmentProwly compared with Brand24
The cheaper way to buy just the monitoring half. Brand24 tracks mentions across news, blogs, social, and forums with sentiment and reach, starting well below any Prowly plan, and is also a Polish product. It does nothing for finding journalists, pitching, or hosting releases. Pairing Brand24 with a lightweight newsroom tool reproduces most of what Prowly did for less money, at the cost of running two subscriptions and two reports.
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 Prowly if
Existing Prowly customers deciding whether to renew, and small PR teams evaluating the Semrush AI PR Toolkit that replaced it: a self-serve, published-price alternative to Cision and Meltwater for teams that want database, pitching, hosting, and monitoring under one login rather than four.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Brand24 | Prowly |
|---|---|---|
| Category | PR | PR |
| Starting price | $199 per month billed annually on Individual ($249 month to month) (14 days trial) | $149 per month for the Semrush AI PR Toolkit Base plan; legacy Prowly Basic was around $258 per month billed annually (7 days trial) |
| 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. | Formerly a self-serve subscription with published tiers metered by database contacts stored, emails sent per month, mentions tracked, users, and number of newsrooms. Prowly's own plans are closed to new customers. New buyers purchase the Semrush AI PR Toolkit, priced per month as a Semrush product with a seven day free trial; existing Prowly subscribers generally continue on legacy terms until renewal. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | 14 days, no credit card required | 7 days, historically without a credit card on Prowly and carried over to the Semrush AI PR Toolkit |
| 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. | Existing Prowly customers deciding whether to renew, and small PR teams evaluating the Semrush AI PR Toolkit that replaced it: a self-serve, published-price alternative to Cision and Meltwater for teams that want database, pitching, hosting, and monitoring under one login rather than four. |
| 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. | A day to be useful: create the account, verify a sending domain so pitches authenticate properly, import existing contacts, and build the first media list. The newsroom takes longer if you want it on your own subdomain, since that needs a DNS record and a pass at branding, typically half a day including whoever controls the domain. |
| 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 for the mechanics and high for the craft. The interface is approachable enough that a marketer with no PR background can send a campaign in an afternoon, which is also the risk: the tool makes it easy to pitch two hundred journalists badly. The skill that takes months is list discipline and pitch writing, and no software supplies it. |
| Platforms | Web application, iOS app, Android app, Slack app, REST API, MCP server | Web application, Hosted newsroom on a custom subdomain, Email sending from an authenticated domain |
| Compliance | GDPR, ISO 27001 | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 (via Semrush) |
| Founded | 2011 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | Wroclaw, Poland | Warsaw, Poland |
| 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 | Acquired by Semrush (2020); Semrush acquired by Adobe (April 2026) |
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.
Prowly
Strengths
- Covered the entire PR loop in one subscription: discovery, CRM, writing, hosting, pitching, monitoring, and reporting, with no per-release wire fees.
- Self-serve with published prices and a seven day trial in a category that otherwise runs on sales calls and annual contracts.
- The hosted online newsroom on your own subdomain was genuinely differentiated, giving small brands a credible press page and the SEO benefit of hosting it themselves.
- Per-recipient open, click, and reply tracking from an authenticated sending domain, which is a meaningful step up from pitching out of a normal inbox.
Limitations
- Prowly is no longer purchasable as a standalone product. New signups at prowly.com are routed to the Semrush AI PR Toolkit, and the replacement is not feature-equivalent.
- The replacement toolkit states 600,000 journalist profiles against Prowly's claimed one million-plus contacts, and it has no direct equivalent to the hosted online newsroom.
- Database freshness is the most repeated complaint across G2, Capterra, and independent reviews: outdated addresses, journalists who have changed outlets, high bounce rates, and no visible last-verified date on a contact.
- Coverage of niche sectors and smaller markets, India among those named by reviewers, is thin enough that global campaigns need a supplementary source.
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.
Prowly
Formerly a self-serve subscription with published tiers metered by database contacts stored, emails sent per month, mentions tracked, users, and number of newsrooms. Prowly's own plans are closed to new customers. New buyers purchase the Semrush AI PR Toolkit, priced per month as a Semrush product with a seven day free trial; existing Prowly subscribers generally continue on legacy terms until renewal.
- Semrush AI PR Toolkit, Base$149
- Semrush AI PR Toolkit, Pro$279
- Legacy Prowly BasicAbout $258
- Legacy Prowly ProAbout $369 to $416
- EnterpriseCustom
As a standalone product Prowly was priced honestly for what it did: around $258 a month for a database, a CRM, a newsroom, tracked pitching, and monitoring is a fraction of a Cision or Meltwater contract, and for a one person comms function it replaced four separate subscriptions. The value question in 2026 is different. The Semrush AI PR Toolkit is cheaper at $149 a month but narrower, with a smaller stated database and no equivalent to the hosted newsroom that made Prowly sticky. If AI citation visibility is genuinely your goal, the new packaging is well aimed and reasonably priced. If you wanted the newsroom and the full contact database, the thing you were quoted a price for no longer exists in that form.
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 profileProwly
Prowly earned its reputation honestly. For most of a decade it was the only way a one person comms function could get a media database, a CRM, a press release editor, a branded newsroom, tracked pitching, and monitoring for a published price and a seven day trial, and the newsroom on your own subdomain was a genuinely good idea that larger vendors never bothered to copy well. It was also never flawless: the database aged faster than the marketing admitted, monitoring stopped at online sources, and the billing practice generated a disproportionate share of one-star reviews. All of that is now historical. Semrush has folded the product into an AI PR Toolkit that costs less, states a smaller database, drops the newsroom, and points at a different problem, and Adobe closed its acquisition of Semrush in April 2026. New buyers should evaluate the Semrush toolkit on its own terms rather than on Prowly's reputation, and existing customers should export everything before their next renewal date.
Read the full Prowly profileBrand24 profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Prowly last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.