34 Best PR Tools & Software for Public Relations Management

Keeping a PR team functional can be hard but with the help of high-quality, professional tools,
effectively managing digital PR workloads can be a breeze.

Our experts at Talkwalker have outlined the best digital PR tools for each category in the menu on your left ⬅️

What are PR tools?

PR tools are a useful set of applications that PR professionals use to work their magic. They include the apps, software, and platforms that help PRs track media mentions, manage influencer outreach, measure campaign performance, and more.

PR tools can offer several benefits, like streamlining workflows, enhancing collaboration, improving data analysis, and helping PR teams maximize the impact of their campaigns.

They're the tools that make the PR work process function – and make it easier to keep those juicy stories and headlines flooding in.

Talkwalker Media Monitoring

When it comes to the best PR tools, we have to include Talkwalker Media Monitoring.

It's just what a busy PR pro needs to get the job done, as it tracks brand mentions across social media, print, broadcast, and more.

It does many of the jobs of the lists below, including:

• Identifying key journalists and influencers in your industry
• Spotting trends within your audience
• Finding media opportunities to promote your brand
• Spotting brand mentions that would make ideal SEO backlinks

And with advanced sentiment analysis, it's also the perfect crisis management tool. Track your brand sentiment over time, and find those negative mentions that could evolve into a crisis.

 Now, onto our other favorite PR tools.

Digital PR tools for finding journalists & influencers

Below are some digital public relations tools designed for finding journalists and influencers:

Muck Rack - Targeting journalists

Muck Rack is one of the best digital public relations tools for discovering key journalists and
influencers – search by media outlet, location, topic, keywords, or what they’ve shared on social media.

The tool allows users to see in real-time what content journalists are posting, and track which
reporters are writing about brand topics.

If you upgrade to the Pro Plan, you can build media lists, schedule media monitoring emails, and track all journalists mentioning your brand.

“I was very impressed with the site and will be using it again when targeting reporters for stories for our clients. I thought it was well worth the look. If you are a marketing director, publicist or just an informed consumer, check out this site.”
Hilary Topper (@hilary25) | CEO of HJMT Public Relations Inc 

Ninja Outreach - Influencer Outreach Dashboard

NinjaOutreach is an all-in-one influencer and blogger marketing platform that helps businesses discover, connect, and collaborate with the right influencers to drive their marketing campaigns.

The platform offers a comprehensive suite of features, including:

Anewstip - Connect with global influencers

Anewstip is a search engine for rooting out journalists, influencers, and media outlets that have talked about a specific topic on Twitter, in news articles, and in other outlets.

This digital PR tool has an influence scoring feature and filters by the number of tweets, keyword mentions, time, topic, and language. Alerts can also be set up.

You can then create a media list and export it for pitching. Anewstip has a paid plan in which you can pitch and track outreach and response.

“I'm always looking for journalists and I thought this platform was an interesting way to find people who tweet about my investment business and my startups. Searching by interests, products, competitors is a great way to keep tabs and (hopefully) engage.”
Fred Soneya (@fredsoneya) | Co-founder of Haatch 

BuzzStream - Coordinated outreach

BuzzStream automatically researches influencers, finding contact information, social profiles, and site metrics.

Identifying the best influencers has never been easier. This digital PR tool helps you keep track of conversations and projects by saving emails and tweets, with follow-up reminders.

BuzzStream identifies the best sites from where to request links, increasing link-building efficiency.

It works in four ways:

This public relations tool is great for companies with offices around the world, facilitating remote, simultaneous coordination.

You can see who has been in contact with who, how long ago, what’s been said — and even leave notes about a contact.

You’ll even get stats about your response rates and templates that can be auto-populated.

“While the plans and pricing do seem a little off, I still recommend checking out BuzzStream. The system isn’t perfect, but it is by far the best link-building and relationship tool I’ve found on the market, given that it allows you to automate the parts that make sense without becoming a complete robot.”
Allison Boyer (@allison_boyer) | Content marketing consultant at Better Blogging with Allison

Prezly - Online newsrooms

Prezly is a digital PR tool connecting you with influencers via email and social media. It all starts with a media center – an online hub where you can publish stories.

It’s easy to build, device responsive and can be integrated into your website. Your stories can include high-resolution multimedia images and videos and can be optimized for social sharing.

Once your stories are set up, it’s time to share. You can add your contacts in Prezly’s CRM, create segments, and import chat history.

You can share your content via email and social media, with a single click. Prezly will also track opens, clicks, and reply rates.

There’s a free demo, live online training, webinars, and 24/7 live support.

“Prezly provides an easy way to create a multimedia press release complete with images and embedded video. Social media integration is built in, allowing you to auto-post to blogs, Twitter and Facebook.”
Martin Bryant (@MartinSFP) | Former Editor-at-Large at The Next Web 

PR tools for hunting down contact details

Below are some key pr software tools for hunting down contact details:

SellHack - Prospecting just got easier

SellHack’s site uses publicly accessible information to determine an individual’s likely contact details.

After you’ve granted permission for the extension to plug into your browser, enter a name and company, along with a social media URL.

SellHack will return a plausible version of what it thinks that person’s email address is, and the free plan will let you search up to 10 emails per month.

“SellHack is my new favorite Chrome Extension! I use it to find email addresses for the developers of CRM solutions that I am trying to review. So far, Sell Hack is batting 100% finding email addresses for me!”
Rich Bohn (@RichBohn) | CRM analyst & publisher at SellMoreNow 

Voila Norbert - You got mail!

This email address search tool is both simple to use and completely free. There are premium options for large-volume searches.

Enter the first and last name of the person you’re looking for, plus the company domain name (for example, ‘talkwalker.com’). Norbert will search for a related email address and return the results.

Voila Norbert works best with company domain names, as the potential results will be more accurate.

It does work with free email providers, like Gmail, but bear in mind that if you’re searching with just a first or last name, the results may not match the person you’re trying to contact due to the large user base.

"Voila Norbert came sixth in Rand Fishkin’s list of the best web tools used in 2014. Need I say more?!"
Rand Fishkin (@randfish) Co-founder of SparkToro

Hunter - Find email in seconds

Hunter is a pr software tool that searches for email addresses online via companies’ website domain names. You get 150 free searches free per month, but if you require more, there’s a paid plan. With these searches, you can look for:

“Wow. Holy sh$t this is a goldmine. Just been working on some outreach for a site and couldn't find any emails. Typed in the URL and then BAM 253 emails.” 
Pierre Wooldridge (@allmakebelieve) | CEO at All Make Believe

Who's opening your email?

Below are some pr analytics tools that can assist in understanding email metrics and who is opening your emails:

Mixmax - Opening, scheduling, tracking

Track who’s opening your email with this pr analytics software. One-click scheduling means you can book meetings in one email, rather than ten. Let guest users choose the time that suits them and Mixmax does the rest.

Mixmax also provides templates, so you can create an effective and professional email. Once you’ve created your email, you can schedule it to be sent automatically at a preferred time.

Additional Features:

“My favorite Mixmax feature is link previews, which pull in a rich preview of any link you drop in, similar to how you’d expect on Facebook. Why isn’t this a native Gmail feature already?!”
Owen Williams (@ow) | Writer & developer, former TNW reporter, creator of Charged

PR tools for spotting trends

Quick Search - Real-time trend research

Quick Search is a pr analytics software that searches social media channels and finds the trends in your industry, surrounding your product or a topic you're interested in.

Use this digital pr tool to help create content that resonates with consumers by jumping on engaging trends.

Quick Search is a user-friendly, powerful social search engine that will help you boost brand impact, find content ideas, detect influencers, learn about your audience, and spot trends.

Talkwalker Alerts - Protect your reputation

Reputation management refers to the monitoring of the reputation of an individual or brand and addressing any damaging content.

Talkwalker Alerts is an easy and free way to stay on top of your online reputation. It provides email updates of the latest relevant mentions on the Web.

If you'd like to read more about protecting your online reputation, take a look at our blog — Best Online Reputation Management Tools & Guide.

Your alerts take seconds to set up and deliver all the breaking news related to your specified search terms. News items are listed with a brief description alongside links to the news source.

Talkwalker Social Media Listening

Unlock the power of social media listening to spot trends related to your brand and industry. Talkwalker’s next-generation platform delivers unparalleled insights to supercharge your marketing, communications, and consumer intelligence efforts.

Tap into extensive data coverage across 30+ social networks and 150 million websites globally. Move beyond basic dashboards with advanced AI-powered analytics that surface the insights that matter most.

Identify individual voices, track brand sentiment, uncover emerging trends, and optimize your campaigns – all from a single, intuitive platform.

PR tools for finding media opportunities

Below are some digital PR tools for finding media opportunities:

LexisNexis Newsdesk - Media Monitoring

LexisNexis Newsdesk is a media aggregation, monitoring, and analytics solution. It offers businesses a comprehensive collection of global news and business insights, including corporate communications, marketing, legal and information professionals.

Winner of the 2018 CODiE award for Best Content Analytics Platform, the LexisNexis Newsdesk is a near real-time monitoring and analysis suite providing actionable insights that will enable you to make more data-driven decisions.

“LexisNexis Newsdesk enables you to stay on top of relevant news through a web dashboard, email alerts, email newsletters, and SharePoint. The service gives you access to more than four million articles and posts daily.”
Neil J. Squillante (@neilsquillante) | Publisher for TopLaw

Connectively (featuring HARO) - Help a Reporter Out

If you’re looking for media coverage opportunities, Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is the digital PR tool for you.

Now under the Collectively brand, HARO connects journalists and bloggers with expert sources. The idea is to help journalists meet their demanding deadlines and enable brands to tell their stories.

Journalists looking for an expert list their needs. Identified sources are then notified of media opportunities up to three times a day.

HARO reaches out to 80,000+ sources and 55,000 journalists and bloggers.

“Over the last seven years, I’ve been scanning HARO emails for PR opportunities for my company and myself, and I’ve had a ton of success. You can too. Anyone can sign up, and HARO subscribers get three emails a day, five days a week, filled with queries from reporters from top news outlets like Forbes, CNN, ABC, Entrepreneur, INC and many more.”
Zalmi Duchman | Forbes contributor 

Radio Guest List | How to find interviews

Radio Guest List – the HARO of the audio world. Okay, the website leaves much to be desired, but the tool is great.

All you have to do is set up email notifications from producers, journalists, and podcast/vidcasts hosts searching for experts on specific topics. You can then reach out with your credentials and build a relationship.

PR writing tools

Below are some pr software tools to assist aspiring digital PR employees with high volumes of writing:

Grammarly - Make your writing better

As the website states, “Grammarly is an online grammar and spelling checker that improves communication by helping users find and correct writing mistakes.”

Along with the text editor, Grammarly offers a free browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and corrects over 150 types of errors.

It works wherever you’re writing online – Gmail, social media platforms, Tumblr. Paid upgrades include Grammarly Premium, which checks for over 250 types of grammatical errors, offers synonyms & clarification suggestions, and hunts down plagiarism.

“When you find a new best friend & it is an app! I am currently so in love with @Grammarly”
Susie McBeth (@susiemcbeth) | Commmunity Manager, geek, writer, Editor - @nerdlikeyou @metroUK @huffpostuk @bitrebels

Hemingway Editor App - Proofreading tool

Don’t be ashamed, we all make mistakes. Hemingway offers a free, impartial pair of eyes to check your work.

It’s an interactive editing tool that highlights grammatical errors, overuse of passive voice, complex sentences, and common mistakes. There’s also a word count and a readability score.

Simply paste your content into the tool and it’ll analyze sentence by sentence.

“Hemingway looks great… There are no fonts to change or backgrounds to alter. It’s simply a grey screen with a font pre-chosen for you: Georgia, from the looks of it. All writers know the feeling of staring at a blank white screen as inspiration drains from their fingertips, but Hemingway feels like a safe place to start doing work.”
Edward Love (@edlovewriter) | Writer, advertising copywriter & games journalist Bandwidth Blog 

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer - Winning titles

This tool scores your headline by its ability to convert, social shares, increased traffic and SEO.
Enter your title and CoSchedule will show results with your headline’s score out of 100 and a grade.

It breaks down your headline and provides hints for improvement like which words stand out to readers, sentiment, and keyword suggestions.

The analysis includes word balance, with more details if you hover over each description. It analyzes the characters and words of a headline. It also offers a Google preview to see what it’ll look like in the search results.

The Most Dangerous Writing App - Tight deadlines

This tool is great for users with tight deadlines, but it may not be for everyone.

Before you start, set your session length – either by minutes or words. Start writing and whatever you do, don’t stop.

If you hesitate for more than five seconds, it deletes everything you’ve written up to that point. Complete your set session, and you’ll be able to save your work.

It’s a useful tool if you’ve got a ridiculously tight deadline. 

“If you’re someone who thrives under pressure, or feels most productive when you’re working at the eleventh hour, the Most Dangerous Writing App could be a good way for you to apply that pressure, artificially. And for the record, it did get me over my writer’s block.”
Margaret Rhodes | Editor at New York Magazine, formerly at WIRED

SEO tools for PR

Below are some SEO analytics tools to help users in ranking opportunities:

Semrush | Keyword research

There’s no point writing brilliant content, if you don’t optimize it for SEO. Semrush is one of the best keyword research tools on the market – if not the best.

Use this tool and you’ll be able to analyze rankings, advertisement copy, and backlink profiles. You can also spy on your competitors.

Check out how your site ranks for keywords, and how competitive they are. Then take a look at what keywords your competitors are using.

Semrush analyzes your entire SEO strategy and then shows you how to drive more traffic to your website.

“For me, the most interesting factor here is the ability to find the top keywords driving traffic to any domain. For a serious marketer or company, knowing a top competitor’s keywords (SEOpivot) is the holy grail.”
Harsh Agrawal (@denharsh) | Fountain head of Internet marketing blog ShoutMeLoud

Ahrefs - Backlinks & SEO

When launched, Ahrefs was primarily for backlink analysis. Now, it also covers SEO auditing, content marketing analysis, link prospecting, review keyword ranking positions, and keyword research.

The dashboard allows you to set up projects where you can monitor specified domains for changes in metrics.

Metrics include domain health, accessibility, crawlability and metadata violations. It also includes URL rating, gained or lost referring domains and backlinks — and the number of keywords your domain ranks for.

Email notifications for domain health, won/lost backlinks, and positions tracker means you can be alerted daily, weekly, or monthly.

Generate a crawl report of your site and extract details of response codes, duplicate content, thin content, title tags, H1 and H2 tags, internal/external links and meta descriptions.

Moz - SEO wizard

Moz started in 2004 as a tool to help you measure, monitor, and improve your website’s onsite/offsite SEO to achieve greater online visibility.

It offers a comprehensive set of paid and free SEO tools, including:

You’ll find insights on how to optimize your site for search engines and spy on your competitors. Moz also has a helpful community, useful blog, workshops, and training programs.

“I find myself using Keyword Explorer frequently for various purposed. It is great to determine which keywords to target for SEO of course. But equally great for choosing content topics to write about (like this Moz Pro review). I sometimes use it to get a general sense of how many people care about a topic. The four metrics (Volume, Difficulty, Opportunity, and Potential) are spot on. Moz intelligently created these metrics and how they interact with each other.”
Stephen Stanczak (@MartechWiz) | Founder of MarTechWiz 

FirstSiteGuide - Website performance

FirstSiteGuide is a free tool for tracking the performance of your website.

It’s a great tool for those new to website creation as it gives you basic site metrics, including domain authority, page loading speed, on-page SEO analysis, Alexa rank, traffic stats, and keyword frequency. These insights are vital for website optimization.

They have a blog that’s packed with advice on blogging best practices, social media, imagery, domain names, SEO, and other useful information.

There are also free guides covering all sorts, including starting a blog, website hosting, content writing, and promoting your blog.

"If you need help with starting and growing your online presence, check out free resources at FirstSiteGuide."
Robert Terson (@RobertTerson) | Master salesman and motivator, author and speaker"How to Start a Blog via FirstSiteGuide. super helpful!"
Mari Smith (@MariSmith) | Social media thought leader & Facebook marketing expert, author of marismith.com

Design tools for digital PR

The digital software tools below offer distinct advantages in speeding up the design process:

Canva - Graphic design tool

Canva is a free drag-and-drop graphic design tool. A simplified version of Adobe Photoshop and InDesign. It’s great for creating social media graphics, blog images, and design presentations.

There are inbuilt templates available, or you can design from scratch. There are plenty of stock photographs, vectors and illustrations to choose from – and if needed, you can upload more.

Photos can be edited with filters or advanced editing tools. There are also icons, shapes, and elements along with hundreds of fonts.

Canva offers online tutorials, templates, and design courses, so you’ll certainly be able to produce some great images.

“I am full on obsessed with Canva and highly recommend it. It is one of my favorite creation tools I have found to date. The interface is easy to use. You can start with a blank slate or a template. They have a pretty good store house of free graphics and allow you to upload your own if you need them. The interface seemed to be cleaner, easier to use, and quicker.”
Karen Jensen (@TLT16) | Creator & owner of Teen Librarian Toolbox

Marq - Layout & Design Software

Similar to Canva, Marq is an easy-to-use page layout and design software that makes every aspect of the design process more intuitive. You can easily lay out text, photos, shapes, and videos for professional results. 

You can easily export your Marq creation as a PDF, JPG or PNG. Or you can post it to social media, embed it on your webpage, or order high-quality prints directly from the editor.

There’s a free version available, and a selection of free templates to inspire your next design project.

Pexels - Free photos

Pexels is a free stock photo site. It has a massive collection of photos that you can do whatever you like with – all are licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), so you can copy, change, and distribute them commercially.

If you know what you’re looking for, use the search box to find the right image. Otherwise, there are heaps of subjects you can search through for all types of images.

“Pexels – Another Awesome Free Stock Photography Site… The site itself is very well designed and the photos are very high quality. Most of the images are also very high resolution so they’re perfect for retina displays too.”
Oliur (@UltraLinx) | Designer & entrepreneur, Founder of UltraLinx  

PikWizard - Free photos

PikWizard is a new free stock photo website. It has a library with over 30,000 free images — and 5000+ exclusive images.

Finding stock photos of people and faces, even paid ones, is hard. PikWizard has some great free people shots.

You can also get help from the company's in-house graphic design team template library. There are thousands of templates, designed to be used on social media, posts, websites, and more. 

“A huge choice of images! I'm sick of seeing the same stock images over and over again - it's boring. PikWizard has a heap of new photos on offer, and it's easy to find something that no one's seen yet.”
Meg (@megzcarpenter) | Digital Comms

PR Management & collaboration tools

Scoro - Work management software

Scoro is a digital public relations tool that offers features like collaboration, time management, project management, productivity and sales force automation.

No more switching between numerous applications and email clients - it’s a PR management solution that allows you to control your entire workflow from one place.

Top features:

“You can align your team’s schedules and tasks, allocate jobs and monitor execution, use tools manage billing and expenses, create reports, send invoices, track late client payments, and so on.”
Dave Nevogt (@dnevgot) | Co-founder of Hubstaff 

Distributing a press release

PR Newswire - Produce, optimize, target

PR Newswire offers the whole package – it produces, optimizes, and targets content. After distribution, it then measures the results. It targets over 170+ countries in 40+ languages.

Its most popular features include:

”Although I've strayed many times to try other newswire platforms, PR Newswire continues to be my platform of choice."
Krystal Covington | Director of PR & Customer Service at Natural Grocers 

Business Wire - Optimization & distribution

Business Wire offers an impressive suite of optimization and distribution channels, allowing a business to target its audience and ensure its release is found via search engines.

Releases are targeted based on social behaviour, geographic location, interest profiles, and other demographic data.

Business wire distributes your release 89,000 media outlets in 162 countries. You can include videos, links, and photos in your releases.

The price is per news release and depends on reach and length.

“Business wire… has a lengthy history as a distribution service and is well regarded as having a strong SEO component. Business Wire’s been heavily praised for its editorial team, which is an important factor when considering any PR platform.”
Stephanie Czajka (@chaikuh) | Inbound marketing Project Manager at Weidert Group 

GlobeNewswire - Share Your Content

GlobeNewswire is a news distribution service for building media and influencer lists, sending targeted news updates, and tracking the performance of your releases.

This digital PR tool also has a feature which lets you create an online newsroom where you can store everything about the client’s brand. GlobeNewswire will target social media and provide detailed analytics.

The communication and marketing platform allows you to send the right message out at the right time, to the right people.

Its large distribution network includes journalists, popular tweeters, and international companies. They also have excellent translation and editorial services.

PR outreach tools

Below are several outreach tools that will help you find the right contacts:

Just Reach Out - Streamlined outreach

 Just Reach Out is an all-in-one media outreach platform that empowers teams to streamline their content marketing, brand awareness and brand mention tactics.

With powerful contact search, automated email creation, and real-time analytics, Just Reach Out helps PRs connect with and pitch to relevant journalists.

Some key features of Just Reach Out include:

Pitchengine - Style & optimize

Pitchengine is a digital PR tool that allows you to take control of the presentation of your social media releases.

You can upload images and videos and then choose a style to suit your content. Pitchengine then optimizes it to be presented on smartphones and desktops.

Once you’ve created your pitch, you can share it, or embed it on your website or blog. Pitchengine will track your pitch and identify what type of messaging receives the highest engagement.

Pitchengine does the techie stuff for you. It creates social media releases that include tags, links and multimedia.

“For all PR firms and client-side PR 2.0 and social media managers, PitchEngine is the new social media release champion, and an indispensable tool in the new media arsenal. Check it out.” 
Jay Baer (@jaybaer) | President of Convince & Convert

Prowly - Public relations & communications

Prowly your very own online pressroom from where you can reach out to journalists and bloggers and measure your digital PR effectiveness.

Recently rebranded, Prowly has added to its already extensive list of features:

Prowly is intuitive and functional, with analytics that enables the optimization of all PR activities.

“We tried couple of PR tools, but eventually chose Prowly and we are extremely happy with everything it provides - the features (especially brand journal!), customer support (very responsive), and the ease of use (all features packed in the great design and well-thought interface). I am pretty sure you will love Prowly, once you try it!”
Lukasz Siemaszko (@LukaszSiemaszko) | Co-founder of DECO WIZARDS 

Additional PR tools

A Soft Murmur

My blog post, my choices!

Too much noise in your office – whistling, lots of different languages, roadworks outside? Then this tool is right for you.

It offers a collection of soothing sounds to get you in the right mood for writing. You can also mix it up and combine sounds and ambience like taking the sound of thunder and putting it in a coffee shop.

Talkwalker Media Monitoring: Be a media monitoring superstar

Talkwalker’s comprehensive media monitoring solution boosts your PR campaigns – giving you real-time insights across news, blogs, print, broadcasts, social media and forums.

Track your brand’s media presence, identify influential journalists, and craft brilliant PR campaigns. Leverage advanced analytics to measure media performance, uncover trending topics, and deliver data-driven strategies.

Schedule a personalized demo to see how our powerful platform can help you become a media monitoring superstar.