How much does media monitoring cost? 12 vendors priced for 2026

By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Surfer, Brand24, and Senuto. How the scoring works.

Published 6 October 2026

Media monitoring costs anywhere from $0 to $130,000 a year. Google Alerts is free, and three of the 12 vendors checked for this report sell self-serve plans between $29 and $1,499 a month. The other eight sell by quote, and Vendr's tracked contracts put seven of their medians between $7,950 and $50,000 a year.

This report prices both groups as of October 2026. It covers the self-serve media monitoring tools with published rate cards, the quote-only platforms PR teams buy on annual contracts, the line items that sit outside the platform fee, and the contract terms that turn a first-year price into a three-year bill.

It's written for PR professionals, marketing teams and communications teams sizing a first budget or a renewal. Every price below links to the vendor's own page or to Vendr's header stats.

How much does media monitoring cost in 2026

Self-serve media monitoring software with a public price runs from free to $17,988 a year, the starting price of Brand24's Enterprise plan. Quote-only medians overlap the top of that range: the lowest Vendr median among the seven tracked here is $7,950 and the highest is $50,000.

Published prices for media monitoring tools are a dime a dozen at the low end and vanish above it. Brand24, Awario and Semrush's AI PR Toolkit print every tier. Cision, Muck Rack, Onclusive, Critical Mention, Talkwalker and Brandwatch print none, Meltwater prints indicative floors in a blog post, and Mention now sells a single demo-only Company plan.

The chart annualises each plan. Awario Starter at $29 a month is $348 a year, Brand24 Individual at $199 is $2,388, Awario Enterprise at $249 is $2,988, and Semrush's AI PR Toolkit Pro at $279 a month is $3,348. Business at $499 is $5,988, and Brand24 Business at $599 is $7,188. Meltwater's $10,000 floor is the first rung a buyer can't reach without a sales call, and Awario's $348 is a drop in the bucket next to it.

Self-serve media monitoring tools with published prices

Four media monitoring tools publish a rate card a buyer can pay by card today. Their tiers gate the same four things: keywords or topics, mentions a month, users, and how often new results arrive.

Prices from each vendor's pricing page, checked 6 October 2026. Awario's mention figures are new mentions collected a month.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is free and sends email when a phrase appears in Google's index. Delivery runs as it happens, at most once a day or at most once a week, and the source filter covers news, blogs, web, video, books, discussions and finance. Results arrive by email, which is enough for a founder who wants to keep an eye on one company name and thin for anyone writing a monthly report for a client.

Awario

Awario is the cheapest paid entry here at $29 a month billed annually, or $49 month to month. That monthly premium is 69%, the steepest of any vendor in this report: $588 a year against $348, so a team sure of a 12-month need should bite the bullet on annual billing. Storage is capped too. Starter keeps 5,000 mentions per topic, Pro 15,000 and Enterprise 50,000, so historical data access is a tier limit before it's an add-on.

Brand24

Brand24 prices five tiers, and the clearest thing each step buys is speed. Individual refreshes every 12 hours, Team every hour, and Pro at $399 a month is the first tier with real time monitoring. That makes real time worth $200 a month over Individual on annual billing, plus 38,000 extra mentions and nine more keywords.

AI sentiment analysis ships on every Brand24 tier, the cheapest being $199 a month. The AI Insights and AI Topics features start at Pro with two projects each, Business lifts AI Insights to five projects and adds Advanced Reports, and the AI Visibility module that tracks brand mentions inside chatbot answers sits on Enterprise only. Our Brand24 pricing breakdown walks each tier, and the Brand24 review tests the sentiment engine itself.

Monthly billing costs $50 a month more at the bottom and $100 more at Pro and Business. Every tier carries a 14-day free trial.

Semrush AI PR Toolkit, formerly Prowly

Prowly now redirects buyers to the Semrush AI PR Toolkit. Semrush's pricing knowledge base lists three plans: Base at $149 a month, Pro at $279 and Business at $499. Media monitoring and competitive analysis are available on the Pro and Business plans only, so the real entry price for monitoring is $279.

For a PR team that pitches and tracks coverage from one login, Pro is the best of both worlds at the price.

Pro automatically tracks which pitches earned media mentions, a way to connect coverage to the pitch that produced it and to PR and marketing efforts. Business adds competitor media tracking, visibility benchmarking and multi-brand monitoring. It's the toolkit's answer to competitive benchmarking, and it costs $5,988 a year at the monthly rate. The toolkit sits outside the core Semrush subscription covered in our Semrush pricing report.

Quote-only media monitoring tools and what buyers pay

Six media monitoring tools publish plan names and no prices, and Meltwater publishes floors with no rate card. For all seven, Vendr's marketplace header stats are the only public record of what buyers pay: a median annual contract value, a low and a high, and an average saving negotiated off the first quote.

Vendr marketplace header stats, checked 6 October 2026. Each vendor's own pricing page was checked the same day.

Vendr's purchase counts show how reliable data behind each median is: 126 purchases for Meltwater against 40 for Brandwatch. Five medians land within $5,756 of each other. The spreads tell the bigger story. Meltwater's high is 10.6 times its low and Cision's is 9.6 times, while Talkwalker's tracked deals sit inside a $3,600 band.

Meltwater

Meltwater is the one quote-only vendor that prints numbers. Its pricing post, published 9 July 2026 and updated 10 September, sets indicative floors of $10,000 a year for Starter, $25,000 for Pro and $130,000 for Enterprise, and calls the ranges "indicative only". The pricing page shows four plans, Agency included, with no prices and a 12-month minimum contract.

Vendr's tracked buyers paid a $25,800 median across 126 purchases, close to the Pro floor. Its low, $5,375, sits $4,625 under the Starter floor. Our Meltwater pricing report goes tier by tier, and the Meltwater acquisition report covers the 2023 take-private behind the current owner.

Cision

Cision's pricing URL redirects to a request form with nine questions to answer before a salesperson calls. Vendr's median is $12,625 across 107 purchases, with buyers saving 25.53% on average, the deepest discount in this group. The full CisionOne package breakdown is in our Cision pricing report.

Public tenders are the most valuable data a buyer can find, because they name the price and the buyer. One shows what a tender does to that number. The Port of Los Angeles board report dated 30 April 2019 awarded Cision media monitoring at $18,150 a year for three years, not to exceed $54,450, after three firms bid. The award cut $52,050, or 49%, from the port's previous agreement.

Muck Rack

Muck Rack's pricing page lists Starter, Standard and Premier, each marked "Contact us". Print coverage and TV and radio clips are add-ons on top of any tier, and the sentiment analysis row shows NLP on Starter and Standard against AI-powered sentiment on Premier. Vendr's median is $13,000 across 80 purchases, with a spread from $8,000 to $20,860.

Critical Mention and Onclusive

Critical Mention is "An Onclusive Company", per its own footer, and its homepage lists broadcast media, online news, social media and podcasts. Its pricing page offers to build a package around a buyer's earned media needs, with nonprofit rates and API access for partners. Vendr's $7,950 median is the lowest in this group.

A $5,920 to $15,400 Vendr spread makes the Onclusive unit the cheapest route here to broadcast monitoring of TV and radio clips. Onclusive itself tracks a $13,706 median, sold through a demo request for managed or self-service media monitoring, with a Unified Platform listed next to both on its product menu.

Talkwalker

Hootsuite announced it would acquire Talkwalker on 8 April 2024. Talkwalker's pricing page now sells three plans, Core, Analyze and Business, each by custom quote, all with unlimited users. Analyze doubles the non-sampled results volume and adds 25 topics, filters and channels. Business multiplies volume by six and adds historical data.

Vendr's tracked range runs $12,260 to $15,860 around a $13,298 median. For Hootsuite's own plans, see our Hootsuite pricing report.

Brandwatch and Mention

Brandwatch's plans page carries no prices and ends in a demo request. Vendr's $50,000 median across 40 purchases is the highest here, and its $81,200 high would cost an arm and a leg for a two-person team.

Cision closed its Brandwatch acquisition on 1 June 2021, so one parent sells at both a $12,625 and a $50,000 median. Brandwatch's suite leads with Consumer Intelligence, a social intelligence platform built for research, and our Brandwatch pricing report and Brandwatch review cover the suites.

Mention's pricing page shows one Company plan behind a demo button. Access to past mentions and API access are both listed as paid add-ons, outside the plan. Mention also deprecated its Publish and Respond features and points users to Agorapulse for publishing and community management.

Broadcast monitoring, print and podcasts priced as add-ons

The most detailed public price list for a full media monitoring platform is a document Meltwater filed to sell to UK public bodies. Its G-Cloud 14 listing shows £22,800 a licence a year, and the attached pricing document prices each media type separately. It's straight from the horse's mouth.

*Published in GBP only. Converted at the ECB reference rates for 6 October 2026, 1.1269 USD and 0.84880 GBP to the euro.

The base licence includes 10 years of retrospective editorial content and 15 months of social history. Adding UK broadcast, UK print and podcasts takes £22,800 to £31,700, 39% more, and five extra users with 25 more searches cost £9,900 a year on their own.

Muck Rack's add-on list follows the same shape. Online news sits in the base fee, and print and broadcast media coverage each carry their own price.

What drives a media monitoring quote

Meltwater's pricing FAQ names the key factors: "the breadth of sources and regions you want to monitor, volume of data and workflows, number of users, integrations, onboarding and support needs, and contract terms." The published plans above show how much each one is worth.

• Sources monitored. Online news and social media come first, and broadcast, print and podcasts are add-ons at Meltwater and Muck Rack, so multiple channels mean multiple line items. Global coverage costs more: Meltwater's global broadcast line is £5,700 against £2,950 for the UK.
• Mention volume. Brand24's tiers run 2,000, 10,000, 40,000 and 100,000 mentions a month; Talkwalker's Business tier carries six times Core's non-sampled volume.
• Update speed. Among self-serve media monitoring tools, real time alerts start at Brand24 Pro, $200 a month above the 12-hour tier.
• Archive depth. Awario caps stored mentions per topic, Talkwalker reserves extra history for Business, and Mention sells it as an add-on.
• Seats. Awario Starter allows 1 team member and Pro 10; Meltwater's G-Cloud card prices 15 users and 50 searches at £9,900 a year over 10 users and 25.
• AI features. Brand24 gates AI Insights by tier and Muck Rack reserves AI-powered sentiment for Premier.
• Contract terms. Meltwater sets a 12-month minimum, and its pricing post says multi-year terms and payment structure change the final price.

Real-time monitoring sits at the top of most quotes because buyers ask for it first. Grand View Research's market report says "real-time capabilities are becoming a critical factor in selecting monitoring solutions," and our guide to real-time market intelligence explains what the refresh rate buys in practice.

Brand24's $200 a month for real time buys the ability to respond quickly to public sentiment and to emerging threats: a 12-hour refresh can leave a crisis running half a day before the first alert.

Basic media monitoring tools leave out the advanced analytics that push enterprise quotes up. Google Alerts delivers results as email. Brand24's Individual tier gets sentiment and stops there; AI Insights start at Pro and Advanced Reports at the $599 Business tier.

What media monitoring tools include at each price

The gap between a $348 plan and a $25,800 contract is mostly analysis. Entry tiers collect brand mentions from online media and social media platforms. Enterprise contracts add the people, history and advanced analytics that turn those mentions into deeper insights for communications and marketing teams.

Mention's demo-only Company plan shows what a mid-market feature list covers:

• Social media monitoring across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest and YouTube.
• Web monitoring of news, blogs and forums, plus 75+ review sites including Google, Trustpilot, Amazon and Glassdoor for customer feedback.
• Sentiment analysis and trend identification, so a team can track industry trends next to its own name.
• Competitor benchmarking, share of voice, and custom reports and dashboards for the key metrics a board pack carries.
• Influence scoring and audience insights, plus white-label reporting for agencies.

Talkwalker sells social listening and media monitoring in one Core plan by quote. Core includes custom dashboards, reports and alerts, the customizable reporting other vendors gate by tier, and adds peak detection, forecasting, AI summaries and LLM Insights, which monitor how AI assistants talk about a brand.

Brandwatch sells its data into market research, brand management, crisis management, social media management, influencer marketing and customer care, each listed as a use case on its site.

Buyers put the output to four jobs, and each maps to a tier:

• Brand reputation management: real time alerts on negative social media posts. Grand View Research found it was the largest application in 2024.
• Marketing campaigns: brand visibility, audience engagement and reach on multiple platforms after a launch.
• Competitive intelligence and market positioning: share of voice against named rivals and industry trends across global markets.
• Audience research: understanding audience behavior and the target audience behind a conversation, to gain valuable insights for content and product teams.

Social media listening for audience behavior needs history, and history is priced. Meltwater's base G-Cloud licence carries 15 months of social history, and Awario Starter stores 5,000 mentions per topic.

Cision's own brand recognition guide links recognition to customer loyalty and sales, the case every vendor here makes for paying at all. Reviews and comments from loyal customers are the earliest signal of a shift in customer loyalty, and influencer checks test if a paid creator's posts fit a company's brand values. Sentiment trends become actionable insights for brand reputation once someone owns them; Brand24 Business adds a Client Success Lead for that job.

Contract terms that add to the bill

Auto-renewal clauses are par for the course on annual media monitoring contracts, and the complaints about them are specific. A VP of marketing and communications in industrial engineering wrote on Capterra on 1 June 2022:

"I stated this when I got the renewal invoice and was told that I had to put it in writing 60 days prior to the auto-renewal in order to cancel the contract."

VR, VP Marketing & Communications, Mechanical or Industrial Engineering, Capterra review, 1 June 2022

Add-ons are the second complaint. A communications manager at a utility put it this way on the same Capterra page:

"They charge separate pricing for everything, and it seems that every time I turn around they're rolling out a cool new feature they want to share, but it's always extra."

DeDe C., Communications Manager, Utilities, Capterra review, 30 October 2020

Seats come third. An SVP in marketing and advertising who uses Meltwater for social media monitoring and media lists wrote on Capterra on 16 August 2024 that it "can be expensive in terms of number of seats and/or tools used." On TrustRadius, Altary Sherman, director of social media at Ideal Cabinetry, listed "too many a la carte items for the sales teams, which starts to price out the client" on 6 April 2022.

The devil's in the details here. A 60-day notice window on a 12-month term leaves ten months to decide, and a missed date rolls the whole fee forward a year.

How to negotiate a media monitoring contract

Vendr's average savings put a number on the room in a first quote: 25.53% at Cision, 16.97% at Muck Rack, 15.29% at Brandwatch and 15.23% at Meltwater. The Port of Los Angeles tender shows the other lever. Three bids cut a public agency's bill by 49%, and competing quotes put any buyer in the driver's seat.

Multi-year terms trade price for lock-in. Julie Collins, owner of Julie Collins Consulting, wrote on TrustRadius on 2 February 2024:

"In my experience, sales reps will push you into signing multi-year agreements to avoid steep year over year price increases."

Julie Collins, Owner, Julie Collins Consulting, TrustRadius review, 2 February 2024

A practical order of work for PR teams before signing, drawn from the complaints above:

1. Get two quote-only bids and one self-serve plan priced against the same keyword list, so the self-serve number caps the conversation.
2. Ask for the renewal notice window in writing and diary it on day one. A rep who won't state it is a red flag.
3. Price every media type as a line item: online news, broadcast, print, podcasts, social.
4. Cap the renewal uplift in the order form before agreeing to a second year.
5. Ask which AI features, historical data and seats sit inside the base fee.

Some buyers leave the category entirely. Abe G., a VP in computer software, wrote on Capterra on 31 January 2023:

"As a product/platform, Meltwater was an overpriced, worse alternative to Google alerts and provided no semblance of quality monitoring results for our organization."

Abe G., VP, Computer Software, Capterra review, 31 January 2023

Media monitoring versus social listening pricing

Social media monitoring and media monitoring overlap in the media monitoring tools buyers shortlist and split in the price. Brand24 and Awario count mentions across social media platforms and online media: news sites, blogs and forums, and their tiers price that volume. Meltwater, Cision and Muck Rack start from online news and earned media performance, then sell broadcast and print as line items.

Social listening platforms sit at the top of the range. A social listening platform such as Brandwatch prices around research use, and Sprinklr sells listening inside a customer experience management suite; our Sprinklr pricing report covers that contract. The social listening pricing report prices nine tools on that side, and the Brand24 vs Brandwatch comparison shows the two ends of it side by side.

The media monitoring market in numbers

Grand View Research's Media Monitoring Tools Market (2025 - 2030) report, published May 2025, sizes the global market at $5.5 billion in 2024 and projects $12.0 billion by 2030, a 14.1% compound annual growth rate from 2025.

The report defines the category by its reach: "These tools provide comprehensive coverage, tracking various content types across TV, radio, digital publications, and social media."

• North America held 37.0% of 2024 revenue.
• Social media monitoring was the largest type segment, with a 28.0% revenue share.
• Brand reputation management was the largest application segment in 2024.

The same report says "AI-powered sentiment analysis is becoming a key feature in media monitoring tools" and that influencer monitoring "is becoming a standard feature". The rate cards above agree: Brand24 ships AI sentiment analysis on every tier, and Brandwatch's product menu lists Influencer Marketing next to Consumer Intelligence. Both features show up in quotes as line items or tier gates.

What to budget by team size

Budget follows the media landscape a team has to cover. The table matches common setups to the cheapest verified price that covers them.

Costs marked ^* are Vendr median annual contract values from tracked purchases. The others are list prices from each vendor's own pricing page, checked 6 October 2026.

Specialized tools cover single jobs for less: broadcast clips at a $7,950 median, or Semrush's toolkit for publicists who pitch. A marketing agency buying for agency clients has a separate problem. Brand24 Business includes 25 keywords at $7,188 a year, and those 25 have to stretch across every client. Meltwater sells a separate Agency plan by quote.

Enterprise brands rarely fit the self-serve media monitoring tools above. Brand24 Enterprise starts at $17,988 a year, and Meltwater's Enterprise floor is $130,000. The media monitoring tools ranking scores the ten main platforms on coverage, and the social listening tools ranking and brand intelligence software ranking cover the adjacent categories.

Frequently asked questions

How much does media monitoring cost per month?

Self-serve plans run $29 to $1,499 a month as of October 2026: Awario Starter at $29 billed annually up to Brand24 Enterprise from $1,499. Quote-only platforms work out to $663 to $4,167 a month at their Vendr medians of $7,950 and $50,000 a year.

How much does Prowly cost?

Prowly is now the Semrush AI PR Toolkit, priced at $149, $279 and $499 a month for Base, Pro and Business. Media monitoring starts on Pro.

How much does a Meltwater subscription cost?

Meltwater's indicative floors are $10,000 a year for Starter, $25,000 for Pro and $130,000 for Enterprise. Vendr's median across 126 purchases is $25,800, on a 12-month minimum term.

What are some examples of media monitoring?

• Tracking brand mentions in online news and on social media channels to measure brand visibility after a launch.
• Clipping TV and radio coverage for a board report, a broadcast monitoring job sold by quote.
• Crisis management: real-time alerts on negative social media posts so communications teams respond the same day.
• Competitive intelligence: share of voice against named competitors and their marketing campaigns.
• Reading customer feedback on review sites and social media to see how brand perception and customer experience move.

What is the best media monitoring tool?

For broadcast-first PR teams, Critical Mention at a $7,950 median. For self-serve social and web, Brand24 or Awario. For global media coverage across every channel, Meltwater at $25,800. Our ranking scores ten media monitoring tools on documented coverage.

Is there free media monitoring software?

Google Alerts is free, with as-it-happens, daily or weekly email. Brand24 offers a 14-day free trial on every tier, and Awario's trial runs on Starter limits.

Bottom line

Check for a published price list first: every vendor here that hides its prices and has a Vendr median sits at $7,950 or more. Teams that can live with the limits of self-serve media monitoring tools pay $348 to $7,188 a year for Awario or Brand24. Teams that need broadcast, print and a journalist database pay a Vendr median between $7,950 and $50,000, before add-ons.

The quote-only medians cluster near $13,000, Meltwater sits at twice that, and Brandwatch at nearly four times. A buyer who prices one self-serve plan first walks into every sales call with a ceiling, and a buyer who diaries the renewal notice date on day one stays on the ball when the 60-day window opens.