All Cision Reviews
1-25 of 89 Reviews
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Heather
51 - 200 employees
Used more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
Reviewed April 2021
One stop shop for PR professionals
Joshua
Verified reviewer
Internet, 11-50 employees
Used weekly for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed May 2019
Cision does the work for you
We did a lot of manual grind searching in Google and Bing for opportunities, Cision has helped us quicken that process without worrying if we had a good resource to reach out to or not.
PROSThe ability to reach out and find people for link ops or for content ops is amazing. The reach and database they have built for this is impressive. We've done several "expert pieces" for clients and the fact we can use this to curate the content we have has sped up our process. Cision's quality of reporters is also nice to trust. We know they don't let just anyone in their database and it allows us to pick and chose who we want to work with.
CONSIt's pricey, but you pay for the high quality of resources which benefits you and your clients in the long run.
Kathy
Verified reviewer
Public Relations and Communications, 11-50 employees
Used daily for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed November 2018
Cision Platform Review
The benefits I received are the open & click rates of my new releases. So if I notice that one of my important editors didn't open it it allows me to resend to that editor.
PROSThe ease of the platform is extremely good! The on-board training I received from account manager was extremely through. Also, sending out emails are very easy.
CONSI don't really have any cons about the platform.
Heather
Consumer Services, 501-1,000 employees
Used weekly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
3
EASE OF USE
3
VALUE FOR MONEY
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
3
Reviewed December 2019
I want to like it
I was actually the person who convinced my boss to purchase Cision for a start-up I was at in 2018. It was helpful, but I'm not sure if it was entirely worth the expense. In part, it was because I didn't have buy-in from necessary stakeholders and there was a significant time investment to sifting through to find contacts. In my current position, I inherited Cision from a predecessor. Again, I feel the money could be better spent elsewhere. Again, it's probably because less the platforms fault and more because we don't have the internal resources to fully dedicate to PR. I've always found the customer service there to be incredibly friendly and helpful.
PROSThe HARO subscription that comes with this product is incredibly handy. The contact database is useful, especially when I was trying to find blogs willing to review a new product.
CONSThe search felt a little cumbersome at times, and I've come across some outdated data. It's very labor intensive to sift through to find valuable contacts and establish a rapport with them. The software doesn't replace a PR professional with solid industry contacts. It bothers me that I can't set up my own listening devices and had to reach out to our rep any time I wanted to make a change. I've yet to come across anything in their that didn't pop up on other alerts I have set up in other platforms, so that piece of the software felt redundant for me.
Jake
Verified reviewer
Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees
Used less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed September 2019
The Only Press Release Tool Worth The Time & Money
Cision is an excellent partner for releasing, disributing and getting visibility for press releases. Our news feels seen - in the best way possible - and feels like we have a very effective partner in Cision.
PROSCision makes users feel like their press releases and news are being seen and heard by the correct audiences and that such press releases actually make some waves - we have consistenly seen feeback, outreach and other traffic when posting to and using Cision.
CONSMy only complaint with Cision is that their internal search can sometimes qualify or disqualify press releases for certain topics/categories/indsutries into diferent baskets and categories than they ought to belong to, but this has a seemingly minimal impact on a campaign's overall performance.
Cris
Verified reviewer
Writing and Editing, 501-1,000 employees
Used daily for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed August 2021
Great tool for PR
We use this to help build our media lists to reach out to media with
CONSI feel like the breadth of reporters on this database is not good as some other reporter databases.
David
Computer Software, 201-500 employees
Used weekly for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
3
EASE OF USE
3
VALUE FOR MONEY
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
3
Reviewed February 2019
Ok media database, good monitoring, and everything else is disappointing.
Ok media database, good monitoring, and everything else is disappointing.
PROSThe Cision database is fairly complete. If you know who you are looking for, you can usually find their name and contact information there. The news monitoring function — alerts which track news published online — does a fairly good job of giving me a heads-up about coverage. If you want to track coverage by source type against particular names or keywords, Cision monitoring will sometimes produce sources that Google alerts will not, and it will usually beat the alerts by a day or so.
CONSReporter discovery is hard. Beat designations within Cision seem very rudimentary and “thick”— reporters listed as “Technology,” for instance, might cover “artificial intelligence” or “embedded analytics” or “machine learning” or some combination of the three. Given the fact that an off-beat pitch can easily result in a communications representative being added to a reporter’s spam list, it’s critical that you know exactly what a reporter is writing about, or risk having no way to contact a reporter ever again. For media search, I needed Boolean search. Cision promised that functionality but, without getting too far into the limitations of their archiving, their provider agreements, and their search functionality, I found it a very clunky and inefficient way to search coverage on the fly. It's also super frustrating to be told that a publication is "in the database" but isn't searchable, because of licensing covenants.
Megan
10,000+ employees
Used daily for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
3
EASE OF USE
3
VALUE FOR MONEY
2
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
3
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed September 2017
Used it during Vocus/Cision transition
Access to tens of thousands of journalists is useful as a PR practitioner. It also does a great job of tracking insights like tone and monitoring where your organization appears in the news.
CONSWe constantly found journalists who hadn't been at their newspaper for over two years. Contact information is frequently outdated. The cost is practically that of a full-time employee. The PRWeb newswire they advertise frequently sends releases to websites with zero traffic, but counts it as a hit. And while their analytics are useful, I'd often go back to a prior month and run the same search string as before and be returned different numbers than the first time. It's hard to trust data that doesn't remain constant.
Katie
Non-Profit Organization Management, 11-50 employees
Used weekly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
3
EASE OF USE
2
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
2
FUNCTIONALITY
3
Reviewed September 2022
Clunky Compared to Competitors
Overall I would not recommend Cision because of the issues we experienced, but some of their tools are strong and it could be worthwhile depending on what you need. Our predecessors had chosen Cision, and while we did renew a couple of times due to the poor timing of making a transition, we eventually switched to Meltwater to consolidate our vendors and have a more user-friendly tool.
PROSCision's reporter database is much more robust than Meltwater's, as they have trade/niche publications and more complete staff listings. You could also do more customization with the e-blasts.
CONSWe had a terrible experience with the constant switching of reps, but even worse was that it took literal hours to pull metrics for our Board of Directors. I
Anonymous
2-10 employees
Used weekly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
3
EASE OF USE
2
VALUE FOR MONEY
2
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
2
Reviewed August 2018
Can't live with it, Can't live without it
When it comes to media databases, none are really amazing. Cision is one of the top contenders and a necessary evil for PR.
PROSCision works when you want to find a specific reporter's email; i.e. you know their name and publication. It's also helpful in figuring out the email formats of different publications.
CONSIt's not very intuitive. If you type in the name of an outlet, for example, all outlets that have any part of the words used in the query will appear. Results require a lot of manual sorting to figure out what is relevant to your search and what isn't.
Anonymous
1,001-5,000 employees
Used weekly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
3
EASE OF USE
2
VALUE FOR MONEY
2
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
2
FUNCTIONALITY
2
Reviewed August 2018
Cision
While its a business necessity for my line of work, Cision could be a smoother experience overall and could be more user friendly.
PROSCision is a great resource to have when evaluating media outlets and using it as a database to access contacts of these media outlets
CONSHard to navigate, UVM seems overly inflated, and not all the outlets are accessible online. Also, when searching for outlets its hard to navigate because the online version of news is considered a separate outlet from the paper or magazine version, when they're owned by the same entity.
Natasha
Public Relations and Communications, 2-10 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed August 2022
The best overall system
This software has everything you need for PR management I one spot: press releases, contact lookups, media monitoring. This is the premium system to use.
CONSThe media monitoring alerts can be a little tricky to setup and remove.
Anonymous
51-200 employees
Used weekly for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
1
EASE OF USE
1
VALUE FOR MONEY
1
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
1
FUNCTIONALITY
1
Reviewed August 2022
Cision Sucks in Every Possible Way! DON'T BUY THIS PRODUCT.
Virtually none.
PROSI worked with Vocus for years and loved it. They had a massive, easy-to-search database, great integration and awesome customer service. But Cision is a sham. Their database is a joke. I usually have to manually add the outlets I want to reach. Their customer service reps are very poorly trained and can't answer simple questions, and parts of their site are often down. The company seems to have been broken into small parts that are not integrated. It's clunky, ineffective and a waste of money.
CONSYes. The search function is needlessly complicated. The database is very shallow. Cision and PRweb are not really integrated. And customer service is virtually nonexistent.
Reason for choosing Cision
Because I had previously worked with Vocus and loved it. Cision does not live up to the standards set by Vocus.
Anonymous
11-50 employees
Used daily for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
2
EASE OF USE
3
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed January 2019
Cision Review
I often use Cision to find out the readership of different media outlets, or to find emails of media contacts.
PROSI use this software in my work in PR, and find it useful for finding information needed regarding media outlets and media contacts.
CONSI find that often the information is out dated when it comes to numbers, emails, etc.
Lauren
Used more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
3
VALUE FOR MONEY
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed May 2017
It's expensive but has up-to-date lists of hard-to-find contacts at major media outlets.
The contact information and search features are extensive, so you can find exactly who you want to reach in the markets that you need. Even the pesky ones who purposely don't want their information published.
CONSList-building can be confusing (or at least, it used to be before I had to cancel), and sometimes too much knowledge can be overwhelming--without knowing how PR works, you can easily blast your information to all the wrong people, and make a gigantic fool out of yourself. This is not for DIY-ers just getting started!
Anonymous
2-10 employees
Used more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
3
EASE OF USE
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
2
FUNCTIONALITY
3
Reviewed March 2019
Necessary evil of the PR industry
Once you have figured out how to navigate Cision to get the information you need, it is relatively straightforward to use. Can be a good starting point when building lists, etc.
CONSMissing critical reporter contact information across all types of publications, not very "smart" in terms of search and pulling only the truly relevant results from keywords.
Anonymous
201-500 employees
Used weekly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed December 2021
Powerful but less relevant
Useful database of media contacts, very helpful in identifying key contacts as we moved into new markets.
CONSUnfortunately, with the changing landscape of journalism and the disappearance of "beat" reporters, the usefulness of the product decreased for us.
Anonymous
51-200 employees
Used weekly for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed November 2019
Really excellent communications software
Definitely the best tool I have used for comms and PR. Really happy.
PROSSo easy to search for the right people. Wouldn't be able to find these journalists and PR people by using a simple web search. So it's really great for PR activity. Great for getting content out there.
CONSI wouldn't exactly call this software cheap. Although excellence should come at a price! Initial training was also a bit confusing.
Stacey
Used weekly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed January 2018
Great
If we ever needed help understanding how to do something we got it right away.
PROSThis is an easy to use multi use platform that my company and myself utilizes regularly with great success.
Drew
Computer Software, 11-50 employees
Used monthly for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
1
EASE OF USE
1
VALUE FOR MONEY
1
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
1
FUNCTIONALITY
1
Reviewed April 2023
Cision won't stop billing my company
Cision provides a sub-par product and high prices. The company is holding customers hostage with a completely onerous contract. Avoid this company at all costs!
PROSMy company used Cision for PR management. We did not receive any value.
CONSCision will not stop billing my company. Within 24 hours of receiving a contract renewal we sent an email cancelling the contract. Cision did not reply and processed payment anyway. We contacted Cision to end the contract and they responded that we must notify them 5 months in advance to cancel a contract. How would we even know if we wanted to cancel at that time?
Anonymous
Used monthly for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
2
EASE OF USE
2
VALUE FOR MONEY
1
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
2
FUNCTIONALITY
2
Reviewed June 2018
Way Oversold, Barely Usable
Not many.
PROSPRWeb and PRNewswire market share drove our usage (we got upsold into trying Cision Cloud). There is some value in having filterable media contact lists....but not at their price points.
CONSHorrifically bad value for money - our worst software purchase of 2017. We left. "Unified cloud" was 100% overhyped. Rolled out with unclear UX, broken features Too many of the media contacts emails bounce. Many of lists are poorly scrubbed - you end up with random contacts that don't fit the segment you are targetting. "Account managers" are useless at solving issues - lots of back and forth by email with no resolution.
bianca
Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees
Used daily for less than 6 months
OVERALL RATING:
3
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
3
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed October 2018
Only Game in Town
think they probably corner the market on PR software.. but that doesn't mean improvements can't be made.
PROSCision offers an extremely wide span of media outlets... from large to the insanely minute publication.. it defintiely provides a good scope of everything in between! I
CONSI think this software is somewhat "clunky" ... think there is definitely room from improvement with the user interface. Moving between listings is a little complex.
Javier Victor Marian
Verified reviewer
Public Relations and Communications, 11-50 employees
Used monthly for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed July 2019
great for us, not so great for latin america
save you a lot of time to do media lists, but definitely need to improve.
PROSthis is my go-to software when having a pitch in the us market. have a lot of journalists and media for your pitch.
CONSi wish the journalists for latin america were more complete. A lot of media ins't even in the database and when there is, is never updated. Other think i don't like is that this include name as directors of media or companies and/or s-suite contacts. If you send a pitch to this people you are bothering them. editors should be more clearly marked.
Anthony
Insurance, 2-10 employees
Used monthly for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
3
VALUE FOR MONEY
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed September 2017
Loved the Social Media Monitoring component
The ability to track, manage, and report on how users are engaging with your brand / company. A 1 stop shop to manage all PR functions.
PROSWhat I liked most was the ability to track, manage, and monitor all your social media activity and track how users are engaging with your company / brand. The analytics and insights you gain from this can be invaluable to the success of a company.
CONSYou need to have a fairly significant PR budget to order and use Cision, not necessarily doable for a smaller company.
Katie
Used weekly for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed November 2017
Another Great Option for Marketing on Social Media
This is for marketing professionals who need a boost on social media. So may deem it unnecessary--especially the millennials
PROSAs someone who is in the younger crowd, this is useful to me because when I started, I was unsure about how to reach who I needed to. Helped me immensely!