Everything Cision does — without the $15K contract or the stale list.
Cision is the 800-lb gorilla of PR software — a 159-year-old wire-and-database empire trusted by 84% of the Fortune 500. But that scale comes with enterprise contracts that typically run $10K–$30K+/yr, annual-only billing, a sales gauntlet before you see pricing, and auto-renewal clauses that demand 3–5 months' notice to escape. Medialyst competes on price and flexibility: a public $149/mo Starter plan, monthly billing, no annual lock-in, and no sales call — build your first list today.
The honest comparison.
Pulled from public Cision documentation, customer reviews, and our own product. We update this page when either side ships something new.
| Capability | Medialyst | Cision |
|---|---|---|
| Finding the right journalist | ||
| Find journalists for this story | ✓ Story-specific relevance scoring | ~ Boolean keyword search; AI suggests queries |
| Understand a journalist's beat | ✓ Reads past articles + recent coverage | ~ Topic filters; “currently covering” tags |
| Analyze past writing | ✓ Grounded in actual articles | ~ Profile bylines, no per-article analysis |
| Per-journalist pitch angles | ✓ Personalized angles + pitch drafts | ~ AI pitch writer + subject lines (basic) |
| Data freshness | ✓ Live news article search in real time | ~ 850K+ static DB — “outdated contacts” #1 complaint |
| Refine a list with natural language | ✓ “Remove anyone inactive in 6 months” | ~ AI Smarter Search suggests Boolean queries |
| Find more like top performers | ✓ “Find 20 more like the top 5” | ✕ Not available |
| Add custom enrichment columns | ✓ “Research if they use affiliate links” | ✕ Not available |
| Pitching & sending | ||
| Email verification | ✓ Multi-step verification waterfall | ~ Human-curated DB — emails bounce per reviewers |
| Send + track from one place | ✓ Built-in send + tracking | ~ Built-in outreach + PR Newswire distribution |
| Pricing & setup | ||
| Time to first pitch | ✓ Minutes | ~ Weeks: sales call → annual onboarding |
| Free trial | ✓ First list free | ✕ Demo only, no free trial |
| Contract | ✓ None — cancel anytime | ~ Annual-only; 3–5 mo cancellation notice |
| Price | ✓ from $149/mo | ~ ~$10K–$30K+/yr (opaque, request a quote) |
| Agent-native workflows | ||
| API access | ✓ Public REST API | ~ Limited |
| Remote MCP support | ✓ Hosted remote MCP server | ✕ Not available |
| Agent-native workflows | ✓ Usable directly inside Claude, ChatGPT & Cursor | ✕ Not available |
| CSV import / re-enrichment from competitor exports | ✓ Upload any CSV — the agent re-verifies & re-scores | ~ No re-enrichment from exports |
Three reasons teams switch.
We're not trying to out-database Cision. We're trying to out-result them — by being more accurate, faster to act on, and honest about price.
A smaller list that actually replies.
Instead of a giant static database, Medialyst enriches journalists live and verifies every email in real time before it reaches you — global coverage across any outlet, journalist, or beat, researched for your story rather than pulled from a stale row.
From story to sent pitch in minutes.
Paste a release, a URL, or a topic. Medialyst proposes journalists, scores them 0–100 by fit, and drafts a tailored angle for each — no demo call, no contract, no multi-week onboarding.
Pricing on the website. Not in a sales deck.
Every plan and limit is public. Starter is $97/mo billed annually (or $149 month-to-month, cancel anytime) — and your first list is free: 300 credits, no credit card. No lock-in, no “let’s get on a call.”
Why people switch from Cision.
Opaque, high pricing and contracts you can't easily exit
Cision publishes no pricing — every quote is a custom sales negotiation, and buyers report wildly different numbers. Vendr's marketplace puts the median buyer at roughly $12,625/yr across 77 tracked transactions, with deals ranging from $3,150 to $30,553. Worse, plans are annual-only and auto-renewal clauses require 3–5 months' advance notice to cancel, with users reporting they're charged for services they didn't agree to. Medialyst is the opposite: published pricing from $149/mo, monthly billing, no contract, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Vendr — Cision median ~$12,625/yr (77 transactions) ↗Data rot is the #1 complaint
Cision's core promise is an accurate 850K+ contact database, but stale data is the most frequent complaint across every review platform. One Reddit user put it bluntly: “Half the contacts have moved outlets or straight up aren't working anymore, and the other half have different emails than the ones provided.” Medialyst doesn't serve a static profile — it enriches each journalist live in real time and verifies every email before it's delivered to you, so the list you get was built and checked for the pitch you're sending today.
Capterra — Cision reviews ↗Cision's own research proves mass-blast PR is broken
Cision's State of the Media 2026 report surveyed 1,899 journalists and found that while 66% rely on PR-provided content for story ideas, 72% report receiving mostly irrelevant pitches — only 28% of outreach is considered relevant. The bulk database and pitch tools that incentivize spray-and-pray are precisely what produce that 72%. Medialyst scores reporters by fit for your specific story, so you send fewer, sharper pitches that actually land.
State of the Media 2026 — PR Newswire ↗A clunky platform built from a decade of acquisitions
Cision's interface is repeatedly called “cluttered,” “clunky,” and unintuitive, with a steep learning curve and search results that require heavy manual refinement. Years of migrations — C3 to NextGen to CisionOne — and a long string of acquisitions left one reviewer noting that “Cision has lost its way.” Medialyst skips Boolean and dashboards entirely: describe your story in plain language and the agent does the relevance work, with the first list returned in minutes.
G2 — CisionOne reviews ↗Where Cision wins.
No tool is best at everything. Here's where Cision is genuinely strong — so you can decide honestly.
Unmatched scale and the PR Newswire wire
Cision is the category leader with roughly 33% market share, an 850K+ contact database across 225 countries, and PR Newswire — one of only two dominant global wire services — for distribution to 170+ countries. If your job requires paid press-release distribution at global scale, that integrated wire is genuinely hard to replicate.
Enterprise-grade monitoring and an all-in-one suite
Cision combines media monitoring across hundreds of thousands of sources, 3,000+ TV/radio stations, 60,000+ podcasts, and 10,000+ premium paywalled titles, plus Brandwatch social listening and a GSA Schedule listing for government buyers. For a large enterprise that wants one umbrella vendor across earned, paid, and social, that breadth is real.
Enterprise credibility and institutional trust
Trusted by 84% of the Fortune 500 with a 159-year history via PR Newswire, Cision is the safe, established choice for a procurement team. Its deep enterprise penetration and high switching costs are a real moat — displacing it inside large accounts is difficult, which is exactly why it commands its prices.
Where Medialyst pulls ahead.
The flip side: here's where Medialyst is the stronger choice over Cision for finding and pitching the right journalists.
Right-priced and flexible — no contract, no sales call
Starter is $149/mo, Pro $299, Scale $800 — published, monthly, no per-seat fees, no annual lock-in, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. The first list is free with 300 credits and no credit card. You'll know exactly what you pay before you ever talk to anyone — the opposite of Cision's request-a-quote gauntlet and 3–5 month cancellation clauses.
Fit for this story, not keyword roulette
Instead of Boolean search over a static index, Medialyst reads hundreds of articles relevant to your specific announcement, scores reporters 0–100 by fit, and tells you why each one would write it — grounded in their actual recent coverage. That directly answers the 72%-irrelevant-pitch problem Cision's own research documents.
Live enrichment instead of a static pull
Global coverage across outlets, journalists, and beats, enriched live in real time rather than served from a database where “half the contacts have moved outlets.” Every email is verified in real time before it reaches you — built to solve the exact data-rot problem that tops Cision's reviews.
Agent-native, not AI bolted on
A public REST API, a hosted remote MCP server, and custom enrichment columns mean you can run Medialyst directly inside Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor — and ask for things a filter UI simply can't, like “find journalists who use affiliate links and which platform.” Cision's API access is limited by comparison.
Switching is a CSV upload
Already paying for Cision? Export your media lists, upload the CSV, and Medialyst's agent re-verifies and re-scores every contact — so you can compare on your own data before your renewal window closes.
AI bolted on vs. AI-native.
Cision's May 2025 AI Suite — the Guided Conversational Assistant, AI Smarter Search, AI Summaries, React Score, and personalized pitch writing — is impressive marketing. Architecturally, though, it's the legacy keyword-filter database with extra steps.
The AI generates and suggests Boolean queries, runs them through the same filter dashboard, and hands back whoever the filters return. It isn't studying each journalist's beat or last ten articles, and you get little control or customization over the result.
Medialyst is AI-native end to end. There's no underlying filter UI to bolt onto — the agent reads real, recent articles per journalist, and you can define custom enrichment columns in plain language: “find journalists who use affiliate links (and which platform),” or “has this travel journalist visited San Diego in the last two years?” That's the difference between an 850K-row database with an AI veneer and a research assistant that actually does the research.
“Not a static database pull. Not the same recycled names that have been sitting in a spreadsheet for two years. A researched, current list built around exactly what you tell it to look for.”— Amy Bartko
Pitching the same announcement.
One launch, two tools. Here's what a comms lead actually does to get a story-specific pitch out the door.
Medialyst9 min totalCision~3 daysThree places the difference shows up.
Database quality
Cision's pitch is database scale: 850,000+ human-curated media profiles across 225 countries, the largest in the category.
The catch, repeated across G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, and Reddit, is that size and accuracy aren't the same thing. Outdated contacts are the single most frequent complaint — one Reddit reviewer reports half their contacts have moved outlets or bounce, and the other half have different emails than the ones Cision provided. Journalism's high turnover from layoffs, outlet closures, and beat changes means any static, human-curated database decays the moment it's published; 49% of journalists in Cision's own 2026 survey cite staff cuts and churn as a primary pressure. Medialyst takes the opposite stance.
Rather than maintaining a giant static inventory and hoping it's current, it enriches journalists live at the moment you build a list: pulling recent articles, confirming the beat, and verifying the email in real time before it's ever shown to you. Coverage is global — any outlet, any journalist, any beat — but the unit of truth is the freshly-researched contact for your story, not a row last touched in a quarterly curation pass. The practical result is fewer bounces and far less of the manual cross-referencing in spreadsheets that 83% of PR professionals still do because they can't trust the database alone.
Speed
With Cision, time-to-first-pitch is measured in weeks, not minutes: there's a multi-step form, a sales conversation, a negotiated annual contract, and onboarding before you build anything — and no free trial, demo only.
Once you're in, finding the right journalists still means constructing Boolean queries, scanning filter results, and manually refining away irrelevant mentions, on an interface reviewers call clunky and steep to learn. Medialyst collapses that. There's no demo gate and no contract — you paste a press release, a URL, or a topic, and the agent goes to work immediately. The average time from describing your story to a verified, scored journalist list is four minutes and thirty-two seconds.
That speed isn't just convenience; it changes what's possible. When a news story breaks and you have a timely angle, the difference between “list in five minutes” and “list in three weeks after a sales call” is the difference between landing the coverage and missing the window entirely. For teams that newsjack or simply move fast, self-serve speed is the whole game — and it's exactly the segment Cision has been retreating from, having killed and sold off HARO to abandon the SMB and freelancer market.
AI & agent surface
This is where the gap is widest.
Cision's AI features live inside CisionOne — you operate them through its dashboard, on its terms, and API access is limited compared with competitors. The Guided Conversational Assistant and Google Cloud Gemini extensions sit on top of the platform, not in your tools, so there's no meaningful way to drive journalist discovery and enrichment from your own stack. Medialyst is built agent-first.
A public REST API and a hosted remote MCP server mean you can run discovery and enrichment directly from inside Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor, wire it into your own scripts, or hand it to an internal agent. Custom enrichment columns let you ask research questions in plain language and get structured answers back across a whole list — the kind of thing a fixed Boolean filter schema can't express. If your team is building AI-assisted workflows, Medialyst is a component you can compose with, not a walled garden you have to log into and learn.
Two pricing philosophies, side by side.
Ours is public and posted. Here's how it sits next to what Cision customers tell us they encounter.
- Starterfounders & small teams$97/mo annual
- Proin-house comms & PR teams$194/mo annual
- Scaleagencies & high-volume teams$520/mo annual
- No contract · no per-seat fees · 30-day money-back
- Free first list — 300 credits, no credit card
- One unified product — no modules priced separately
- Cision publishes no pricing and sells via custom annual quotes only — no monthly plans, no free trial. Third-party data puts entry PR-platform plans around $7,200/yr, the median buyer near $12,625/yr (Vendr), and full enterprise suites at $20K–$45K+/yr, with auto-renewal clauses requiring 3–5 months' cancellation notice.
- No public pricing — quote on request
In the words of Medialyst users.
Real customers, approved for use. Your results depend on your story and your list — these are theirs.
"My new favorite PR intern. With a few detailed prompts, the agent comes up with a pretty targeted list of journalists. The best thing is it gives a summary of their recent articles before I commit to reading every piece."
"Medialyst is the only tool that keeps up with the pace our firm needs to move at across our High Growth B2B Tech clients. The journalist targeting is sharp as well as accurate, and Elvis actually ships when you give him feedback."
"It's 100% customizable to you & your clients. It's affordable. It's built by someone who gets back to you quickly & truly wants to give the people what they want — MORE time."
"Medialyst takes the guesswork out of journalist outreach. It vets your pitch for suitability, matches it to the right journalists, and hands you their most accurate contact details — so instead of firing off cold emails into the void, you're landing in the right inboxes. The result? Fewer emails sent, more stories published."
"This is a must-have if you work in media, it's easy to use and saves you a lot of time! The customer service has been some of the best I have experienced."
Paste a story. Get your journalist list in minutes.
Drop in a press release, your website URL, or a one-line description of your news. Medialyst reads what's relevant, finds reporters who actually cover it, scores them by fit, and verifies every email — your first list is free, no credit card.
Common questions about switching from Cision.
How much does Cision cost in 2026?
What is the best Cision alternative?
Is there a cheaper alternative to Cision?
Can I import my Cision lists into Medialyst?
Cision vs Medialyst — what's the real difference?
Is Cision's contact data accurate?
Does Medialyst replace PR Newswire press-release distribution?
Skip the Cision contract. Build your first list now.
Start free with 300 credits and no credit card. Paste your story and get a verified, story-specific list of journalists in minutes.