Ranking · Media Monitoring & PR Monitoring

Media monitoring means a service reads newspapers, online portals, radio and television on your behalf and reports every piece that mentions your company. In German this is called Medienbeobachtung, and many vendor pages use both terms. For press offices in Germany, Austria and Switzerland the choice usually comes down to four questions: which countries does a service demonstrably cover, who handles the licence for the press review, what does it cost, and do people check the hits? Above you see the providers we track with every documented feature. Below you read what sits behind the columns. All details come from vendor pages, collected on 13 October 2026.

What is media monitoring and what does a clipping service deliver?

Media monitoring is the ongoing search for mentions of a company, a person or a topic in editorial media: newspapers, magazines, online portals, news agencies, radio and television. A clipping service delivers the pieces it finds as clippings, usually bundled into a daily press review.

According to its contract offer to the Austrian regulator RTR, APA-Comm delivers by 9 a.m. on working days, with print articles in full text and as full-page PDFs. pressrelations says on its own page that it sends the media review as HTML or PDF by email, as a podcast or through an interface into your intranet. According to its factsheet, Landau Media shows print articles in the original layout in its customer portal MediaAccount, with circulation and reach.

Online media monitoring, meaning a portal with search and alerts, is standard among the PR services: APA-Comm delivers in the PR-Desk, Landau Media through MediaAccount, ARGUS Data Insights through ARGUSintelligence and pressrelations through NewsRadar. Broadcast is searched by speech recognition: according to its page on extension modules, APA-Comm monitors more than 50 radio and TV stations with AI speech recognition.

A response evaluation for a single press release is something else. dpa / news aktuell says on its own page that it sells “ots-Monitoring by ARGUS” only as an add-on to distributing a press release through ots. For four weeks it evaluates where that release appeared, delivered technically by ARGUS Data Insights. According to the terms and conditions of news aktuell, this is not ongoing monitoring of your brand.

Media monitoring or social media monitoring: what do you need?

Media monitoring in the sense of Medienbeobachtung watches editorial media, while social media monitoring watches networks such as Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn. Google search blurs the line: for “media monitoring”, Google in Germany shows provider overviews for media monitoring mixed with guides to social media monitoring, according to Ahrefs (13 October 2026).

The providers are growing together too. According to its contract offer, APA-Comm covers German-language content from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and other networks, and pressrelations lists Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok among others for NewsRadar. In the other direction, listening platforms cover broadcast: Brandwatch lists nearly 3,000 TV and radio stations in more than 15 languages. Meltwater lists more than 400,000 newspapers, magazines and trade titles in its media monitoring and, according to the vendor, also listens to more than 20 networks. At Talkwalker, TV and radio come as a paid Broadcast add-on according to the Marketplace, and Sprinklr only listens to broadcast in the USA, Canada and the UK according to its help centre. At Hootsuite, print as well as TV and radio sit in the business intelligence product Lumen, only in the enterprise segment.

Your rule of thumb: if the response to your work comes mainly from newspapers and broadcast, you are in the right place. If it runs through comments and creators, look at the social media monitoring tools.

Which providers cover Germany, Austria and Switzerland?

How well a service covers Germany, Austria and Switzerland is documented by the providers in very different detail, and only a few give figures per country.

• Austria: According to its contract offer to RTR, APA-Comm covers all relevant Austrian print and online media, with around 2,000 print sources in total. From Germany and Switzerland it covers only selected leading media. According to its own announcement, pressrelations has had a company in Vienna since 2021, but gives no number of titles for Austria. The media panel of PMG MediaMeter includes Der Standard, Die Presse, Kurier and Kronen Zeitung among others, 57 Austrian sources by our count.
• Switzerland: ARGUS Data Insights lists more than 3,500 national print media, 45 radio and 25 TV stations and 4,000 Swiss online media for the package ARGUSflat Schweiz, and around 12,000 print media for ARGUSflat DACH. According to its product page, Media Focus from Zurich monitors Swiss media, without a number of titles. The PMG panel includes NZZ and Tages-Anzeiger among others, 74 Swiss sources by our count.
• Germany: In its 2022 factsheet, Landau Media lists more than 1,300 daily newspapers, more than 1,600 magazines and more than 2,300 trade magazines. PMG Presse-Monitor, a joint venture of German publishers, lists more than 1,300 daily newspapers and more than 3,000 digitally available publications. pressrelations lists 58,000 print media worldwide, without a breakdown by country. For ots-Monitoring, dpa / news aktuell lists 6,000 print and 8,800 online media in the “German-speaking region”, without naming countries.

The gaps are part of the picture. For Landau Media, Austria is not documented, and Switzerland only through a 2018 report by Horizont. Cision lists media monitoring in more than 190 countries, but neither a number of titles for DACH nor Austria or Switzerland explicitly. Meltwater, Brandwatch, Talkwalker, Sprinklr and Hootsuite give global source figures or none at all, but no DACH breakdown. In the demo, ask specifically about the titles that matter to you.

Press reviews and copyright: who handles the licence?

Whether you may distribute a press review with full articles internally is handled differently in the providers’ documents, and differently per country. What follows are their statements, not legal advice.

• Germany: PMG Presse-Monitor is the publishers’ own licensing body. According to PMG, in the MediaMonitor you acquire the usage rights per article automatically when you obtain it and pay a licence fee per article, depending on the medium and the number of recipients. According to its factsheet, Landau Media licenses press reviews through PMG and takes over the licence management; its terms require a PMG contract for electronic press reviews unless agreements with the rights holders exist. For ots-Monitoring from dpa / news aktuell, digital clippings come from the PMG portfolio according to the terms, and three people may use them.
• Austria: According to its page on extension modules, APA-Comm covers “all licence fees”. According to its own blog, pressrelations handles licences in Austria with the Association of Austrian Newspapers (VÖZ) and says the rights for internal distribution are included in the service.
• Switzerland: ARGUS Data Insights states in its terms that copyrights do not pass to the customer. You must obtain any further usage rights from the rights holders yourself, and delivered articles are for own use only.

On the press review from Cision Insights, Cision only writes that clippings are summarised in a way that keeps licence costs down, and names no licensing partner. The same question applies to press review software that you fill yourself. For Media Focus, Meltwater, Brandwatch, Talkwalker, Sprinklr and Hootsuite, no press review licence is documented on the pages we checked. Ask specifically and have the answer written into the contract.

What does media monitoring cost?

Only a few of the providers we track publish what media monitoring costs. As of 13 October 2026:

According to its product page, APA-Comm gives 2 months free with an annual contract; whether the prices are net is not stated there. At Landau Media, fixed prices apply only to the AI packages, while classic media monitoring and press reviews are available on request. At PMG, licence fees per article come on top according to the price page, an average base price of €4.42 for 1 to 10 readers. MediaMeter is priced per year with a 12-month term.

dpa / news aktuell gives no separate price for the monitoring; the only public price is the PR Basic package of ots distribution, image and monitoring at €1,175 per distribution, with no statement on net or gross. ARGUS Data Insights, pressrelations, Media Focus, Cision, Meltwater, Brandwatch, Talkwalker, Sprinklr and Hootsuite publish no prices. When it comes to media monitoring cost, only a fair comparison helps: get quotes for the same media set and the same number of hits.

Human or machine: who selects the hits?

At the classic PR services, people check the hits according to the providers, while on self-service and large platforms you sort with software. Landau Media writes in its factsheet that research experts check hits for relevance. ARGUS Data Insights has editors summarise the most relevant reports. pressrelations calls this human in the loop, selectable from fully automated to fully editorial. According to its own page, Cision compiles press reviews in Insights to editorial guidelines, with human expertise and AI. At APA-Comm, editorial preparation with abstracts and translations is an extension module. For Media Focus, human selection is not explicitly described. Landau Media, ARGUS Data Insights, pressrelations and APA-Comm still use AI according to their own pages, for example for summaries and translations of the hits.

PMG Presse-Monitor is self-service: in the MediaHub you select the articles yourself. Media monitoring tools such as Meltwater or Brandwatch describe no editorial selection. That works if you filter with search logic anyway. If you need a press review for management every morning, human preselection saves you the sorting.

Data protection: where is the data stored?

Only a few providers state where a media monitoring service stores its data. According to its privacy policy, ARGUS Data Insights runs its database and login in the Azure region Switzerland North, but for AI functions also in the USA where technically necessary. According to its about page, pressrelations processes customer data in Germany, and the NewsRadar privacy policy names the US service Storylane. According to Hootsuite’s subprocessor list, Talkwalker stores data at Hetzner in Germany and also uses services in Europe and the USA. Meltwater names AWS in Ireland and Germany, with other parts partly outside the EU. According to its Trust Center, Hootsuite stores data on AWS in the USA, and Sprinklr also uses the USA unless agreed otherwise. According to its Data Processing Addendum, Cision governs transfers with standard contractual clauses, without a location. APA-Comm is a processor under Art. 28 GDPR, and PMG sees itself as controller according to its customer privacy notice; neither names a server location. Landau Media, Media Focus and dpa / news aktuell publish no location for their monitoring products. According to its own page, pressrelations is certified to CISIS12. ARGUS Data Insights has not published a data processing agreement for media monitoring customers. Request the data processing agreement before you sign.

How the PR features and the score relate

The table of PR features above complements the score but does not (yet) feed into it. The monitoring score under methodology v1.4 counts only documented checkpoints for sources, analysis, alerts, reporting, data protection, German language and AI connectivity. Whether a service delivers a licensed press review or people select the hits does not count there. For press offices, exactly these columns are often decisive. Read both together: the score shows the breadth of documented functions, the table shows whether a service works as a press review tool for you. Missing details never count as fulfilled in the score, and below 70% documented checkpoints we mark a score as provisional. How we count is explained in the methodology.