A free Cision alternative will not give you a media database or a newswire. What it can give you is the part most small teams wanted in the first place: a ping when someone mentions your project, your studio or your game. Cision itself has no public price; its pricing page asks for your company, job title and phone number so an expert can call you. If that is not your style, here is what you can get for nothing, or close to it, without talking to sales.
What free can and cannot do
Cision's CisionOne bundles monitoring, reports, journalist outreach and social listening. The press side, sending releases and finding reporters, has no real free substitute. Monitoring is different. You can watch the web for your name at no cost, and pay a few dollars more for something smarter.
Option 1: AyeWatch Free Preview, then $9
AyeWatch lets you describe what you want to follow in a normal sentence, like "reviews or forum threads about our puzzle game, not the board game with the same name". Its AI judges each new item by meaning and only alerts you when one fits, with a short summary.
The Free Preview needs no credit card. It gives three lifetime runs across up to three topics, at a daily or slower pace, and the runs do not renew, so treat it as a test drive. If it earns its place, Pro is $9 a month with hourly checks, and you can cancel any time because there are no contracts.
What it can watch:
- News, blogs, forums and other sites, from more than a billion sources
- A specific page, such as a store listing or a rival's update notes
- Subreddits, YouTube channels, X searches, TikTok profiles, Instagram hashtags and LinkedIn posts
Alerts land in a feed and as push notifications on iPhone and Android on every plan, including the preview.
Option 2: Talkwalker Alerts, free for good
Talkwalker Alerts costs nothing and does not expire. You enter keywords and an email address, pick news, X, blogs or forums, choose from 22 languages and set how often you hear back, down to "as it happens". It supports Boolean operators and can also deliver by RSS or Slack.
The catch: it matches words, not meaning, and it has no analytics. If your project shares a name with something popular, expect noise.
Option 3: Awario's trial
Awario offers a free trial of its Starter plan: 3 alerts and up to 30,000 mentions. After that, Starter costs $29 a month billed yearly or $49 monthly. It is a real listening tool with Boolean search and PDF reports, but the free part is a trial, not a plan.
Quick comparison
| Free part | First paid step | Matches by | |
|---|---|---|---|
| AyeWatch | 3 runs, up to 3 topics, no card | $9/mo, hourly | Meaning |
| Talkwalker Alerts | Free, no end date | None | Keywords |
| Awario | Starter trial | $29/mo yearly | Keywords |
| Cision | No public free plan | Price by request | Not published |
A tip for the free preview
Since the preview has only three runs, spend them on the topics where a missed mention would hurt the most: your project's name, your biggest rival and one place your players gather, such as a subreddit.
Which one should you start with
If you want alerts that already filter out the noise, start with the AyeWatch preview, and see what it turns up on your three most important topics. Keep Talkwalker Alerts running beside it if you like a free safety net.
Pick Cision only if you need what it is built for: sending press releases through PR Newswire and reaching reporters from its database of more than 500,000 journalists and outlets. For a small team that just wants to know when people talk about its work, the AyeWatch signup is a few clicks and no phone call.