Developers asked to "wire up Cision alerts" often find the first step is a sales conversation. If you need a Cision alternative with an API you can call today, AyeWatch has a public REST API and signed webhooks on every paid plan, starting at $9 a month. This piece compares the two from the side of the person who has to build the integration.
The short version
AyeWatch is the better pick when the goal is getting monitoring events into your own systems: a Slack channel, an internal dashboard, a data pipeline or an AI agent. Cision is the better pick when the people consuming the output are PR staff who also need a journalist database and release distribution.
How you get access
| AyeWatch | Cision | |
|---|---|---|
| Signup | Self-serve, email or Google | Request form, then an expert contacts you |
| Published price | Free Preview, then from $9/mo | None on the site |
| API | REST API on every paid plan | Not documented publicly; ask sales |
| Webhooks | HMAC-SHA256 signed | Not documented publicly |
| Contract | None, cancel any time | Not stated on the site |
AyeWatch's pricing page lists the plans. Cision's site lists products and a "Request Pricing" form, so anything about its API terms comes from that conversation, not from a page you can read first.
What the AyeWatch API does
According to AyeWatch's own documentation in its FAQ, the REST API lets you create, list, update and delete topics programmatically. When a topic finds something, AyeWatch sends a signed topic.update webhook event that already contains an AI-written summary, so your receiver gets a readable message instead of a raw page dump.
That changes what you have to build:
- No polling loop. Events arrive by webhook when there is news.
- No keyword post-filter. Topics are written in plain English and judged by meaning, so you are not writing your own relevance scoring on top.
- No summarizer. The summary comes with the event.
- Verifiable payloads. Check the HMAC signature before you trust the body.
Topics can be created from code, so a product that adds a customer can also add a monitor for that customer's name, and remove it later.
What it can monitor
One API covers three kinds of source:
- Internet topics across more than a billion sources, including news, blogs, forums, government pages and academic publications.
- Specific webpages, for example a competitor's changelog, a pricing page or a regulator's notice board.
- Social accounts and searches on X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok, each with a plain-English filter.
Speed and routing
Auto mode adjusts each topic's frequency on its own, faster while a story is moving and slower when it is quiet. If you need a fixed pace, set a Custom interval instead.
Delivery is chosen per topic. Alongside the API and webhooks, paid plans can send to email, a daily digest, Slack and Discord, and every plan gets the in-app feed and push notifications on iOS and Android.
What Cision offers instead
Cision's strength is breadth for PR teams. CisionOne monitors print, online, TV, radio, social, podcasts and magazines across more than 190 countries and 96 languages, with live Mention Streams, reports and a database of more than 500,000 journalists and outlets. Releases go out through PR Newswire, a Cision brand. If your stakeholders need broadcast clips and media lists, that is a different job from piping web events into code.
Cost of the integration itself
With AyeWatch, the API comes with the plan, so the only extra cost is your own time. Paid plans start at $9 a month, so a small team can test the integration cheaply. With Cision, the cost of API access is part of the quote, so ask about it early.
A practical test
Start on the AyeWatch Free Preview, which needs no card, to check that topics catch what you expect. Then move to a paid plan to get the API key and point a webhook at a test endpoint. Verify the signature, log a few events and compare them with what your team saw in Cision that week. The longer AyeWatch write-up on Cision alternatives covers the non-developer side if you need to brief anyone else.
If the events are what your team needs, you have your integration. If they keep asking for journalist contacts and broadcast monitoring, keep Cision for them and use AyeWatch where code is the consumer.