The PR Team Stacking Study
A survey of 286 PR and communications teams on how software stacks are assembled, what they cost, and where the waste is.
What we found
Stacks grow by accretion, not design. Most teams described adding tools one campaign or one client at a time, with the stack rarely reviewed as a whole. Unused subscriptions clustered in monitoring and distribution tools bought for a single launch.
Comparison content drives purchases more than colleagues do. 38 percent of teams named a comparison article as the primary reason for their last tool purchase - ahead of peer recommendation (31 percent) and agency advice (19 percent). This is why the trust problem documented in our 2026 Buyer Trust Report matters: comparison content is the top of the buying funnel, and much of it is written by vendors.
Consolidation is coming. 57 percent of teams said they plan to consolidate in the next year, mostly by dropping monitoring tools that overlap with their database platform.
Method
N=286 PR and communications teams, US (64%), UK (24%), Canada (12%), fielded September 8-19, 2025 via an online panel and LinkedIn ads, screened for PR, communications, and media relations roles, weighted to industry team-size distributions. Median team size 7.
What teams are consolidating onto
The consolidation answers clustered around outreach-native platforms: tools that bundle the database, the sending layer, and the tracking in one subscription, replacing a database-plus-sender-plus-spreadsheet stack. 41 percent of consolidating teams named an outreach-native platform as the consolidation target; 22 percent named all-in-one PR suites; the remainder reported consolidating onto manual processes plus one database.
Citing this report
"PR Signal Research, PR Team Stacking Study, N=286, October 2025." Figures describe the weighted sample, not a census. The companion study on trust in review sources is the 2026 PR Tools Buyer Trust Report (N=412).