Magic Pitch auto-pitches in your name. Medialyst is built for your reputation.
Magic Pitch is built around automatic pitching — the AI drafts and sends outreach for you. But the send is the part you shouldn't automate: journalists don't want AI-generated auto-pitches, and getting flagged for spammy automation damages your brand. Medialyst automates the research and hands you a clean, scored list — you decide what goes out. Magic Pitch automates the part you shouldn't automate; Medialyst automates the part you should.
The honest comparison.
Pulled from public Magic Pitch documentation, customer reviews, and our own product. We update this page when either side ships something new.
| Capability | Medialyst | Magic Pitch |
|---|---|---|
| Finding the right journalist | ||
| Find journalists for this story | ✓ Story-specific relevance scoring | ~ DB lookup by topic; podcast-first, journalists added recently |
| Understand a journalist's beat | ✓ Reads past articles + recent coverage | ~ Recent episode/article metadata reference line |
| Analyze past writing | ✓ Grounded in actual articles | ✕ — references one recent item, no per-article analysis |
| Per-journalist pitch angles | ✓ Personalized angles + pitch drafts | ~ AI auto-drafts the pitch from a writing sample |
| Data freshness | ✓ Live news article search in real time | ~ Daily-updated DB; journalist data decays faster |
| Refine a list with natural language | ✓ “Remove anyone inactive in 6 months” | ✕ — fixed two-knob personalization, no NL refinement |
| Find more like top performers | ✓ “Find 20 more like the top 5” | ✕ Not available |
| Add custom enrichment columns | ✓ “Research if they use affiliate links” | ✕ — no user-defined enrichment columns |
| Pitching & sending | ||
| Email verification | ✓ Multi-step verification waterfall | ~ “Verified” contacts that reviewers report bouncing |
| Send + track from one place | ✓ Built-in send + tracking | ~ Auto-send from your inbox + follow-ups + tracking |
| Pricing & setup | ||
| Time to first pitch | ✓ Minutes | ~ Minutes to send, but you're auto-pitching |
| Free trial | ✓ First list free | ~ $29 / 14-day trial of Standard |
| Contract | ✓ None — cancel anytime | ~ No long-term commitment (monthly/quarterly/annual) |
| Price | ✓ from $149/mo | ~ $166 / $499 / $999 per month |
| Agent-native workflows | ||
| API access | ✓ Public REST API | ~ API on Pro ($999/mo) only |
| 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 | ~ Excel export out; no CSV re-enrichment in |
Three reasons teams switch.
We're not trying to out-database Magic Pitch. 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 Magic Pitch.
Automation puts your reputation on the line
Magic Pitch's core loop is automatic pitching — the AI drafts and sends from your inbox, with a daily cap (20/day on Standard) as the main guardrail. For journalist outreach, that's the exact thing reporters resent. A Salesforge teardown found that despite “verified” contact claims, real-world testing showed significant bounce rates that damage sender reputation — and the auto-send architecture shifts that reputation risk onto you. Medialyst never mass-blasts: it researches the list and hands it back so a human decides what gets sent.
Salesforge — PodPitch teardown ↗The AI personalization is two knobs deep
Magic Pitch's personalization surface is exactly a writing-style sample plus a recent-episode or recent-article reference line — a template with two fill-in-the-blank slots. There are no editable prompts, no user-chosen signals, and no custom data sources. Medialyst reads each journalist's actual recent articles, scores them 0–100 for fit to your specific story, and lets you ask for research a fixed template can't express — in plain language, across the whole list.
magicpitch.com — how it works ↗“Verified” emails that bounce
Journalist data decays faster than podcast-host data, and reviewers flag that Magic Pitch's “verified” contacts still bounce in real-world testing — which, on an auto-send setup, quietly burns your sender reputation. Medialyst verifies every email in real time before it's delivered to you, so the list you receive was checked for the pitch you're sending today rather than served from a stale row.
Salesforge — “verified contacts that bounce” ↗No third-party reviews to lean on
Magic Pitch / PodPitch has essentially zero reviews on G2, Capterra, ProductHunt, Slashdot, or SourceForge — the only ratings are self-reported on its own site. If you're vetting a tool that will pitch in your name, the absence of independent feedback is its own risk. Medialyst publishes named PR-practitioner testimonials and lets you build your first list free before committing anything.
Slashdot — PodPitch (0 reviews) ↗Where Magic Pitch wins.
No tool is best at everything. Here's where Magic Pitch is genuinely strong — so you can decide honestly.
High-volume podcast booking
Podcast outreach has different norms than journalist outreach — hosts genuinely want a steady stream of qualified guests, and automated, capped pitching fits that motion well. Magic Pitch claims it books roughly 4–5% of all weekly English-speaking podcast interviews off a 3.85M-podcast database with daily-updated contacts. For booking yourself onto podcasts at volume, that's a real, tuned engine.
A tuned automated-sequencing engine
Magic Pitch is built for hands-off volume: auto follow-ups, daily send caps, open/reply tracking, and inactive-contact auto-removal — all sent through your own Gmail / Outlook / IMAP so you dodge the deliverability cliff of bulk relays. For a team that has decided high-throughput automated sequencing is the motion it wants, that's a coherent end-to-end machine. (Medialyst sends from your own domain too, but it's built for tailored, lower-volume pitching, not sequenced blasts.)
Agency-friendly, no per-seat billing
Magic Pitch offers unlimited team seats with no per-seat billing and unbranded Excel export for agency clients, and it ships fast for a small bootstrapped team — journalists and newsletters were added in roughly twelve months. For an agency that wants one tool to book podcasts across many clients, that packaging is attractive.
Where Medialyst pulls ahead.
The flip side: here's where Medialyst is the stronger choice over Magic Pitch for finding and pitching the right journalists.
Automate the research, not the send
Medialyst's whole stance is that reputation is the product. It does the heavy research — reading articles, scoring fit, verifying emails — and hands you a clean list. You stay in control of what gets pitched, so you never get flagged for spraying AI-generated auto-pitches into reporters' inboxes. No mass-blast, ever.
Grounded in each journalist's actual writing
Instead of a two-knob template, Medialyst reads hundreds of articles relevant to your announcement, scores reporters 0–100 by fit, and tells you why each one would write the story — grounded in their real recent coverage, not a single “I loved your recent piece” reference line.
Live enrichment with real-time email verification
Coverage is global across outlets, journalists, and beats, enriched live in real time rather than served from a profile that's drifting out of date. Every email is verified in real time before it reaches you — the antidote to “verified” contacts that bounce.
Custom enrichment a fixed template can't express
Define enrichment columns in plain language — “research if they use affiliate links and which platform,” or “has this reporter covered seed-stage fintech in the last six months?” Magic Pitch's fixed personalization simply can't ask those questions; Medialyst answers them across a whole list.
Agent-native and switch-in-one-upload
A public REST API and a hosted remote MCP server let you run Medialyst directly inside Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor. Already have a list of contacts? Upload the CSV and the agent takes it from there — re-verifying and re-scoring every row against your story.
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 totalMagic Pitchhours–daysThree places the difference shows up.
Database quality
85M shows with daily-updated, “verified” contact info — genuinely strong on the podcast side, where host data is stable and the contact is often a booking address.
The journalist side is newer and thinner. com/data page doesn't even mention journalists, and the headline “1 billion professional profiles” almost certainly layers a third-party aggregator rather than a proprietary build. The practical problem is decay: journalist contact data goes stale far faster than podcast-host data, and a Salesforge teardown found “verified” contacts still bouncing in real-world testing — which quietly damages sender reputation when you're auto-sending. 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 from a quarterly refresh. For journalist outreach specifically, that's the difference between a list that bounces in your name and one that was built and checked for the pitch you're sending today.
Speed
Magic Pitch is fast to send — paste a topic, let the AI draft from your writing sample and a recent-episode reference line, and pitches go out of your own inbox, capped at a daily limit.
But speed-to-send isn't the same as speed-to-a-good-list, and on the journalist side the auto-send is the risk: you're moving fast in a direction that can burn your reputation. Medialyst is fast where it's safe to be fast. There's no demo gate and no contract — paste a press release, a URL, or a topic and the agent goes to work immediately, with the average time from describing your story to a verified, scored journalist list at four minutes and thirty-two seconds.
That's fast enough to newsjack a breaking story, but the output is a list you review, not a blast that already left. When a window is open, “a clean, fit-scored list in five minutes that you control” beats “auto-pitches already sent” precisely because you can still decide who deserves the email — and who would flag you as spam.
AI & agent surface
Magic Pitch's AI lives inside Magic Pitch.
You operate it through its dashboard on its terms, the personalization is a fixed two-knob template you can't reprogram, and API access is reserved for the Pro tier at $999/mo. There's no meaningful way to compose it into your own workflows below that. Medialyst is built agent-first on every plan. A public REST API and a hosted remote MCP server mean you can run journalist 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 two-slot template can't express. And because the workflow ends in a list rather than an automatic send, you can fold Medialyst into a pipeline where a human, or your own review step, signs off before anything goes out. If your team is building AI-assisted PR workflows, Medialyst is a component you compose with — not a walled auto-pitcher you log into.
Two pricing philosophies, side by side.
Ours is public and posted. Here's how it sits next to what Magic Pitch 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
- Magic Pitch publishes three monthly tiers — Lite $166, Standard $499, Pro $999 — with quarterly and annual options and no long-term commitment, plus a $29 14-day trial of Standard. Higher tiers gate journalist access, a success manager, and API.
- Pricing published online
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 Magic Pitch.
How much does Magic Pitch cost in 2026?
What is the best Magic Pitch alternative?
Is automatic pitching safe for PR?
Magic Pitch vs Medialyst — what's the difference?
Does Magic Pitch have real journalist data?
Can I move my Magic Pitch contacts into Medialyst?
Automate the research, not your reputation. Build your list.
Start free with 300 credits and no credit card. Paste your story and get a verified, story-specific list of journalists in minutes.