vs
Connectively alternative · 2026Connectively sends you journalist queries. Medialyst finds the reporters already writing your story.
Connectively was the name Cision gave HARO when it rebranded the service in March 2024, before shutting it down on December 9, 2024.
FreeMonitor journalist requests from HARO, Connectively, LinkedIn & more with an AI agentFree: let an agent watch journalist requests alongside Connectively.
Connect one authenticated MCP feed to Claude, ChatGPT, or another compatible agent. It checks six included request channels every hour, uses zero Medialyst credits, and keeps every response behind human review.
- $0
- 0 credits
- Checks every hour
- Human review before anything sends
All six sources included free
Built by an AI engineer and a working publicist.
Medialyst's co-founders bring both halves of the job into the room: Elvis brings the standard he held at Google, and Carly brings the standard her own clients pay for.


Co-founder
Runs Notably, a boutique PR agency serving 25+ clients, and pitches journalists for a living.
The proof is public. Carly grades our real media lists, and we publish every grade, starting with her first: F, 27.9/100 (latest: B, 81.1). As far as we know, Medialyst is the only AI PR tool that publishes a public, recurring quality benchmark.
The honest comparison.
Pulled from public Connectively documentation, customer reviews, and our own product. We update this page when either side ships something new.
| Capability | Medialyst | Connectively |
|---|---|---|
| Finding the right journalist | ||
| Find journalists for this story | ✓ Story-specific relevance scoring | ✕ — you answer queries the crowd also sees |
| Understand a journalist's beat | ✓ Reads past articles + recent coverage | ~ AI co-pilot suggests queries; no per-story scoring |
| Analyze past writing | ✓ Grounded in actual articles | ✕ — no per-journalist article reading |
| Per-journalist pitch angles | ✓ Personalized angles + pitch drafts | ~ AI co-pilot drafts; same crowd sees the request |
| Data freshness | ✓ Live news article search in real time | ~ Real-time query feed + AI co-pilot |
| Refine a list with natural language | ✓ “Remove anyone inactive in 6 months” | ✕ Not available |
| Find more like top performers | ✓ “Find 20 more like the top 5” | ✕ Not available |
| Add custom enrichment columns | ✓ “Research if they use affiliate links” | ✕ Not available |
| Pitching & sending | ||
| Email verification | ✓ Multi-step verification waterfall | ~ Pangram AI-detection on inbound pitches, not contact verification |
| Send from one place | ✓ Built-in sending | ✕ — reply through the platform, no domain send |
| Pricing & setup | ||
| Time to first pitch | ✓ Minutes | ~ Hours to days — wait for a relevant query |
| Free trial | ✓ First list free | ~ Paid platform (trial) |
| Contract | ✓ None — cancel anytime | ~ None — but reactive-only |
| Price | ✓ from $149/mo | ~ Paid; tiers unverified during relaunch |
| Agent-native workflows | ||
| API access | ✓ Public REST API | ✕ Not available |
| 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 | ✕ Not available |
Find your journalists now. No demo. No contract. No credit card.
Start in seconds and see live journalist matches for your first pitch.
Why people switch from Connectively.
The request feed and proactive discovery, together
Featured is building Connectively into an AI PR co-pilot on top of its journalist-request feed. Medialyst gives you both sides: one hosted MCP connection exposes authorized Connectively records alongside HARO, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, MentionMatch, and Substack, free and read-only, then adds proactive discovery of the journalists already covering your story. You can answer a request when one fits and reach out first when none has been posted.
GlobeNewswire — Featured.com revives Connectively, launches AI co-pilot ↗An AI layer bolted onto a crowd queue
Connectively's co-pilot is built on top of the same reactive request feed: a journalist posts a query, it goes to everyone, and you pitch alongside the crowd — now with AI help to write faster. Medialyst is AI-native, not AI-bolted-on. It doesn't make you a faster contestant in a public queue; it researches the right journalists for your specific story so you reach out first, on your own terms.
AZBigMedia — Connectively journalist request platform ↗AI spam is exactly what killed Connectively the first time
When Cision ran Connectively, AI-generated responses flooded every query, fake "experts" with AI bios piled in, and journalists couldn't find real sources — "every other pitch seemed like nothing more than lazy AI-generated nonsense from someone who definitely wasn't an expert." Adding an AI co-pilot that helps everyone pitch faster is a curious answer to a problem AI created. Medialyst sidesteps the dynamic entirely: it researches the right journalists for your story so the pitch belongs there in the first place.
Ahrefs — HARO has been dead for a while ↗Pricing that keeps changing mid-relaunch
Connectively relaunched as a paid platform on June 2, 2026, and its tiers are still unsettled — one source cites $149/mo, another $49/mo, and featured.com/pricing now redirects to connectively.us. Medialyst's pricing is public and stable: $149/mo Starter, $299 Pro, $800 Scale, no contract, a 14-day money-back guarantee, and a free first list, so you'll know what you pay before you start.
GlobeNewswire — Featured.com revives Connectively (paid platform) ↗
Where each one wins.
Where Medialyst wins
Built by AI practitioners — AI-native to the core
Medialyst is built by people who actually build AI, led by an AI engineer who spent 8 years at Google working on AI systems, not a media marketplace bolting a co-pilot onto a legacy product. It's AI-native by design: it analyzes every candidate journalist in parallel, so you get the depth of reading each reporter's recent work at the speed of a single search. Fast and deep, instead of one at the cost of the other.
Built around the right journalist
The core of Medialyst is finding the right journalist for your story: relevance grounded in real recent coverage, a fit score with the reason behind it, and a verified contact. Around that sit Radar for spotting newsjacking moments, a journalist-request feed, a PR calendar, Journalist Moves, and pitch analytics, all aimed at getting the right pitch to the right reporter.
Open-source newsjack.sh — a full PR team any agent can run
We open-sourced newsjack.sh, a free PR skill set any AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor) can load to research angles, find journalists, and draft pitches like a full PR team. Paired with our public REST API and hosted MCP server, it's a level of openness the incumbents are still playing catch-up to — and a marker of where PR tooling is heading, not where it's been.
Proactive discovery, not a public queue
Instead of waiting for a journalist to post a query the whole crowd can see, Medialyst finds your own newsjacking opportunities from live news and lets you pitch any number of journalists you choose — each one scored by fit for your story, grounded in their actual recent coverage. Every email it delivers was validated within the last 14 days or is re-checked when you build the list.
Right-priced, public, and yours to keep
Starter is $149/mo, Pro $299, Scale $800 — published, monthly, no contract, no per-seat fees, a 14-day money-back guarantee, and your first list is free (100 credits, no card). Already have a media list or an old HARO export? Upload it and the agent re-verifies and re-scores every contact — so you start from what you've already got, not an empty query feed.
Where Connectively wins
A live feed of inbound journalist demand
Connectively's platform gives you a real-time feed of journalist requests with search and filter, AI co-pilot workflows for bylined articles, podcasts, speaking engagements and awards, and early access to queries. When a journalist is actively asking for sources on your exact topic, that explicit, opted-in demand is a genuinely useful signal a proactive tool has to find for itself.
AZBigMedia — Connectively journalist request platform ↗Breadth across multiple PR verticals
If you want one login that touches journalist quotes, podcast bookings, speaking slots, and awards, Connectively's breadth is real. Medialyst is built around journalists: discovery, outreach, Radar news monitoring, a journalist-request feed, and a PR calendar. Podcast bookings, speaking slots, and awards aren't part of it today.
Reach into publisher partnerships
Featured/Connectively says it supports 100,000 users and helps 2,500 publishers fill content gaps, connecting an expert with a publisher "every six seconds." If your goal is volume of low-effort quote placements across that publisher network, the marketplace is built for exactly that throughput.
GlobeNewswire — Featured.com revives Connectively ↗
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 total
Connectivelyhours–daysThree places the difference shows up.
01Database quality
Connectively isn't a journalist database — it's a request marketplace with an AI co-pilot on top, and its "data" is whatever queries journalists choose to post.
That's a different unit of value than a researched contact: you don't get a list of the right reporters for your story, you get a stream of whatever happened to be asked today, broadcast to everyone at once. The quality problem the model is famous for is AI spam — "every other pitch seemed like nothing more than lazy AI-generated nonsense" — which is why HARO had to add Pangram AI-detection so journalists could filter responses out. Medialyst takes a different stance. Rather than relying on a feed of inbound requests, it picks journalists from what they published recently for your story and confirms the beat from their actual bylines.
It keeps its own journalist database too, but every email it delivers was validated within the last 14 days or is re-checked when you build the list, and you pay 1 credit only when a verified email is delivered. It works globally across major online news sources and many trade publications. Coverage is strongest where articles and bylines are published online; hyper-local, print-only and some regional trade sources can be thinner. The unit of value is a researched contact for your specific story, not a public query you're racing the crowd to answer.
02Speed
On a query marketplace, "speed" means how fast you can react once a relevant request appears — and that's the catch: if no journalist posts a query that fits, there's nothing to react to, AI co-pilot or not.
Medialyst removes the waiting entirely. You paste a press release, a URL, or a topic, and the agent goes to work immediately — searching live news in real time and building a verified, scored journalist list without anyone needing to ask for sources first. A verified, scored journalist list takes minutes.
It's that fast because it's genuinely AI-native: built by AI practitioners, led by an AI engineer who spent 8 years at Google working on AI systems, it researches every candidate journalist in parallel rather than one after another, so depth and speed arrive together instead of trading off. That matters most for newsjacking: when a story breaks and you have a timely angle, you find the reporters already covering it and reach out, while the window is open.
03AI & agent surface
Connectively is something you log into and use through its own response workflow.
Medialyst is agent-native: one hosted MCP connection exposes authorized Connectively records (formerly Featured) alongside HARO, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, MentionMatch, and Substack — all six platforms free — then adds proactive journalist discovery and enrichment.
The request feed is read-only, costs zero credits, and does not promise every record from any network; a human still reviews and submits each response through the source platform.
Two pricing philosophies, side by side.
Ours is public and posted. Here's how it sits next to Connectively's own published pricing page and what named third parties report.
- 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 · cancel anytime · 14-day money-back guarantee
- Free first list — 100 credits, no credit card
- One unified product — no modules priced separately
- Connectively relaunched June 2, 2026 as a paid platform; exact tiers are unverified during the relaunch — one source cites $149/mo for Pro, another $49/mo — and featured.com/pricing now redirects to connectively.us. The free HARO newsletter is a separate product. Verify at connectively.us/pricing.
- No public pricing — quote on request
In the words of Medialyst users.
Real customers, approved for use. Your results depend on your story and your list — these are theirs.
"Then recently I stumbled upon Elvis Sun's agentic PR tool Medialyst — 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."

"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."

"What came back was a working list with real journalists, current coverage, and contact information I could use the same day. No cross-referencing. No digging through three different tabs. One prompt and I was pitching."

"Medialyst makes it super easy to narrow down and create dedicated PR lists to reach out to the journalists that actually want to hear what you have to say. The timeline from chatting to the agent about what you have to promote to actually launching the campaign goes down to mere 1-2 hours instead of days worth of research and prospecting."

"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."

"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."

"The big media database platforms are built for agencies with full teams and retainers to match. For a boutique practice like mine, the economics just do not work. Medialyst fits the model. Beyond contact discovery, it helps me stay on top of what reporters are actually covering: the beats, the patterns, the recent angles. That is the real work of pitching well these days. Spray and pray is over, and Medialyst is built for how modern media relations actually works, at a price point that makes sense for the way I operate."

"This new company is a terrific idea—and helps PR people in ways they didn't know they needed it. The team really 'gets' this business and so many businesses just don't. Jump in. The agents are ready!"

"I needed a tool built for speed: finding the journalists who are on a story right now, in the moment, while it's still news. For how fast our world moves, this service is genuinely a big deal."

"I love Medialyst. It follows the workflow I already use, which, if I may say so myself, is the right workflow. I don't keep old Excel documents full of old emails and blast things to people. I hate the spray and pray. I like to make sure reporters are writing about the things I'm talking about, and to find new people who are. Muck Rack, Cision, all of those are basically very expensive static databases. I already know the major trade reporters. What Medialyst has helped me uncover are the people at Fast Company and The Wall Street Journal who cover packaging, and the freelancers I can get on the radar of. Muck Rack just doesn't help with that. Now when I tell Claude 'here's the person,' it pulls them through Medialyst, onto my list there, and starts gathering information about them. I haven't gotten a bounced email yet. I'd rather send a smaller list I can defend. And I'm never afraid to share it with clients, because it has everything in there. It proves its worth. My first job, as an intern, was photocopying Bacon's books into an Excel database every year. So I'm acutely aware of how hard it is to keep track of all this. This is how I would approach it myself."

"As most of us in the PR business know, media database services can be expensive, cumbersome, and too often imperfect. We pay a premium for access to AI and out-of-the-box features. We still spend significant time verifying whether a journalist is still covering the same beat, whether contact information is current, whether a reporter is truly relevant to a story, and whether outreach is actually reaching the right person. And that is only one part of the problem. Media relations itself has become increasingly fragmented. Research happens in one place, list building in another, monitoring somewhere else, and outreach through email —with PR teams constantly stitching the workflow together manually. This can leave teams overwhelmed and unsure how efficient they are. At Trier and Company, we’re excited to endorse Medialyst because it is tackling that workflow from a different direction - with AI top of mind. It's 'pitch-driven' in real time with bona fide speaking points. It's an entirely new experience. … It’s time for a change — and Medialyst is building in exactly the right direction. We’re pleased to support the team - Elvis Sun and Carly Martinetti. Excited to see where they take it from here. Count us in!"

"This is awesome and I just want to say I LOVE Medialyst! It’s well into my workflow. Landed an AP and WashPo interview today for a newsjack for two different clients. Cut down HOURS of work and enabled me to move so quickly! What a great tool!"

Common questions about switching from Connectively.
What is Connectively?
Is Connectively an AI PR agent?
Connectively vs Medialyst — what's the difference?
How much does Connectively cost?
What's the difference between HARO and Connectively?
Can I import my Connectively or HARO contacts into Medialyst?
Stop waiting for the request. Find your journalists now.
Paste a press release, your website URL, or a one-line description of your news. Medialyst finds reporters who actually cover it, scores them by fit, and checks every email before you get it.