Honeyjar charges $250 a seat. Medialyst gives you unlimited seats for $149/mo.
Honeyjar is a per-seat AI workspace for all of comms. Medialyst is a per-list research agent for the one step that decides whether a pitch lands.
The honest comparison.
Pulled from public Honeyjar documentation, customer reviews, and our own product. We update this page when either side ships something new.
| Capability | Medialyst | Honeyjar |
|---|---|---|
| Finding the right journalist | ||
| Find journalists for this story | ✓ Story-specific relevance scoring | ~ Smart Media Lists built from the pitch, with a reason each reporter was selected |
| Understand a journalist's beat | ✓ Reads past articles + recent coverage | ~ Reporter background + tips on how to approach them |
| Analyze past writing | ✓ Grounded in actual articles | ~ Not documented — describes “continuously updated media intelligence” |
| Per-journalist pitch angles | ✓ Personalized angles + pitch drafts | ~ Pitch drafting in the PR Content Studio; per-reporter angles not documented |
| Data freshness | ✓ Live news article search in real time | ~ Licensed media data (LexisNexis, per Media Copilot) + news, social and events feeds |
| Refine a list with natural language | ✓ “Remove anyone inactive in 6 months” | ~ Free-form agent chat; list-refinement commands not documented |
| Find more like top performers | ✓ “Find 20 more like the top 5” | ~ Not documented |
| Add custom enrichment columns | ✓ “Research if they use affiliate links” | ~ Custom agents inside the workspace; no user-defined enrichment columns documented |
| Pitching & sending | ||
| Email verification | ✓ Multi-step verification waterfall | ~ Contact details surfaced; verification method not published |
| Send from one place | ✓ Built-in sending | ~ Not documented — founders say agents can't send pitches from the platform |
| Pricing & setup | ||
| Time to first pitch | ✓ Minutes | ~ Guided “confirmation steps” before each output; no time claim published |
| Free trial | ✓ First list free | ~ 7-day free trial via Early Access checkout |
| Contract | ✓ None — cancel anytime | ~ Monthly or annual; “No annual contract” on the monthly plan |
| Price | ✓ from $149/mo | ~ $250/user/mo, or $175/user/mo billed annually ($2,100/user/yr) |
| Agent-native workflows | ||
| API access | ✓ Public REST API | ✕ — none published |
| Remote MCP support | ✓ Hosted remote MCP server | ✕ — none published |
| Agent-native workflows | ✓ Usable directly inside Claude, ChatGPT & Cursor | ✕ — agents run inside Honeyjar only |
| CSV import / re-enrichment from competitor exports | ✓ Upload any CSV — the agent re-verifies & re-scores | ~ Not documented |
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Why people switch from Honeyjar.
You pay per seat before you know if the lists are good
Honeyjar's only self-serve plan is Professional at $250 per user per month, or $175 per user per month billed annually — $2,100 per user per year — behind a 7-day trial. Enterprise is “Talk to Sales.” Every additional teammate who needs to build or review a list is another seat. Medialyst has no per-seat fees on any plan: teams share one workspace, you pay for lists built, and the first 100 credits are free with no credit card.
honeyjar.ai/pricing — Early Access Pricing ↗It is still Early Access — by their own description
Honeyjar's pricing page says the product “is currently available through a limited Early Access Program,” and the homepage CTA leads to a waitlist: “Join the waitlist to get access as slots open.” On the Smart In Public podcast (19 March 2026) the founders described it as “early product. It's early access. Things break.” As of 1 September 2026 there are no third-party reviews on Slashdot. Medialyst is self-serve today, with named practitioner testimonials and a free first list, so you can judge the output before paying anything.
honeyjar.ai/earlyaccess — waitlist ↗The media-list step is the least documented part of the product
Honeyjar's public materials describe Smart Media Lists that “surface journalists, podcasts, and Substacks” and build targeted lists, but publish no numbers on email find rate, how contacts are verified, or how fresh the underlying data is. Its own blog argues that models recommending reporters from training-data memory get beats and employers wrong. Medialyst's answer to that problem is structural: it searches live news articles at build time, scores each journalist 0–100 for fit to your specific story, and verifies every email in real time before you see it.
Honeyjar blog — “Why LLMs Have a Massive Crush on Kyle Wiggers” ↗No API, no MCP — the agent lives in their tab
Honeyjar's stated goal is to be “the tab you open when you do your comms work.” Its agents run inside the Honeyjar workspace, and no public API, developer documentation or MCP server is published. If your team already works in Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, Medialyst's public REST API and hosted remote MCP server let you run journalist research from there — no new tab required.
Honeyjar on the Smart In Public podcast ↗Where Honeyjar wins.
One workspace for the whole comms job
Honeyjar's Professional plan bundles an AI agent for PR strategy, plans, press releases and pitches; discovery of journalists, podcasts, Substacks and speaking opportunities; coverage and narrative tracking across online, print, X and TikTok with sentiment and share-of-voice; and context from Google Drive and call transcripts. Medialyst does not track coverage, find speaking slots, or draft comms plans. If you want one system of record for everything comms, Honeyjar is aiming at exactly that.
Built and dogfooded by senior comms operators
CEO Michelle Masek ran a PR agency and led comms at Obvious Ventures, Apeel, Lookout and Eventbrite after Ketchum and SHIFT; co-founder Nadia Jamshidi has 25 years in media strategy. They run real client programs through the product and describe “confirmation steps” — the agent asks how many targets, how short — that agency managers say help junior staff learn. Multiplayer client workspaces with permissions and in-platform reviews shipped in March 2026.
Licensed data, multi-model orchestration, and $2M behind it
Honeyjar says it orchestrates four LLMs (it has named Claude, Gemini, Grok and OpenAI models) over premium licensed media data — LexisNexis, per Media Copilot — plus social, Substack and podcast sources. It raised a $2M pre-seed in December 2025 led by Human Ventures and SNR Ventures, with angels including former a16z CMO Margit Wennmachers, former TechCrunch editor-at-large Josh Constine and former New York Post publisher Jesse Angelo.
Where Medialyst pulls ahead.
Story-specific research, not a general workspace
Paste a press release, a URL or a topic. Medialyst reads hundreds of relevant articles, scores each journalist 0–100 for fit to that story, and tells you why they would write it — grounded in what they actually published recently, not in a profile or a training-data memory of who used to cover the beat.
Every email verified in real time
Contacts are enriched live at build time and pass a multi-step verification waterfall before they reach you. You are not charged for contacts where no email is found, and the list you get was checked for the pitch you are sending today.
Per-list pricing with no seats
Starter is $149/mo ($97/mo billed annually), Pro $299/mo, Scale $800/mo for agencies — and none of them charge per user. Your whole team works in one workspace. The first 100 credits are free with no credit card, there is no contract, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Agent-native on every plan
A public REST API and a hosted remote MCP server mean journalist discovery and enrichment run directly inside Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, in your own scripts, or in an internal agent. Medialyst is a component you compose with, not a workspace you have to move into.
Bring the lists you already have
Upload any CSV — from Honeyjar, a legacy database, or a spreadsheet — and the agent re-verifies every email and re-scores every row against your current story. You can compare results on your own data before changing anything.
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 totalHoneyjarhours–daysThree places the difference shows up.
01Database quality
Honeyjar's data story is licensing plus orchestration.
” The founders' pitch is that a licensed database plus four LLMs beats a bare chatbot — and their own August 2026 blog post makes the case sharply, showing models still recommending Kyle Wiggers for AI pitches more than a year after he left TechCrunch. ” Medialyst starts from the other end. There is no licensed inventory to keep current; each list is researched at build time by searching live news articles for the story you describe, so a reporter who changed beats last month is scored on what they wrote last month.
Every email passes a multi-step verification waterfall before it is shown, and you are not charged when no email is found. Honeyjar is betting a licensed database will stay accurate under AI orchestration. Medialyst is betting that for a specific pitch, fresh research beats a maintained inventory — and it publishes the row you actually get, not a catalogue size.
02Speed
Honeyjar deliberately trades a little speed for input quality.
” For drafting a press release or a briefing doc, that is a reasonable trade, and they report it helps junior staff learn. Time-to-list is not something Honeyjar has published. Medialyst is built for the moment a window is open. There is no demo gate, no waitlist and no seat provisioning: paste a press release, URL or topic and the agent starts researching immediately, with the average time from describing a story to a verified, fit-scored journalist list at about five minutes.
The output is a list you review, not a pitch that already went out, so the speed is safe to use — you can newsjack a breaking story and still decide, row by row, who deserves the email. If your bottleneck is drafting and coordinating a comms program across a team, Honeyjar's guided workflow is designed for that. If your bottleneck is “who covers this, and how do I reach them, before the news cycle moves,” Medialyst is designed for that.
03AI & agent surface
Honeyjar's agents live inside Honeyjar.
Its stated ambition is to be the single tab comms teams open, with preloaded workflows for media lists, briefers, visibility calendars and press materials, and — per the founders — the ability to build custom agents inside the workspace, for example an agency's own new-business-pitch procedure. What it does not offer, as of September 2026, is any way to reach those agents from outside: no public API, no developer documentation and no MCP server are published, and Enterprise “custom integrations” are sold through sales. Medialyst is built agent-first on every plan. A public REST API and a hosted remote MCP server let you run journalist discovery and enrichment from inside Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, wire it into your own scripts, or hand it to an internal agent.
” — and return structured answers across a whole list. Because every workflow ends in a list rather than an automatic send, Medialyst slots into a pipeline where a human, or your own review step, signs off before anything goes out. If your team is standardising on one AI workspace, Honeyjar is one candidate. If your team already has one, Medialyst plugs into it.
Two pricing philosophies, side by side.
Ours is public and posted. Here's how it sits next to what Honeyjar 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 — 100 credits, no credit card
- One unified product — no modules priced separately
- Honeyjar publishes one self-serve tier — Professional at $250 per user per month, or $175 per user per month billed annually ($2,100 per user per year) — with a 7-day free trial, plus a custom-priced Enterprise tier. A separate 30-day free pilot for agencies and in-house teams (up to 5 users) converts at $100 per user per month, or $80 billed annually, according to its checkout page.
- 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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 Honeyjar.
How much does Honeyjar cost in 2026?
Is Honeyjar available yet, or is it waitlist only?
Honeyjar vs Medialyst — what's the difference?
Does Honeyjar have an API or MCP server?
What is the best Honeyjar alternative for media lists?
Can I move my Honeyjar lists into Medialyst?
Skip the seat licence. Build your first list free.
Start free with 100 credits and no credit card. Paste your story and get a verified, story-specific list of journalists in minutes.