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ListIQ alternative · 2026Everything ListIQ does — in one AI workflow, without the browser-tab juggling.
ListIQ is a lightweight, affordable Chrome extension that pulls real-time journalist info from Google News pages as you browse.
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 ListIQ documentation, customer reviews, and our own product. We update this page when either side ships something new.
| Capability | Medialyst | ListIQ |
|---|---|---|
| Finding the right journalist | ||
| Find journalists for this story | ✓ Story-specific relevance scoring | ~ Manual: you run Google News searches; extension annotates the page |
| Understand a journalist's beat | ✓ Reads past articles + recent coverage | ~ Recent-articles panel per author, read tab by tab |
| Analyze past writing | ✓ Grounded in actual articles | ~ Shows recent articles; no per-article analysis |
| Per-journalist pitch angles | ✓ Personalized angles + pitch drafts | ✕ Not available |
| Data freshness | ✓ Live news article search in real time | ~ Real-time research from the page you're on |
| Refine a list with natural language | ✓ “Remove anyone inactive in 6 months” | ✕ — point-and-click extension, no NL refine |
| 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 | ✕ — discovers emails, no verification before send |
| Send from one place | ✓ Built-in sending | ✕ — feeds BuzzStream CRM (separate product) |
| Pricing & setup | ||
| Time to first pitch | ✓ Minutes | ~ Per-journalist, manual: search → extension → sheet |
| Free trial | ✓ First list free | ~ Free tier (200 standard / 20 email credits) |
| Contract | ✓ None — cancel anytime | ~ Monthly, credit-based; no contract |
| Price | ✓ from $149/mo | ~ $24–$399/mo (credit tiers); separate from CRM |
| 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 | ✕ — Chrome extension only |
| CSV import / re-enrichment from competitor exports | ✓ Upload any CSV — the agent re-verifies & re-scores | ~ Google Sheets augment; no re-verify / re-score |
Find your journalists now. No demo. No contract. No credit card.
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Why people switch from ListIQ.
It's an extension, so you still do the work yourself
ListIQ is a Chrome extension layered over Google News — you run the searches, open each result, pop the extension, check activity, spend email credits, and paste contacts into a sheet, one tab at a time. It's faster than doing it fully by hand, but the human is still the workflow. Medialyst is agent-native: describe your story once and the agent finds journalists, reads their recent coverage, scores them by fit, verifies emails, and stages the send — no tab-juggling.
BuzzStream — ListIQ (Chrome extension) ↗Reviewers flag unverified emails
Multiple 2026 reviews report that ListIQ finds email addresses without verifying them before you send, with one Capterra reviewer noting the extension "sometimes pulls wrong contact info, requiring tools like Email Hunter." With Medialyst, every email it delivers was validated within the last 14 days or is re-checked when you build the list. You pay 1 credit only when a verified email is delivered, and misses are free.
Capterra — BuzzStream reviews ↗No story-specific scoring — just whoever's on the page
ListIQ annotates the journalists who show up in your Google News search; it doesn't read each reporter's beat and rank them 0–100 by how likely they are to write your specific story. Medialyst does exactly that, grounding every score in the journalist's actual recent articles and telling you why each one would cover it — so you're not eyeballing relevance tab by tab.
BuzzStream — ListIQ features ↗Two separate products, two separate bills
ListIQ builds lists; BuzzStream's outreach CRM sends and tracks them — and they're sold as separate subscriptions that share a login but not credits. To run the full find-to-send loop you pay for both, and the CRM's prices have climbed sharply (Starter $24→$49/mo, +104%, since 2025). Medialyst is one workflow at one price: discovery, verified contacts, and built-in sending together.
BuzzStream — plans & pricing ↗
Where each one wins.
Where Medialyst wins
One workflow instead of a dozen tabs
Discovery, story-specific scoring, verified contacts, and send all happen in one place. You describe the story once; the agent does the research, the vetting, and the email verification — instead of you running searches, popping an extension, and copy-pasting into a sheet for every journalist.
Fit for this story, scored 0–100
Rather than annotating whoever appears in a Google News search, Medialyst reads hundreds of relevant articles, scores reporters by fit, and tells you why each one would write your announcement — grounded in their actual recent coverage.
Pay only for verified emails
Every email Medialyst delivers was validated within the last 14 days or is re-checked when you build the list. You pay 1 credit only when we deliver a verified email, and misses are free, so checking addresses isn't left to a second tool.
Agent-native: API, MCP, and custom columns
A public REST API, a hosted remote MCP server, and custom enrichment columns let you run Medialyst directly inside Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor — and ask for things an extension can't express, like "research if they use affiliate links" or "flag anyone inactive in the last six months." None of these are documented on ListIQ's product page as of 4 October 2026.
Switching is a CSV upload
Already building lists in ListIQ? Export your contacts to CSV, upload it, and the agent takes it from there — re-verifying every email and re-scoring each journalist against your story, so you can compare on your own data before you change anything.
Where ListIQ wins
Lightweight and in-browser
ListIQ lives where digital-PR and link-building teams already work — inside Chrome, on top of Google News, with a Google Sheets integration that augments lists you've already started. If your workflow is built around browsing news and dropping contacts into a spreadsheet, that in-the-flow convenience is real, and reviewers consistently praise how quickly you can pop the extension open.
Tuned for digital-PR and link building
ListIQ comes out of BuzzStream's link-building world, so it's shaped for SEO and digital-PR teams chasing coverage-for-links — surfacing contributors and outlets you can pitch for backlinks, then handing the list to an outreach CRM. If link building is the actual job rather than earned-media storytelling, that focus is a genuine fit.
A light footprint when that's all you need
If you just want to pop open an extension now and then and grab a few contacts, ListIQ stays minimal — no onboarding, no campaign builder to learn. On price and freshness it's a wash with Medialyst, which also researches journalists live and starts free (100 credits, no card) — so choose on workflow, not sticker.
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
ListIQhours–daysThree places the difference shows up.
01Database quality
ListIQ and Medialyst agree on one big thing: a static media database goes stale, so journalist research should start from what reporters are publishing now.
ListIQ does this from the page you're on — scan a Google News search, and the extension pulls current bios, recent articles, activity status, and social profiles for the authors it finds. That's fresher than a quarterly database refresh, and reviewers like Kalina MacKay say the contacts feel "more targeted than those pulled from media databases." The limits are structural. ListIQ researches whoever your search surfaces, so coverage is only as good as the search you ran, and there's no proactive discovery without a starting URL. Reviewers also report that the emails it discovers aren't verified, with users reaching for tools like Email Hunter to double-check addresses.
Medialyst shares the research-first stance and runs it from your story rather than a search page: it picks journalists from what they published recently and confirms the beat from their 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. It works globally across major online news sources and many trade publications; coverage is strongest where articles and bylines are published online, and hyper-local, print-only and some regional trade sources can be thinner. The unit of value is a researched, verified contact for your story, not a page annotation you still have to check yourself.
02Speed
ListIQ is fast in the moment — "you can rapidly pop that Chrome extension open," as one reviewer puts it — but the speed is per-journalist and human-driven.
You run a search, open results, trigger the extension, read the activity check, spend email credits, and move the contact into a sheet, then repeat for the next name. The tool accelerates each manual step; it doesn't remove the manual loop. Medialyst removes the loop.
You paste a press release, a URL, or a topic, and the agent goes to work on the whole list at once: finding journalists, reading their recent coverage, scoring fit, verifying emails, and staging the send. Going from describing your story to a verified, scored journalist list takes minutes, for the entire list rather than one contact. When a story breaks and the window is short, building the whole list in one pass beats annotating a search page row by row.
03AI & agent surface
This is the widest gap, and it's the core of the wedge.
ListIQ is a Chrome extension: it runs in your browser, on the page you're viewing, and that's the entire surface. A ListIQ API or MCP server is not documented on its product page as of 4 October 2026, so the documented workflow routes through a human clicking inside Chrome. Medialyst is built agent-first.
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 plain-language research questions across a whole list — "do they use affiliate links and on which platform?" — and get structured answers back, the kind of thing a point-and-click extension simply has no way to express. If your team is building AI-assisted workflows, Medialyst is a component you compose with; ListIQ is a tab you open.
Two pricing philosophies, side by side.
Ours is public and posted. Here's how it sits next to ListIQ'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
- ListIQ publishes credit-based monthly pricing: a free tier (200 standard + 20 email credits), then Starter $24, Plus $99, Growth $199, and Pro $399/mo, plus custom Enterprise. Credits don't roll over, and ListIQ is billed separately from BuzzStream's outreach CRM ($49–$999+/mo), so the full find-to-send stack costs more than either alone.
- 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.
"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 ListIQ.
How much does ListIQ cost?
What is the best ListIQ alternative?
Is the ListIQ Chrome extension worth it?
Does ListIQ verify journalist emails?
ListIQ vs Medialyst — which should I use?
Can I import my ListIQ list into Medialyst?
One workflow beats a dozen browser tabs. Build your list 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.