The alternative to Muck Rack — built for teams who can't expense $10K a year.
Muck Rack does not publish prices.
The honest comparison.
Pulled from public Muck Rack documentation, customer reviews, and our own product. We update this page when either side ships something new.
| Capability | Medialyst | Muck Rack |
|---|---|---|
| Finding the right journalist | ||
| Find journalists for this story | ✓ Story-specific relevance scoring | ~ Filters + keyword search; AI Search Assistant; Media List Agent (beta) suggests up to 50 |
| Understand a journalist's beat | ✓ Reads past articles + recent coverage | ~ Profile topic tags + outlet, location and scope filters |
| Analyze past writing | ✓ Grounded in actual articles | ~ Match explanations cite “relevant articles and location” |
| Per-journalist pitch angles | ✓ Personalized angles + pitch drafts | ~ Brand-level angles via Newsjacking Opportunities (Sept 2026); PressPal.ai drafts |
| Data freshness | ✓ Live news article search in real time | ~ “We aim to review every listing annually” — Muck Rack |
| Refine a list with natural language | ✓ “Remove anyone inactive in 6 months” | ~ AI Search Assistant “translates your request into a precise search” |
| Find more like top performers | ✓ “Find 20 more like the top 5” | ~ Media List Agent (beta) suggests who to add or remove |
| Add custom enrichment columns | ✓ “Research if they use affiliate links” | ~ Not publicly documented as of Sept 2026 |
| Pitching & sending | ||
| Email verification | ✓ Multi-step verification waterfall | ~ Green “verified” badge marks full-time journalists, not email deliverability |
| Send from one place | ✓ Built-in sending | ~ Built-in pitching + coverage tracking |
| Pricing & setup | ||
| Time to first pitch | ✓ Minutes | ~ Pricing page routes to “Contact us” for a custom proposal |
| Free trial | ✓ First list free | ~ No free trial published; pricing page is “Contact us” |
| Contract | ✓ None — cancel anytime | ~ Not published by Muck Rack; third parties report annual terms |
| Price | ✓ from $149/mo | ~ Not published · Vendr median $13,000/yr |
| Agent-native workflows | ||
| API access | ✓ Public REST API | ~ Paid add-on for Premier customers (Muck Rack help centre) |
| Remote MCP support | ✓ Hosted remote MCP server | ~ MCP integration announced as “upcoming”, Sept 2026 |
| Agent-native workflows | ✓ Usable directly inside Claude, ChatGPT & Cursor | ~ MCP for coverage analysis announced as “upcoming”, Sept 2026 |
| CSV import / re-enrichment from competitor exports | ✓ Upload any CSV — the agent re-verifies & re-scores | ~ Media List Importer “cleans, matches and connects” CSVs to profiles |
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Why people switch from Muck Rack.
You can't find out what it costs
Muck Rack's pricing page lists Starter, Standard and Premier tiers and puts a “Contact us” button on each one. Asked directly why, the page answers: “Pricing depends on a few factors specific to your team including the number of users, so we'd love to prepare a customized proposal for you” (retrieved 11 September 2026). The only public numbers are third-party ones: Vendr's marketplace reports a median Muck Rack buyer paying $13,000 per year, across 80 tracked purchases, with a low of $8,000 and a high of $20,860. We can't tell you what Muck Rack would quote you — and neither can Muck Rack's website. Medialyst's prices are on our pricing page.
Muck Rack — pricing page (retrieved 11 Sept 2026) ↗Their freshness target is annual. Ours is per-list
Muck Rack is straightforward about its data cadence: “We aim to review every listing annually and we make hundreds of thousands of updates every year,” and it staffs “a team of over 100 people all over the world” to do it. Worth knowing what the green badge means, too — in Muck Rack's words, it “lets people know that a profile page meets Muck Rack's criteria to be defined as a full-time journalist.” It certifies that someone is a working journalist, not that the email on the profile still lands. Medialyst inverts the order: we research the journalist and verify the email when you build the list, so what reaches you was checked for the pitch you're sending today.
Muck Rack — media database page (retrieved 11 Sept 2026) ↗The AI you read about may not be on your plan
Muck Rack's cofounder and CEO Gregory Galant made the case himself on 28 April 2026: “PR teams were never supposed to be experts in Boolean. It was a workaround for a different era, and the industry has outgrown it.” We agree. The catch is who gets the fix. The same release states that Curation Engine “will be available to Muck Rack Brand Premier and Media Intelligence customers.” When Muck Rack shipped Newsjacking Opportunities on 9 September 2026, it drew the same line: “Newsjacking Opportunities is available to Curation Engine users, under the Muck Rack Brand Premier or Media Intelligence plans.” On Medialyst there is no premium tier of the research agent — Starter runs the same engine as Scale.
GlobeNewswire — Muck Rack launches Curation Engine (28 April 2026) ↗Driving it from your own tools costs extra, or isn't here yet
Muck Rack does have an API. Its help centre describes it as a paid add-on for Premier customers that exposes “the article data behind a Saved Search” for piping coverage into systems like Snowflake, Power BI or Tableau, and notes the integration “is a custom implementation that your engineering or data team is responsible for building.” On MCP, Muck Rack's Q3 2026 update describes an “upcoming MCP integration” for agentic coverage analysis — announced, not shipped, as of 11 September 2026. Medialyst ships a public REST API and a hosted remote MCP server on every plan, covering list building and enrichment rather than coverage reporting.
Muck Rack Help Center — Muck Rack API ↗Where Muck Rack wins.
Breadth of monitoring and licensed content
Muck Rack announced in March 2023 that its global media monitoring covers more than 600,000 news sources across online, television, radio, newsletters and print. In May 2026 it said it monitors more than 2 million podcasts, around 65,000 of them with full searchable transcripts, and its Q3 2026 update adds content partnerships with Bloomberg Media, STAT and MIT Technology Review. If your job is broad monitoring across print, broadcast and podcasts, that breadth is real and we don't match it.
Mature analytics and AI-visibility tracking
Muck Rack launched AI Visibility Badges on 5 March 2026, built on its Generative Pulse dataset, which it says draws on more than 15 million AI response citations to show which journalists and outlets are cited most often in AI-generated answers, tiered and refreshed monthly. For an enterprise comms team measuring share of voice inside ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, that is a genuinely differentiated reporting suite and a real reason to stay.
Brand trust and a polished product
Muck Rack is a known quantity, and it won PRWeek's Best Comms Tech Platform in 2024 and again in 2025. It is journalist-first by design, with profiles built around real bylines, and it is the answer nobody on your team will question. If you are a large team whose main requirement is the safe, established choice, that reputation carries weight we haven't earned yet.
Where Medialyst pulls ahead.
Right-priced for the work
Starter is $149/mo, Pro $299, Scale $800 — published, monthly, no per-seat fees, no contract, cancel anytime. Your first list is free with 100 credits and no credit card. You'll know what you pay before you ever talk to anyone, because it's on the pricing page.
Fit for this story, not keyword roulette
Instead of filtering a standing index, Medialyst reads articles relevant to your specific announcement, scores reporters 0–100 by fit, and tells you why each one would write it, grounded in their recent coverage. Every plan gets the full research agent — there's no premium tier of the thing you came for.
Researched when you ask, not on a review cycle
Global coverage across outlets, journalists and beats, researched live when you build the list rather than served from a profile waiting its turn in a refresh queue. Every email that reaches you has been verified in real time first, and journalists we can't find a verified address for don't cost you a credit.
Agent-native, not AI bolted on
A public REST API, a hosted remote MCP server and custom enrichment columns on every plan mean you can run Medialyst from inside Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, and ask for things a fixed filter schema can't express — like “find journalists who use affiliate links.”
Switching is a CSV upload
Already paying for Muck Rack? Export your lists, upload the CSV, and Medialyst's agent re-verifies and re-scores every contact — so you can compare on your own data, against your own renewal date, before you cancel anything.
AI bolted on vs. AI-native.
Legacy platforms point AI at the same filter UI you already had. Medialyst assigns a research agent to each candidate journalist, reads their actual work, and consolidates the strong fits. Watch the same brief run through both.
MEDIALYST AGENTOUTPUT: 1,847 RESEARCHED TO FIT-CHECKED SHORTLIST
Full architecture notes for Muck Rack
Muck Rack has shipped real AI, and it is worth being precise about what it does. Media List Agent, announced in beta on 2 February 2026, “surfaces up to 50 recommended journalists, with a clear explanation for each match, including relevant articles and location,” and its suggestions are “based on pitch content, journalists' recent coverage, interests and engagement patterns.” AI Search Assistant “translates your request into a precise search.” Curation Engine replaced Boolean monitoring, and Newsjacking Opportunities, shipped 9 September 2026, proposes brand-level angles on developing stories. Two differences are documented rather than argued. First, gating: Curation Engine “will be available to Muck Rack Brand Premier and Media Intelligence customers,” and Newsjacking Opportunities “is available to Curation Engine users, under the Muck Rack Brand Premier or Media Intelligence plans.” Second, where each loop ends. Muck Rack's newsjacking loop ends at a card with a suggested brand angle; choosing journalists is a separate step in a separate feature. Medialyst's ends at a fit-scored, email-verified list of named journalists with per-journalist angles, on every plan. In our view that is the difference that matters, and it is the one to test on your own story rather than take from either of our marketing pages.
★★★★★“Not a static database pull. Not the same recycled names that have been sitting in a spreadsheet for two years. A researched, current list built around exactly what you tell it to look for, with journalist names, their publication, their most recent articles, and their contact information all in one place.”Amy BartkoPR professional, Chatterbox
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 totalMuck Rack~3 daysThree places the difference shows up.
01Database quality
Muck Rack's strength is scale and editorial staffing, and it describes both plainly.
” That is a serious data operation, and more human review than most competitors fund. It is also, by Muck Rack's own description, a review cycle rather than a check performed at the moment of use. The green badge is worth reading carefully for the same reason: Muck Rack says it “lets people know that a profile page meets Muck Rack's criteria to be defined as a full-time journalist,” which certifies the person, not the deliverability of the address on the page. ” Medialyst is built the other way round.
We keep no standing inventory to age; the agent researches journalists when you build the list, pulls their recent articles, confirms the beat against what they have actually published, and runs the email through a verification waterfall before you see it. Coverage is global, but the unit of truth is the freshly researched contact for this story. Which model suits you is a real choice: if you want a broad browsable directory with human curation behind it, Muck Rack's is better than ours. If you want the specific list for Thursday's pitch to have been checked this week, that is what we built.
02Speed
Getting started is the clearest gap, and it is visible without a single customer anecdote.
” As of 11 September 2026 there is no published self-serve signup and no published free trial of the Muck Rack platform, so the path to your first list runs through a proposal conversation. ai free, which drafts a pitch and suggests journalists, but it is a separate tool from the platform. Medialyst has no demo gate. You paste a press release, a URL or a topic and the agent starts; your first list is free, with 100 credits and no credit card, and lists come back in minutes rather than days.
That matters most when the clock is the constraint. When a story breaks and you have a credible angle, the gap between a list today and a list next week is the gap between landing the coverage and reading someone else's version of it. For teams that newsjack, or simply move fast, self-serve speed is most of the product.
03AI & agent surface
This is where the two products are built on different assumptions.
” Muck Rack's Q3 2026 update describes an “upcoming MCP integration” so teams can “access the same insights from the AI tools your team already uses” — aimed at coverage analysis, and announced rather than shipped as of 11 September 2026. So the direction is real and the destination is analytics. Medialyst starts from the other end.
A public REST API and a hosted remote MCP server are included on every plan and cover the job itself — journalist discovery, enrichment and list building — so you can run them from inside Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, wire them into your own scripts, or hand them to an internal agent. Custom enrichment columns let you pose research questions in plain language and get structured answers back across a whole list, which a fixed filter schema cannot express. If your team is assembling AI-assisted workflows, we think you want a component you can compose with rather than a dashboard you log into — and you should check both against your own stack before you believe either of us.
Two pricing philosophies, side by side.
Ours is public and posted. Here's how it sits next to Muck Rack'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
- Free first list — 100 credits, no credit card
- One unified product — no modules priced separately
- Muck Rack publishes no prices. Its pricing page lists Starter, Standard and Premier tiers for brands and for agencies with a “Contact us” button on each, and states that “pricing depends on a few factors specific to your team including the number of users” (retrieved 11 September 2026). The only public figures are third-party: Vendr's marketplace reports a median buyer paying $13,000/yr across 80 tracked purchases, ranging from $8,000 to $20,860. Muck Rack does not publish contract length or refund terms; third-party reviews report annual commitments.
- 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.
"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 Muck Rack.
How much does Muck Rack cost in 2026?
What is the best Muck Rack alternative?
Is there a cheaper alternative to Muck Rack?
Does Medialyst have a bigger database than Muck Rack?
Can I import my Muck Rack lists into Medialyst?
Muck Rack vs Medialyst — which is better for small teams and freelancers?
Skip the sales call. Build your first list now.
Start free with 100 credits and no credit card. Paste your story and get a verified, story-specific list of journalists in minutes.