MedialystvsVuelioVuelio alternative · 2026

The modern alternative to Vuelio.

Vuelio is the UK and Europe's established all-in-one PR platform — a media database, stakeholder management, monitoring, and analytics suite trusted by major UK brands and public-sector organizations.

First list free · No credit card
From $97/mo · no contractPay only for verified emailsFirst list free · no credit card
See the full Vuelio comparison ↓
Who builds it

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.

  • Elvis Sun

    Co-founder

    Spent 8 years at Google working on AI systems used by millions of people.

  • Carly Martinetti

    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.

At a glance

The honest comparison.

Pulled from public Vuelio documentation, customer reviews, and our own product. We update this page when either side ships something new.

Capability
MedialystMedialyst
VuelioVuelio
Finding the right journalist
Find journalists for this story
✓
Story-specific relevance scoring
~
Keyword search + filters over UK/EU database
Understand a journalist's beat
✓
Reads past articles + recent coverage
~
Beat tags + political/stakeholder mapping
Analyze past writing
✓
Grounded in actual articles
~
Profile bylines, no per-article analysis
Per-journalist pitch angles
✓
Personalized angles + pitch drafts
✕
Not available
Data freshness
✓
Live news article search in real time
~
Static database — human-curated, periodic refresh
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
~
Human-curated DB — standard stale-contact issues
Send from one place
✓
Built-in sending
~
Built-in outreach + monitoring + analytics
Pricing & setup
Time to first pitch
✓
Minutes
~
Weeks: sales call → annual onboarding
Free trial
✓
First list free
✕
Demo only
Contract
✓
None — cancel anytime
~
Annual-only
Price
✓
from $149/mo
~
~£5K–£20K+/yr (opaque, request a quote)
Agent-native workflows
API access
✓
Public REST API
~
API access (limited)
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
~
No re-enrichment from exports

Find your journalists now. No demo. No contract. No credit card.

Start in seconds and see live journalist matches for your first pitch.

Build your first list free →
The honest read

Why people switch from Vuelio.

  1. UK/EU-centric in a global market

    Vuelio is strongest in the UK and Europe, with particular depth in UK media and political stakeholders. But if your PR needs extend globally — US, Asia-Pacific, or emerging markets — coverage thins. Medialyst 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.

    G2 — Vuelio reviews ↗
  2. Opaque, enterprise-tier pricing

    Vuelio doesn't publish pricing — every plan requires a sales call and an annual commitment. Estimated pricing ranges from roughly £5,000 to £20,000+/yr depending on modules. For a UK startup or small agency, that's a significant locked-in cost before you've sent your first pitch. Medialyst publishes pricing from $149/mo with no contract.

    Prezly — Vuelio alternatives ↗
  3. The same static-database model as Cision

    Vuelio's media database is human-curated and refreshed periodically, but it draws the same data-rot complaints as every legacy index — outdated contacts, journalists who've moved outlets, and details that drift between refresh cycles. Medialyst picks each journalist from what they published recently about your story, and every email it delivers was validated within the last 14 days or is re-checked when you build the list.

    Capterra — Vuelio reviews ↗
  4. A legacy platform with a steep learning curve

    Vuelio is comprehensive but complex — reviewers note a steep learning curve, a dated interface in places, and features that require dedicated training to use effectively. Medialyst takes the opposite approach: describe your story in plain language and the agent does the research.

    G2 — Vuelio reviews ↗
Fair is fair

Where each one wins.

Where Medialyst wins

  • Works beyond the UK and Europe

    Medialyst works globally across major online news sources and many trade publications, so US or Asia-Pacific journalists can sit on the same list as UK ones. Coverage is strongest where articles and bylines are published online; hyper-local, print-only and some regional trade sources can be thinner.

  • Right-priced and flexible — no contract, no sales call

    Starter is $149/mo, Pro $299, Scale $800 — published, monthly, no per-seat fees, no annual lock-in, and a 14-day money-back guarantee. The first list is free with 100 credits and no credit card.

  • Recent bylines, plus a 14-day email window

    Medialyst picks each journalist from what they published recently about your story, so a list doesn't lean on a profile from the last refresh cycle. Every email we deliver 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.

  • Agent-native, not dashboard-bound

    A public REST API, a hosted remote MCP server, and custom enrichment columns mean you can run Medialyst directly inside Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor — and ask for things a legacy platform simply can't express.

  • Switching is a CSV upload

    Already paying for Vuelio? Export your media lists, upload the CSV, and Medialyst's agent re-verifies and re-scores every contact — so you can compare on your own data before your renewal window closes.

Where Vuelio wins

  • The most comprehensive UK/EU PR suite

    Vuelio bundles media database, stakeholder management (including political contacts and parliamentary monitoring), media monitoring, social listening, and analytics in one platform. For UK comms teams that need political stakeholder mapping alongside media relations, that breadth is hard to replicate.

  • Political and public-affairs intelligence

    Vuelio's unique differentiator is political stakeholder management — UK parliamentary monitoring, political contact databases, and policy-tracking tools. For public-affairs teams and organizations with government-relations needs, this is a capability no pure media-database competitor offers.

  • Established UK institutional trust

    Vuelio is the default choice for many UK public-sector organizations, NGOs, and large enterprises. Its institutional credibility and long track record in the UK market carry real weight with procurement teams that need a recognized, established vendor.

Their AI vs. ours

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.

THEIR AILegacy database + AI layer
AI
BEAT
AnyTravel▾
REGION
AnyUS-West▾
KEYWORDS
Anyhotel...▾
that was the entire AI step: three dropdowns you could have clicked yourself
Henry Whitfield
GigaTravel
verified 2018outlet defunct
Rita Moss
Biz Traveler Weekly
verified 2019wrong beat
-generic inbox
Worth pitching: 0 of 3

OUR AIMedialyst: AI-native research agent
MEDIALYST AGENT

OUTPUT: 1,847 RESEARCHED TO FIT-CHECKED SHORTLIST

94
Diego Fuentes
Travel + Leisure
RECOMMENDED ANGLEVisited San Diego in March. Pitch the return-visit story.
91
Priya Raman
AFAR
RECOMMENDED ANGLERuns a boutique-openings series. Pitch the design story.
87
Lena Kowalski
The Points Guy
RECOMMENDED ANGLEAffiliate-friendly. Pitch opening rates and booking link.

Full architecture notes for Vuelio

Vuelio has added AI features for content creation and monitoring intelligence, but its journalist discovery remains the traditional filter-and-browse model over a static database. The AI assists with analytics and reporting, not with researching whether a journalist actually covers your specific story. Medialyst is AI-native end to end — the agent reads real, recent articles per journalist, and you can define custom enrichment columns in plain language. That's the difference between AI for reporting and AI for research.

★★★★★
“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 BartkoAmy BartkoPR professional, Chatterbox
Workflow

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.

MedialystMedialyst9 min total
1
Paste the release
Drop your announcement into the agent. It identifies the angle and newsworthiness.
~30 sec
2
Receive ranked matches
Journalists scored 0–100 by fit, each with reasoning grounded in their recent articles.
~90 sec
3
Review drafted pitches
A unique angle per journalist referencing their actual recent work. Edit anything; tone stays yours.
~5 min
4
Send from your own Gmail or Outlook
You send each pitch from your own inbox, then see opens, clicks and replies per journalist.
~2 min
Time to first pitch~9 minutes
VuelioVuelio~3 days
1
Build a media list
Filter by outlet, beat, and geography, then cross-reference recent coverage by hand and export to CSV.
hours
2
Validate the list
Someone checks each contact’s most recent byline. A meaningful chunk gets cut for staleness.
~1 day
3
Draft pitches
Mostly one template lightly varied per contact; generic AI assist gets re-edited anyway.
~1 day
4
Send & chase replies
Track opens and replies across separate tools; reporting often lags behind.
~1 hr
Time to first pitch~3 days
Under the hood

Three places the difference shows up.

01Database quality

Vuelio's media database covers UK and European journalists, bloggers, and influencers, with particular depth in UK national, regional, and trade media.

The database is human-curated with regular updates, and the addition of political stakeholder data gives it a unique dimension. But it draws the same fundamental critique as every static database: contacts decay between refresh cycles, and accuracy varies by sector and region. International coverage outside the UK and Europe is limited. Medialyst takes the opposite stance: evidence-first, not database-first.

When you build a list, the agent reads recent articles about your story, picks the journalists who wrote them, and confirms the beat. The email comes from Medialyst's own database when it was validated within the last 14 days, and is re-checked when you build the list otherwise. Coverage works globally across major online news sources and many trade publications. It is strongest where articles and bylines are published online; hyper-local, print-only and some regional trade sources can be thinner.

02Speed

Vuelio is built for ongoing media relations, not rapid list-building.

There's a sales call, an annual contract, and training before you're productive. Once inside, finding journalists means keyword searches, filtering, and manual vetting — the standard legacy workflow. Medialyst collapses that entirely.

You paste a press release, a URL, or a topic, and the agent goes to work immediately. A verified, scored journalist list takes minutes, and it works globally, not just in the UK.

03AI & agent surface

Vuelio's features live inside its platform — database, monitoring, and analytics are operated through its dashboard, with limited API access for enterprise customers.

There's no meaningful way to drive journalist discovery from your own tools. Medialyst is built agent-first.

A public REST API and a hosted remote MCP server mean you can run discovery and enrichment directly from inside Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor, wire it into your own scripts, or hand it to an internal agent.

Pricing reality

Two pricing philosophies, side by side.

Ours is public and posted. Here's how it sits next to Vuelio's own published pricing page and what named third parties report.

Pricing and claims verified June 2026
Medialyst
Transparent
From $97/mobilled annually
or $149/mo month-to-month · cancel anytime
  • 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
Vuelio
Quote-based
£5K–£20K+/yr
No public pricing — quote on request
  • Vuelio doesn't publish pricing — quotes are custom and annual. Estimated pricing ranges from roughly £5,000 to £20,000+/yr depending on modules and seats. There's no monthly option and no free trial.
  • No public pricing — quote on request
What teams say

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."

Rita Liao
★★★★★

"Medialyst has become one of my go-to tools. It’s fast and intuitive, so I spend less time searching and more time pitching. It’s also helped me find journalists I hadn’t come across before, which has opened up new coverage opportunities for our brands."

Vanessa Dones
★★★★★

"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."

Kristjana (Kris) Hillberg
★★★★★

"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."

Amy Bartko
★★★★★

"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."

Milena Petrović
★★★★★

"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."

Sim Aulakh
Sim Aulakh
Founder at EstablishCred
★★★★★

"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."

Saddat Abid
Saddat Abid
CEO at Property Saviour
★★★★★

"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."

Raul Quiroz
Raul Quiroz
Senior Account Manager at HJ-PR
★★★★★

"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."

Kyle Cabodi
★★★★★

"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!"

Richard Laermer
★★★★★

"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."

Emily Carter
★★★★★

"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."

Christine Pietryla Wetzler
Christine Pietryla Wetzler
★★★★★

"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!"

Beth Trier
★★★★★

"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!"

Lizi Sprague
FAQ

Common questions about switching from Vuelio.

How much does Vuelio cost in 2026?
Vuelio doesn't publish pricing — quotes are custom and annual. Estimated pricing ranges from roughly £5,000 to £20,000+/yr depending on modules and seats. There's no monthly option and no free trial.
What is the best Vuelio alternative?
For journalist discovery and outreach, Medialyst is the best alternative: it finds and scores journalists by fit across major online news sources and many trade publications globally, delivers emails validated within the last 14 days (or re-checked when you build the list), and starts at $149/mo with no contract. If you specifically need UK political stakeholder management, Vuelio has a unique capability there that pure media tools don't replicate.
Is Vuelio good outside the UK?
Vuelio covers UK and European media well, with particular depth in UK outlets. It's part of Pulsar Group plc (AIM: PULS, formerly Access Intelligence), which also owns Isentia (APAC) and Pulsar (social listening). Coverage outside the UK and Europe is more limited — for global PR, tools with broader coverage are a better fit.
Can I import my Vuelio contacts into Medialyst?
Yes. Export your Vuelio contacts as CSV and upload them — Medialyst's agent re-verifies the contacts, re-scores them against your story, and enriches them with recent coverage.
Vuelio vs Medialyst — what's the difference?
Vuelio is the UK's comprehensive all-in-one PR suite — media database, political stakeholder management, monitoring, and analytics — sold on annual enterprise contracts. Medialyst is AI-native journalist discovery: it researches journalists per story from their recent articles, scores them by fit, and delivers emails validated within the last 14 days (or re-checked when you build the list), starting at $149/mo with no contract. Vuelio wins on UK institutional trust and political stakeholder data; Medialyst wins on journalist discovery, reach beyond the UK and Europe, speed, and flexibility.
Try it free · no account to start

Beyond the UK. Build your first global journalist 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.

First list free · No credit card
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