Can't see the contacts. Can't send the pitch. Can't get a refund.
The 7-day trial withholds journalist contact details, so the only way to see the data is to pay for it. Their refund policy is one sentence: “We don't offer refunds.” And there's no sending inside the product — their FAQ recommends you go buy outreach tools for that.
The honest comparison.
Pulled from public JournoFinder documentation, customer reviews, and our own product. We update this page when either side ships something new.
| Capability | Medialyst | JournoFinder |
|---|---|---|
| Finding the right journalist | ||
| Find journalists for this story | ✓ Story-specific relevance scoring | ~ Semantic keyword search; AI Agent vets beat/reach |
| Understand a journalist's beat | ✓ Reads past articles + recent coverage | ~ Crawls 50M+ articles, surfaces who's covering now |
| Analyze past writing | ✓ Grounded in actual articles | ~ Profile bylines + recent-article references |
| Per-journalist pitch angles | ✓ Personalized angles + pitch drafts | ~ AI Agent builds pitch-ready lists, no per-journalist drafts |
| Data freshness | ✓ Live news article search in real time | ~ Real-time crawl; outdated contacts auto-removed |
| Refine a list with natural language | ✓ “Remove anyone inactive in 6 months” | ~ Natural-language semantic search |
| 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 | ~ Email validation w/ bounce protection (80–90% reported) |
| Send from one place | ✓ Built-in sending | ✕ CSV export only — no built-in sending |
| Pricing & setup | ||
| Time to first pitch | ✓ Minutes | ~ Minutes (self-serve, 7-day trial) |
| Free trial | ✓ First list free | ~ Free Plan (no card) + 7-day trial (contacts withheld) |
| Contract | ✓ None — cancel anytime | ~ Monthly available; annual discounts |
| Price | ✓ from $149/mo | ~ ~$119/mo annual (Individual) |
| Agent-native workflows | ||
| API access | ✓ Public REST API | ~ No documented public REST API |
| Remote MCP support | ✓ Hosted remote MCP server | ~ Claude/ChatGPT connector (MCP-style, unverified) |
| Agent-native workflows | ✓ Usable directly inside Claude, ChatGPT & Cursor | ~ Build lists inside Claude/ChatGPT via connector |
| CSV import / re-enrichment from competitor exports | ✓ Upload any CSV — the agent re-verifies & re-scores | ~ Batch URL upload, no re-verify/re-score of CSVs |
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 JournoFinder.
You can't send from JournoFinder
JournoFinder finds the journalist. Then it hands you a CSV. In their own words: “We don't currently have the ability for you to email from within our platform, but if you need we can recommend you some tools to use for outreach.” So the real workflow is search, export, open a second tool you're paying for separately, paste, send — and the real cost is JournoFinder plus that tool. Medialyst finds the journalist and sends the pitch in one place. One tool, one workflow, no export step.
JournoFinder FAQ — “How do I contact journalists?” ↗Your research is metered
JournoFinder includes 250 credits a month. One credit per news search, one per bulk search. Run out on the 20th and your research waits for the 1st.
JournoFinder Help Center — FAQs (250 credits/month) ↗What it actually costs
$189/mo billed monthly, ~$119/mo annual on Individual. $349/mo monthly, ~$229/mo annual for a 3-seat Team. The Individual annual price rose from $99 to $119. And because there's no sending inside the product, the outreach tool their FAQ tells you to go buy sits on top of all of it.
JournoFinder — pricing (archived at $99/mo annual, Oct 2025) ↗Where JournoFinder wins.
An easy, no-sales-call on-ramp
JournoFinder is fully self-serve — a formal Free Plan with no credit card and a 7-day trial with no demo call — so you can be inside it in minutes, and Reddit fans like it as “a fraction of the price of Prowly without artificially low limits.” Worth knowing: Medialyst is self-serve too, starts at $97/mo annually (below JournoFinder's ~$119) and gives you a free first list — so the honest reason to pick JournoFinder is its reactive toolset, not the sticker.
Best-rated free journalist-request aggregator
JournoFinder Requests — its free HARO/Qwoted/#journorequest aggregator with semantic filtering and DA scores — was rated the #1 journalist request platform by Hey Press in February 2026. As a top-of-funnel reactive-PR tool, that's a genuinely strong, well-regarded offering.
DA scores for the link-building crowd
JournoFinder attaches domain-authority scores to the outlets and journalists it surfaces, which suits SEO and digital-PR teams optimizing for backlinks as much as coverage. If your KPI is link equity rather than the story itself, having DA baked into discovery is a fair, niche-specific convenience that an earned-media tool like Medialyst doesn't center on.
Where Medialyst pulls ahead.
Right-priced, and built for the whole workflow
Starter is $149/mo, Pro $299, Scale $800 — published, monthly, no per-seat games, no contract, 30-day money-back. The first list is free with 300 credits and no credit card. And unlike JournoFinder, sending is built in, so you don't pay for a second outreach tool on top.
Verified in real time, not validated and stored
Medialyst verifies every email in real time before it reaches you through a multi-step verification waterfall — rather than serving whatever a validation run last marked deliverable.
Fit for this story, grounded in real articles
Instead of semantic keyword search over a crawl, Medialyst reads hundreds of articles relevant to your specific announcement, scores reporters 0–100 by fit, and tells you why each one would write it — grounded in their actual recent coverage, not a topic tag.
Live, global enrichment
Global coverage across outlets, journalists, and beats, enriched live in real time rather than served from a stored profile. The average time from describing your story to a verified, scored list is four minutes and thirty-two seconds.
Agent-native from the ground up
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 a connector over a filter UI can't, like “find journalists who use affiliate links.” Upload competitor CSVs and the agent takes it from there.
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 JournoFinder
JournoFinder's AI Agent and Claude/ChatGPT connector are real and newer than most indie tools' — credit where it's due. But architecturally, the AI sits on top of the same keyword-filter database: semantic search generates related terms, the crawl returns whoever matches, and the Agent vets that set by beat and reach. It's the legacy filter dashboard with extra steps, and you get little control over the step. Medialyst is AI-native end to end. There's no underlying filter UI to bolt onto — the agent reads real, recent articles per journalist, and you can define custom enrichment columns in plain language: “find journalists who use affiliate links and identify which platform,” or “has this travel journalist visited San Diego in the last two years?” That's the difference between an AI Agent driving a keyword crawl and a research assistant that actually does the 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 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 totalJournoFinder~3 daysThree places the difference shows up.
01Database quality
JournoFinder's pitch is freshness over size: a continuous crawl of 50M+ news articles, AI-built profiles for newly-surfaced journalists, and automatic removal of outdated contacts.
That's a smart stance for an indie tool, and it genuinely beats a static index of 2019 bylines. The honest caveats are scale and verification depth — its database is smaller than Cision or Muck Rack, coverage is stronger in its UK-origin market than in niche international beats, and email accuracy, while reported at a solid 80–90%, rests on validation runs with bounce protection rather than a check at the moment you build a list. Medialyst takes the same freshness-first instinct further.
Rather than maintaining a crawl and validating against it, it enriches journalists live the moment you build a list: pulling recent articles, confirming the beat, and verifying the email in real time before it's ever shown to you. Coverage is global — any outlet, any journalist, any beat — but the unit of truth is the freshly-researched, freshly-verified contact for your story, not a row from the last crawl pass. The practical result is fewer bounces and less manual cross-referencing, because the list you receive was built and checked for the pitch you're sending today.
02Speed
” This is one of its real strengths, and it's fair to say so.
Medialyst matches the self-serve speed and then closes the loop. There's no demo gate and no contract — you paste a press release, a URL, or a topic, and the agent goes to work immediately, with an average time from describing your story to a verified, scored journalist list of four minutes and thirty-two seconds.
” For reactive PR, where the window between a story breaking and your angle landing is measured in hours, removing that export-and-switch step is the difference between catching the moment and missing it.
03AI & agent surface
JournoFinder has moved earlier than most indie tools here, and it deserves credit: it markets an AI Agent for automated list building and a Claude/ChatGPT connector that lets you build lists inside an AI assistant (described as MCP-style, though unverified in the June 2026 refresh).
The limit is what sits underneath — the connector drives the same keyword crawl, so you're automating a filter, not composing with a research primitive, and there's no documented public REST API for wiring it into your own scripts. 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 research questions in plain language and get structured answers back across a whole list — the kind of thing a fixed crawl schema can't express. If your team is building AI-assisted workflows, Medialyst is a component you compose with, not a connector bolted onto a database.
Two pricing philosophies, side by side.
Ours is public and posted. Here's how it sits next to what JournoFinder 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 — 300 credits, no credit card
- One unified product — no modules priced separately
- JournoFinder publishes pricing: a formal Free Plan, an Individual plan around $189/mo monthly (~$119/mo annual), and a new 3-user Team plan around $349/mo monthly (~$229/mo annual). A 7-day trial is available with no sales call, though “you will not be able to access the journalists contact information on the free trial,” and their published policy is “We don't offer refunds.”
- 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."
"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 JournoFinder.
How much does JournoFinder cost in 2026?
What is the best JournoFinder alternative?
Is JournoFinder accurate?
JournoFinder vs Medialyst — which is better?
Does JournoFinder have built-in email sending?
Can I import my JournoFinder list into Medialyst?
Discovery and sending in one place. Build your first list.
Start free with 300 credits and no credit card. Paste your story and get a verified, story-specific list of journalists in minutes.