Anewstip vs Muck Rack
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentAnewstip compared with Muck Rack
The straight database comparison, and it is not close on software quality. Muck Rack has current journalist profiles maintained with journalist participation, real relationship history, coverage reporting, team workflows, and support, at annual pricing that typically lands in the five figures with no free tier and no published price. Anewstip has a comparable-scale contact database, unlimited reveals, a $200 monthly option, and a free plan. Small teams that cannot justify Muck Rack's floor buy Anewstip and accept the dated interface; teams with a PR budget and a procurement process buy Muck Rack.
Choose Anewstip if
Founders, solo PR consultants, and small in-house teams who want to build a targeted journalist list from what reporters actually wrote, and who value unlimited contact reveals over polished software. The free tier makes it a reasonable permanent research companion even for teams that pitch from a different tool.
Choose Muck Rack if
In-house communications teams and PR agencies with a funded, ongoing earned-media program: teams that pitch journalists most weeks, need defensible coverage reporting for executives or clients, and can commit to an annual contract in the five-figure range.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Anewstip | Muck Rack |
|---|---|---|
| Category | PR | PR |
| Starting price | Free; paid plans from $200 per month (Standard), with a $99 per month early-stage plan for eligible applicants (free plan available) | Quote only; reported entry points around $5,000 per year for a single-seat Starter license, with most teams reported near $10,000 per year |
| Pricing model | Subscription with four tiers, metered on pitch volume, number of media lists, contacts per list, and number of alerts. Access to journalist email addresses and phone numbers is unlimited on every tier including the free plan, which is unusual for this category. Pitch capacity can be topped up with one-time, non-expiring point packages. Standard bills monthly or annually; Professional is annual only. | Quote-only annual subscription. Three published plans (Starter, Standard, Premier) with a public feature matrix but no public prices; the quote depends on seat count and which modules you take. Print and broadcast monitoring, social listening, press release distribution, Media Intelligence services, Generative Pulse and the API are add-ons rather than base features. No monthly billing option. |
| Free plan | 1 user, unlimited email and phone reveals, 2 media lists of up to 100 contacts, 2 alerts, and zero pitches per month | No |
| Free trial | 7 days on Standard and Professional, converting to a paid subscription automatically unless cancelled | No |
| Best for | Founders, solo PR consultants, and small in-house teams who want to build a targeted journalist list from what reporters actually wrote, and who value unlimited contact reveals over polished software. The free tier makes it a reasonable permanent research companion even for teams that pitch from a different tool. | In-house communications teams and PR agencies with a funded, ongoing earned-media program: teams that pitch journalists most weeks, need defensible coverage reporting for executives or clients, and can commit to an annual contract in the five-figure range. |
| Setup time | Minutes. Registration is self-serve, there is nothing to install or connect, and the first useful search happens on the free plan before any payment. Building a first media list of a few dozen contacts is an afternoon of query iteration rather than a project. | Days rather than weeks for the core product. Connecting email, configuring saved searches and alerts, and building the first media lists is same-week work. Reporting takes longer to get right because dashboards, tagging conventions and the coverage score need agreement on what counts as a good placement. |
| Learning curve | Low mechanically, higher editorially. The search syntax and filters are straightforward; the skill that decides results is choosing query phrases specific enough to surface genuinely relevant writers and disciplined enough not to fill a list with anyone who mentioned your category in passing. | Low by the standards of the category; Muck Rack is routinely cited as the easiest of the major PR platforms to pick up. The harder skill is judgment: building tight, evidence-based media lists instead of large ones, and writing pitches the tracking data can teach you to improve. |
| Platforms | Web application, ClipCoverage Google Slides add-on (separate product and account) | Web application, Gmail and Outlook integration, Slack alerts, Mobile web |
| Compliance | No published SOC 2, ISO 27001, or equivalent attestation, Card payments handled by Stripe, so card data is not stored on Anewstip servers, Privacy policy includes a section addressed to journalists and other indexed individuals | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II |
| Founded | 2014 | 2009 |
| Headquarters | Hong Kong (terms of service governed by California law, San Francisco jurisdiction) | Miami, Florida (fully distributed workforce) |
| Ownership | Independent, founder-operated | Founder-controlled; minority growth investment from Susquehanna Growth Equity (2022) |
Strengths and limitations
Anewstip
Strengths
- Searching by what journalists actually published beats filtering by assigned beat tags for niche or technical topics, and this is the tool built around that idea.
- Unlimited email and phone reveals on every tier, including free, removes the per-credit anxiety that shapes how teams use most media databases.
- The free plan is usable indefinitely for research, which makes it a low-risk permanent addition to a stack even if you pitch from elsewhere.
- One saved query serves three jobs: a list, an alert, and an AutoList rule that keeps building the list without supervision.
Limitations
- The Twitter and X search, historically the product's defining feature, is labeled deprecated inside the app; if that is why you are looking at Anewstip, it is no longer the reason to buy.
- The company appears to be a one-to-few-person operation with no outside funding since its 2014 founding, which is a genuine continuity risk for a system of record you would keep for years.
- The public site is visibly stale: the customer count is footnoted as of August 2018, testimonials date to the Twitter era, a Google Plus link survives in the markup, and the footer's about, blog, and contact links resolve to 404 pages.
- The terms of service carry a December 2014 effective date and the privacy policy is generic template text with no named GDPR lawful basis, no data processing agreement, and no subprocessor list, which will stall enterprise or EU procurement.
Muck Rack
Strengths
- Journalist-maintained profiles keep beat and outlet data fresher than databases built purely from scraping and phone verification.
- Search operates over what journalists have actually written recently, so lists are built from evidence rather than stale beat tags.
- Pitching, monitoring and reporting live in one place with a shared team history, which removes the duplicate-pitch failure mode agencies dread.
- Podcast and newsletter monitoring cover channels many competing tools still treat as an afterthought.
Limitations
- No free plan, no self-serve trial, and no monthly billing; every buyer goes through a demo and signs an annual contract, which excludes most small businesses outright.
- Prices are not published at all, so comparable teams are quoted very different numbers for the same feature bundle depending on size and leverage.
- The reporting features that justify the platform to executives (custom dashboards, AI sentiment, auto-tagging, PR Hit Score, Google Analytics tie-in) are Premier-only.
- Capabilities buyers expect to be included are separate paid modules: print and broadcast monitoring, social listening, press release distribution and the API.
Pricing compared
Anewstip
Subscription with four tiers, metered on pitch volume, number of media lists, contacts per list, and number of alerts. Access to journalist email addresses and phone numbers is unlimited on every tier including the free plan, which is unusual for this category. Pitch capacity can be topped up with one-time, non-expiring point packages. Standard bills monthly or annually; Professional is annual only.
- Free$0
- Standard$200
- Professional$400
- PartnersCustom
Judged purely on capability per dollar for research, Anewstip is one of the best offers in the category, because the free tier does not withhold the thing every competitor charges for. A founder can identify and reach the right forty journalists for the price of a single point package. The judgment gets harder at $200 per month, where Standard buys one user, 1,000 sends, and twenty lists against competitors that charge two to five times as much but ship modern software, coverage reporting, CRM-grade relationship history, and support you can rely on. The honest framing is that you are buying a database and a search engine at a fair price, with dated tooling wrapped around it, from a company small enough that continuity is a real consideration.
Muck Rack
Quote-only annual subscription. Three published plans (Starter, Standard, Premier) with a public feature matrix but no public prices; the quote depends on seat count and which modules you take. Print and broadcast monitoring, social listening, press release distribution, Media Intelligence services, Generative Pulse and the API are add-ons rather than base features. No monthly billing option.
- StarterCustom quote
- StandardCustom quote
- PremierCustom quote
Per dollar, Muck Rack is usually the better-liked of the major PR platforms: the interface is markedly cleaner than the legacy incumbents, the journalist data is fresher because journalists maintain much of it, and the reporting is credible enough to survive an executive review. But the entry point is an annual five-figure commitment with no trial, and the analytics that make the reporting genuinely good sit on the top tier. For a communications team with a real budget and a weekly pitching cadence, it is defensible and often cheaper than the incumbent it replaces. For a small business doing PR a few times a year, the math does not work, and a lighter tool with published monthly pricing will do the job.
Editorial verdict on each
Anewstip
Anewstip is the cheapest credible way to answer the question that actually matters in media relations: which specific journalists have already written about the thing I am announcing, and how do I reach them. Searching published articles instead of assigned beat tags produces better lists in niche categories, and giving away unlimited email and phone reveals on a free plan is a genuinely different commercial posture from the rest of the category. Against that, the software is dated, the marketing site has visibly not been touched in years, the tweet search that made the product famous is now marked deprecated, compliance documentation is effectively absent, and the company appears to be one person. Buy it as a research utility, on Standard's month-to-month terms or the free plan, keep exports of anything you would miss, and do not expect it to be the system of record a growing PR function will need in three years.
Read the full Anewstip profileMuck Rack
Muck Rack is the best-liked of the serious PR platforms for good reasons: journalists maintain much of the database, search runs on what reporters have actually written rather than stale beat tags, the interface does not feel like enterprise software from 2009, and the company has been early and substantive on measuring how AI answers cite the media. Generative Pulse and the AI Visibility Badges built on it are the most credible attempt any PR vendor has made to attach earned media to LLM visibility. The commercial model is the problem for anyone reading this site's usual audience. Nothing is published, nothing is self-serve, there is no free plan and no trial, the contract is annual, and the reported floor is about $5,000 a year for one seat, with the reporting features that make the platform persuasive gated to the top tier and several expected capabilities sold as add-ons. If you have a funded comms function and pitch most weeks, get the quote and negotiate hard on multi-year terms. If you are a small business doing PR a few times a year, this is not your tool yet, and a competitor with a published monthly price will get the same three placements for a fraction of the money.
Read the full Muck Rack profileAnewstip profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Muck Rack last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.