Anewstip vs SparkToro
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 SparkToro
Complementary research tools that answer different questions. SparkToro tells you which publications, podcasts, and accounts a defined audience already pays attention to, which is how you choose targets strategically. Anewstip tells you which individual reporters at those outlets have written about your topic and how to reach them. A sensible sequence is SparkToro to pick the twelve outlets that matter to your buyers, then Anewstip to find the right byline at each one.
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 SparkToro if
Marketers planning where to advertise, sponsor, pitch, or guest before committing budget, agencies producing audience research for clients, founders working out which communities their buyers actually inhabit, and PR teams building outlet lists that are not just the obvious ten publications.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Anewstip | SparkToro |
|---|---|---|
| Category | PR | Signals |
| Starting price | Free; paid plans from $200 per month (Standard), with a $99 per month early-stage plan for eligible applicants (free plan available) | $0 (Free), then $50 per month (Personal) (free plan available) |
| 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. | Freemium per-plan subscription metered on reports per month, with seats included generously and a separate pay-as-you-go API. |
| Free plan | 1 user, unlimited email and phone reveals, 2 media lists of up to 100 contacts, 2 alerts, and zero pitches per month | Three reports per month with preview data only, one user. |
| Free trial | 7 days on Standard and Professional, converting to a paid subscription automatically unless cancelled | No fixed-length trial; the free tier serves as the evaluation path |
| 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. | Marketers planning where to advertise, sponsor, pitch, or guest before committing budget, agencies producing audience research for clients, founders working out which communities their buyers actually inhabit, and PR teams building outlet lists that are not just the obvious ten publications. |
| 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. | Ten minutes to a first report. Describe your audience, run it, and read the results. There is nothing to connect and no data to import. |
| 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 mechanically, moderate interpretively. Running a report is trivial; defining an audience precisely enough that the results are specific rather than generic takes a few attempts, and reading affinity rankings correctly means resisting the pull of the largest names on the list. |
| Platforms | Web application, ClipCoverage Google Slides add-on (separate product and account) | Web application, MCP endpoint, Pay-as-you-go API, Shareable report links |
| 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 | Output is aggregate audience data rather than records about identifiable individuals, Single sign-on and SCIM available on the Agency tier |
| Founded | 2014 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | Hong Kong (terms of service governed by California law, San Francisco jurisdiction) | Seattle, Washington, United States |
| Ownership | Independent, founder-operated | Independently owned, angel-funded under a profit-sharing structure rather than venture capital |
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.
SparkToro
Strengths
- Affinity-based ranking rather than popularity ranking is the core insight and it produces media plans that a general research tool simply cannot.
- Podcast and community affinity data is close to unavailable anywhere else at any price, and it is the single most cited reason people subscribe.
- The free tier is real and permanent, and preview data is enough to judge whether the full product would tell you something new.
- Seat counts are extraordinarily generous: ten users at $150 and a hundred at $300, when most research tools charge per seat.
Limitations
- No company data, no contacts, and no account-level intent, so it cannot participate in a sales motion at all.
- Report metering fits steady research and fits bursty project work badly; four a month on Personal vanishes during an intensive week.
- Reports do not appear to roll over, so under-use is simply lost value.
- The data reflects public online behaviour, so audiences that are largely offline or on private channels come back thin.
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.
SparkToro
Freemium per-plan subscription metered on reports per month, with seats included generously and a separate pay-as-you-go API.
- Free$0
- Personal$50
- Business$150
- Agency$300
Model it per report, because that is the unit. On Personal at $50 for four reports you are paying $12.50 a piece, which is trivial against the cost of one badly chosen sponsorship. On Business at $150 for 25 reports and ten seats it drops to $6, and Agency at $300 for 250 reports lands near a dollar. The economics get better the more research you do, which is the right shape. The real value question is frequency: audience composition does not change month to month, so a single business might genuinely need four reports a year rather than four a month, and the honest advice is to subscribe during a planning cycle and cancel afterwards rather than to hold a seat year-round out of habit.
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 profileSparkToro
Best ValueSparkToro is the odd one out in this category and it is worth being clear about why: it will never hand you a lead. What it does instead is answer the question that sits upstream of every outbound and advertising decision, which is where your buyers already are. The affinity ranking is the reason to buy it, because a list ordered by relevance rather than reach is the difference between a media plan and a Wikipedia article, and the podcast and community data is genuinely unavailable elsewhere. Buy Business at $150 if a team will use it, since ten seats and 25 reports is a much better deal than three Personal licences. Buy Personal at $50 during a planning cycle and cancel afterwards if you are a solo operator, because audience research stays valid for months and reports do not roll over. Just do not put it in a sales stack and expect it to produce pipeline, because it is not that kind of tool and never claimed to be.
Read the full SparkToro profileAnewstip profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; SparkToro last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.