Featured vs JustReachOut
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 assessmentFeatured compared with JustReachOut
Different philosophies of the same job. JustReachOut is built for proactive outbound: find journalists writing about your topic, build a list, pitch them, and track the sequence, with coaching and templates around the process. Featured is primarily inbound plus aggregation, matching you to requests and calls that already exist, with pitch drafting layered on. Teams that want to control exactly who they target and follow up systematically prefer JustReachOut; teams that want a daily list of opportunities to react to prefer Featured, which is also cheaper at entry.
Choose Featured if
Founders, solo marketers, boutique PR firms, and small in-house communications teams that want earned media across several channels at once, are comfortable writing their own pitches with AI assistance, and want one subscription instead of a database licence plus a monitoring tool plus a query service.
Choose JustReachOut if
Founders, small-business owners, authors, and solo PR consultants who intend to pitch journalists themselves, want live source requests and verified reporter emails in one place, and value written guidance and coaching as much as the database itself.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Featured | JustReachOut |
|---|---|---|
| Category | PR | PR |
| Starting price | Free, with paid plans from $29 per month billed annually (free plan available) | $147 per month (Starter, billed monthly) or $98 per month billed annually (7 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Usage-based subscription metered on daily AI usage rather than seats. Every chat message, workflow run, and result review draws from a daily pool that resets each day. All plans include the same feature set (Featured Chat, workflows, journalist requests, podcast discovery, bylined articles, speaking opportunities, awards, media monitoring, GEO visibility, competitor tracking, and multi-channel delivery); the tiers differ only in how much AI work you can do per day. HARO remains free and separate, funded by newsletter sponsorship. | Flat monthly subscription tiered by monthly email sends, team members, and number of brands, with a roughly 33 percent discount for annual billing. Every tier includes the full toolset; what changes is volume, seats, brand count, and how much human PR help is attached. No contracts, cancel anytime. |
| Free plan | Featured Chat, daily pitching tools, journalist matching, core workflows, and GEO visibility tracking on a small daily AI allowance. HARO's three-times-daily journalist query digest is separately free forever. | No |
| Free trial | No time-limited trial; the free plan serves that purpose | 7 days, credit card required |
| Best for | Founders, solo marketers, boutique PR firms, and small in-house communications teams that want earned media across several channels at once, are comfortable writing their own pitches with AI assistance, and want one subscription instead of a database licence plus a monitoring tool plus a query service. | Founders, small-business owners, authors, and solo PR consultants who intend to pitch journalists themselves, want live source requests and verified reporter emails in one place, and value written guidance and coaching as much as the database itself. |
| Setup time | Under an hour. You create an account, write a profile describing your expertise and topics, and the matched opportunity feed populates immediately. HARO signup is separate and takes a couple of minutes plus an email verification. | Under an hour to a first pitch. Account creation, from-address and signature setup, and a first keyword subscription are all self-serve, and the Pitch Requests feed has usable opportunities on day one without any data import. |
| Learning curve | Low mechanically, since the primary interface is plain-language chat. The skill that takes longer is pitch judgment: knowing which requests are worth answering, responding within hours rather than days, and editing the AI draft into something that sounds like a person with a specific opinion. | The software is simple; the discipline is not. The skill that determines results is writing a pitch a busy reporter will answer and choosing angles that are genuinely newsworthy, which is why the product ships so much written guidance and sells strategy calls at higher tiers. Expect a few weeks of sending before the reply rate becomes informative. |
| Platforms | Web application, Email (HARO digest, workflow delivery), Slack (workflow and monitoring delivery) | Web application (browser only), Email sending from your own from-address |
| Compliance | GDPR, CCPA | GDPR, CAN-SPAM |
| Founded | 2020 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | Scottsdale, Arizona, United States | United States (distributed team) |
| Ownership | Venture-backed, independent | Majority stake acquired by Adam White, founder of SEOJet, in late 2020 in a reported high six-figure deal; founder Dmitry Dragilev retained a minority stake. Jon Mest has served as CEO since 2024. |
Strengths and limitations
Featured
Strengths
- Aggregates five distinct earned-media opportunity types (journalist requests, podcasts, bylined articles, speaking calls, awards) that normally require separate tools or manual searching.
- Owns HARO and Connectively, which means its journalist request feed draws on the category's largest and most recognized query sources rather than a scraped subset.
- Every feature is available on every plan including the free one, so evaluation is genuinely free and upgrades are purely about throughput.
- The GEO audit against ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini is a real answer to a question executives are now asking, and it is included at no cost on the free tier.
Limitations
- The daily usage reset is the sharpest constraint: hit the ceiling mid-afternoon and the tool is unavailable until tomorrow regardless of how much of the billing month remains.
- The company does not publish absolute usage numbers, only relative multiples (5x, 20x), so you cannot calculate before purchase how many chats or workflow runs a plan actually buys.
- The Pro+ tier is named on the pricing page without a printed headline price next to the other tiers, which makes budgeting for the agency use case harder than it should be.
- No guaranteed placements or links. Publishers and journalists decide, competitive categories draw many responses to the same query, and quotes are frequently published without a link.
JustReachOut
Strengths
- One of the very few media outreach products with published prices, a self-serve signup, and no annual contract, which is the entire reason a small business can buy it at all.
- Human-verified email addresses instead of pattern-guessed ones, which shows up directly in bounce rates.
- The Pitch Requests feed aggregates six sources of live journalist queries, which is the highest-conversion way for an unknown company to get quoted and became scarcer after HARO's free service was retired.
- The AI pitch engine removes the real bottleneck in DIY PR, which is not finding the journalist but writing something personalized enough to be opened.
Limitations
- The send cap is the binding constraint: 100 emails a month on the $147 tier, and the company deliberately blocks mass sending, so no plan solves a high-volume outreach need.
- No list export and no raw database access; the FAQ answers this directly with a no, which rules out working the data in your own CRM or sequencing tool.
- No public API and effectively no third-party integrations, so pitch activity does not sync to a CRM, a shared inbox, or a reporting stack.
- Contact data freshness is the most repeated complaint in public reviews, particularly for reporters who have changed outlets, despite the manual verification step.
Pricing compared
Featured
Usage-based subscription metered on daily AI usage rather than seats. Every chat message, workflow run, and result review draws from a daily pool that resets each day. All plans include the same feature set (Featured Chat, workflows, journalist requests, podcast discovery, bylined articles, speaking opportunities, awards, media monitoring, GEO visibility, competitor tracking, and multi-channel delivery); the tiers differ only in how much AI work you can do per day. HARO remains free and separate, funded by newsletter sponsorship.
- Free$0
- Lite$29
- Pro$79
- Pro+Listed as a 20x usage tier
At $29 a month the Lite plan is cheap against any alternative that involves a media database licence or an agency hour, and the fact that every plan carries every feature means a buyer can validate matching quality for free before spending anything. The honest caveat is that the highest-value classic workflow, answering journalist queries for a quote and a link, is free through HARO, which this same company operates. What the subscription actually buys is breadth (podcasts, speaking, awards, bylines, monitoring in one place) and drafting speed. If you would genuinely use three or more of those opportunity types, the price is easy to justify. If you would only use journalist requests, start free and see whether the aggregation earns the upgrade.
JustReachOut
Flat monthly subscription tiered by monthly email sends, team members, and number of brands, with a roughly 33 percent discount for annual billing. Every tier includes the full toolset; what changes is volume, seats, brand count, and how much human PR help is attached. No contracts, cancel anytime.
- Starter Outreach$147
- Advanced Outreach$247
- Ultimate Outreach$497
- Jumpstart Program$417
- White Glove$1,997
Judged against the media database category, JustReachOut is inexpensive: Muck Rack and Cision quote annual contracts in the thousands and rarely publish a number, while $98 to $147 a month is a purchase a solo founder can actually authorize. Judged against what a small business sends, the value is less obvious, because 100 pitches a month for $147 is expensive per email and the tool refuses to let you scale the volume, by design. The right way to price it is per placement: if the Pitch Requests feed and the narrative guidance produce two pieces of coverage a quarter that you would otherwise have paid an agency for, the Starter plan pays for itself many times over. If you already know exactly who to pitch and simply need addresses, this is a costly way to buy them.
Editorial verdict on each
Featured
Featured is in an unusual position: it owns the free thing that competes with its paid thing. HARO, relaunched free and sponsorship-funded under Featured's ownership, covers the classic journalist query workflow at no cost, and Connectively covers expert to publisher matching. The subscription buys breadth and speed on top of that, and the breadth is real, since podcasts, speaking calls, awards, bylines, monitoring, and an AI visibility audit in one $29 a month product is a set of tools that would otherwise be four subscriptions. The MCP server and the GEO audit both suggest a company reading the market correctly. The reservations are that the current product is only a few months old, that daily usage caps are a harsher constraint than monthly ones, and that the company publishes usage in multiples rather than numbers, so you cannot size a plan before buying. Start on the free plan, which carries every feature, and let the placements decide whether to upgrade.
Read the full Featured profileJustReachOut
JustReachOut is one of the few PR tools built on the assumption that the buyer is the person doing the pitching. It publishes its prices, sells without a contract, verifies its email addresses by hand, and pairs a 700,000-contact journalist database with an aggregated feed of live source requests plus an AI writer that removes the personalization bottleneck. For a founder, author, or solo consultant, that is a coherent product at a price a small business can authorize, and the surrounding education is better than most of the category. The constraints are real and worth stating before you buy: the send cap is low and intentional, there is no list export and no API, coverage ends at the pitch with no monitoring on the other side, and public reviews consistently flag contact freshness. Buy it if the hard part of your PR is knowing who to pitch and what to say; do not buy it expecting an outreach engine, a CRM, or a coverage report.
Read the full JustReachOut profileFeatured profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; JustReachOut last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.