Featured 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 assessmentFeatured compared with Muck Rack
Not really competitors despite overlapping vocabulary. Muck Rack is the professional media database and PR CRM: verified journalist contacts, beat and coverage history, pitch tracking, and reporting, sold on annual quote-based contracts that put it out of reach for most small businesses. Featured is a self-serve subscription starting free that surfaces opportunities rather than contacts. A small business that cannot get a Muck Rack quote approved should look at Featured; a communications team running large targeted campaigns against named reporters needs the database.
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 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 | Featured | Muck Rack |
|---|---|---|
| Category | PR | PR |
| Starting price | Free, with paid plans from $29 per month billed annually (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 | 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. | 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 | 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 | No |
| 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. | 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 | 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. | 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, 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. | 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, Email (HARO digest, workflow delivery), Slack (workflow and monitoring delivery) | Web application, Gmail and Outlook integration, Slack alerts, Mobile web |
| Compliance | GDPR, CCPA | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II |
| Founded | 2020 | 2009 |
| Headquarters | Scottsdale, Arizona, United States | Miami, Florida (fully distributed workforce) |
| Ownership | Venture-backed, independent | Founder-controlled; minority growth investment from Susquehanna Growth Equity (2022) |
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.
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
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.
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
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 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 profileFeatured 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.