Featured vs Qwoted
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
Both sides assessedFeatured compared with Qwoted
The closest direct competitor for journalist queries, and the two are usually run together rather than chosen between. Qwoted is a two-sided network with a strong reputation among reporters and a free source tier, and its strength is depth in a single workflow: source requests, with good filtering and a real relationship layer. Featured is broader, adding podcasts, speaking, awards, bylines, and monitoring, plus the GEO audit. If you only want to answer queries, Qwoted's free tier plus HARO's free digest covers it. If you want one place for every kind of earned media opportunity, Featured is the wider net.
Qwoted compared with Featured
The closest direct competitor and the most useful comparison to run. Featured is question-and-answer oriented, generally cheaper, and skews toward smaller business and marketing publications with a higher publication rate on lower-authority sites. Qwoted skews toward business, finance, and national outlets, where the placements are harder to win and worth more when they land. Test both free tiers for a month and compare the outlets actually posting, not the marketing pages.
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 Qwoted if
Founders, consultants, and subject matter experts in business, finance, technology, and health who want to earn quotes in real publications, plus small PR agencies that need a source-request channel and a shared reporting view without an enterprise media database contract.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Featured | Qwoted |
|---|---|---|
| Category | PR | PR |
| Starting price | Free, with paid plans from $29 per month billed annually (free plan available) | Free (Basic, 2 pitches per month); Pro listed at $149 per month (free plan available) |
| 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. | Per-account subscription for sources and PR professionals, metered by monthly pitch credits. Journalists use the platform free. The free Basic plan keeps your profile searchable but caps you at two pitches a month and delays new requests by two hours; Pro removes the delay and adds the research features; Teams is quoted for multi-seat accounts. |
| 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. | Basic: 2 pitch credits per month, 2 hour delay on new opportunities, profile stays in the journalist-searchable database, real-time alerts and daily opportunity email included |
| Free trial | No time-limited trial; the free plan serves that purpose | No standard time-limited trial; the free Basic plan is the trial |
| 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, consultants, and subject matter experts in business, finance, technology, and health who want to earn quotes in real publications, plus small PR agencies that need a source-request channel and a shared reporting view without an enterprise media database contract. |
| 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 working account. The profile, biography, headshot, and expertise tags are the only setup, and there is nothing to install or integrate. Getting the tags right matters more than getting them fast. |
| 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 mechanically, real in practice. The skill is writing a pitch a journalist can paste: lead with the quotable line, keep it to a few short paragraphs, include credentials and a photo, and hit send within the first hour. Sources who treat the credit as scarce outperform those who spend all thirty five. |
| Platforms | Web application, Email (HARO digest, workflow delivery), Slack (workflow and monitoring delivery) | Web application, Email alerts and daily digest, Mobile web |
| Compliance | GDPR, CCPA | GDPR, CCPA |
| Founded | 2020 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | Scottsdale, Arizona, United States | New York, New York, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed, independent | Majority owned by Vested (financial communications agency), with a strategic investment from Prosek Ventures, the venture arm of Prosek Partners |
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.
Qwoted
Strengths
- The strongest remaining source-request marketplace after Connectively shut down in December 2024, with real journalists from national business and finance outlets posting requests.
- Discoverability is free: profiles stay searchable by reporters on every plan, so the inbound half of the product costs nothing.
- Unusually strong in business, finance, and fintech beats, a direct consequence of being built by financial communications firms.
- Pitch intelligence gives a measurable open and reply rate, which almost nothing else in earned media does at this price.
Limitations
- Purely reactive: there is no way to pitch a publication that has not posted a request, so campaign timing is not yours to control.
- The free plan's two hour delay is decisive on competitive requests, which regularly close before a Basic user can respond.
- Thirty five Pro credits a month is a real ceiling for anyone managing several clients or spokespeople, and pushes agencies toward a quoted Teams contract.
- Backlinks are unreliable; major outlets nofollow or omit source links, so buying this as an SEO tool sets the wrong expectation.
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.
Qwoted
Per-account subscription for sources and PR professionals, metered by monthly pitch credits. Journalists use the platform free. The free Basic plan keeps your profile searchable but caps you at two pitches a month and delays new requests by two hours; Pro removes the delay and adds the research features; Teams is quoted for multi-seat accounts.
- Basic$0
- Pro$149
- TeamsCustom
The free plan is the most interesting thing about the pricing, because discoverability is not gated behind it: a well-built free profile can earn coverage without a single pitch credit being spent. Pro at $149 list is expensive against two plausible comparisons, a $99 a month competitor with a similar model and simply spending the time on direct outreach, and the honest test is whether thirty five credits a month convert into more than one placement you would otherwise have missed. For agencies the Teams tier is easier to justify because reporting is the billable artifact. For a solo expert, start free, tag the profile properly, and upgrade only when the two-credit cap is visibly costing you opportunities.
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 profileQwoted
Qwoted is the sensible default in a category that lost its default when Connectively closed. The two-sided mechanics work, the request supply in business and finance beats is real, and pitch intelligence gives you an honest number for a channel that usually runs on anecdote. The best argument for it is the free plan, which keeps your profile searchable by journalists without charging you anything, so inbound placements can happen before you ever swipe a card. The arguments against it are worth taking seriously: $149 list for thirty five credits is steep next to cheaper rivals, the platform is entirely reactive so you cannot run a campaign on your own schedule, backlinks are not something you should count on, and Teams pricing is quote-only. Build a properly tagged free profile first, measure how often relevant requests appear in your actual beat, and upgrade only when the two-credit cap is demonstrably the thing standing between you and coverage.
Read the full Qwoted profileFeatured profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Qwoted last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.