Hunter 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
Editorial assessmentQwoted compared with Hunter
The manual alternative. With Hunter you find a journalist's email address and pitch cold, which costs a fraction of a Qwoted Pro plan and gives you complete control over who you approach. What you give up is permission: a Qwoted pitch answers a request the reporter posted, while a Hunter-sourced email is an unsolicited approach with the reply rate that implies. Use Hunter for a deliberate campaign against a named list, Qwoted for a steady flow of opportunities you did not have to source.
Choose Hunter if
Small teams and solo founders who need reliable work email addresses for named people at named companies, want to see where each address came from, and would rather pay a flat monthly fee with unlimited seats than a per-seat contact database subscription.
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 | Hunter | Qwoted |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Data | PR |
| Starting price | 0 euros (Free, 50 credits per month), then 49 euros per month (Starter) (free plan available) | Free (Basic, 2 pitches per month); Pro listed at $149 per month (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Freemium monthly or annual subscription priced in euros by credit allowance, with unlimited team members on every plan and a separately quoted Data Platform for API-heavy buyers. | 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 | 50 credits per month, one connected email account, 100,000 saved leads, 10 AI searches and 15 AI suggestions, and full access to Domain Search, Email Finder, and Email Verifier. | 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 permanent free tier is the evaluation path | No standard time-limited trial; the free Basic plan is the trial |
| Best for | Small teams and solo founders who need reliable work email addresses for named people at named companies, want to see where each address came from, and would rather pay a flat monthly fee with unlimited seats than a per-seat contact database subscription. | 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 ten minutes for the lookup product: create an account, run a domain search, install the extension. Campaigns takes another twenty to thirty minutes because you have to connect and authenticate a sending mailbox and set up tracking and unsubscribe handling. | 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 | Very low. Domain Search and Email Finder are self-explanatory, and the only concept that needs learning is the difference between a valid result, an accept-all result, and a pattern-inferred guess. Teams that ignore the confidence score and treat every result as verified are the ones who complain about bounces. | 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, Chrome extension, Firefox extension, Google Sheets add-on, REST API v2 | Web application, Email alerts and daily digest, Mobile web |
| Compliance | GDPR with a data processing agreement, CCPA, Published individual claim and removal process | GDPR, CCPA |
| Founded | 2015 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | Wilmington, Delaware, United States (fully remote team across Europe, America, and Asia) | New York, New York, United States |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped and independent | Majority owned by Vested (financial communications agency), with a strategic investment from Prosek Ventures, the venture arm of Prosek Partners |
Strengths and limitations
Hunter
Strengths
- Credits are only consumed on results, so the advertised price is close to the real cost per found email rather than a ceiling you never reach.
- Per-result public source citations are close to unique in this category and are the strongest available answer to a provenance or GDPR question.
- Unlimited team members on every plan, including Free, removes the per-seat tax that makes comparable tools expensive for small teams.
- The API is properly documented with published per-second and per-minute limits, free management endpoints, and stable behaviour, which is why Hunter appears as a provider inside so many waterfall tools.
Limitations
- No phone numbers at all, in any tier, which rules Hunter out entirely for teams that cold call.
- Coverage is a function of what companies publish on the open web, so it is strong for tech, agencies, media, and education and noticeably weaker for manufacturing, trades, healthcare, and privately held mid-market firms.
- It is not a prospecting database: Discover finds companies, but you cannot filter a hundred million people by title and seniority the way you can in Apollo or UpLead.
- Confidence scores and pattern inference mean some returned addresses are educated guesses; the pattern is usually right but the individual result can be wrong, and a wrong result still consumed a credit.
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
Hunter
Freemium monthly or annual subscription priced in euros by credit allowance, with unlimited team members on every plan and a separately quoted Data Platform for API-heavy buyers.
- Free0 euros
- Starter49 euros
- Growth149 euros
- Scale299 euros
- EnterpriseCustom
At Growth, 10,000 credits for 149 euros works out at roughly 0.015 euros per found email, and because failed searches are free that number holds in practice rather than in theory. At Starter, 2,000 credits for 49 euros is about 0.025 euros each. Both are competitive with Anymail Finder and cheaper than credit-metered platforms once you account for unlimited seats and the bundled sending tool, which alone would cost 30 to 50 dollars a month elsewhere. The catch is scope: there are no phone numbers, so a team that needs to call as well as email is buying a second tool regardless, and at that point the bundled Campaigns feature is less of a saving than it looks.
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
Hunter
Hunter is the safest choice in this category for a small business that needs work email addresses and nothing else. Credits are charged only on results, seats are unlimited, credits last a year, the API is properly documented, and every address comes with the public URLs it was found at, which is the best answer anyone in this market gives to the provenance question. A decade of bootstrapped independence means the terms are unlikely to change underneath you. Buy it if your workflow starts with a list of companies and ends with a sent email. Do not buy it if you need phone numbers, because there are none at any price, or if you need to discover who to contact rather than how to reach them, because that is Apollo's job and not Hunter's.
Read the full Hunter 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 profileHunter profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Qwoted last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.