Is JustReachOut or Semrush cheaper?

JustReachOut starts at $147 per month (Starter, billed monthly) or $98 per month billed annually (7 days trial). Semrush starts at $139 per month (SEO plan, monthly billing) or $117.33 per month billed annually (free plan available).

JustReachOut vs Semrush

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 assessment

JustReachOut compared with Semrush

Different categories that overlap at the backlink. Semrush finds the link gaps, tracks referring domains, and has an outreach module plus ownership of Prowly for the PR side. JustReachOut is the execution layer for earning those links through pitching people rather than through content and technical SEO. Teams already paying for Semrush should check what its own outreach tooling covers before adding a second subscription; teams whose link strategy is entirely relationship-based get more from JustReachOut.

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.

Choose Semrush if

Marketing teams and agencies that run paid and organic together, need competitive intelligence across advertising as well as search, and want AI answer visibility tracking bundled into the same subscription rather than bought separately.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	JustReachOut	Semrush
Category	PR	SEO
Starting price	$147 per month (Starter, billed monthly) or $98 per month billed annually (7 days trial)	$139 per month (SEO plan, monthly billing) or $117.33 per month billed annually (free plan available)
Pricing model	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.	Self-serve tiered subscription repackaged in 2026 around SEO and AI Search bundles, metered on websites, daily-tracked keywords, and daily AI prompt checks, with per-seat charges for additional users.
Free plan	No	One demo project, 10 daily reports across tools, and limited AI Visibility features. Enough to evaluate the interface and run occasional lookups, not enough to work in.
Free trial	7 days, credit card required	7 days, no credit card required
Best for	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.	Marketing teams and agencies that run paid and organic together, need competitive intelligence across advertising as well as search, and want AI answer visibility tracking bundled into the same subscription rather than bought separately.
Setup time	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.	An hour to set up properly: create your project, verify the domain, connect Google Analytics and Search Console, start the first Site Audit crawl, and load Position Tracking with your target keywords and competitors. AI prompt tracking takes another half hour if you use Prompt Research rather than inventing prompts.
Learning curve	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.	Steep, mainly because of breadth. Every individual tool is understandable, but there are dozens of them and the navigation assumes you know which one you want. Expect a week before a new user stops getting lost, and plan to formally ignore several toolkits.
Platforms	Web application (browser only), Email sending from your own from-address	Web application, Chrome extension (SEO toolbar), Looker Studio connector, Mobile apps for reporting, REST API
Compliance	GDPR, CAN-SPAM	GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 (verify current attestation with the vendor)
Founded	2014	2008
Headquarters	United States (distributed team)	Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Ownership	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.	Subsidiary of Adobe Inc. following a $1.9 billion all-cash acquisition completed in April 2026

Strengths and limitations

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.

Semrush

Strengths

By far the broadest coverage of any self-serve SEO tool: organic, paid, local, social, PR, content, and market research in a single subscription.
AI search visibility is bundled into paid plans across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, rather than sold as a four-figure add-on.
Advertising Research is genuinely unmatched among SEO suites and is the clearest reason to choose Semrush over Ahrefs.
Database scale and refresh cadence are published openly, including the honest admission that keyword updates range from daily to monthly by term popularity.

Limitations

Additional users from $45 per month each on every tier make Semrush expensive for teams and cheap only for lone operators.
Backlink data is large but is not the reference index; when Ahrefs and Semrush disagree, most practitioners believe Ahrefs.
The breadth is genuinely overwhelming, and small teams routinely pay for toolkits they open once during onboarding and never return to.
The 2026 repackaging is recent enough that plan-to-feature mapping is still confusing, particularly for customers migrating off legacy Pro, Guru, and Business plans.

Pricing compared

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.

Semrush

Self-serve tiered subscription repackaged in 2026 around SEO and AI Search bundles, metered on websites, daily-tracked keywords, and daily AI prompt checks, with per-seat charges for additional users.

Free$0
SEO$139
Starter$199
Pro+$299
Advanced$549
EnterpriseCustom quote

Semrush is the best value in this category for a team that will actually use three or more toolkits, and mediocre value for anyone who will not. At $199 the Starter plan includes AI visibility tracking across five engines, which at Ahrefs costs $129 plus $199 to $699 on top; that comparison alone justifies the plan for anyone whose board is asking about AI answers. The counterweight is seats. Every extra login is $45 per month, and the pricing is designed around a single power user with reports flowing outward rather than a team working inside the tool. If your use case is keyword research and rank tracking for one small site, this is roughly three times more platform than you need and you should look at SE Ranking, Mangools, or Ubersuggest instead.

Editorial verdict on each

JustReachOut

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 profile

Semrush

Category Leader

Semrush is the most complete self-serve marketing visibility platform available, and the 2026 repackaging made it the sensible default for anyone whose leadership is asking about AI answers: prompt tracking across five engines starts at $199 per month, where the equivalent at Ahrefs is a separately billed add-on running to $699. The dataset is large, the refresh cadence is documented honestly, and the free plan plus seven-day no-card trial means you can check the claims yourself. Two caveats matter. Seats at $45 each make this a tool for one power user with reports flowing outward, not a team workspace. And Adobe's $1.9 billion acquisition, completed in April 2026, means the vendor you are signing a three-year deal with is now a division of a company with very different pricing instincts. Buy it if you will use the breadth. Buy something cheaper if you will not.

Read the full Semrush profile

JustReachOut profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Semrush last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.