HARO Alternatives: What Actually Works Now

HARO did not die. It changed hands twice in two years, and the confusion that caused is why most pages about HARO alternatives are out of date before you reach the second heading.

Everything below was checked directly in September 2026. Where a site would not load for us, we say so rather than guess.

What happened to HARO

Help A Reporter Out launched in 2008 and was owned by Cision from 2014. Cision rebranded it as Connectively in 2024, then discontinued that platform. Cision's own site now states plainly that it no longer offers either service.

In April 2025 Cision sold HARO to Featured.com. Featured's own press page records the acquisition and says HARO returned to its original free, email-based format. Featured has since confirmed it owns both brands and intends to give Connectively a second life as the platform version.

So the practical answer in September 2026: HARO exists, it is free, and it arrives as an email newsletter three times a day. Connectively is no longer a Cision product. One caveat on method — helpareporter.com and connectively.us both sat behind a bot-protection screen when we tried to load them, so the account above rests on Cision's and Featured's published statements rather than on the live sites themselves.

How source-request platforms work

The mechanic is identical everywhere, and worth understanding before you compare brands.

A journalist is already writing a piece and needs an expert quote, a case study or a number. Rather than hunt for one, they post a request with a deadline. Sources read it, send a short answer, and the journalist uses whichever responses are usable.

You are not pitching a story here. You are supplying raw material for someone else's story, on their deadline and their terms. That single fact explains the entire category. It rewards people who are genuinely qualified and genuinely fast, and it quietly ignores everyone else. Earned media works this way in general, but here the window is measured in hours.

The main alternatives, verified

Each of these was loaded and read in September 2026.

• HARO, run by Featured. Free. Journalist requests delivered by email three times a day to sources. Still the lowest-friction way into the category, and still the one with the most volume.
• Featured. The company that now owns HARO, selling a paid layer above it. Its pricing page showed a free tier, then plans at $29 and $79 a month billed annually, with team and enterprise options above. Every plan carries the same features; what scales with price is AI usage allowance. Built for sources and PR people, not for journalists.
• Qwoted. A platform rather than a newsletter, used by journalists and sources alike. Its pricing page showed a free plan capped at two pitches a month with a two-hour delay on new requests, and a Pro plan at $149 a month for 35 pitches, real-time alerts and no delay. The delay matters more than the cap, because good requests are answered early.
• SourceBottle. Free for sources, Australian in origin, and visibly alive — the homepage was listing call-outs with deadlines a few days out when we checked. Strongest for Australian and New Zealand media, with UK and US call-outs alongside. Paid pitching upgrades exist.
• MentionMatch. helpab2bwriter.com now redirects here, so treat Help a B2B Writer as the former name. Narrow by design: B2B writers post requests, matching experts are emailed. Lower volume, better odds per request if you are a real B2B specialist.
• ResponseSource. UK-based and part of Pulsar Group, aimed at PR professionals rather than individuals. Journalist enquiries arrive in your inbox; access is paid, with a free trial advertised. The natural choice if your targets are British national and trade titles.
• Source of Sources. Recommended widely elsewhere, but sourceofsources.com would not serve us a page in September 2026. We will not tell you it works when we could not load it.

Two additions that cost nothing. Journalists post call-outs publicly on social platforms every day, with no intermediary and no subscription. And trade press in your own sector takes cold approaches far more readily than any national title, which is a route worth running alongside all of the above.

What each one costs in time

Cash price is the least interesting column on the comparison.

Read a day's requests properly and you have spent perhaps twenty minutes. Write one genuinely good response and you have spent fifteen to thirty more, because a usable answer needs a specific claim, a number or an example a journalist can verify. Done consistently, this is a daily habit rather than a monthly task, and that is the real price of every service listed above, free or paid.

Most responses are never used, and you will rarely be told why. Wins arrive in clusters after long stretches of silence. People who treat it as a burst of effort in week one conclude the category does not work, when what failed was the consistency.

There is a newer cost too: being distinguishable from automated answers. Featured's own published research puts roughly a fifth of HARO pitches as entirely AI-generated and reports that about a third of journalists now filter such responses out. Whether or not those exact figures hold, the direction is obvious. A generic reply written in seconds now competes with thousands of other generic replies written in seconds, and loses to the source who actually knows something.

Which one suits you

The honest recommendation depends less on budget than on who you are.

• Starting from nothing, with time. Free HARO email plus SourceBottle. No money, real practice, and enough volume to learn what a usable answer looks like.
• Answering requests most days. Qwoted Pro or a paid Featured tier. What you are buying is speed — no alert delay, a higher pitch allowance — and speed is the currency of this category.
• Selling to other businesses. MentionMatch first. Fewer requests, far less competition on each one, and the writers want precisely your kind of expertise.
• Targeting the UK. ResponseSource, because US-centric services will fill your inbox with requests you cannot usefully answer.
• Expertise but no time. None of them. Monitoring is the job, and a subscription does not do the job for you.

If you do have the time, the strongest free combination remains a source-request service plus direct pitching to named writers. Our guide to pitching a journalist by email covers the second half of that properly.

What none of them can do

This is the part these comparisons usually skip.

A source-request platform gives you access to questions. It does not give you a story, and it cannot make you the best available answer to one. If you have nothing specific to say, a larger feed of requests simply means being ignored faster and at greater scale. Expertise and speed decide this, not spend.

Nor do any of them control the outcome. You may get a quote with no link, a link with your name misspelled, or a mention at the foot of a piece nobody finishes. Anyone selling certainty here is selling something they do not own, which is the same test we apply to guaranteed PR.

It is also worth saying plainly that Digital Networking Agency is not on this list, and should not be. These platforms are you answering journalists' questions yourself, in your own time. We are a different product: we develop and write features and place them with publications, with your approval before anything runs. One costs your hours; the other buys our work. Plenty of people sensibly do both. If you want to work out which fits, our services page sets out what we actually do, and you can talk to us from there.

Frequently asked questions

Is HARO still running?

Yes. It is owned by Featured rather than Cision, and as of our check in September 2026 it goes out as a free email newsletter three times a day. Cision confirms on its own site that it no longer offers HARO or Connectively.

Is there a genuinely free HARO alternative?

Several. SourceBottle is free for sources, Qwoted runs a free plan with a pitch cap and a delay on alerts, and journalists post call-outs publicly on social platforms at no cost at all. Free tiers trade cash for speed, and speed is what wins requests.

Are these platforms good for SEO links?

Sometimes, and it is the wrong reason to use them. A fair share of requests come from content sites rather than newsrooms, links are the writer's decision and frequently absent, and answers written for a link rather than a reader are exactly the ones now being filtered out. Chase the coverage and treat any link as a bonus.