HARO alternatives, honestly compared
The best HARO alternative depends on what you are short of: requests, time, or budget. Below we compare seven options on price, volume and effort, including doing HARO yourself and our own product, QuotedExpert.
The shortlist
- Least effort: QuotedExpert ($47/mo). Every platform monitored, only your matches emailed to you, drafts written from your words.
- Free and you have time: HARO itself, plus Source of Sources. The original firehose, filtered by you.
- Broadest opportunity feed: Featured (free to $99/mo). Journalist requests plus podcasts, awards and speaking slots.
- Best for PR professionals: Qwoted (free tier, Pro $99/mo billed annually). Built for people pitching all day.
- UK press: ResponseSource and #journorequest. Smaller ponds, British journalists.
- Money is no object: a PR agency ($5,000+/mo) or a HARO link building service (per-link pricing).
What happened to HARO and Connectively?
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) moved onto Cision's Connectively platform, then Connectively shut down in December 2024. The HARO brand came back at helpareporter.com, but plenty of journalists had already scattered to Featured, Qwoted and Source of Sources.
That scattering is the real problem in 2026. The requests did not disappear; they fragmented across five platforms, each with its own login, format and daily email.
The comparison
| Option | Cost | What you get | Your effort | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| QuotedExpert | Free to browse, $47/mo to respond | HARO, Featured, Qwoted and Source of Sources matched to your expertise; drafts in your voice | About 5 minutes a week | Experts and founders who want quotes without the daily grind |
| HARO (DIY) | Free | Three emails a day of journalist requests, unfiltered | 30 to 60 minutes per response | Anyone testing the water at zero cost |
| Featured | Free, Lite $39/mo, Pro $99/mo | Journalist requests plus podcasts, awards, speaking and byline opportunities, with an AI assistant | You still pitch inside their platform | People who want every kind of visibility, not just press quotes |
| Qwoted | Free (2 pitches/mo), Pro $99/mo billed annually or $149.99 monthly | Curated journalist requests and an expert database reporters search | Pitch caps on every plan; you write each pitch | PR professionals and serious individual pitchers |
| Source of Sources | Free | Peter Shankman's HARO successor: daily emails of vetted requests | Manual, like classic HARO | HARO veterans who want the old workflow back |
| UK enquiry services | Free to follow, subscriptions vary | ResponseSource journalist enquiries and the #journorequest feed on X | Manual and fast-moving | UK experts who want British coverage |
| PR agency / link building service | $5,000+/mo, or per-link fees | Humans do everything, including the pitching | Meetings and approvals | Companies with budget and no internal expertise to quote |
Prices checked against vendor websites on 9 November 2026. Plans change; the shape of the trade-off does not.
1. QuotedExpert: the work done for you
Full disclosure: this is our product, on our site. We monitor HARO, Featured, Qwoted and Source of Sources, score every request against your LinkedIn experience and the core offering you define, and email you only the genuine fits.
When one lands, you speak or type your answer and we draft the reply in your voice. You send it from your own email, so the journalist relationship is yours. Pick us if your bottleneck is time, not money.
2. HARO itself: free, and priced in hours
HARO at helpareporter.com remains the biggest single source of journalist requests, and it costs nothing. You get three dense emails a day and no relevance filtering at all.
Pick HARO DIY if you are validating the channel before spending anything. Most experts we talk to last about a fortnight before the unfiltered volume beats them.
3. Featured: the broadest feed
Featured started as a HARO-style Q&A platform and has become an AI PR assistant. Alongside journalist requests it surfaces podcasts, awards, speaking slots and byline opportunities.
Plans run from free to $99/mo for individuals, priced by daily AI usage. Pick Featured if you want every visibility format in one place and are happy pitching inside their platform rather than from your own inbox.
4. Qwoted: built for professional pitchers
Qwoted runs a curated request feed and an expert database that reporters search directly. The free plan allows two pitches a month; Pro ($99/mo billed annually) allows 35 with instant delivery.
Pick Qwoted if pitching is already your job. The pitch caps and per-pitch writing make it a poor fit for busy experts, which is most of our customers.
Read the full QuotedExpert vs Qwoted comparison →
5. Source of Sources: classic HARO, minus Cision
Peter Shankman founded HARO, sold it, then built Source of Sources when Connectively closed. It is free, email-based and deliberately old-school: vetted requests, no platform to log into.
Pick it if you liked HARO exactly as it was. You will still read every request yourself, which is why many of its users end up adding a matching layer later.
6. UK enquiry services: smaller pond, home crowd
ResponseSource carries enquiries from UK journalists, and the #journorequest hashtag on X is where British reporters ask in public. Volume is lower than the US platforms and deadlines move in hours, not days.
Pick these if UK coverage is the goal. They reward speed and a personal touch over tooling.
7. Agencies and HARO link building services: money instead of time
A PR agency at $5,000 a month, or a HARO link building service charging per placed link, removes you from the process entirely. You pay for their hours and their journalist relationships.
Pick this route if nobody in the business can be the quoted expert. If you have the expertise in-house, you are paying agency prices to rent what you already own.
How to choose
- Count your hours first. Under an hour a week for PR? You need matching and drafting done for you, or an agency.
- Decide your pond. US national press lives on HARO and Featured. UK coverage adds ResponseSource and #journorequest to the list.
- Keep the relationship. Whichever route you pick, send from your own email where you can. Journalists quote people, not platforms.
Common questions
- Is HARO still worth using in 2026?
- Yes. HARO requests still produce quotes and backlinks in national publications, and the service is free. The cost is your time: three emails a day, hundreds of requests, and no filtering by your expertise.
- What replaced Connectively?
- Nothing directly. Connectively shut down in December 2024, HARO returned at helpareporter.com, and the remaining demand split across Featured, Qwoted and Source of Sources. Most active experts now monitor several platforms or use a tool that aggregates them.
- Are there free HARO alternatives?
- Yes. HARO itself, Source of Sources and the free tiers of Featured and Qwoted cost nothing. Free always means you do the filtering and writing yourself, so the real price is 30 to 60 minutes per response.
- Which HARO alternative gives the best backlinks?
- The platform matters less than the outlet that quotes you. HARO and Featured both carry requests from DR80+ publications. What decides your hit rate is responding only to genuine expertise fits, which is what relevance matching is for.
- How many journalist requests are there per day?
- Across HARO, Featured, Qwoted and Source of Sources we see 150 or more new requests on a typical weekday. A narrow expert might match five to ten of them well in a week.
Last updated 9 November 2026 by the QuotedExpert team. We sell option 1 and have tried to be straight about the other six; tell us at hello@quotedexpert.com if we have your favourite wrong.