GetPress

August 24, 2026

HARO alternatives in 2026

Key takeaways

You already get the HARO digest. Three times a weekday. Morning, afternoon, evening. A pile of journalist queries lands in a mailbox you promised yourself you would actually read.

You did, for a week. Then the evening edition arrived while you were on a call. Someone said “just use Qwoted.” Now you want the rest of the stack without standing up five more inboxes.

That search is honest. You already know what HARO is. You need to know which of these products do the same job, which do a different job, and which will become a Gmail label you check on Fridays.

What people actually mean by “alternative”

Most listicles treat “HARO alternative” as “any place a journalist might ask a question.” That is how you end up with eight logins, a Slack bot, and a founder who still answers from pitches@theagency.com.

There are at least three jobs hiding under the same phrase.

The first job is query volume. You want more asks from working reporters, writers, and producers, in the same shape HARO already taught you: a deadline, a beat, a reply-to, a paragraph of what they need. Connectively, Source of Sources, Mention Match, and Source Bottle mostly live here. They send lists. You answer.

The second job is a network. You want journalists to find you, or to be matched, because you filled in a profile and paid for a seat. Qwoted lives here. Featured lives partly here. You are not only hunting a digest. You are sitting in a directory.

The third job is desk work. Someone has to ingest the lists, skip the asks you will not take, match them to the people you actually represent, and send from a mailbox the marketplace already knows. That job is independent of which logo is on the email. It is also the job most “alternatives” refuse to do for you.

If you only wanted more volume, you could subscribe to everything tomorrow morning. The reason that fails is not lack of queries. HARO still dumps three weekday editions. Source of Sources sends its own. Mention Match is narrower and still daily. Stack them and you have not built a PR program. You have built a second full-time inbox.

A short history, because the names keep moving

Help a Reporter Out started in 2008 as Peter Shankman’s three-times-a-day email. Vocus bought it. Cision inherited it.

In 2024 Cision rebranded the product as Connectively, pushed a paid wrapper around a thing people had used for free, and then shut Connectively down in December 2024.

That shutdown is the year people still mean when they say “HARO is dead.” They are a year late.

Featured.com bought the HARO name and turned the free digest back on in April 2025. By May they were back to morning, afternoon, and evening editions, weekdays, the cadence everyone still means when they say “HARO.”

In 2026 Featured also put the Connectively name back on a sister product: a logged-in platform with filtering and tracking, while HARO stayed the newsletter. Featured itself is a separate product from the same company. How to get picked on Featured is the old Terkel playbook for that job.

Peter Shankman, watching the 2024 collapse, had already launched Source of Sources. Help a B2B Writer, a narrower B2B digest, was acquired by Superpath and later renamed Mention Match. Qwoted kept doing what it was already doing: a journalist marketplace with expert profiles. Source Bottle kept sending Drink Up! alerts out of Australia.

So when someone says “HARO is dead, use X,” ask which year they mean. In 2026 HARO the digest is alive. Connectively is not the Cision corpse. The journalists did not relocate as a bloc. They post wherever is least annoying this month.

Your problem is receiving all of that without becoming a mail clerk.

Connectively

Treat Connectively as HARO’s sister, not as a replacement you can ignore.

The digest you grew up on is still HARO: free, three weekday drops, reply to the query address, journalist on the other side of a relay. Connectively, as relaunched in 2026, is the logged-in product around similar demand. Filtering. Response tracking. A UI for people who got tired of searching an email body for “No AI Pitches Considered.”

Same trade, different furniture. The journalists overlapping those two products still want a source who exists, who can be reached at a real mailbox, and who answers the question they asked.

If you only pick one extra source besides the HARO newsletter, understand Connectively first, because the brand confusion is doing real damage. People cancel a HARO forward, miss three editions, and think the whole category died.

What did not change: you still need the expert’s account. Agencies that send from a shared inbox get bounces, silent drops, or a journalist who googles the From: line and closes the tab.

Connectively versus HARO is the longer version of that fight.

In short: keep the newsletter. Use the platform if someone will log in.

Qwoted

Qwoted is the name people actually search. That is not because Qwoted secretly replaced HARO. It is because Qwoted is a product with a homepage, a sales motion, and a profile you can point a client at.

On Qwoted, journalists post requests. Experts (and the PRs who represent them) keep profiles. Matching is the point.

The free plan is a taste: a couple of pitches a month, delayed so paying users go first. Paid plans raise the cap and drop the delay. Team pricing is a conversation with sales. Check their current page before you budget. They have moved the numbers more than once.

Qwoted is a good product for a specific person: an expert who wants to be findable, or a PR who wants one marketplace with a directory attached. It is a weak HARO “alternative” if what you meant was “I want every open query in my trade, for free, in an email.”

Those are different jobs. Paying for a network does not ingest Source of Sources. Running a digest stack does not put your COO in a journalist’s expert search.

Plenty of operators pay for Qwoted and should. The mistake is treating the invoice as if it cancelled the rest of the mail.

Qwoted versus doing it yourself is the honest version of that choice.

Featured is two things, and people mix them up.

The product is the old Terkel.io job: you log in, you see questions, you submit a short quote on the site, publishers build roundups. Profile, headshot, 4 to 6 sentences, no greeting in the body. That playbook still works. Confirm the current fields in their FAQ.

The company is the parent that acquired HARO in April 2025 and revived Connectively in 2026. Same owner. Three wrappers.

After the acquisition, HARO queries sometimes surface on the platform earlier than the next newsletter, because a digest has to wait for the morning / afternoon / evening Eastern slots and a website does not. Treat that as Featured’s marketing, not as “HARO the email is dead.”

Volume on the roundup side is smaller and more curated than a raw HARO evening edition. Outlets can be very good. They can also be the same roundup mill you already declined last month.

Worth ingesting if you already have a roster and a rule for what “good” means: a real publication, a deadline you can hit, a format the author will actually do. Not worth a separate morning ritual if you are a one-person shop still missing the HARO afternoon drop.

The brand overlap is annoying on purpose. Featured, HARO, and Connectively share an owner and do not share a workflow. Subscribe to the newsletter. Keep the platform login if you use it. Do not assume a pitch you typed into Featured was also emailed to the HARO relay.

It was not.

Mention Match (Help a B2B Writer, HAB2BW)

People still search “help a b2b writer.” The product is Mention Match.

Elise Dopson built Help a B2B Writer as a two-sided list: B2B writers who need operators, and operators who will give a quote. Superpath bought it in 2022. The rebrand to Mention Match is the same idea with a new URL. Their own FAQ says so: “Is this Help a B2B Writer?” Yes.

Writers are capped (historically about three requests per publication per week), which is why the list stays smaller than HARO and why a SaaS or fintech roster often sees a better hit rate here than in a random HARO “General” block.

The queries are not “seeking a thought leader.” They are a writer drafting a roundup on churn who needs someone who has actually watched a cohort die. The writer might be at a trade site you care about. They might be a freelancer placing the piece in three client blogs. Read the outlet line.

The format is usually a written quote, sometimes a short email interview, rarely a Zoom.

Treat it as another source in one catalog. Do not keep a separate Gmail label you check twice a week. The old name still appears in forwards, in Slack, and in “HAB2BW” subject lines. Alias all of that to Mention Match so you do not invent a second program.

The rebrand explainer is for the people still googling the old name.

Source of Sources

Peter Shankman founded HARO, sold it, and when Cision wound Connectively down he did the obvious thing: another labeled digest.

Source of Sources is free. Journalists post. Sources get email. Open rates on a list like that stay high because the mail is short and the man sending it still talks like a person.

SOS is not a secret HARO. Some of the same journalists appear. Some do not. The queries skew practical: a producer who needs a guest this week, a reporter who needs a named expert on a deadline that is already too close. There is no fancy profile. There is a reply-to. That is the feature.

If you already do HARO, SOS belongs in the same ingest. If you do not already do HARO, start with HARO anyway. The three weekday editions are still the fattest pipe in this category. SOS is the extra pipe you add once the first one is under control.

Source Bottle

Source Bottle started in Australia in 2009. Bec Derrington built it as a call-out list for journalists and bloggers who needed experts, case studies, and sometimes products. Drink Up! alerts still go out on weekdays.

The geography is wider than people assume (Australia, New Zealand, UK, Ireland, North America), but the center of gravity is still ANZ media in a way HARO is not.

Gift-bag and product call-outs show up here more often than in a US business digest. If you represent a CPG brand, that is useful. If you represent a B2B SaaS roster in the US, most of the list is skippable, and the remaining asks are still worth ingesting because a skip is cheaper than a missed relevant one.

Source Bottle is the example I use when someone says “we’ll just add it to the intern’s Gmail.” You will not. You will forget the time zone, miss the 10 a.m. alert, and then decide the product “doesn’t work.”

It works. You did not run it.

The actual problem is the second inbox

Every alternative above can be justified in isolation. Stack them and the failure mode is identical.

You now receive:

That is not a media program. That is seven products doing one job (asking experts for help) and zero products doing the job you are paid for (answering as the right person, on time, from the right mailbox).

The second inbox is how good operators get slow. They forward HARO to a shared box. They leave Qwoted in a browser tab. Mention Match sits in the founder’s personal Gmail because “it’s B2B, I’ll handle it.” A query with a 6 p.m. Eastern deadline dies at 4 p.m. because nobody owned the afternoon edition.

One ingest address is the boring fix. Forward every digest there. Parse them into a single list. Match against the authors you actually represent, not against a generic “we do finance.” Hide the formats those authors will not do. Then the remaining work is a pitch, which is a different article.

If you are still on raw Gmail, the ingest is a mailbox nobody uses for conversation. Filters by From: HARO, Connectively, Source of Sources, Mention Match (and the HAB2BW aliases), Featured, Qwoted, Source Bottle. Auto-forward is allowed. Auto-reply is not.

A human still has to classify format. “Looking to interview” in a HARO index is often a written quote. Authority Magazine-style series are homework. WAMC’s 20-30 minute Zoom is a booking. The New York Post numbered listing is a listing. Your “HARO alternative” subscriptions do not do that classification. They add rows.

I have watched operators add Qwoted in January, Mention Match in March, SOS when a Twitter thread scared them about Connectively shutting down, and Source Bottle because someone said Australia was easy. By June they had seven unread labels and one author who still answered from their phone on the train, which is at least a real Gmail.

The alternatives were not the failure. The absence of a skip list was.

Who each is for

Stay on HARO only if you are one expert, you already reply from the registered Gmail, and you can live with missing everything that never hits the three weekday drops. Plenty of people should do this. Adding sources does not make you more quotable.

Add Connectively if you want the platform wrapper around the same trade: filters, tracking, fewer hours spent command-F’ing a 40-query email. Do not drop the HARO newsletter until you have confirmed you still see the three editions.

Pay for Qwoted if the profile and the journalist-side matching matter to you, or if your clients expect to “be on Qwoted.” Do not pay for it as a HARO replacement. It is not one.

Use Featured if you like on-site quotes and curated roundups and you will actually log in. Skip it if you already ignore the HARO evening edition.

Add Mention Match if the roster is SaaS, fintech, agencies, or other B2B operators. Skip it if your authors are consumer-only and you do not want to explain why a PLG churn query is in the queue.

Add Source of Sources once HARO is ingested. It is free and it is Shankman still doing the job.

Add Source Bottle if you have ANZ/UK media in the plan, or products to place. Otherwise keep it in the catalog on a low-priority filter rather than a dedicated human.

Run a desk if you represent more than one byline, or one byline across more than one source. The threshold is lower than agencies admit. Two authors and three digests is already too much for one unmarked inbox.

Mistakes that look like strategy

Signing up for four alternatives on a Sunday and pitching nothing on Monday. Volume is not the bottleneck. Attention is.

Using one shared mailbox as the “source” on every platform. HARO, Connectively, and several of the others still care which address is registered. Journalists care who is in the From: field. hello@agency.com answering as a COO is a tell.

Treating “looking to interview” as a calendar hold. In HARO it often means a written quote. Authority Magazine-style series are a different product: a long Q&A, even when they say email is fine. Live Zooms and NPR-affiliate radio are a third. If the author does not do live or series work, skip those at ingest. Do not discover the format at 5:55 p.m.

Pitching the same paragraph from two people at the same company. Journalists notice. So do the other sources on your roster, later, when they google themselves and find a twin.

Chasing Domain Rating as the reason to subscribe. A HuffPost health query and a gift-bag ask for a sneaker ball are not the same job because one of them has a bigger logo in a spreadsheet.

Keeping Help a B2B Writer, Mention Match, and HAB2BW as three rows. They are one source. The name change is not a new funnel.

Telling a client “we moved off HARO.” You did not. You added a tab. The three weekday emails are still the fattest free pipe.

Checklist

  1. List the sources you already receive. If HARO is not among them, start there. Three weekday editions, still.
  2. Register each expert on the marketplaces you will actually send from, using the Gmail they will send from. The desk is the radar. The mailbox is the ticket.
  3. Pick a single ingest address. Forward HARO, Connectively, SOS, Mention Match, Featured, Qwoted, Source Bottle into it. No per-source folders as the system of record.
  4. For every author, write down whether they will do a written quote, an email interview series, a live call, a podcast, or a product placement. Default the rest to skip.
  5. Decide Qwoted separately: profile and network, or not. Do not mix that invoice into “HARO alternatives” as if it cancelled the digest.
  6. On a query, read the format before the outlet. A Washington Examiner “one question by email” is a quote. A WAMC “20-30 minute interview via Zoom” is a booking. An Authority Magazine series is a homework assignment.
  7. Answer in the author’s words. If the query says no AI commentary, that is a constraint, not a vibe.
  8. Send from the registered mailbox. Copy-paste into Gmail is the fallback, not the plan.
  9. Once a week, kill a source you are not reading. An unread alternative is worse than not subscribing, because it creates the feeling of coverage.

GetPress is the desk version of that loop: one catalog, matched to the roster, sent from the author’s Gmail. Start a desk.