If you are reviewing Hunter for outreach, be specific about whether you need address discovery, verification or help finding suitable sites. Most people looking for a Hunter alternative want the same two things: find an email address at a domain, and confirm it will not bounce. Nothing on this page verifies deliverability, OppAlerts included. If verification is what you need, your alternatives are other verification services and none of them are here.
OppAlerts publishes this page and is one of the alternatives on it. It does not verify email addresses, and verification is why most people bought Hunter.
What this page covers is the work around the lookup. Choosing who to contact, keeping a record of it, and sending the campaign.
For reference: Hunter gives you 50 credits a month free, then 2,000, 10,000 and 25,000 on paid plans. Verifying an address costs half a credit. Users are unlimited on every plan.
BuzzStream stores the contacts and the history
If you are exporting Hunter results into a spreadsheet to track who you contacted, an outreach CRM replaces the spreadsheet and not the lookup.
BuzzStream charges for stored contacts. $49 a month gets one user, 500 contacts and 30 prospecting searches. $174 gets 3 users, 25,000 contacts and 250 searches. $424 gets 6 users, 100,000 contacts and 1,000 searches. From $999 you get 12 or more users and 300,000 or more contacts. Extra users cost $58 and $70.
Its Discovery feature is an influencer database. It supplies contacts and does not verify them. Watch the per-user charges too, because Hunter charges nothing for users at all.
Pitchbox does research and sending together
Pitchbox combines prospecting with outreach and charges by campaigns run and prospecting searches. $300 a month, or $210 billed yearly, covers 25 campaigns and 1,000 searches. $600 covers 1,000 campaigns and 5,000 searches. The top tier is $1,200.
Buy it when managing replies and follow-ups has become more work than finding addresses.
BuzzSumo has the journalists
Hunter finds addresses at a domain. It cannot tell you which reporter covers your subject.
BuzzSumo PR & Comms at $299 a month includes a Media Database for finding journalists writing about your brand, your market and your competitors. Five users, five alerts, and Coverage Reports showing publication data, engagement, mention count and where in the article you appeared.
A curated database with beat information is a different product from a domain lookup. Do not substitute one for the other.
OppAlerts, when you do not know who to contact yet
OppAlerts verifies nothing. Site Info returns what a website published about itself, as stored, and never tests it.
It works one step earlier than Hunter does. Hunter assumes you already have the domain. This produces the list of domains and gives you a reason to believe in each one.
- Prospect Index, searched by meaning as well as keyword and filtered by opportunity type: guest contribution pages, resource lists, expert roundups, podcasts, industry directories, award programs and speaking submissions.
- Backlinks DB: Link Gap, listing sites with observed links to competitors you name and no observed link to you.
- Brand Unlinked Mentions, listing pages that already name your business and did not link.
- PageRank history, monthly link-graph measurements for a host and its domain, so you can decide whether a site deserves the effort.
- Site Info, returning the contact pages, emails, phone numbers and social profiles that site publishes.
Plenty of publishers state on the page exactly how they want contributions or corrections sent, and following that route needs no address lookup at all. Where you do need a named person, go back to a lookup and verification service.
Like Hunter, OppAlerts does not sell seats.
Matching the reason to the product
| Why Hunter stopped fitting | Look at |
|---|---|
| Storing and tracking who you contacted | BuzzStream |
| Sending and sequencing at volume | Pitchbox or BuzzStream |
| Reaching journalists by beat | BuzzSumo PR & Comms |
| Not knowing which domains to look up | OppAlerts |
| Judging whether a site is worth contacting | OppAlerts PageRank history and link gap |
| Confirming an address accepts mail | Stay with Hunter, or another verification service. Nothing here does it. |
Before choosing another contact tool, test the exact step your outreach process requires. Retain a verification service if verifying addresses remains part of that work.
For the two-product version, see OppAlerts and Hunter compared.