Hey Press vs Prezly in 2026: a discontinued journalist search tool vs a full PR CRM with branded newsrooms
Hey Press merged into JournoFinder and no longer operates on its own. Prezly is a 500+ team PR platform built around a newsroom that keeps earning views long after a campaign ends.
Hey Press
Prezly- Hey Press merged into JournoFinder and no longer sells a standalone product; hey.press today functions as a PR content hub rather than active software.
- Prezly's branded newsroom is indexed by Google and increasingly cited by AI systems, generating organic views between active campaigns rather than only during them.
- Prezly combines contact management, email outreach, and coverage analytics in one platform, used by 500+ PR teams including IKEA, Sony, and Emirates.
- Prezly starts at 100 EUR/month for Essential, capped at one user and 5,000 contacts; Standard at 250 EUR/month adds white-label newsrooms and doubles the contact limit.
- Prezly does not include a built-in media database, so you bring your own journalist contacts; Hey Press's original core feature was exactly that kind of contact discovery, now handled by JournoFinder instead.
- Hey Press's PR guides and comparison content are still actively maintained on hey.press, even though the product itself no longer runs independently.
Hey Press and Prezly were never really aimed at the same buyer, and the gap has only widened since Hey Press folded into JournoFinder. Prezly is a full PR CRM: a branded, SEO-indexed newsroom, contact management, email outreach, and campaign analytics, priced from 100 EUR/month and trusted by teams at IKEA, Sony, and Emirates. Hey Press was a narrow journalist search tool for solo founders, and today the hey.press domain mostly hosts PR guides rather than an active product. If you need a platform to run PR as an ongoing function, this comparison leans one way almost immediately; if you are trying to understand what happened to Hey Press along the way, that story is worth knowing too.
The tools at a glance
Hey Press
Journalist discovery tool for startups, now part of JournoFinder
Hey Press started as a no-frills journalist search tool: type in a topic, get a list of relevant reporters, skip the cost of an enterprise media database. It built a base of over 1,000 PR professionals on that pitch alone before the company changed direction.
That direction was a merger into JournoFinder. The hey.press homepage now identifies itself as part of JournoFinder, and the live journalist search product sits under that domain and its own pricing. What is left natively on hey.press is a library of PR guides and tool comparisons, useful reading regardless of which platform you end up choosing.
Set next to Prezly, a full PR CRM with a newsroom, outreach, and analytics, Hey Press was never trying to compete on the same axis even before the merger. It solved one narrow problem, finding a contact, not the broader one of running a campaign and measuring what happened after.
| Feature | See JournoFinder Via JournoFinder |
|---|---|
| Journalist search | Via JournoFinder |
| Contact database | Via JournoFinder |
| PR guides and resources | Free on hey.press |
Prezly
PR CRM with branded newsrooms, email outreach, and campaign analytics in one platform
Prezly bundles three things most PR teams manage separately: a branded online newsroom, contact and relationship management, and email outreach with analytics attached. The idea is that a press release should have a permanent, indexed home rather than disappearing into an inbox the day after it is sent.
The newsroom is the real differentiator. Stories published through Prezly live on a branded, SEO-indexed site that Google crawls and that is increasingly showing up in AI system citations too, driving views long after the outreach email stops getting opened. The company reported millions of organic newsroom views in 2025 without a single active campaign running.
Prezly is not a media database. You bring your own journalist contacts and Prezly manages the relationship history, the pitch tracking, and the coverage log from there. Pricing in euros starts at 100 EUR/month for Essential, capped at one user and 5,000 contacts, and white-label, custom-domain newsrooms require upgrading to the 250 EUR/month Standard plan.
| Feature | Essential 100 EUR/mo | Standard 250 EUR/mo | Enterprise Custom |
|---|---|---|---|
| Users included | 1 | 2 | Custom |
| Contact limit | 5,000 | 10,000 | Custom |
| White-label / custom domain | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Full analytics | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 14-day free trial | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
Head-to-head feature comparison
| Feature | Hey Press | Prezly |
|---|---|---|
| Standalone active product | No, merged into JournoFinder | Yes |
| Branded / indexed newsroom | No | Yes, SEO-indexed and increasingly cited by AI systems |
| Contact / relationship CRM | No | Yes |
| Built-in journalist database | Yes, original core feature (now via JournoFinder) | No, bring your own contacts |
| Email outreach and campaign tracking | No | Yes |
| Coverage and analytics dashboard | No | Yes, on every plan |
| Localization / auto-translation | No | Yes, Standard and Enterprise |
| Free trial | No public pricing on hey.press | 14 days (Essential and Standard) |
| Starting price | Via JournoFinder | 100 EUR/month |
Want to know if your Prezly newsroom stories actually get cited by AI?
Prezly's newsroom is indexed by Google and, per Prezly's own reporting, increasingly cited by AI systems, but that visibility is a byproduct of publishing, not something Prezly measures or tracks for you. Hey Press has no AI-visibility angle at all. AI Peekaboo tracks brand mentions directly across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode, with a read and write API and white-label reporting on every plan from $50/month. If your newsroom's organic AI citations matter to how you report PR results, pairing Prezly's publishing with AI Peekaboo's monitoring closes that gap.
Read the AI Peekaboo review →Which should you choose?
PrezlyPrezlyPrezlyThere is not much tension to resolve here. Prezly is a mature PR platform with a genuine strategic idea behind it, that press coverage should keep earning views after the campaign ends, backed by a CRM and analytics to prove it worked. Hey Press, as a piece of software, does not exist in a form comparable to that anymore; its value today is the PR guides sitting on hey.press, not a competing product. Anyone weighing Hey Press against Prezly should really be asking whether JournoFinder (what Hey Press became) or Prezly fits their workflow, and those two are not close on scope either.
Bottom line
Choose Prezly if PR is an ongoing function at your company or agency and you want a newsroom, CRM, and outreach in one subscription starting at 100 EUR/month. Do not evaluate hey.press as a competing product; read its guides if useful, and check JournoFinder directly if the original Hey Press journalist search is what drew you here, since that functionality no longer lives on the hey.press domain at all.
Frequently asked questions
Is Hey Press still available as a standalone journalist search tool in 2026?
Hey Press is no longer available as a standalone tool since it merged into JournoFinder, and the hey.press domain today functions mainly as a hub for PR guides and comparison articles rather than active software.
Does Prezly include a built-in journalist database like Hey Press originally did?
Prezly does not include a media database, so you have to bring your own journalist contacts; it focuses instead on managing the relationships, campaigns, and coverage tracking once you have those contacts loaded in, which is a different job than the contact discovery Hey Press originally handled.
Is Prezly worth 100 EUR a month for a solo PR freelancer?
Prezly's Essential plan at 100 EUR/month is genuinely workable for a solo freelancer, covering one user, one site, up to 5,000 contacts, and unlimited campaigns with a 14-day free trial, though white-label newsrooms require upgrading to the 250 EUR/month Standard plan.
Does Prezly's newsroom actually get cited by AI models like ChatGPT?
Prezly reports that its branded newsrooms are increasingly cited by AI systems in addition to being indexed by Google, though Prezly itself does not provide dedicated tracking to show which specific AI answers cite your stories or how often.
What happened to the original Hey Press journalist search feature?
The original Hey Press journalist search now operates entirely under JournoFinder after the merger, so there is no separate contact database left to search directly on hey.press.
Is Prezly better than Hey Press for PR teams managing multiple brands?
Prezly is the clear choice for teams managing multiple brands, since it offers contact segmentation, campaign analytics, and, on Standard and Enterprise, white-label newsrooms per client, none of which Hey Press ever offered even before it merged into JournoFinder.