What’s the Best BuzzSumo Alternative for Creator Outreach? Our Top 4 Choices

BuzzSumo is one of the most popular research and analysis tools for content marketers, with plenty of features for social media engagement. The platform streamlines large-scale analysis of social activity through a huge engagement index that covers Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Pinterest. 

Many marketers also use BuzzSumo to find online content creators that fit their brands—the platform has a media database with contact information for over 700,000 journalists. 

While the platform’s analytics tools can help you improve your social media metrics, BuzzSumo isn’t the most cost-effective outreach tool. Our guide will assist you in choosing the best BuzzSumo alternative that can help you find more journalists and influencers at a lower price.

How We Picked Our Top BuzzSumo Alternatives

Our approach to selecting BuzzSumo alternatives was simple—we looked for platforms that provided similar features without any of BuzzSumo’s limitations. 

After consulting our team of sales experts and closely examining each tool on the market, we’ve compiled a set of guidelines to help you choose your next outreach platform. We recommend considering the following four factors: 

1. Data accuracy—Some users have expressed concerns about inaccurate data in BuzzSumo, so look for platforms that draw information from multiple databases and allow you to easily cross-reference information 📊
2. Ease of use—Since BuzzSumo didn’t manage to integrate its wide range of features into one seamless experience, the platform has a steep learning curve and cluttered UI. Choose a replacement that’s easy to use and presents information clearly 🧩
3. Flexible pricing—BuzzSumo doesn’t offer a free account beyond a 30-day free trial. The lower-priced subscriptions don’t include some of its most useful features, such as the media contact database and outreach tools. The platform also severely limits the number of contacts you can add to a list without the most expensive package, so choose an alternative that provides more value for your money 💰
4. Email automation tools—Personalized, AI-generated emails are one of the best outreach features in BuzzSumo. Ideally, its replacement should offer similar options for automating your email pitches 🤖

You should prioritize these criteria according to your team’s specific preferences and needs. Outreach tools that check all these boxes are rare, but we’ve reviewed a few of our favorites below to help you make an informed choice. 

Best Alternative to BuzzSumo—Our Top Choices

You can find detailed reviews of the following alternatives to BuzzSumo in the sections below:

1. Clay
2. Sprout Social
3. Apollo
4. Meltwater 

Clay

Clay is a data enrichment and outreach platform that comes out on top among other BuzzSumo alternatives for a few important reasons:

• Superior data accuracy
• AI-powered email automation
• Modern, streamlined interface
• Cost-effective pricing

Unlike BuzzSumo and the other services we’ve reviewed here, Clay doesn’t draw contact information from only one database. Instead, the platform relies on over 50 sources, including:

• G2
• Close
• Hunter.io
• Outreach
• LinkedIn
• DropContact
• Google

The risk of outdated or incorrect information is minimized when you can cross-reference results between different databases—resolving the data accuracy issues that bother users on most other outreach platforms. 

Clay also includes an AI assistant you can use to streamline your online research and generate personalized emails for each prospect. 

Compared to BuzzSumo and similar alternatives, Clay is also far more cost-effective, thanks to its flexible pricing and waterfall prospect enrichment.

The following five payment plans are available:

1. Free—$0 (100 credits)
2. Starter—$149 (2,000 credits)
3. Explorer—$349 (10,000 credits)
4. Pro—$800 (50,000 credits)
5. Enterprise—Custom (custom amount of credits)

You can sign up for a 14-day free trial with every subscription, which allows you to explore Clay’s various features and determine if it’s useful for your team. 

Sprout Social

Like BuzzSumo, Sprout Social isn’t primarily an outreach tool. Rather, it’s a social media management platform with influencer outreach options. Besides a database with millions of contacts, its main features include: 

• Social media analytics—Detailed visual reports highlighting key performance indicators 
• Unified social inbox—A clear overview of all your accounts on popular social media platforms in a single dashboard 
• Digital asset library—Built-in storage for your brand’s videos and images
• Trend analysis—Reports on relevant hashtags and keywords that help you spot emerging trends

These numerous options are packed into an easy-to-use interface. Unfortunately, the platform’s AI functionalities don’t focus on outreach. You can only use them to generate social media posts. 

While mostly accurate, the platform’s contact database is limited in scope. It only helps you find influencers, and information on other outreach targets is lacking—even with the highest-priced subscription. 

Sprout Social doesn’t offer a free account, although there is a limited free trial. You can choose between the following paid tiers:

1. Standard—$199 per user per month
2. Professional—$299 per user per month
3. Advanced—$399 per user per month
4. Enterprise—Custom pricing 

If you need a broader social media management platform, Sprout Social is a viable BuzzSumo alternative, but it’s not cost-effective if you’re looking for a creator outreach tool. 

Apollo

Apollo.io is a powerful sales outreach platform with a database containing 270+ million contacts from various niches—including journalists and content creators. 

It allows you to manage your entire outbound funnel in one place, including:

1. Prospecting—An in-depth system of filters helps you find suitable professionals and create lead lists
2. Enrichment—The platform will fill in missing information on incomplete contacts automatically
3. Engagement—A built-in call and email function for contacting prospects 

Similarly to BuzzSumo, Apollo.io has a built-in AI writing assistant. It generates personalized emails for each individual prospect, and you can integrate these messages into workflow automations called Plays. 

While Apollo’s interface is modern, many customers have reported a slight learning curve upon first accessing the platform and frequent bugs with data enrichment. 

The platform is far from budget-friendly. You have to spend different types of credits for mobile contacts, email addresses, and data exports, and different subscriptions provide various amounts of these credits.

You can choose one of the following tiers:

1. Free—$0 per user per month
2. Basic—$59 per user per month
3. Professional—$99 per user per month
4. Organization—Custom

Users who pay for an entire year in advance get a lower monthly price on each subscription.

Note that Apollo’s contact profiles don’t include links to social media accounts. As a result, Apollo won’t be useful for influencer outreach, but it may help you contact journalists. 

💡 Bonus read: Want to learn more about Apollo? Check out our guides to Apollo pricing, online reviews, and top alternatives.

Meltwater

Meltwater is primarily a media monitoring service that helps businesses track and analyze information from various outlets, including:

• Online news
• Social media
• Radio
• TV
• Newspapers

Besides its media reports, the platform contains several outreach features. Its social media database can streamline the process of finding and contacting online influencers, making it easier to collaborate with the right creators.

Meltwater also provides access to an AI assistant, which you can use to generate outreach messages and analyze trends in media coverage and conversations on social media.

Unfortunately, judging Meltwater’s cost-effectiveness is difficult because the platform isn’t transparent about its pricing. Its website only states that users can choose from the following subscriptions:

1. Essentials
2. Advanced
3. Suite
4. Enterprise

Meltwater is equally vague on what features are available in each tier. Some users have stated that certain subscriptions don’t include intelligence on traditional media outlets, such as radio, newspapers, and TV. Others have also mentioned that many useful features are available as add-ons, making the pricing structure even more confusing.

Multiple users have also reported issues with the interface, which isn’t streamlined and clean enough to make Meltwater’s features easy to access.

While its wide media coverage is commendable, the complex and untransparent pricing makes Meltwater a less-than-ideal BuzzSumo replacement.

💡 Bonus read: To learn more about user experiences with similar platforms, check out our guides to online reviews of the following solutions:

• Salesloft
• BeenVerified
• ZoomInfo

Final Verdict—Which BuzzSumo Alternative Comes Out on Top? 

While you can choose from multiple decent BuzzSumo replacements, most are expensive, single-database platforms. Despite paying a sizable monthly subscription, you may not be able to find all the prospect information you need with these services. The info you do find isn’t easily verifiable as the tools don’t let you cross-reference their databases with other sources.

That’s why Clay is the superior BuzzSumo replacement—it provides superior data accuracy and AI automation at an affordable price. 🦾

Use Clay to Bolster Your Sales ROI

Clay provides superior data accuracy by relying on more than the pre-built databases other service providers maintain. With the platform’s cutting-edge AI assistant, you can automatically gather information from any online source. Besides that, the Claygent AI has two more important functions:

1. Analyzing data from hundreds of online sources in mere minutes and providing contact information and actionable insights 📈
2. Using collected information to write hyper-personalized emails to each contact 🎯

Claygent is a conversation-based AI that runs on OpenAI’s GPT model, making it intuitive and user-friendly. You can easily ask it to find contact info on influencers in a given niche or journalists focusing on a specific industry. 

When you look for contact information through Clay, its waterfall enrichment approach ensures the platform will search its data sources sequentially. You only pay for the info you find using Clay credits. 

Otherwise, you’d have to sign a costly contract with Apollo, Outreach, and dozens of other platforms just to search their databases—without the guarantee you’ll find what you’re looking for. Clay accesses these platforms for you, and you only pay one affordable subscription.

Others have already used Clay to reach out to influencers successfully—check out this video to see how: 

If you’re concerned about integrating Clay into your current tech stack, there’s no need to worry—it’s compatible with 100+ other platforms, ensuring a smooth and seamless integration process.

Supercharge Your PR Outreach With Clay 

Getting started with Clay is simple—you only need to follow three quick steps:

1. Visit the signup page
2. Provide an email and choose a password
3. Start reaching out to influencers and journalists at scale! 

For more tips on prospecting via Clay, sign up for the platform’s newsletter. More useful advice is available on Clay’s Learn hub, and you can also join the Slack community to learn more from fellow users and share your experiences! 💌