An OutreachBoard alternative, scored round by round

Open the OutreachBoard homepage and you meet a near-black page with a single yellow-green idea: find blogs open to guest posts. Two buttons sit under the headline, Browse Directory and Submit Your Sites, and under them a row of category tiles that starts with Technology at 21,843 sites. There is no pricing table, no sign-in button and no wall of customer logos. It is a browse-first product, and it knows it.

That clarity is why a scorecard suits this comparison. You are not choosing between two products that do the same thing. You are choosing which job you need done today, and the honest way to show that is to play one round per job and let each side win the rounds it deserves.

The rules are simple. Six rounds. A round goes to whichever side does the job better for a person who is about to place a link, and a round can go to OutreachBoard even when we have nothing to offer there. Discovery and verification are different skills, and the card keeps them apart.

One note on the bucket: OutreachBoard is a directory of sellers, not a seller. Its own Terms say a paid marketplace is planned, so we score it as the place you find publishers and not as the place you pay them.

The directory page states "108,456 websites across 24 categories". Technology leads with 21,843, News & Media follows with 14,873, and Lifestyle has 9,915. Down at the small end, Religion & Spirituality lists 682 and Blockchain & Crypto lists 754. Each card carries a GP or LI badge, meaning guest post or link insertion, plus DR, traffic and country, and some cards add a Dofollow tag. A category page such as Marketing paginates 30 listings at a time and offers tag chips, for instance "link building" with 45 sites.

apibacklinks has nothing comparable. We do not list sites that accept guest posts, we do not know who is open to a pitch, and we do not host a directory of any kind. We know who links to whom, 2,774,625,913 domain-to-domain links across 181,132,097 domains, which is a different thing.

Round 1 goes to OutreachBoard, and not narrowly. If your question is "who might say yes?", a filterable list of 100,000-plus sites that declare they are open is the right starting point and ours is not.

Here is the pricing wording as the site gives it: browsing, filtering and contacting sites through the directory is free, and whatever a publisher charges for a placement is agreed between you and the publisher. OutreachBoard also says it does not set or take a cut of that fee. No plans, tiers or prices are published, and the /pricing page does not exist.

Contacting is built in. Each listing has a form headed "Contribute to" the site, with fields for name, email and message and a request type of Guest Post, Content Collaboration or Sponsored Content. Its Privacy Policy says the service forwards those requests to the publisher. On the other side, publishers paste a Google Sheet URL and the site says they appear in the directory within 24 hours.

We cost almost nothing as well, at $0.0001 per credit, free actions that cost 0, and $100 of starter credit on first sign-in with Google. But we offer no way to contact anybody, and a cheap lookup is not the same as a warm introduction.

Round 2 goes to OutreachBoard. It takes you from "I found a site" to "I asked the site" in one place, for free.

This is where our data earns a point. OutreachBoard shows a Domain Rating and a traffic figure per listing, but it does not say which tool supplies them, and its Terms state that pricing, traffic and other metadata are supplied by the submitter and may be inaccurate or out of date. The site is candid about this elsewhere too. Its own guide says domain rating goes last on a prospect checklist because it is the number easiest to inflate.

So we spot-checked the first page of its Marketing category with our free domain action. Remember that our DR is our own metric, built from referring-domain counts, and is not expected to equal theirs. The more useful column is how many domains actually link in.

A site with 104 referring domains and a listed DR of 97 deserves a second look before you pay for a placement. That does not make the listing dishonest. It means the number has no stated source, and one free call can price in the doubt. Fourteen *.it.com listings on that page all show DR 92, which looks like a figure inherited from the parent domain, though the site does not say so.

Round 3 goes to apibacklinks. Both sides show a score, but only one can show you the links behind it.

A directory introduces you; it does not audit the result. Once a post is live you want to know whether the donor is what you were told and whether the link appears where it should. Our actions map neatly onto that checklist: overview for donor DR and counts, refdomains for who links to the seller, anchors for how that site is usually linked, and backlinks filtered by source domain or target URL for your own placement.

Be exact about the limit. We read our web index, refreshed about monthly, so a link placed this week can take weeks to show. We have no alerts, no new-and-lost report and no toxicity score, and OutreachBoard blocks CCBot in its robots.txt, so we cannot see its listings or its outbound links at all. That is a smaller problem for this job, because the link you placed lives on the publisher's site, which is what we read, provided the publisher's own robots.txt lets the crawler in.

To see what such a report looks like, the free explorer will open OutreachBoard's own report with no sign-in. The same call works for any seller you are considering.

Round 4 goes to apibacklinks, with an asterisk about freshness that Round 6 will cash in.

We found no public API at OutreachBoard. The paths /api and /docs return 404, no developer page appears in the navigation, and the Terms ban unauthorized scraping or data harvesting from the directory. No export or CSV feature is mentioned. For a person browsing, none of that matters. For a team that wants to score several hundred prospects in one run, it matters a great deal.

apibacklinks is nothing but the script-friendly part. There are 19 actions on one endpoint, bulk_dr takes up to 2,000 domains per request, and compare puts up to 20 side by side. A rough pipeline: export your shortlist from wherever you collected it, run bulk_dr, drop anything where the donor looks thin, then call refdomains on the survivors. The details are in the API docs. A credit costs $0.0001.

Round 5 goes to apibacklinks. It is the easiest point on the card to win, since an API is the only thing we are.

OutreachBoard's own guide says the directory is "refreshed hourly" and category pages say the list is rebuilt from submissions and recategorised daily. The numbers move: the guide mentions 108,457 sites, another FAQ line says 88,000-plus, and one category shows a slightly different count from its homepage tile. That is the cost of a live list. It is also a reminder to treat counts here as dated snapshots.

Our index is a snapshot built from 13 crawl snapshots between 2025 and mid-2026 and refreshed roughly monthly as new releases are processed. It is not real time, and a brand-new link may take weeks. For a decision about a publisher, that is usually fine. For "is this site accepting submissions right now?" it is the wrong tool entirely.

Round 6 goes to OutreachBoard. Live beats monthly when the question is about availability.

Stay with OutreachBoard if you are a link builder who needs prospects, and you need them this afternoon. It does three things we do not even attempt: it lists the sites, it filters them by niche, country and language, and it sends your request to the publisher. It is free, which matters if you are running a handful of pitches instead of a campaign.

Publishers are served too. Handing over a Google Sheet and appearing within a day is a lower barrier than most outreach lists will ever give you, and in our index capsulink.com links its own "submit your request" text to its OutreachBoard listing form, so at least one publisher uses it that way.

OutreachBoard is also upfront on one point: it says it does not own or endorse any listed website and that inclusion is not a recommendation. A second data source is a sensible complement to that, and our domain and overview actions are free. If you send only a few pitches a month and trust the publisher's own numbers, you may never need us.

If you do choose to check, our hub of link-building tools shows where we sit next to the rest of the market.

A tie is not a cop-out here. The two products meet in the middle of one workflow: pick a site on a directory, price it with data, buy or pitch, then check it showed up. If you want a sibling comparison on the other side of that workflow, our GuestPostSale comparison looks at another place to buy placements.

Use both: the directory for discovery and contact, the data for a second look. If a listed DR of 97 sits next to 104 referring domains, one free call is a cheap way to ask the question before you pay.