If you have been researching how to reach out to an ex, these two programs have almost certainly both landed in front of you, and you have probably noticed something the sales pages do not want you to notice: they sound similar. Both promise a plan. Both warn you against begging. Both talk about reopening contact carefully and not walking back into the dynamic that ended things.
So let us start where an honest comparison has to start. These two overlap a great deal. Not slightly, not at the edges. The core sequence inside them is largely the same sequence, because the sensible advice for reconnecting with an ex is broadly known and broadly shared. Anyone comparing them by pretending they are opposites is comparing marketing rather than products, and you would spot it about ten minutes after buying.
Short answer: The Ex Factor is the multi-format package and the better fit for a recent breakup where you want a book, audio, and video. Restart Your Relationship is the frame-first program and the better fit when months or years have passed, when you have already tried the standard advice, or when you want one clear organizing idea instead of a library. Both vendors state a 60-day guarantee, but the billing differs. The decision is your timeline, how much material you want, and how you prefer to pay.
The Two Programs at a Glance
| Restart Your Relationship | The Ex Factor | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Matthew Coast, relationship coach | Brad Browning, breakup coach (official site) |
| Core idea | Do not resume the old relationship. Start a new one with the same person. | A “3R” system: recovery, rekindling, reattraction. |
| Format | Digital program sold as a trial that rolls into a monthly membership; no format list published | Ebook plus audio book, video lessons, and bonus manuals |
| Editions | One version, written for women | Separate men’s and women’s editions |
| Signature move | The “Time Machine Texting Technique” (memory-first first contact) | The 3R system and its reattraction phase |
| Best for | Breakups that are no longer fresh; women who already tried the standard playbook | Recent breakups; women who want a multi-format package |
| Price | $1 for a 14-day trial, then $67 a month until canceled (vendor’s affiliate page) | $47 one-time payment (sales page) |
| Refund | 60-day money-back guarantee stated by the vendor | 60-day money-back guarantee stated by the vendor |
Where They Genuinely Overlap
It is worth naming the shared ground explicitly, because it is most of the ground.
Neither vendor publishes a chapter list, so this is our reading of how each is pitched rather than a line-by-line comparison. Restart’s vendor says it has no begging scripts and no manipulative tactics. The Ex Factor’s page tells readers to press “the reset button” and describes a period of ignoring the ex before rebuilding attraction. Both are pitched around restraint before contact, a gentle first message, and a slow return to real conversation. Both also tell you the old relationship is gone and that something new has to be built.
That shared skeleton exists because it is roughly correct, and because there is no secret technique hiding in this category. What you are choosing between is two different packages wrapped around a common core, aimed at two slightly different women.
Which means the honest question is not “which one is right.” It is “which one is right for the situation I am actually in.” Below is how we would answer that.
What Actually Differs Underneath
Once you set the shared skeleton aside, three real differences remain, and they are the only three that should influence your money.
The starting assumption about time. The Ex Factor’s page is written around a breakup that just happened, with its warning about the first 30 days and its talk of ignoring the ex. That presumes there is still contact to withdraw and still a raw week to survive. Restart Your Relationship is pitched for a gap that already exists, whether the breakup was last week or years ago. Its opening move is a reframe rather than a withdrawal, because when a year has passed, silence is the thing you are trying to get out of. Two programs, two different starting lines, and your calendar decides which line you are standing on.
The size of the package. The Ex Factor’s page lists a book, an audio book, video lessons, and two bonus manuals, which is genuinely more to work with and genuinely more to finish. Restart’s vendor page does not list the formats. Neither is better in the abstract. The right answer depends on whether depth motivates you or defeats you, and only you know which one you are after a breakup, when concentration is not what it usually is.
How you pay. The Ex Factor is a one-time $47 payment on its sales page. Restart Your Relationship is a $1 trial that becomes $67 a month until you cancel. The monthly structure rewards finishing quickly and canceling on time, and it is the difference most likely to catch a buyer off guard.
Beyond those three, the rest of the advice is described in similar terms.
Which One Fits Your Situation
The breakup happened within the last few weeks. The Ex Factor. You are in the acute stage, where the most valuable thing a program can give you is a sequence to follow while your judgment is compromised by grief and four hours of sleep. Its page is written around exactly this window, and a book plus audio and video gives you something to occupy the weeks you would otherwise spend refreshing his profile. Our no-contact rule guide covers the free version of that first stage if you want to start tonight without buying anything.
Months or years have passed and the contact is cold. Restart Your Relationship. This is its home ground and the clearest reason it exists. A program built around the first weeks after a breakup quietly assumes you have contact to withdraw, and when the silence is already a year long, that opening describes a problem you no longer have. The restart frame starts where you actually are: how do you reopen something cold without the first message carrying the entire weight of the relationship. We walk through that specific timeline in getting back together after months apart.
You have already done the standard advice and nothing changed. Restart Your Relationship. If you went quiet, rebuilt your routines, sent the careful message, and still ended up in the same loop of hope and disappointment, another manual of the same steps is unlikely to help. The reframe is the thing you have not tried, and it is what this program sells.
You want the most complete package for the money. The Ex Factor. It is the bigger product on paper: its page lists a book, an audio book, video lessons, two bonus manuals, and a separate women’s version so the examples fit your side of the story. If you learn by working through something thoroughly, that depth may be worth real money to you. Our full Ex Factor review covers what is inside and where its own marketing oversells.
You know you will not finish a long program. Choose the format you will actually use. This is not a small consideration and it is not a character flaw. A program you actually complete beats a comprehensive one that stalls at chapter four, and grief makes long-form reading genuinely difficult for a while. The Ex Factor offers audio and video next to the book, and Restart’s vendor publishes no format list, so check what you get before you rely on it.
You are not sure whether you want him back or want to stop hurting. Neither, yet. This is the most important row in this whole comparison. Sometimes “I want him back” is grief that has found itself a project, because missing someone is more bearable when it comes with a plan. Spend a week with how to keep your self-respect after a breakup and our self-worth guides before you spend money on re-attraction. If the wanting is still there afterwards, it is real, and then you can choose a program properly.
The relationship involved abuse, coercion, or fear. Neither, and we will not soften that. Re-attraction is the wrong goal, and no honest comparison will hand you a workaround. Safety and support come first, with a licensed professional rather than a digital program.
A Closer Look at Restart Your Relationship
Matthew Coast’s program is pitched around one sentence: the relationship you had is over, and what you can attempt is a new one with the same man (Commitment Connection).
That reframe does more work than it appears to. If you believe the old relationship is recoverable, every message you send is implicitly arguing for its return, and arguing is what produces the explaining, apologizing, campaigning tone that closes doors. If you accept that it is genuinely finished, there is nothing left to argue, and the only live question is whether something new is worth building with who you both are now. It also puts the burden where it belongs, on new terms rather than nostalgia, which is where most reunions quietly fail.
Its signature technique, the Time Machine Texting Technique, follows from that frame. The vendor describes it as bringing back the feelings he had when you first met. As we read it, that means opening a cold conversation with a specific shared good memory rather than with the relationship itself, so the first thing he feels is the moment and not the weight of the subject. The principle underneath it is familiar and unremarkable, which we say as a compliment and a caution. It is a door-opener, not a persuasion device, and it only works with memories that were genuinely good.
What you are buying is framing and sequencing, since the individual moves in this category tend to be standard moves. Our full Restart Your Relationship review goes through the stages, the pros and cons, and the vendor’s stated claims.
A Closer Look at The Ex Factor
Brad Browning’s program is a widely advertised name in this category, and its strength is completeness on paper. The sales page lists a written guide plus an audio book, video lessons, and two bonus manuals, so the material can meet you however you take things in, and the program is sold in separate versions for men and women (The Ex Factor). That last detail matters more than it sounds: the examples and scenarios are written from your side of the breakup.
The vendor describes the method as a “3R” system: recovery, rekindling, and reattraction. Treating recovery as the first step, an emotional reset for you before any strategic move, is the correct order, and it is the part that helps you whether or not he ever texts back.
The honest limitations: the outcome leans hard on why the breakup happened, the vendor’s quoted success rate is not repeated here, and the checkout may offer extras the core program does not need. Our full Ex Factor review covers all three, and can The Ex Factor actually get him back tackles the question its sales page answers too confidently.
Price and Refund: Not the Deciding Factor
The Ex Factor’s sales page lists a one-time payment of $47, though promotions in this niche move constantly, so confirm the current figure at checkout rather than trusting any review, this one included.
Restart Your Relationship’s vendor lists $1 for a 14-day trial, then $67 a month until you cancel, with no upsells (Commitment Connection). Confirm the terms at checkout and set a reminder for the end of the trial.
What is similar is the stated protection. Both vendors state a 60-day money-back guarantee, and ClickBank’s return policy lets it approve returns within 60 days of purchase at its discretion (ClickBank Support). Sixty days is comfortably longer than you need to read either program and judge whether you can carry out the approach. Because that term is the same on both sides, it cannot be a tiebreaker, though the billing structure can. The real cost of choosing wrong here is the money plus six weeks spent running a plan built for a situation you are not in.
The Mistake Most Buyers Make Here
By a wide margin, it is buying on the sales page instead of on the calendar.
Both pages are written to the same woman at the same moment: the one who is awake at 1am, hurting, and looking for something that sounds like a plan. So a woman fourteen months out buys the program written around the first thirty days and spends a month re-creating a silence she has been living in since last spring, wondering why nothing is moving. Or a woman two weeks out buys the reframe-first program, skips past the stabilizing she badly needs, and reaches out while she is still too raw to hear whatever comes back.
In both cases the product was fine and the match was wrong, and she concludes that programs like this do not work. They did not fail. They were answering a question she was not asking.
So before you pick, answer two things honestly, on paper if that helps. First: how long has it actually been, not how recent does it feel. Second: are you trying to survive the loss, or trying to reopen a conversation. Those are two different projects with two different tools, and a fresh breakup usually needs the first one whether or not you want to hear it.
There is a third question underneath both, and it is the one that decides whether either purchase was worth it. What would need to be different for a second attempt to end differently than the first? If you cannot name anything, no program is going to name it for you, and the honest move is to sit with that for a while before you buy a plan for a reunion neither of you has changed enough to survive.
Can You Use Both?
You can. We think most women should not, and this is the one comparison on this site where we say that plainly.
With most pairs of programs, the overlap is small enough that a second purchase adds a genuinely different layer. Here it is not. Buying both mostly buys you the same sequence twice in different words, and the second copy does not make the first one work better. Worse, buying two at once is a reliable way to finish neither, because the effort splits and the disappointment arrives on schedule.
If you have worked properly through one, given it a real attempt, and stalled at a specific identifiable point, then adding the other is a defensible decision made with information. That is a different act from buying both on the same anxious evening.
The Verdict, by Scenario
No cop-out tie, so here it is as plainly as we can put it.
Recent breakup, you want the complete manual: The Ex Factor. Bigger package on paper, aimed at the acute phase, multiple formats, a version written for women. For a fresh breakup it is the better fit.
Months or years apart, cold contact, or you have already run the standard playbook: Restart Your Relationship. The reframe is the thing you are missing, and it is built for a gap rather than for a silence you are still creating. It is the smaller product and, for this specific woman, the more useful one.
Genuinely torn between the two: start with the free work. Our commitment guides and the self-worth material will carry you further than most buyers expect, and a month of that clarifies the choice better than another comparison article will, including this one.
One last thing, because it is the thing both sales pages leave out. Neither program can tell you what he wants, and neither can make him want it. What either one can genuinely do is stop you from making things worse, give your attention somewhere useful to go, and hand you an order to follow while your judgment recovers. That is worth paying a modest amount for. The rest of it, the part where you find out whether there is a new relationship to build here, was always going to be a conversation between two adults, and no program gets to sit at that table.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the difference between Restart Your Relationship and The Ex Factor?
- The Ex Factor's sales page describes a book plus an audio book, video lessons, and bonus manuals, in separate men's and women's versions, built on what it calls a 3R system of recovery, rekindling, and reattraction. Restart Your Relationship leads with a single organizing idea, that you are not resuming the old relationship but starting a new one with the same person, although the Ex Factor page makes a similar point. In practice, The Ex Factor is the multi-format package pitched at a recent breakup, and Restart is the reframe-first program that its vendor says is for women whether the breakup was last week or years ago. The advice inside them likely overlaps heavily, because the sensible advice in this category is broadly the same everywhere.
- Which one is better if the breakup was months or years ago?
- Restart Your Relationship, in most cases. The Ex Factor's sales page talks about what not to do in the first 30 days after a breakup, which reads as aimed at a recent split, and when a year has passed there is little left to go quiet from. The restart frame fits a cold gap better because it treats reopening the conversation, not creating distance, as the first real problem. The Ex Factor's material may still apply once you are talking again, but you would be paying for a front half that your timeline already skipped past.
- Can I buy both programs?
- You can, and the honest answer is that most women should not. These two overlap more than almost any other pair we compare on this site, so the second purchase mostly buys you a rewording of advice you already have. If you have worked properly through one and genuinely stalled at a specific point, adding the other is defensible. Buying both in one burst of hope is the pattern that ends with two unfinished programs and a conclusion that self-help does not work. Pick the one that matches your timeline, finish it, and let the other wait until it earns a place.
- Do either of them actually work?
- Both give you a structured plan at the moment your judgment is least reliable, and that is a genuine benefit, because a plan beats panic-texting almost every time. Neither can promise reconciliation, and any sales page implying otherwise is overreaching, since the other half of that outcome belongs to an adult with his own free will. What the structure can do is stop you from making things worse. Whether that leads back to him depends on why you broke up, and no program can rewrite that.
- Are both refundable?
- Both vendors state a 60-day money-back guarantee, and both sell through ClickBank, whose return policy lets it approve returns within 60 days of purchase at its discretion. Sixty days is longer than you need to read either program and decide whether you can actually carry out the approach. The billing is what differs: The Ex Factor's page lists a one-time $47 payment, while Restart's vendor lists a $1 14-day trial that becomes $67 a month until you cancel, and canceling is a separate step from requesting a refund. Request a refund inside the window rather than after it, since ClickBank sends customers to the seller after 60 days.
Sources & references
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The 3 Texts That Break a Dead Silence
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The 3 Texts That Break a Dead Silence
Three word-for-word texts that restart a gone-quiet conversation without chasing or pressure — free, straight to your inbox. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.