TL;DR
Apollo.io publishes its prices and grants credits per seat per year, which makes it the easiest of the six to model before you buy. Best for: teams that want list building, enrichment and sequencing on one bill without a sales call.
ZoomInfo and Cognism both quote privately and both sell in annual commitments. Best for: teams with a procurement process, a compliance requirement, and a budget that survives a 12-month signature.
Lusha and RocketReach are the two that price cheaply at entry and get expensive at volume, for opposite reasons. Best for: individual reps and small teams whose monthly record volume is genuinely small and genuinely known.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator has the freshest job data of the six and the weakest export rights of the six. Best for: research and account planning, never for building a list you intend to push into a sequencer.
Contents
- What a contact database actually has to do
- The six databases compared
- Comparison table
- Export rights are the clause most teams miss
- How pricing units differ, and why the sticker price misleads
- How to choose in one afternoon
- FAQ: B2B Contact Databases
What a contact database actually has to do
A contact database has one job that matters and four that get talked about more. The one that matters is this: turn a description of an account you want into a list of named people you are allowed to contact, with contact details that still work.
Everything else is a variation on that. Search filters determine whether you can describe the account. Contact types determine whether you get an email, a phone number, or both. Export rights determine whether you are allowed to move the record into the tool where the work happens. Pricing units determine what that costs.
The four that get talked about more are total record count, data accuracy percentages, integration logos, and AI features. Record count is close to meaningless because no vendor's total tells you the density in your segment. Accuracy percentages are self-reported and untestable at purchase. Integration logos tell you a connection exists, not what it moves. AI features change every quarter.
So this comparison is organised around the four that matter, and it is scoped to database selection. It is not a guide to enrichment orchestration, which is a different layer with different vendors, and it is not an alternatives page for any one product.
All pricing below was read from vendor pricing pages on 8 September 2026. Where a vendor does not publish prices, this article says so rather than quoting a third-party estimate as fact.
The six databases compared
1. Apollo.io
Layer(s)/Best for: Database, enrichment and sequencing in one platform. Best for teams that want a modelable bill and a self-serve start.
Apollo.io publishes self-service plan information alongside custom arrangements. Its pricing page distinguishes standard internal use from external customer-facing data use, which can require a separate agreement. Agencies should establish those rights before comparing credit allowances.
The structure is per seat, billed annually, with credits granted per seat per year rather than per month. Free gives 900 credits per seat per year, granted monthly. Basic is $49 per seat per month with 30,000 credits per seat per year granted upfront. Professional is $79 per seat per month with 48,000 credits. Organization is $119 per seat per month with a three-seat minimum and 72,000 credits. Basic and Professional both offer a 14-day trial.
Upfront annual credit grants matter more than the headline price. A team that runs uneven volume, heavy in January and light in July, is not penalised, because the pool is annual. Monthly-granted plans elsewhere force you to size for your worst month.
The important mechanical detail is what consumes an export credit. Apollo.io consumes them on CSV export, on CRM push, and on Person API enrichment to an external system. If your workflow is Apollo.io to Clay to a sequencer, you are paying export credits at the first hop, and your effective per-record cost is higher than the in-app browsing experience suggests.
Apollo.io acquired Pocus in March 2026, which moved signal and product-usage scoring into the same platform.
Pricing: Free $0. Basic $49 per seat per month, billed annually. Professional $79 per seat per month, billed annually. Organization $119 per seat per month, three-seat minimum, billed annually.
Where it falls short: breadth comes at the cost of depth in specific segments, and European mobile coverage is thinner than Cognism's. The all-in-one design also means you inherit Apollo.io's sequencer whether or not it is the best one for you.
Verdict: the default starting point for a team building its first real outbound motion, and the easiest of the six to forecast.
2. ZoomInfo
Layer(s)/Best for: Enterprise data platform with intent, conversation intelligence and workflow modules. Best for organisations with a procurement function.
ZoomInfo publishes no prices. Its pricing page routes to sales, and that is a verified fact about the product rather than an omission in this article. Contracts are annual, and the structure combines seats, credits and modules, which means two companies paying the same total can hold very different entitlements.
What you are buying is depth in the North American mid-market and enterprise, org-chart data that is genuinely better than the category average, and a module ecosystem that extends into intent and conversation intelligence. Chorus.ai has been ZoomInfo-owned since 2021 and is now folded into Copilot.
The module structure is where budgets break. Teams sign for the database, then discover that the intent data, the enrichment automation and the workflow layer are separately licensed. Ask for the full module list and the price of each before you sign the first one.
Pricing: Contact sales. No public pricing.
Where it falls short: no self-serve entry, annual commitment from the start, and a seat-plus-credit-plus-module structure that makes year-two renewal negotiation a real project rather than a click.
Verdict: still the deepest North American dataset of the six, and priced accordingly. Correct for teams selling into the enterprise; wrong for teams testing whether outbound works at all.
3. Cognism
Layer(s)/Best for: Database with European mobile depth and compliance screening. Best for teams selling into Europe.
Cognism also publishes no prices, and also sells annual. Packages are Standard and Pro, with five seats included, and the credit model is unusually simple: one credit reveals one contact.
The reason Cognism belongs in a six-item list rather than a footnote is compliance. It screens against do-not-call registers across several European markets, which is a real operational control rather than a marketing claim. If you are dialling into Germany, France or the Nordics, that screening is the difference between a compliant motion and an incident.
Intent is Bombora-powered, with up to 12 topics selectable from a taxonomy of more than 11,000. Add-ons cover CRM Enrichment and Data-as-a-Service.
One gate worth knowing before you scope a build: API access requires a prospecting seat. You cannot buy API-only access and skip the seat cost, which changes the arithmetic on any automated enrichment plan.
Pricing: Contact sales. No public pricing. Standard and Pro packages, five seats included.
Where it falls short: North American coverage is respectable but not ZoomInfo's, and the five-seat floor makes it awkward for a two-person team.
Verdict: the strongest choice of the six for European outbound, particularly any motion that involves phones.
4. Lusha
Layer(s)/Best for: Profile-first lookups with published prices. Best for reps who work from named accounts rather than from queries.
Lusha is the one to read carefully, because its pricing looks cheap and its credit mechanics are the most consequential of the six.
The plans: Free gives 40 credits per month. Starter is $49.90 per month, or $37.45 per month on annual billing at $449.10 per year, with 400 credits monthly or 4,800 annually. Professional is $69.90 per month, or $52.45 annual at $629.10 per year, with 600 credits monthly or 7,200 annually. Premium is $399.90 per month, or $299.95 annual at $3,599.10 per year, with 3,400 credits monthly or 40,800 annually.
Now the mechanic that decides everything: one credit per verified email, five credits per phone number. Any workflow with meaningful phone volume consumes credits five times faster than the plan card implies. A rep who needs 200 mobiles a month is spending 1,000 credits on phones alone, which is already past Professional.
Monthly plans roll credits over up to twice the plan limit. Annual plans issue the whole allocation upfront and reset at cycle end, so unused annual credits are lost rather than banked. Per-user credit limits appear only on Scale. Teams above five users must contact sales.
Pricing: Free $0. Starter $49.90 monthly or $37.45 per month annual. Professional $69.90 monthly or $52.45 annual. Premium $399.90 monthly or $299.95 annual.
Where it falls short: the five-credit phone charge makes phone-heavy work expensive fast, and the search experience is built for looking up people you have already identified rather than discovering people you have not.
Verdict: good value for email-led work at modest volume. Model the phone multiplier before you commit to a tier.
5. RocketReach
Layer(s)/Best for: Query-first search with hard export quotas. Best for teams whose constraint is export count rather than lookup count.
RocketReach inverts the usual model. Verified emails and, on the higher tiers, verified mobile and direct phone numbers are unlimited. What is capped is exports, and the cap is annual.
Essentials is $27 per month, or $329 billed annually. It is email only, includes unlimited verified personal and professional emails, 1,200 exports per year, and sending of up to 500 emails per day. Pro is $69 per month or $829 annually, adds verified mobile and direct phone numbers, 3,600 exports per year, technographics, news and org charts, Autopilot for 10 active jobs, and Salesforce, Outreach, HubSpot and Salesloft integrations. Ultimate is $142 per month or $1,699 annually, with 20,000 exports per year, Autopilot for 25 active jobs, and Bullhorn added to the integration list.
Ultimate on annual billing works out to roughly 8.5 cents per exported record, which is the lowest unit cost of any published plan across all six vendors. That is the reason RocketReach earns its place here despite a smaller feature surface.
For RocketReach, separate lookup access from exports, phone inclusion and API use. Size the plan around the records that must reach the team’s working system.
Pricing: Essentials $27 per month or $329 per year. Pro $69 per month or $829 per year. Ultimate $142 per month or $1,699 per year.
Where it falls short: unlimited lookups against a capped export quota can be a frustrating combination, because you can see records you cannot move. There is no intent layer and no sequencing.
Verdict: the best unit economics of the six if your workflow is export-shaped and your volume is predictable.
6. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Layer(s)/Best for: Live professional graph for research and account planning. Best for validation, never for list export.
Sales Navigator is in this list because it is the freshest source of employment data available to a sales team, and it is last in this list because of what you are not allowed to do with that data.
The structural facts are more useful than the price, because they do not vary. There is no bulk export of contact data. InMail allocation is capped per tier. Advanced Plus is the CRM-integrated tier and is quoted rather than listed.
Sales Navigator is where you verify that the person still holds the role your database says they hold. It is not where you build the list.
Where it falls short: no bulk export, capped InMail, and no email or phone data of the kind the other five sell.
Verdict: keep one or two seats alongside a real database. Do not treat it as the database.
Comparison table
| Tool | Layer | Best for | Entry price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apollo.io | Database, enrichment, sequencing | Modelable bill, self-serve start | $49 per seat per month, annual |
| ZoomInfo | Enterprise data platform | Deep North American coverage | Contact sales |
| Cognism | Database with EU compliance screening | European outbound, phone-led | Contact sales |
| Lusha | Profile-first lookups | Email-led work at modest volume | $37.45 per month, annual |
| RocketReach | Query-first search, capped exports | Best unit cost per exported record | $27 per month, or $329 per year |
| LinkedIn Sales Navigator | Live professional graph | Research and role verification | Current scoped quote; confirm term and included capacity |
Export rights are the clause most teams miss
Every team compares coverage. Almost no team compares export rights, and export rights are what determine whether the data can reach the tool where revenue is actually generated.
Four distinct restrictions show up across these six products, and they are not interchangeable.
Volume caps. RocketReach caps exports annually at 1,200, 3,600 or 20,000 depending on tier. This is the cleanest kind of restriction because you can count it.
Credit consumption on movement. Apollo.io charges export credits when a record leaves the platform, including CRM push and API enrichment to an external system, not only CSV download. If your architecture routes data through an orchestration layer, budget for that hop.
Selection limits. Apollo.io also applies a record selection limit that constrains how many rows you can save or export in a single bulk action. This is an operational friction rather than a cost, but it shapes how a large build is sequenced.
Outright prohibition. Sales Navigator does not permit bulk export of contact data at all. No tier changes this.
The practical test before you sign anything: write down the exact path a record takes from search result to sequencer, name every system it passes through, and ask the vendor in writing what each hop costs and whether it is permitted. Vendors answer this question accurately when it is asked directly. They rarely volunteer it.
One more thing worth saying plainly, because it protects you rather than the vendor: "not documented" is not the same as "does not support". If a capability is absent from a vendor's documentation, the correct conclusion is that you must ask, not that the capability does not exist.
How pricing units differ, and why the sticker price misleads
These six products meter four incompatible things, which is why direct price comparison produces nonsense unless you normalise first.
Apollo.io meters credits per seat per year, granted upfront on paid tiers.
Lusha meters credits per reveal, weighted five to one against phone numbers.
RocketReach meters exports per year, with lookups unlimited.
ZoomInfo and Cognism meter seats plus credits plus modules, privately.
Sales Navigator meters seats and InMail, with export prohibited.
Normalise with one number: cost per usable record delivered into the system where you will act on it.
Work a real example. Say you need 1,000 usable records a month, split 80 percent email and 20 percent phone.
The ranking by sticker price is Lusha, then RocketReach, then Apollo.io. The ranking by cost per usable record at this volume is Apollo.io, then RocketReach, then Lusha. That inversion is the entire point of this section.
Run the same arithmetic with your own mix before you choose. A twenty percent shift in the phone ratio moves the answer.
How to choose in one afternoon
You do not need a three-week evaluation. You need four decisions.
Write down your monthly record volume and your email-to-phone split. If you cannot, take last quarter's sequenced contacts and divide by three. An estimate you wrote down beats a precise number you did not.
Decide whether your constraint is geography or budget. European phone-led outbound points to Cognism regardless of price. North American enterprise depth points to ZoomInfo. Neither of those is a budget decision.
If neither applies, choose on unit cost using the arithmetic above. For most teams between five and fifty reps, this lands on Apollo.io or RocketReach.
Add one or two Sales Navigator seats for verification, and stop. Do not buy a third database because a rep liked a Chrome extension.
The failure mode is buying two overlapping databases because neither felt complete. Two partial datasets cost more than one and improve coverage less than a waterfall built on one good base.
FAQ: B2B Contact Databases
Which B2B contact database has the best coverage?
There is no single answer, and any article that gives you one is guessing. Coverage is segment-specific. ZoomInfo is deepest in the North American mid-market and enterprise. Cognism is strongest on European mobile numbers. Apollo.io is broadest across segments without being deepest in any. The only reliable test is to sample 100 accounts from your own target list in a trial and count fills.
How much should a B2B contact database cost?
Pricing basis: ZoomInfo. Scope seats, export allowances, API access, enrichment and intent separately. A platform quote does not establish the cost of an API-led workflow.
Can I export contacts from LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
No. LinkedIn does not permit bulk export of contact data from Sales Navigator on any tier. Sales Navigator is appropriate for research, account planning and verifying that someone still holds a role. Build lists in a database that grants export rights.
What is the difference between a contact database and an enrichment tool?
A contact database is a source: it holds records and lets you search them. An enrichment tool is an orchestrator: it takes records you already have and fills gaps by calling multiple sources in sequence, keeping the first acceptable answer. The two are complementary, and orchestration is a separate purchase from the database underneath it.
Do I need more than one contact database?
Usually not at the start. A second database is justified when you have measured a specific, repeating gap in the first, such as European mobiles or a vertical the base source does not cover. Buying two general-purpose databases because neither felt complete is the most common avoidable cost in an outbound stack.
Why do third-party pricing pages disagree with vendor pricing pages?
Because most of them were scraped once and never refreshed. RocketReach is the clearest example in this category: current third-party listings show at least six different figures for the same three tiers. Vendors also run time-bound promotions that get captured as list prices. Always read the vendor's own page, and note the date you read it.
The source is one part of the data workflow. Our guide to b2b data enrichment tools covers the adjacent options.
Work with Forma Nôrden
We build signal-based outbound systems for B2B companies selling into the enterprise and upper mid-market. If you are choosing between the databases above, the harder question is usually which motion you are funding rather than which vendor wins a feature table. Explore how we work.
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