TL;DR
- Cognism belongs on the shortlist for a five-seat or larger team buying across several European markets and willing to scope contact data, mobile verification and CRM enrichment separately. Its Standard and Pro prospecting packages are quote-led; the CRM Enrichment product can be an add-on or standalone.
- Lusha gives a team a clear credit rule: one credit for a verified email, five for a phone number. Its free plan offers up to 40 monthly credits, but a multi-country production programme needs a real seat, credit and usage-rights budget.
- Kaspr is an accessible LinkedIn-centred path. Starter is €45/user/month billed annually or €59 monthly; Business is €79 or €99 on those terms. “Unlimited B2B emails” does not make phone, direct email, exports or API unlimited.
- Leadfeeder (formerly Dealfront) is the different choice when the team needs European company discovery and website activity before finding contacts. Its Activate tier starts at €369/month billed annually and adds verified contact data; the €79 Discover tier is company visitor identification, not an equivalent contact database.
- Run the same people and companies through every candidate in your actual countries. Report correct current work email, mobile, employer and role separately. A useful European database is the one that supplies the fields your sales motion needs at a workable cost and with clear handling of data rights.
What a European contact database must prove
“Good European coverage” is not a usable buying criterion. A French enterprise team calling directors of procurement may need current direct dials and French legal entities. A UK SaaS team sending account research emails may need verified work addresses and role context. A German industrial team may find that the relevant decision-maker is at a subsidiary whose domain and switchboard differ from the parent. A vendor can perform well for one of those teams and fail the others.
Define the country, role, company size, contact channel and workflow before seeing a vendor demo. Then make each field a separate metric. A work email is not a mobile number; an office line is not a direct dial. A profile for a person who left the company is a wrong record even if the email pattern looks deliverable. A company entry can be useful for territory mapping while supplying no reachable contact at all.
European data procurement also needs clear responsibilities. A vendor can explain its data collection, security and rights handling. The buying company still decides why it processes the information, which people may access it, how suppression and objections propagate and which outreach is appropriate in each market. Do not treat a vendor's compliance page as automatic approval for every campaign. For wider data categories, see our B2B enrichment guide.
Four buying paths compared
| Product | Primary job | Public commercial starting point | Question that changes the purchase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cognism | Multi-market person and company data; optional CRM maintenance | Standard/Pro and CRM Enrichment by quote; five prospecting seats included in listed packages | Which countries and fields are covered in the exact quote, and what consumes a credit? |
| Lusha | Self-serve contact reveals and team prospecting | Free up to 40 credits/month; one email credit, five phone credits | How many usable phones versus emails will the team need, and what are seat and rollover terms? |
| Kaspr | LinkedIn-centred individual and team retrieval | Starter €45/user/month annual or €59 monthly; Business €79/€99 | How do phone, direct-email, export and API limits affect the workflow? |
| Leadfeeder | European company discovery, visitor signals and activation | Activate from €369/month annual; Discover from €79/month annual | Is the need a contact database, an identified-company feed, or both? |
These starting points are not like-for-like. Cognism's quote may include seats and a credit allocation; Lusha and Kaspr have different units for email and phone; Leadfeeder's listed price depends on identified-company and activation volume. Convert all into accepted contacts or account actions in the relevant countries before comparing them.
1. Cognism
Best for: a regional or international sales team prepared to buy a guided data programme and test it country by country.
Cognism's current pricing page lists Standard and Pro Sales Prospecting packages, each including five seats. Standard covers core contact and company prospecting; Pro adds advanced capabilities such as on-demand mobile verification and intent-based prioritisation. The same page lists CRM Enrichment as a separately priced add-on and says it can be purchased standalone. API or bulk Data-as-a-Service has its own delivery and usage scope. A team planning Salesforce or HubSpot refreshes should not quote only the prospecting seats.
Cognism describes one credit as a revealed contact and says the same credits can be used across prospecting, enrichment and API access under the applicable setup. For CRM Enrichment, it says credits apply to new records, ongoing maintenance is included, and key changes such as a job move can consume another credit. Translate that language into an example using your actual volumes: initial backfill, new contacts per month, job movers and the number of users. Request the resulting quote in writing, with country coverage, phone fields, integrations and permitted storage.
The live test must resist a broad “European data” claim. Give the vendor 40 known contacts each in the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. Include common names, regional offices and recently changed roles. Have a reviewer confirm work email, mobile, employer and title independently for a subset. Keep a wrong-person match separate from no result; the former can damage outreach. A strong phone result in the UK should not mask missing mobiles in Germany.
Where it falls short: no public list price for the main purchase and a contract that needs careful package scoping. A small team that only needs a few self-serve work emails may find the sales process and minimum configuration disproportionate.
2. Lusha
Best for: a small or growing team that wants to test contact discovery quickly and understand the cost of different fields before moving to a larger data commitment.
Lusha's published credit explanation is unusually clear about the field difference: one credit to reveal a verified email and five to reveal a phone number. Its Free plan offers up to 40 credits per month. This means a 40-credit test could reveal 40 emails, eight phones, or a mix. It does not mean 40 complete contacts with both fields. For a calling team, the phone multiplier is the commercial detail that matters; for an email-led team, the same allocation lasts longer.
Its page also explains rollover. Unused credits on monthly plans accumulate while subscribed up to twice the plan's credit limit; annual credits are issued up front and unused credits reset at the end of the annual cycle. For a team whose demand is seasonal, the chosen billing term changes waste. Ask for the actual paid-tier seat price, included credits, user controls, CRM rights and any API entitlement at checkout or in a quote. The static text view of its current price page gives credit rules but not a reliable full paid-plan table, so inventing one would undermine the comparison.
Pilot Lusha on the exact countries and job functions, not just the people a rep can find through the browser extension. For every returned phone, classify mobile, direct office line, switchboard or unknown; those are not interchangeable for a sales play. For every email, note current employer and verification status. Have users follow a prepared suppression and review process before export. Lusha may be an efficient entry point when the desired field is available at the right unit cost, and a poor fit if hard-to-find mobiles consume the budget without useful conversations.
Where it falls short: the small free allocation is useful for evaluation, not proof of production economics. A team needing a large backfill, custom data delivery or precise per-user credit controls must confirm the appropriate plan and terms.
3. Kaspr
Best for: sellers who work from LinkedIn profiles and want a quick contact lookup, with their data operations team watching export and field entitlements.
Kaspr's price table shows Starter at €45/user/month on an annual plan or €59/user/month when billed monthly. Business is €79 or €99 on the same billing terms. The page lists “unlimited B2B email credits” for both paid plans, but also separate allowances for phone credits and direct email credits. Starter lists 100 phone credits monthly, five direct email credits and up to 12,000 annual exports. Business lists 200 phone and 200 direct-email credits monthly and up to 30,000 annual exports. Verify what each email category means under the current terms, including fair-use and export rules, before translating “unlimited” into an outbound forecast.
There is a second plan gate: Starter's API is described as limited and available on request; Business lists API access on request. A browser-based salesperson may be satisfied with Starter, while a RevOps team building a scheduled CRM workflow needs the vendor to confirm API scope. Kaspr also describes a CSV enrichment path using LinkedIn URLs and CRM exports. Test that path on the team's normal lead source, rather than assuming a single-click extension result will scale into bulk delivery.
Use a three-person trial with contrasting markets. Have one rep focus on DACH, one on France and one on the Nordics. Each should work the same seniority and company-size bands. Count work emails, usable direct dials and wrong or stale matches separately; record how many contacts can be exported within the plan. A vendor's attractive nominal email allowance may be less valuable if the team chiefly needs verified mobiles or requires API access unavailable in its tier.
Where it falls short: the headline “unlimited B2B emails” does not cover every kind of contact data or every downstream use. LinkedIn-centred workflows may not suit a team that builds territories from company filters and bulk data delivery first.
4. Leadfeeder
Best for: a team whose first need is discovering relevant European companies, then identifying contacts and activating them after account review.
Leadfeeder's current pricing separates Discover, starting at €79/month billed annually, from Activate, starting at €369/month billed annually. Discover identifies companies visiting a website and offers alerts and CRM handoff. Activate adds verified emails and phones, intent filters and further activation features. Its tiers also vary with the number of identified companies and credits. Comparing Discover's €79 with a contact database's entry price would be a category mistake if the buyer needs email and phone lists.
The company-level workflow can be valuable for a European team. A manufacturer visits a product page; the team sees which account is involved, checks whether it is in target territory, and then researches an appropriate buyer. That is a different trigger from a rep searching all finance directors in France. Contact details associated with a visiting company do not prove that a named employee visited. Report the company visit and suggested contacts as separate evidence.
Ask Leadfeeder to show a territory sample across your markets and a live handoff into the CRM. How is a visitor matched to a legal entity when the group has multiple subsidiaries? What counts as an identified company for pricing? Which contacts and credits are included in Activate? Can the team export or use the data in its intended sales tools? A team with no meaningful web traffic or no capacity to act on account signals may be better served by a direct contact database.
Where it falls short: a visitor-led platform is not the fastest way to assemble an unconstrained list of people. The commercial starting point for verified contacts is Activate, not the lower Discover figure.
A six-country contact test
Prepare 240 known target people, 40 each from the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. The sample should span target seniority and company size, and include 20 recent job movers and 20 difficult subsidiary or common-name cases across those countries. Lock the sample before running vendors. For a known-answer subset, verify current employer and role from company sources and confirm email or phone where the team has legitimate first-party evidence.
For every vendor output, mark five separate results: correct person, current employer, current role, usable work email and usable direct phone. Label no result, unverified, stale, wrong person and wrong company separately. Record the source date, credit cost and whether the result can be exported under the proposed plan. A contact with a good work email but an old employer does not count as accepted. A switchboard cannot be counted as a mobile just to raise coverage.
Then run an actual buyer action: assign 30 accepted contacts per vendor to reps for reviewed outreach, with the same message quality and suppression rules. Track bounce, wrong-person responses, connection attempts and meetings only as observed pilot outcomes, not as promises. This prevents a huge database from winning because it filled the most columns while salespeople reject the records.
The scorecard should show results by country and field. A team selling only to Germany and France can weight those countries heavily; a pan-European territory may need acceptable minimum coverage in all six rather than one high average. Re-run a subset after a quarter to see whether job changes and refresh policy affect the decision.
How the prices compare in practice
Start with the field mix. Suppose a team needs 800 work emails and 200 phone numbers per month. At Lusha's published rule, that would represent 800 email credits + 1,000 phone credits = 1,800 credits before accounting for plan rules, no-results or any existing contacts. Do not turn 1,800 credits into dollars until the selected paid tier, seat count and top-up rate are known.
For Kaspr, a single Starter user's 100 monthly phone credits would not cover 200 phone reveals. Business lists 200 monthly phone credits per user, but the team must also account for seats, export limits and the difference between B2B and direct email allowances. On an annual-billed Business plan, one user's displayed €79/month is €948/year before additional credits or users; three users at that displayed rate would be €2,844/year, if the plan applies per user exactly as shown. A quote should confirm allocation and permitted sharing.
At Leadfeeder's Activate starting €369/month billed annually, the displayed floor is €4,428/year. It is useful only if the corresponding identified-company and contact-credit tier fits the traffic and work; it should not be compared with a bare three-seat contact tool. Cognism needs a quote with its five included prospecting seats, expected credits and any CRM Enrichment or API scope. To compare all four, divide the full cost by correct contacts in the target country that a rep accepted, then track resulting qualified conversations. A €1 address no one can use is more expensive than a €4 address that reaches the right buyer.
Choose by the sales motion
Select Cognism for a structured, multi-country programme where a five-seat purchase and optional ongoing enrichment fit the team. Start with Lusha if the team wants a self-serve test and can forecast email versus phone credits. Use Kaspr if sellers naturally begin at LinkedIn profiles and the plan's export, phone and API limits fit. Choose Leadfeeder Activate when company website activity is the signal that selects which European accounts to research and contact.
Do not buy four overlapping subscriptions to compensate for a weak benchmark. Choose the source of record for company identity, then one or two contact sources whose incremental accepted-contact coverage exceeds their cost. For an adjacent vendor comparison, see Cognism, Lusha and Kaspr; for the wider database market, see our ZoomInfo alternatives.
Use the Clay Waterfall Enrichment Guide to plan selective provider fallback around the countries and roles your European team actually sells to.
FAQ
Which B2B database is best for all European countries?
None can be declared best from a Europe-wide headline. Test the precise country, role, company size and field required. Report the correct current work email and phone rate separately for each country, along with wrong-person and stale-employer results.
Does a vendor's compliance programme make my outreach compliant?
No. The vendor can describe how it sources and manages data, but the buyer still controls its purpose, lawful basis, suppression, access and message practice in each market. Review the actual campaign and contract with the responsible internal team.
Is a phone credit the same as an email credit?
No. Lusha states one credit for an email and five for a phone. Kaspr has separate B2B email, direct email and phone allowances. Cognism's prospecting credit unit is a revealed contact. Compare the field mix the sales team will actually use.
Does Leadfeeder identify the person who visited a website?
Company-level identification and associated contact suggestions are separate. Leadfeeder's Discover is the visitor-company tier; Activate adds verified contact data. A contact at the company should not be described as the person who visited unless there is separate person-level evidence.
What is the practical difference between Kaspr Starter and Business?
The listed Business tier increases phone and direct-email allowances and export capacity, and lists API access on request. Starter is cheaper and supports a LinkedIn-centred user, but its API is limited and also on request. Confirm current entitlements before building an automated workflow around either.
How should a five-seat team compare a quote with self-serve prices?
Price the same 12-month use: five seats, required countries, expected email and phone reveals, CRM or API rights, credits, exports and renewals. Divide by verified contacts that reps actually accept in the target markets. A per-user banner and a negotiated multi-seat package are not equivalent budgets.
