Finding the right B2B data provider for sales prospecting is one of those decisions that can quietly make or break your outbound pipeline. The wrong pick means wasted credits, stale contacts, and hours spent filtering junk. The right sales intelligence tool means your team actually talks to decision-makers who match your ideal customer profile.
We spent time evaluating the major B2B contact database providers on the market before settling on People Data Labs (PDL) as our primary data source for company-based prospecting at Starnus. This post lays out what we found across pricing, data quality, data accuracy, query flexibility, and API integration, and why we made the choice we did.
The B2B Sales Intelligence Landscape in 2025
The B2B data provider market has gotten crowded. You have enterprise-grade sales intelligence platforms like ZoomInfo, all-in-one prospecting tools like Apollo.io, lightweight contact data enrichment tools like Lusha, HubSpot's own Breeze Intelligence (formerly Clearbit), and API-first data infrastructure providers like People Data Labs. They all claim large contact databases and high data accuracy. The real differences are in pricing structure, firmographic and technographic coverage, how much freedom you get when building targeted lead lists, and what kind of lead generation workflow they assume you are running.
For businesses building automated outbound sales pipelines or doing account-based marketing (ABM), the choice of data source directly impacts your cost per lead, email deliverability, and ultimately your sales pipeline quality. So it is worth getting right.
ZoomInfo: The Enterprise Sales Intelligence Platform
ZoomInfo is the name everyone in B2B sales knows. It has one of the largest B2B contact databases, the most features, and the highest price tag to match. The Professional plan starts at roughly $14,995 per year with 5,000 annual credits and up to three users. The Advanced plan runs around $24,995, and Elite hits $39,995. These are annual contracts only, with no monthly billing option.
The data quality is generally considered strong for the North American market. ZoomInfo covers firmographic data, technographic data, organizational charts, buyer intent data, and direct dial phone numbers. For enterprise go-to-market (GTM) teams running complex account-based marketing campaigns, the depth of company intelligence and contact enrichment is hard to match.
But the credit system is complex. Not all credits cost the same, and the features that make the platform genuinely powerful (intent signals, org charts, buyer intent) sit behind add-on paywalls even on paid plans. Multiple users on G2 and Reddit report that the real cost after add-ons, per-seat expansions, and credit overages lands well above the listed price. Auto-renewal clauses with narrow cancellation windows are another common complaint.
For an SMB or startup running lean outbound prospecting, ZoomInfo is almost certainly overkill. The minimum annual spend puts it out of reach for most small and medium businesses.
Best for: Enterprise sales and marketing teams with budget for a full-featured go-to-market platform.
Pricing: $$$$$ (starts ~$15K/year, realistically $20K-40K+ with add-ons and extra seats)
Apollo.io: The Affordable All-in-One Prospecting Tool
Apollo.io positions itself as the affordable ZoomInfo alternative. It bundles a B2B contact database with email sequencing, a sales dialer, CRM functionality, and basic analytics into one sales engagement platform. Pricing starts at $49 per user per month (billed annually) for the Basic plan with 5,000 credits. The Professional plan at $79/month adds a US dialer, call recording, and more credits. The Organization tier at $119/month brings international calling and advanced permissions.
Apollo has over 275 million contacts and 73 million companies in its database, with 65+ search filters for building targeted prospect lists. For small teams doing outbound lead generation for the first time, Apollo is hard to beat on value. The free plan gives you a real taste of the database, and the Basic plan is genuinely usable for light B2B prospecting and cold email outreach.
The downsides are real, though. Data accuracy is a frequent complaint on review platforms. Some users report that email bounce rates from Apollo-sourced contacts run higher than expected, especially outside the US. The platform has also experienced two data breaches (2018 and 2021), which matters if GDPR compliance or data security is a concern for your buyers. And while the per-user pricing looks cheap, it scales linearly. A team of 10 on the Professional plan is nearly $10,000 per year before any extra credit purchases.
Apollo works best as a self-serve sales prospecting tool for individual SDRs, BDRs, and small sales teams. It is less suitable as a B2B data source you are integrating into a custom automation pipeline, because the API is secondary to the UI-driven sales engagement workflow.
Best for: Startups, SMBs, and individual sales reps who want prospecting and outreach in one platform.
Pricing: $$ ($49-$119/user/month, or free for very light usage)
Lusha: Lightweight B2B Contact Finder
Lusha is the simplest sales intelligence tool on this list. It is primarily a Chrome extension that reveals verified contact information from LinkedIn profiles and company websites. Paid plans start at around $22 per user per month (billed annually) for the Pro tier with 3,000 annual credits. Premium runs about $52/month with 7,200 annual credits. The Scale plan for larger sales teams uses custom pricing.
Lusha is fast, easy to set up, and useful for individual sales reps who prospect directly on LinkedIn. The credit model is straightforward: 1 credit for a verified email address, 5 credits for a direct dial phone number. It integrates with major CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive.
The limitation is that Lusha is not really a B2B data search platform. You are enriching contact profiles you already found somewhere else. It does not let you build targeted company lists from scratch based on firmographic or technographic criteria. The contact database is also noticeably weaker outside the US and Western Europe. And the "unlimited" claims on the Scale plan come with fair-use caps that typically land around 2,000 to 5,000 contacts per month.
Lusha is a good supplement for LinkedIn prospecting, not a replacement for a full B2B data provider.
Best for: Individual sales reps and small teams doing LinkedIn-based prospecting and contact enrichment.
Pricing: $$ ($22-$52/user/month, free plan available with 40 credits)
Breeze Intelligence (Clearbit): Built for HubSpot CRM Enrichment
Clearbit was acquired by HubSpot in late 2023 and rebranded as Breeze Intelligence. It now lives inside the HubSpot ecosystem as a credit-based data enrichment layer. Pricing is based on credit packs: 100 credits for about $30/month, 1,000 for around $150/month, and 10,000 for roughly $700/month.
If your entire go-to-market stack runs on HubSpot, Breeze Intelligence is a natural fit for enriching inbound leads, de-anonymizing website visitors, and powering lead scoring based on firmographic fit. The data quality for company-level enrichment has historically been solid, especially for US-based SaaS and technology companies.
The catch is that Breeze Intelligence is not designed for outbound sales prospecting or lead generation. It does not provide direct dial phone numbers. It does not have standalone buyer intent data. It is not a standalone product; you need a HubSpot subscription, and advanced features are gated behind higher HubSpot tiers. For teams that need to build outbound prospect lists from scratch or run cold outreach campaigns, Breeze Intelligence is not the right tool.
Best for: HubSpot users who need inbound lead enrichment, website visitor identification, and CRM data hygiene.
Pricing: $$ ($30-$700/month for credit packs, requires HubSpot subscription)
Cognism: The GDPR-Compliant European Data Provider
Worth a mention for teams prospecting in European markets: Cognism is a sales intelligence platform built with GDPR compliance as a foundation. It is especially strong for verified mobile phone numbers in the UK and EU, using a human verification process they call Diamond Data. The platform checks against 13+ global Do-Not-Call lists.
Cognism does not publish pricing publicly, but reports indicate plans start around $15,000+ annually, positioning it alongside ZoomInfo in the enterprise tier. It provides firmographic data, technographic insights, Bombora-powered buyer intent data, and a Chrome extension for LinkedIn prospecting.
If your ICP includes European decision-makers and compliance is a priority, Cognism is worth evaluating. However, coverage outside EMEA can be thinner, and the lack of transparent pricing makes it harder to budget for without a sales call.
Best for: B2B sales teams targeting European markets where GDPR compliance and verified phone numbers are critical.
Pricing: $$$$ (custom quotes, estimated $15K+/year)
People Data Labs: The API-First B2B Data Infrastructure
People Data Labs (PDL) takes a fundamentally different approach from the sales intelligence platforms listed above. It is not a sales tool with a UI for reps to click through. It is a B2B data infrastructure provider with a developer-friendly API. You query their datasets programmatically, using either Elasticsearch queries or SQL syntax, and get back structured company and person data.
PDL covers over 3 billion person profiles and 70+ million company profiles globally. The Company Search API is where it stands out for ICP-based prospecting and account-based marketing. You can query by industry, employee count, company location, technology stack, funding stage, employee growth rate, NAICS/SIC codes, tags, and free-text company descriptions. Queries run directly against an Elasticsearch index, which means you get the kind of search and filtering flexibility that UI-based sales intelligence tools simply cannot offer.
For example, you can write a single API call that finds all SaaS companies in the Netherlands with 11 to 50 employees, founded after 2018, that have raised Series A funding and are tagged with "artificial intelligence." On ZoomInfo or Apollo, you would be clicking through dropdown menus and hoping the pre-built filters cover your criteria. On PDL, you write an Elasticsearch bool query or a SQL WHERE clause and get exactly the company data you need.
Pricing starts with a free tier (100 person/company lookups per month for testing and evaluation). The Pro plan begins at $98/month for 350 person enrichment credits and 1,000 company lookups. Company Search API calls cost one credit per result returned, so you can control spend by setting the `size` parameter. Enterprise plans start around $2,500/month with custom data volumes and dedicated support.
The trade-offs are clear. PDL is an API with no graphical user interface. If you do not have engineering resources or an automation platform to integrate it into your sales workflow, it is not the right choice. The data is refreshed monthly, not in real time, so some records will be a few weeks old. And person-level contact data like verified email addresses and phone numbers costs extra through the Person Identify API at $0.40 to $0.55 per successful match.
Best for: Technical teams building automated prospecting pipelines, AI-powered sales automation, or custom lead generation workflows via API.
Pricing: $ ($0 free tier, $98/month Pro, enterprise custom pricing)
Why We Chose People Data Labs for Automated Company-Based Prospecting
At Starnus, we build AI coworkers for small and medium businesses. Our platform is built around a multi-agent system with a central AI coworker called Starny at the core. Starny is not a chatbot that answers questions. It is an autonomous agent with deep professional expertise that can plan, execute, and iterate on complex business workflows, starting with outbound sales as the first and most critical use case.
Our prospecting workflow is not a human clicking through a sales intelligence UI. It is an automated pipeline where specialized AI agents identify companies that match a client's ideal customer profile, enrich the company and lead data from multiple sources, perform deep analysis and scoring, and feed qualified prospects into LinkedIn and email outreach sequences.
For that use case, PDL made the most sense as our primary company data source, but it is just one piece of a much larger data infrastructure.
Query flexibility for ICP definition. The Elasticsearch and SQL query support gives us freedom to define ideal customer profiles with a precision that no UI-based prospecting tool can match. We can combine firmographic filters with keyword searches on company tags and descriptions, apply employee growth rate thresholds, filter by funding data, and paginate through large result sets programmatically. When you are building custom ICP definitions for different clients across different industries, this kind of flexible company search is not optional.
Pricing that works for automation. PDL charges per result returned, not per user seat. When you are running automated lead generation pipelines rather than putting seats in front of sales reps, per-result pricing is far more predictable and cost-efficient than per-user models. The Pro plan at $98/month with 1,000 company lookups is a fraction of what ZoomInfo charges as a starting point. For SMBs building their outbound engine, this cost structure makes experimentation and iteration affordable.
Company data depth for account-based targeting. PDL's company schema includes employee growth rates broken down by department, funding details, technology tags, NAICS/SIC codes, and detailed location data including office addresses. For company-based prospecting where the first step is finding the right organizations before identifying the right people within them, this level of firmographic and technographic depth matters more than having the world's biggest phone number database.
Developer-friendly API for sales automation. PDL is built for technical teams. The API documentation is thorough, SDKs exist for Python, JavaScript, Ruby, and Go, and the API behavior is predictable with clear error handling. When you are integrating a B2B data source into a larger AI-driven sales automation system with CRM integration, webhook triggers, and multi-step enrichment workflows, a well-documented API is not a nice-to-have. It is a requirement.
Beyond PDL: Our Multi-Source Data Infrastructure
PDL is our primary source for company discovery, but Starnus integrates with 11+ additional data sources to provide comprehensive intelligence on both companies and leads.
For Companies: Deep technology stack analysis revealing what tools and platforms a company actually uses, headcount growth trends and hiring velocity, real-time company news and market positioning signals.
For Leads: Detailed professional history and career trajectory, recent social activity and content themes, verified email enrichment, and web-based research for deeper context.
For Execution: LinkedIn automation for connection requests and messaging, cold email campaign management, and integrations with CRMs and communication tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Gmail, and Slack.
This multi-source approach allows our AI agents to perform deep analysis and scoring that goes far beyond what any single data provider can offer. When Starny analyzes a lead, it does not just check if they match firmographic criteria. It examines their recent posts to understand what they care about, analyzes their company's tech stack to identify integration opportunities, reviews hiring patterns to detect growth signals, and synthesizes all of this into an ICP score with detailed reasoning.
The result is hyper-personalized messaging tips that reference specific signals, not generic templates with a first name inserted.
That said, PDL is not the right solution for every prospecting scenario. If your sales team needs verified direct dial phone numbers at scale for cold calling, ZoomInfo or Cognism will serve you better. If you want a self-serve prospecting and outreach platform that SDRs can use without engineering support, Apollo.io is the more practical choice. If you are purely enriching inbound HubSpot leads and want native CRM integration, Breeze Intelligence is more tightly integrated with your existing stack.
B2B Data Provider Comparison: Summary Table
| Provider | Pricing | Database Size | Best For | Main Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZoomInfo | $$$$$ (~$15K-40K+/yr) | 200M+ contacts, extensive company data | Enterprise GTM teams, ABM, intent data | Expensive, complex credits, annual lock-in |
| Apollo.io | $$ ($49-$119/user/mo) | 275M+ contacts, 73M companies | SMB outbound, all-in-one prospecting | Data accuracy issues, per-user cost scaling |
| Lusha | $$ ($22-$52/user/mo) | 100M+ profiles | LinkedIn prospecting, quick contact lookup | Not a search platform, limited outside US |
| Breeze Intelligence | $$ ($30-$700/mo) | N/A (enrichment only) | HubSpot inbound enrichment, lead scoring | No outbound, no phone numbers, HubSpot-dependent |
| Cognism | $$$$ (custom, ~$15K+/yr) | 400M+ profiles | European markets, GDPR-compliant calling | Opaque pricing, weaker outside EMEA |
| People Data Labs | $ ($0-$98/mo Pro) | 3B+ person profiles, 70M+ companies | API-driven company search, automated pipelines | No UI, requires engineering integration |
Choosing the Right B2B Data Source for Your Sales Stack
Every tool on this list solves a real problem for B2B lead generation and sales intelligence. The right choice depends on how you prospect, what kind of contact and company data you need most, and whether your workflow is human-driven or automated.
If you are an enterprise sales organization running account-based marketing with a large SDR team that needs buyer intent signals and organizational charts, ZoomInfo remains the market leader despite its cost.
If you are a startup or SMB looking for an affordable, all-in-one sales engagement platform to handle prospecting, email outreach, and CRM management, Apollo.io offers the best value for money.
If you need quick contact enrichment while browsing LinkedIn and do not want to commit to an expensive annual contract, Lusha gets you started fast.
If your go-to-market strategy is inbound-first and your CRM is HubSpot, Breeze Intelligence handles lead enrichment and website visitor identification natively.
If GDPR compliance and verified European phone numbers are non-negotiable for your cold calling strategy, Cognism is purpose-built for that.
And if you are building automated, AI-powered prospecting pipelines where query flexibility, cost efficiency, and API-first data access matter most, People Data Labs is the strongest option we have found. That is why we integrated it into the Starnus platform as our primary data source for company-based ICP search and B2B lead generation, alongside 11+ other data sources that together power the deep analysis and scoring our AI coworker delivers.
Ready to automate your prospecting pipeline? Starnus handles the data sourcing, enrichment, analysis, and outreach so you can focus on closing deals.