Choose a contact data provider by what your outbound list is missing: work emails, mobile numbers, or the company facts that say whether an account is worth a call. Outbound teams now chain several providers and try the next one only when the last comes back empty, usually inside Clay or FullEnrich. The seven below are what goes into that chain.
Empact Partners runs the sourcing behind its own partner development, and as a go-to-market consultancy for software companies it treats that as RevOps work. This October we re-sourced about 16,500 software companies, and the input mattered more than the database: a name found a valid email three times in four, a job title under half the time.
So the list is sorted by the gap each provider fills: the field you lack, what you already hold, where your accounts sit. Our run used two of the seven, Anymailfinder and Hunter. The other five are reviewed from their own pages and from what their users report.
| Provider | The gap it fills | Where it is strongest |
|---|---|---|
| Anymailfinder | The email of a person you have named | Global; our hit rate 77% to 79% in the US, UK, Canada and DACH |
| Hunter | The people and emails at a domain | Global, with a source for every address |
| Prospeo | Email and mobile from a LinkedIn profile | No regional split published |
| Dropcontact | European emails and CRM records | France and the EU |
| Cognism | Mobiles a person has confirmed | The UK and Europe |
| Lusha | Direct dials and mobiles | The US |
| ZoomInfo | Company data and the account list | North America |
1. Anymailfinder
Best for: the work email of a person you have already named.
Anymailfinder finds a person’s work email from their name and a company domain, a company name, or a LinkedIn URL. It checks the address against the mail server when you search, instead of reading it from a stored database, and outbound teams use it as the email step once the names are found.
Anymailfinder is the email step our own sourcing ran. Across 14,181 named people at software companies it found a valid email for 75.6%, at about 0.85 credits a new contact. By company headquarters it was 77% to 79% in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland, and DACH. Elsewhere in Europe it was 71% to 74%, and in Asia and the Gulf 64%.
The knocks are ours too. When we gave it a job title and a domain instead of a person’s name, it found a valid address 203 times in 452. And a verdict ages: 25 addresses it verified on 13 September bounced at send, and 14 re-checked invalid or risky 16 to 18 days later. Its own FAQ says to re-verify anything older than two to four weeks.
Pricing
Pros and cons
What G2 reviewers say
“Getting up to 90% valid leads without paying for the ones they can’t find takes the guesswork out of budgeting for prospecting, it’s a rare pricing model that actually aligns with results instead of just API calls.” — G2 reviewer, higher education, Aug 2026
“Occasionally there are gaps in coverage for smaller or newer companies where public data is limited, so a small percentage of searches come back empty though that’s a common limitation across this category of tool, not unique to them.” — G2 reviewer, AI engineer, Jul 2026
Standout feature: Find Person Email
The search by name is the one to build a list around. The role search asks Anymailfinder to guess who you mean, and on our list giving it the name turned under half into three in four. That makes the names the step worth paying for first.
Verdict: the email step to buy once your list has names, and the reason to get the names first. Skip it if your list is only domains and you were counting on the role search to find the people for you.
2. Hunter
Best for: finding who to email at a company you only know by its domain.
Hunter is an email finder built around Domain Search. Enter a company’s domain and it lists the addresses it has found for that company on the public web, each with a name, a department, a confidence score and the pages it came from. Sales and marketing teams buy it to find out who works at a company before they look for anyone’s email.
We ran it on the companies where the people search had left gaps. Our 434 paid searches returned 1,075 people in target roles, about two and a half a search, and Hunter’s own verdicts marked 799 of them valid and 171 accept-all.
Accept-all is the knock. A catch-all mail server accepts any address, so the verdict cannot say whether the person still works there. On our list it was 92 of 550 target people at US companies and 26 of 84 at UK and Irish ones, a third on a small set.
Pricing
Pros and cons
What G2 reviewers say
“The interface is clean and easy to use, and the domain search feature quickly provides relevant contacts along with confidence scores, which saves a significant amount of time.” — G2 reviewer, commercial sales, Feb 2026
“sometimes emails data is old and your mails are bounced back” — G2 reviewer, marketing consultant, May 2026
Standout feature: Domain Search
Domain Search is a people list as much as an email list: names, departments and the company’s email pattern, with the sources a person can open and check. On a list of domains with no names, that is the step that turns accounts into people.
Verdict: the people step for an account list that has domains and nothing else, and the quickest way to see a company’s email pattern. Skip it as the only email source for UK and Irish accounts until you have a plan for the accept-all third.
3. Prospeo
Best for: getting an email and a mobile on one record from a LinkedIn profile.
Prospeo sells verified business emails and direct mobiles from its own database of 280 million leads and companies, by its count. You can search it, use its Chrome extension on LinkedIn profiles, or call its API, and it is priced per seat.
We did not run Prospeo ourselves. Its reviewers say a lookup returns the person’s job title and job history as well as the email. It bills 1 credit for an email and 10 for a mobile, nothing when it finds nothing, and says it refreshes its data weekly.
Its reviewers report gaps at small companies. Prospeo publishes no breakdown by region, so you test its European coverage yourself, and unused credits expire each cycle, so a slow month is money gone.
Pricing
Pros and cons
What G2 reviewers say
“With a single call, I can get a job title, LinkedIn URL, full job history with dates, and company data, not just an email.” — G2 reviewer, growth manager, Sep 2026
“I ran a batch of small manufacturers through it and most came back with nothing, which meant falling back to other tools anyway.” — G2 reviewer, IT consultant, Oct 2026
Standout feature: Mobile Finder
The mobile number sits on the same contact record as the email, revealed separately. A team that calls and emails the same people buys both from one source and spends the ten credits only on the contacts it plans to call.
Verdict: the provider for a list that came out of LinkedIn and needs a phone as well as an email. Skip it as the only source for small or niche companies, and test it on your own sample before you trust it on European accounts.
4. Dropcontact
Best for: European emails and CRM records when GDPR decides the vendor.
Dropcontact is a French email finder and CRM enrichment tool with no contact database. Its own algorithms build each address from a name and a company website, verify it on its own EU servers and store nothing. European teams buy it to clean a CRM and enrich lists without a debate with their lawyers.
Its company fields show where it is strongest: the French SIREN number, the NAF industry code and the EU VAT number, beside headcount, industry and website. The plans bill on success, and an email it does not find is credited back.
The finder plans return emails, with LinkedIn and company data added on Growth. Phones and the automatic CRM cleaning sit in a separate CRM subscription that finder credits do not pay for.
Pricing
Pros and cons
What G2 reviewers say
“ease of use and ease of integration into CRMs like HubSpot” — G2 reviewer, founder, Feb 2026
“It can be a little slow in generating results, but overall it is fine.” — G2 reviewer, business owner, Feb 2026
Standout feature: Company data enrichment
The company side is built for a French list: the legal identifiers a finance or compliance team asks for, filled in from a website and a name on the Growth plan.
Verdict: the email source for French and EU accounts when your legal team asks where the data lives, and the CRM clean-up worth running before any provider chain. Skip it if you need phones, or a database to build the list from.
5. Cognism
Best for: mobile numbers a person has confirmed, for calling into Europe.
Cognism is a B2B contact and company database that sells itself as Europe’s most trusted, in packages of five seats. Its distinction is Diamond Data: mobile numbers its team has phoned to confirm that the right person picks up.
Cognism scrubs numbers against Do Not Call registries in the US, the UK, Australia, France, Germany and other European countries, and on Pro it will verify a mobile you ask for within 48 hours. It claims more than 10 million phone-verified contacts and publishes no counts by region.
Its users report thinner coverage outside Europe and a price that is high for a small team. Neither package has a published price, so the number comes from a sales quote.
Pricing
Pros and cons
What Reddit and G2 reviewers say
“Cognism does have better data for Europe than zoominfo, but still not perfect” — r/Sales_Professionals, Jul 2026
“Coverage also thins out noticeably outside Europe; searching for contacts in APAC or more niche industries yields way fewer verified phone numbers than what we get on European lists.” — G2 reviewer, business development, mid-market, Jul 2026
“I also think Cognism is quite expensive for what it is; the price is pretty high compared to some competitors.” — G2 reviewer, senior business development executive, Aug 2026
Standout feature: Diamond Data
A mobile number that matches a person in a database can still ring a former employee. Diamond Data is the version a person has called, the one kind of check that confirms who answers.
Verdict: the phone source to buy if your reps call UK and European accounts and the contract size fits the team. Skip it if your calls go to the US or Asia, or if five seats is more team than you have.
6. Lusha
Best for: direct dials and mobiles for small teams calling North America.
Lusha is a self-serve contact database and Chrome extension for sales teams, with 515 million contacts by its own count, 132 million of them in the US. Small teams buy it because a free plan and a credit card are enough to start.
Lusha returns direct dials and mobiles as separate fields, each with its Do Not Call status, and shows which fields exist on a contact before you spend a credit. It publishes its own email accuracy by region: 98% in North America, 97% in EMEA, 96% in APAC.
Its reviewers tell a less tidy story: stale records at smaller companies and after job changes, and a wish for more verified mobiles and better international coverage. A phone costs 5 credits against 1 for an email, so a calling team spends the allowance fast.
Pricing
Pros and cons
What Reddit and G2 reviewers say
“I find cold calling is the best way to go. Especially if you go to Lusha which can reveal people’s work phone numbers too.” — r/sales, Oct 2026
“The biggest drawback is that the contact database isn’t always up to date, especially for smaller companies or people who have recently changed jobs.” — G2 reviewer, revenue operations analyst, Aug 2026
“Having access to more verified direct mobile numbers, particularly for decision-makers in SMBs and mid-market companies, would significantly improve connect rates and reduce time spent searching elsewhere.” — G2 reviewer, partnerships manager, Oct 2025
Standout feature: Direct dials with Do Not Call status
A US calling list carries legal weight, and a number is only half the answer. Lusha labels each one as a direct dial or a mobile and says whether it is on a Do Not Call list before a rep dials it.
Verdict: the phone source for a small team calling the US, priced so you can test it this week. Skip it for European calling lists, where Cognism’s phone-verified numbers are the stronger buy.
7. ZoomInfo
Best for: company data and the North American account list, for teams that can buy through a sales contract.
ZoomInfo is a US-built B2B data platform with 500 million professional profiles, by its own count. It sells access on a contract, along with intent signals and engagement tools. Sales and marketing leaders buy it to build the account list itself: which companies match, how big they are, who sits where.
Its own regional counts say where it is deep: 157.8 million contacts and 79.6 million companies in North America, against 66 million contacts in Europe, about 2.4 to 1. Its company record runs to 80 fields, and a credit buys one exported profile.
Price and phones are where buyers push back. Pricing is by quote, built from licenses, credits and features, so the first number you see comes from a sales call. And the complaint its users repeat is stale data, mobiles above all.
Pricing
Pros and cons
What Reddit and G2 reviewers say
“Instead of manually researching prospects or relying on outdated CRM records, we can pull verified contact details, job titles, and company information directly, which has cut down significant time in our prospecting workflow.” — G2 reviewer, technical lead, mid-market, Sep 2026
“We used Zoominfo at every company for like the 6-7 years and it’s the best of the worse because all their data is stale.” — r/EmailProspecting, Oct 2026
“The quality of zoominfo data has nose dived over the last few years, I feel like I call a spouse or a child like 3x a week.” — r/Sales_Professionals, Jun 2026
Standout feature: Advanced Search
Advanced Search filters by company, industry and revenue as well as the person’s role. Build an account list in that order: the companies first, then the people inside them.
Verdict: the account-list source for a team selling into North American companies that will use the platform every day and can carry the contract. Skip it if you already know your accounts and only need emails; you would be paying for the part you have.
Which Provider Fills the Gap on Your List
Start from what the list already holds and where its accounts are:
Whatever the mix, start with the cheapest records. We used the addresses we already held first, then matched new names onto addresses we held without a name, and only then paid to find names and their emails. Of 20,843 named people, 4,891 cost us nothing.
The one step we stopped was the cheapest-looking. Buying every address at a domain filled an earlier wave with bare inboxes, and 62% of its leads carried no job title at all.
.png)
Every address we send to now has been verified in the seven days before its send. About three weeks passed between our first lookups and our first send on 21 October, and in the hour before that launch the rule removed 195 of 3,080 addresses that had passed a check earlier in the month.
Working with us on this is RevOps work. We audit your list for the fields it is missing, choose the order of providers by where your accounts are, and run it in your own CRM and sending tools. One consultant owns the sourcing and the verification, and before anything is bought we agree the measure: the share of your list you can reach.
If your outbound lists keep coming back half empty and the fix on the table is another subscription, book a call with me, and we’ll see whether we can work together.
