Cognism alternatives, sorted by why you are leaving
Nobody leaves Cognism over the data. They leave over the quote, the five-seat floor, and the second allowance nobody mentioned. 4 replacements below, each one matched to a specific reason rather than ranked on a score nobody can audit.
Prices and limits for every option below are read off the vendor's own page. These are the Cognism competitors that answer a named problem, not a field of logos.
The 4 reasons people actually leave
If none of these is your situation, the honest answer is that you should probably stay, and the Cognism API review covers what you already have. The 26 providers these replacements are drawn from are in the Enrichment APIs listing.
1 · There is no published price to sanity check
Both prospecting plans route to a sales conversation, and nothing on cognism.com carries a number. That is survivable for an enterprise buyer with a procurement process and genuinely difficult for a team of eight trying to work out whether this is a $400 or a $4,000 decision before booking a call.
2 · Five seats is the minimum, even for a pipeline
Both plans include five seats. If what you want is API access for an unattended enrichment job and no human will ever log in, you are still buying five seats to get it, which is the single most common reason small teams rule Cognism out.
3 · Search tokens are a second allowance
Credits meter contacts revealed, and a separate pool of search tokens meters rows returned, one per row. Broad searches burn tokens you never planned for and the error when they run out is a 402 rather than a 429, so a retry loop will not save you. Teams discover this after the first month, not during the demo.
4 · The compliance premium only pays off if you need it
Notified data and screening against 15 DNC and TPS registries is real and nothing else here matches it. It is also worth nothing to a team selling by email into North America, who are paying for a legal posture they will never be asked about.
4 replacements, and what each one fixes
Ordered by how often they turn out to be the right answer, not by price.
| Provider | Entry price | Unit cost | Free tier | Fixes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cognism | Quote only | Not by the unit | No free tier and no published price. Both plans include 5 seats. | Baseline |
| Apollo API | $49/seat/mo | $0.0196 per credit | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | Best all-in-one GTM API |
| Lusha | $37.45/mo annual | $0.087 per credit | Free plan, 40 credits a month, 1 seat, no card. API is rate limited strictly. | Best published credit costs for contact data |
| LeadMagic | $99/mo | $0.0198 per credit | No free tier. Essential starts at $99 for 5,000 credits, and failed lookups cost nothing. | Best priced per operation |
| Prospeo | $49/mo | $0.0245 per credit | Free plan, 100 credits a month, and no API access on it | Cheapest entry for email |
Read from each vendor's own pricing page between 8 and 19 October 2026.
The case for each one
Each one below is matched to a reason rather than scored, and each one names what you give up by taking it. A replacement with no downside is a replacement nobody has actually run.
Apollo API
A published $49 seat, a free plan with 900 credits a year, and search, enrichment and sequencing on one balance. The default move when the quote was the problem.
Everything Cognism will not tell you until a call, Apollo puts on a page: $49 a seat a month on annual billing, $0.0196 a credit, 200 requests a minute and 2,000 a day on Basic, and a free plan with full API access. For a team that cannot get a number out of a vendor, that alone usually settles it.
There is also no five-seat floor. Cognism's prospecting plans both include five seats, which is an expensive shape for an unattended enrichment job that no human will log into. Apollo charges per seat too, but one seat is a valid purchase.
The allowance is the number to read twice: 30,000 credits per seat per year, so Basic is 2,500 a month, and reaching more means buying seats rather than a higher tier.
What you give up
The compliance position, which is the actual reason Cognism costs what it costs. Notified data and screening against 15 DNC and TPS registries is real and nothing else in this directory matches it. Apollo carries a GDPR DPA, SOC 2 Type II and CCPA, which is not the same claim.
When it is the wrong answer
Anyone calling mobiles in the UK or EU at scale, or any team whose legal function specifically asked for notified data. The premium you were paying is for exactly that, and this swap removes it.
Entry $49/seat/mo. Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month. One of the few providers here that covers sourcing, enrichment and sending behind a single key, which is why it is usually the first API a GTM team wires up and the last one they rip out. Read the review · Cognism vs Apollo
Lusha
The opposite disclosure trade: every credit cost published, rate limits not. A free plan, 40 credits a month, and an exact number you can put in a spreadsheet.
Lusha publishes a price for every operation, which is the thing Cognism refuses to do. An email is 1 credit, a phone number is 5, a company profile is 1 and a recorded call is 8, at about 8.7 cents a credit on the Pro tier. You can model a month exactly before buying.
The plans are annual-granted rather than monthly: Starter is $37.45 a month billed yearly for 4,800 credits a year, Pro $52.45 for 7,200 and Premium $299.95 for 40,800. The monthly equivalents are 400, 600 and 3,400, which is the figure to compare against a monthly allowance elsewhere.
There is a free plan at 40 credits a month with one seat and API access, strictly rate limited, which is enough to measure match rate on your own list before committing.
What you give up
Published rate limits and European compliance depth. Lusha discloses prices and not limits, which is the exact inverse of what you may have wanted, and it carries a GDPR DPA and CCPA rather than Cognism's notified-data position.
When it is the wrong answer
High-volume mobile enrichment. At five credits a number, around 44 cents, phone is the line that will dominate your bill, and a provider that charges per result at a flat rate will be cheaper.
Entry $37.45/mo annual. Free plan, 40 credits a month, 1 seat, no card. API is rate limited strictly.. Lusha publishes what every operation costs to the credit: an email is 1, a phone number is 5, a recorded call is 8. Read the review · Cognism vs Lusha
LeadMagic
A published cost for every operation with credits deducted only on success, and no seat license at all. The answer when finance wants a number rather than a range.
This is the most forecastable rate card here. Email finder 1 credit, mobile 5, validation 0.25, job change 3, at $0.0198 a credit on the $99 Essential plan with 5,000 credits. No seats, no five-seat floor, no quote.
Credits are deducted on valid results only and never on a miss, which removes the thing that makes a hard segment unpredictable. People, company and jobs search spend nothing from Essential upward, so exploring a list costs nothing before you decide to enrich it.
An MCP server comes with every plan, and the rate limits are account-wide rather than per key: 5 requests a second on Professional and 10 on Ultimate.
What you give up
The free tier and the compliance premium. LeadMagic has no free allowance, so the first measurement costs $99, and it carries a GDPR DPA rather than Cognism's notified data and DNC screening.
When it is the wrong answer
Teams that need to prove the data before there is budget, and anyone whose reason for Cognism was the compliance position rather than the price.
Entry $99/mo. No free tier. Essential starts at $99 for 5,000 credits, and failed lookups cost nothing.. The clearest rate card in this directory. Read the review
Prospeo
Strong European data at the cheapest paid floor in this directory, with a free tier to measure your own match rate on before committing.
Prospeo is $49 a month per user for 2,000 credits, at $0.0245 each, which makes it one of the cheapest ways to start on European contact data. For a team leaving Cognism over the five-seat minimum and the quote, a single $49 seat is a very different shape of purchase.
The free plan carries 100 credits a month, which is the point: you can measure what Prospeo returns on your own European list before cancelling anything. Note that the free tier has no API access, so the measurement is through the app rather than through code.
The paid ladder runs $49 for 2,000, $99 for 5,000 and $249 for 15,000 credits a month, with annual billing delivering the year's credits upfront at roughly a 25% discount.
What you give up
Notified data, DNC screening and the breadth. Prospeo is a contact finder rather than a compliance-led database, and the thing Cognism sells that nobody else here does is precisely the part that does not come with it.
When it is the wrong answer
Any outbound motion that phones EU or UK mobiles at volume without its own screening process. That is the case Cognism is built for and the one where leaving is a legal decision rather than a budget one.
Entry $49/mo. Free plan, 100 credits a month, and no API access on it. Prospeo gets you to 2,000 verified emails a month for $49, which is the cheapest real entry point in this directory, and unused credits roll into the next cycle rather than expiring. Read the review
What you would actually pay, on each one
4 of the 5 providers here publish a rate card. Cognism does not, and the entry price below is all it will tell you without a call. The plan you want is the one whose included volume covers a normal month for you, not the cheapest one on the page.
Cognism
Cognism publishes no price at all, so there is no rate card to put here. Everything is quoted, which means the number you get depends on what you ask for and on where in their quarter you ask it.
Get these in writing before you sign: the per-unit rate at your volume, the annual minimum, how many seats that price assumes, whether API access is included or an add-on. Without the first two you cannot compare this against anything else on this page.
Apollo API
Apollo API publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $119.
Free
- Full API access, not a trial of it
- Granted monthly, so 75 credits a month in practice
- 2 sequences and basic filters
Basic
- US$588 a seat a year, credits granted upfront and pooled across the team
- 2,500 credits a month, at $0.0196 each
- Annual billing saves 24% against paying monthly
Professional
- 4,000 credits a month, at $0.0198 each
- AI lead scoring and multi-touch outreach
Organization
- 72,000 credits a seat a year, so 6,000 a month
- $0.0198 a credit, so the rate is flat across every paid tier
- The three-seat minimum makes US$357 a month the real floor
Lusha
Lusha publishes 5 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $37.45 to Quote.
Free
- 40 credits a month, 1 seat
- No credit card required
- API access, but strictly rate limited
Starter
- 4,800 credits a year, granted up front
- 1 seat. Works out at $0.094 a credit
- API still strictly rate limited
Pro
- 7,200 credits a year, at $0.087 each
- 2 free seats, full API, webhooks, CSV enrichment
- Credits roll over to twice the monthly cap
Premium
- 40,800 credits a year, at $0.088 each
- 5 free seats, API Advanced, team management
- Credit allocation across the team
Scale
- Custom annual credit volume
- SSO and a dedicated customer success team
- No rollover: the cap does not apply
LeadMagic
LeadMagic publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $99 to Higher.
Essential
- $83/mo billed annually, $990 a year, saving $198
- $0.0198 a credit, or $0.0165 on the annual 60,000
- 3 seats sharing one credit pool
- Rollover up to 2 months
Growth
- $208/mo billed annually
- $0.0124 a credit, or $0.0104 on the annual 240,000
- 5 seats, one shared pool
Professional
- $0.0100 a credit, or $0.0083 on the annual 600,000
- The published floor is $0.007 a credit at volume
Free tier
- No way to measure your own match rate before paying
- The clearest gap in an otherwise clear rate card
Prospeo
Prospeo publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $249.
Free
- No API access, Enrich or Search
- 28 search filters, 3 intent topics
- Max 25 rows per selection
- App only, which is the thing to notice
Starter
- $441 a year, which is $37 a month
- 24,000 credits delivered upfront on annual
- 32 filters, 6 intent topics, 20,000 row selection
- $0.0245 a credit
Growth
- $888 a year, which is $74 a month
- 60,000 credits upfront on annual
- 38 filters, 9 intent topics
- $0.0198 a credit
Pro
- $2,241 a year, which is $187 a month
- 180,000 credits upfront on annual
- All 41 filters, 12 intent topics
- $0.0166 a credit, and the highest rate limits
Read the included volume before the headline price. A plan that costs twice as much and carries five times the credits is the cheaper plan, and on this page that is the usual case rather than the exception.
What each one costs at your volume
Cognism first, then every replacement. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers your volume on each one, which is the comparison a row of entry prices cannot make.
Cognism
Publishes no price, so there is nothing here to model and the lines below say what to ask for.
Apollo API
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Lusha
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
LeadMagic
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices before any discount you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount. Cognism publishes no price, so nothing is modeled there and the panel says what to ask for instead.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for. Every column moves with volume, because all of these meter usage rather than seats.
| A year at | Cognism | Apollo API | Lusha | LeadMagic | Prospeo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | Quoted | $588 Basic | $3,599 Premium | $1,188 Essential | $588 Starter |
| 10,000 a month | Quoted | $2,352 Basic | Quoted | $2,988 Growth | $2,988 Pro |
| 50,000 a month | Quoted | $11,760 Basic | Quoted | Quoted | Quoted |
4 of the 5 providers here publish enough to be put in this table. These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, so they are the number before you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount by between a fifth and a half.
Which replacement is yours
Answer what matters most and the lean appears below. Every option is read from the records on this page, and staying on Cognism is one of the possible answers.
Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two.
A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your segment, and the one test that does is the bake-off further down: real rows, cheapest entry on each side, spend divided by survivors.
Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is not how good the data is, it is who is allowed to hold it. A migration is the moment to check it, because you are signing a new contract anyway.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cognism | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Job postings, Job changes | Global | ISO 27001 ISO 27701 SOC 2 Type II GDPR notified data | Not stated |
| Apollo API | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Job postings, Intent and news, LinkedIn profile, CRM records | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | Not stated |
| Lusha | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Job changes | Global | GDPR DPA CCPA | Not stated |
| LeadMagic | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Job postings, Job changes, LinkedIn profile | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
| Prospeo | Work email, Mobile phone, LinkedIn profile | Strongest in EMEA | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor, not your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving off Cognism
Written against Apollo API, the first pick above, because the steps are the same whichever one you take and the specifics are what make them useful. Swap the name and the order still holds.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Run 500 rows you already have through Cognism and record the match rate, the fields that came back populated and the cost. Without that number a migration cannot be judged, because every provider looks cheaper per unit than the one you are paying for today.
Check the fields, not the field count
Apollo API does not return Job changes, which Cognism does. If anything downstream reads job changes, that is a change to your pipeline and not just to your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Cognism authenticates with OAuth 2.0 client credentials, from M2M Connect in platform settings. Apollo API uses API key in the x-api-key header.
The limits are the part that bites later. Cognism rate: 500 req/min per operation, separate windows. Plus search tokens and credits.
Apollo API rate: 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date, not before
Credits on most of these plans do not survive a downgrade. Check what happens to the balance you have already paid for, and time the switch so you are not buying the same records twice.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new match rate against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your segment looks like a provider that is fine.
What practitioners say about Cognism
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. These are people describing Cognism in their own words, transcribed as written and linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above.
The regional split is the real difference, and practitioners buy both
Each data tool only really excels at one or two things. ZI is solid for NA mid-market and enterprise, while Cognism crushes it in EMEA and cell numbers. Every time I need one, we run a trial. If you've got the budget, use 2-3 tools to cover more ground. Right now, I'm using Clay for data infrastructure, Cognism for EMEA, and ZoomInfo for the US. sometimes Cognism finds data that ZI can't-and vice versa.
r/SalesOperations · November 2024 · 5 points
The comparison pages here reach the same place from the rate cards rather than from experience: Cognism sells notified EMEA data and mobile coverage, ZoomInfo sells North American breadth, and neither of them publishes a price. This is somebody running both with Clay in front, which is the arrangement those verdicts describe rather than the either-or the question usually assumes.
Coverage is the one thing nobody in this category will put a number behind, so "crushes it in EMEA" is an experienced opinion and not a measurement. The thread it sits in is itself a request for accuracy benchmarks that do not exist, which is a fair summary of the evidence available on either vendor.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
What practitioners say about Apollo
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. The comment below makes its point in crude words, so we summarize it in our own words and link the thread. A Reddit claim is a signal rather than a fact, so nothing here is the only source for a figure on this page.
The rate limit, not the credit price, is what people actually hit
In our words: A practitioner building on the API says the rate limits are what their team hit, that they got past them by routing requests across three Apollo accounts, and that Apollo charges per request even when a lookup returns nothing.
r/gtmengineering · May 2026 · summarized rather than quoted
Two halves worth separating. The limit is real and it is on this page: 200 requests a minute and 2,000 a day on Basic, with enrichment on a separate 1,000 a minute and no daily cap, which is why a bulk job and a per-row loop feel like different products.
The charge-on-no-output half needs care, because Apollo publishes 0 credits when nothing is found and that matches what we read. What a miss does spend is a request against the rate limit, and when the limit is the binding constraint that is the cost you feel. Pooling accounts to get round a published limit is a terms question before it is an engineering one.
11 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Should you actually switch?
Be honest about whether you are buying data or a defense. If you cold call in the UK or EU, Cognism notifies the people in its database and screens against 15 Do Not Call and TPS registries, and no alternative on this page does either, so the quote is the price of a question you will eventually be asked. If you sell by email, or your calling happens somewhere with light rules, you are paying a compliance premium against a risk you do not carry, and Apollo or LeadMagic will do the same job with a rate card you can read. The middle case worth naming: if you liked Cognism for European mobile coverage rather than for the compliance paperwork, Prospeo sells EU mobiles from a far cheaper floor and lets you test the match rate first.
No provider in this category publishes a match rate you can hold them to, so run the same 500 rows through one free tier and one trial, verify every result set, and divide spend by survivors. Your own list is the only evidence worth acting on, it takes half a day, and it changes the decision often enough to be worth it.
Head to head, and in a stack
Apollo API vs Cognism
CompareThe cheapest published seat here against the only notified, DNC-screened database in the directory.
Compare them →Cognism vs Lusha
CompareNeither publishes the number you need, but they withhold opposite halves.
Compare them →Cognism vs ZoomInfo
CompareTwo quote-only databases, strongest on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
Compare them →All alternatives
29Every provider in the directory that teams regularly try to replace, with the reasons and the replacements for each.
Browse the hub →Switching costs more than the rate card says. Usually.
Three times out of four the fix is a second provider behind the first and a credit ceiling in front of it, not a migration. We will tell you which case you are in before you sign anything.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
Switching from Cognism, answered
What is the best Cognism alternative?
It depends on why you are leaving, which is how this page is organized rather than ranked. The replacement most teams land on is Apollo, which this directory lists as the best all-in-one GTM API, at $49/seat/mo. The case for it, and what you give up, is in the section above.
Is there a free alternative to Cognism?
Apollo (Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month) and Lusha (Free plan, 40 credits a month, 1 seat, no card. API is rate limited strictly.).
What is the cheapest Cognism alternative?
On the entry plan, Lusha: $37.45/mo annual, against Cognism at quote only. Entry price is not the same as cost per result, so check the unit figure on each review before deciding.
How were these alternatives chosen?
By the reason teams leave, not by a score. The page opens with the reasons teams leave and matches a replacement to each one.