Cognism vs Lusha
Cognism
Best for notified, DNC-screened contact data Quote onlyLusha
Best published credit costs for contact data $37.45/Cognism vs Lusha is a neat illustration of how differently two similar products can be sold. Lusha publishes every credit cost and no rate limit. Cognism publishes every rate limit and no price. So Lusha is the one you can budget and Cognism is the one you can design against.
Where they actually differ
Every value comes from the same record that drives the Enrichment APIs listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are data one provider returns and the other does not.
| Compare | Cognism | Lusha |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Three quotas, and none of them is a price | Every credit cost published, no rate limit published |
| Entry price | Quote only | $37.45/mo annual |
| Unit cost | Not sold by the unit | $0.087 per credit |
| Billing model | Per seat Subscription Credit packs | Credit packs Subscription Per seat Free tier |
| Free tier | No free tier and no published price. Both plans include 5 seats. | Free plan, 40 credits a month, 1 seat, no card. API is rate limited strictly. |
| GTM motion covered | Source Enrich Signal | Source Enrich Signal |
| Data returned | Work emailMobile phoneFirmographicsTechnographicsIntent and newsJob postingsJob changes | Work emailMobile phoneFirmographicsTechnographicsIntent and newsJob changes |
| MCP server | Yes https://mcp.cognism.com/mcp | Yes https://mcp.lusha.com |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Bulk or async | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async |
| Auth | OAuth 2.0 client credentials, from M2M Connect in platform settings | API key in the api_key header, generated in the Lusha dashboard |
| Rate limits | 500 req/min per operation, separate windows. Plus search tokens and credits. | Per plan, across minute, hour and day windows. Numbers are not published. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | ISO 27001 ISO 27701 SOC 2 Type II GDPR notified data | GDPR DPA CCPA |
| Best for | Best for notified, DNC-screened contact data | Best published credit costs for contact data |
Pick each one when
Cognism
- UK or EU calling, where DNC and TPS screening is the requirement.
- You need the rate limits published before you design the integration.
- Intent and signal data are part of the buy.
Lusha
- You need an exact, published cost per operation.
- A free plan to test the data shape matters.
- Five seats minimum is more than you need.
Neither vendor publishes a match rate you could hold them to, so the rate card only tells you half the story. Take 500 rows from the segment you actually sell into, run them through one free tier and one trial, verify both result sets, and divide spend by survivors. Half a day and about $20, and on a close pair it changes the answer often enough to be worth it.
What each one costs, tier by tier
Only one of these two publishes a rate card. Lusha lists its tiers, and Cognism quotes everything, so half of this comparison is a number you have to go and get. Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, and the pages they came from are listed at the foot of this one.
| The short version | Cognism | Lusha |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Not published | Starter, $37.45 |
| Tiers published | None | 5 |
| Free tier | No free tier and no published price. Both plans include 5 seats. | Free plan, 40 credits a month, 1 seat, no card. API is rate limited strictly. |
| Unit cost at entry | Not sold by the unit | $0.087 per credit |
The cheapest paid plan is rarely the plan you end up on, because what moves you up a tier is usually volume rather than a feature, and the two cards below say what each side publishes and what it keeps off 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.
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
What Cognism and Lusha cost at your volume
Put your own volume in. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers it on each side, which is the question a rate card cannot answer and the one that decides the bill.
Cognism
Publishes no price, so there is nothing here to model and the lines below say what to ask for.
Lusha
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 | Lusha |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | Quoted | $3,599 Premium |
| 10,000 a month | Quoted | Quoted |
| 50,000 a month | Quoted | Quoted |
1 of the 2 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.
How this plays out once it is running
On Lusha you know an email is 1 credit and a phone is 5, at roughly 8.7 cents a credit on Pro, and you cannot find out how fast you may call the API without asking an account manager. On Cognism you get 500 requests a minute per operation, documented headers and error codes, and not one dollar figure anywhere, with a five-seat minimum behind the quote.
On the data itself the real split is compliance: Cognism notifies contacts within GDPR timeframes and screens phone numbers against 15 DNC and TPS registries, which Lusha does not claim. For UK and EU calling that is the whole comparison. For an email-first motion where you need a defensible number in a spreadsheet, Lusha wins on legibility alone.
What each one is genuinely good at
Not a feature list. These are the things that make somebody keep paying after the novelty has worn off, which is a different question from what the marketing page leads with.
Cognism
The limits are published and the errors are documented
Cognism tells you what the API tolerates and what it returns when it does not, which is unusual for a vendor that will not tell you the price. Lusha publishes every credit cost and no rate limit at all, so you can budget Lusha precisely and cannot design against it.
Notified data and screening against 15 DNC and TPS registries
The reason Cognism costs what it costs, and nothing else in this directory offers it. For UK or EU calling that is a legal position rather than a feature, and it does not have a cheaper equivalent anywhere on this site.
Intent and signal data in the same purchase
Part of the prospecting plans rather than a separate product. Lusha sells contact data with operations priced individually; if signal is part of what you are buying, that is one contract here and two elsewhere.
Lusha
An exact published cost for every operation
An email is 1 credit, a phone number is 5, a company profile is 1, a recorded call is 8, at about 8.7 cents a credit on Pro. You can model a quarter on paper. Cognism will not give you a number at all until you have had a call.
A free plan to see the data shape
Forty credits a month with one seat and API access, strictly rate limited, no card. Cognism has no free tier, so the only way to evaluate it is through a sales process, and the only way to evaluate Lusha is to sign up.
No five-seat minimum
Starter is $37.45 a month billed yearly for one seat. Cognism's prospecting plans both include five, so for a small team or an unattended pipeline Lusha is a far smaller commitment before you know whether the data works.
Where each one falls down
Every provider on this site has a case it handles badly, and the people who find out are the ones who bought it for that case. These are the ones worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
Cognism
Nothing about the price is public
Both plans route to a form. For an enterprise buyer that is normal; for anyone trying to compare total cost across this directory it means Cognism cannot be placed on the axis at all, which is itself the finding.
Three meters running at once
Rate limits for speed, search tokens for rows returned at one per row, and credits for contacts revealed. The search-token pool is the one people meet unexpectedly, because a broad query spends it without revealing anything.
Five seats minimum on both plans
Even when the use case is an API key and no humans. That is four seats of overhead on top of an unpublished price.
Lusha
No published rate limits anywhere
The exact inverse of Cognism. You can forecast the bill to the cent and cannot size the integration, so the throughput behavior is something you discover in production rather than design for.
The allowance is annual and reads as monthly
Starter is 4,800 credits a year, which is 400 a month. Pro is 7,200 a year, or 600 a month. Comparing those figures against a competitor's monthly allowance without dividing overstates Lusha by twelve, and the pricing page does not make the period loud.
Volume buys no real discount
About 9.4 cents a credit on Starter, 8.7 on Pro and 8.8 on Premium. The rate is flat, so scaling up buys more credits at the same price rather than a better one.
Using Cognism and Lusha together
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of them. On this pairing it often is not, and the arrangement below is what teams actually end up running.
These do the same job, so running both is only sensible as a split by territory: Cognism where the calling rules are strict and the data has to be defensible, Lusha where it does not and the per-operation price is what matters.
If you are running that split, route by the territory field you already hold rather than by campaign, and keep the two from enriching the same account. The cost of an accidental overlap here is high, because Cognism's credits sit behind a negotiated contract and Lusha's are flat-rate with no volume discount to absorb the waste.
Cognism or Lusha, for you
Three questions, answered from the same records as the rest of this page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no result to email yourself.
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. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| 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 |
| Lusha | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Job changes | Global | GDPR DPA CCPA | 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 between Cognism and Lusha
Most readers of this page are already on one of these two. A swap is four hours of code and a month of watching, and the order below is the one that catches the expensive mistakes while they are still free.
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
Lusha does not return Job postings, which Cognism does. If anything downstream reads job postings, 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. Lusha uses API key in the api_key header, generated in the Lusha dashboard.
The limits are the part that bites later. Cognism rate: 500 req/min per operation, separate windows. Plus search tokens and credits.
Lusha rate: Per plan, across minute, hour and day windows. Numbers are not published. 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. Quotes are transcribed as written, 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.
The wider field for both
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of these two. Often it is not, and the reason you are comparing them at all points somewhere else entirely: Cognism alternatives and Lusha alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
Cognism alternatives
4Nobody leaves Cognism over the data. They leave over the quote, the five-seat floor, and the second allowance nobody mentioned.
See the alternatives →Lusha alternatives
4A phone number costs five credits, volume buys no discount, and the rate limits are not published. Those are the three reasons people look.
See the alternatives →Everything in Enrich
13The full category these two sit in, filtered by data returned, billing model and entry price.
Browse the category →Related comparisons
The 26 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: Cognism vs ZoomInfo, Lusha vs RocketReach and Cognism vs UpLead.
And: Lusha vs UpLead and Cognism vs RocketReach. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
Apollo API vs Lusha
A seat with credits bundled against a published price for every single operation.
Compare them →Apollo API vs Cognism
The cheapest published seat here against the only notified, DNC-screened database in the directory.
Compare them →Lusha vs RocketReach
Five credits for a phone number against one export for the whole contact.
Compare them →Comparison pages end at the rate card. Your list does not.
We run the bake-off on your actual data, pick the provider order, and build the pipeline behind it: waterfall routing, credit ceilings and the write-back that puts a verified contact in front of a rep the same day.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
Cognism and Lusha, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Cognism or Lusha cheaper?
Cognism does not publish a price at any tier, so the two cannot be compared on cost. Lusha starts at $37.45/mo annual, which is as far as the comparison goes.
Can I try Cognism and Lusha for free?
Cognism: No free tier and no published price. Both plans include 5 seats. Lusha: Free plan, 40 credits a month, 1 seat, no card. API is rate limited strictly.
What are the rate limits on Cognism and Lusha?
Cognism: 500 req/min per operation, separate windows. Plus search tokens and credits. Lusha: Per plan, across minute, hour and day windows. Numbers are not published.
Do Cognism and Lusha both have MCP servers?
Both do. Cognism: https://mcp.cognism.com/mcp. Lusha: https://mcp.lusha.com.
Which is better, Cognism or Lusha?
Cognism vs Lusha is a neat illustration of how differently two similar products can be sold. Lusha publishes every credit cost and no rate limit. Cognism publishes every rate limit and no price.
What are the downsides of Cognism and Lusha?
Measured against each other rather than in general. Cognism: there is no free tier, so you cannot measure your own match rate before paying; nothing is priced publicly, so every comparison starts with a sales call. Lusha: none of the structural gaps in this answer; the limits section carries its operational ones.
Can you use Cognism and Lusha together?
These do the same job, so running both is only sensible as a split by territory: Cognism where the calling rules are strict and the data has to be defensible, Lusha where it does not and the per-operation price is what matters.
Can I migrate from Cognism to Lusha without losing data?
Not without losing a field. Lusha does not return job postings, which Cognism does, so anything downstream that reads it has to change. Either way, measure your match rate on 500 rows before you switch, because that number is the one you cannot recover afterwards.