People Data Labs vs Clearbit
People Data Labs
Best for building on top of $98/Clearbit
No longer sold on its own, now HubSpot Breeze Intelligence Quote onlyThis comparison has an unusual answer: Clearbit is no longer sold on its own. clearbit.com now reads "Clearbit has joined HubSpot" and offers a customer login rather than a signup, and the enrichment lives inside HubSpot as Breeze Intelligence. So the real question is whether you want enrichment inside HubSpot or enrichment as an independent API, and only one of these two is still the second thing.
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 | People Data Labs | Clearbit |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A licensed dataset you can put inside your own product | Joined HubSpot, and the standalone product went with it |
| Entry price | $98/mo | Quote only |
| Unit cost | $0.28 per record | Not sold by the unit |
| Billing model | Subscription Credit packs Free tier | Credit packs Subscription Per seat |
| Free tier | Free plan, up to 100 credits per month with contact data obfuscated | Not sold standalone. Requires a paid HubSpot seat. |
| GTM motion covered | Source Enrich | Enrich Signal |
| Data returned | Work emailPersonal emailMobile phoneFirmographicsLinkedIn profile | Work emailFirmographicsTechnographicsIntent and news |
| MCP server | No | No |
| Interfaces | REST API Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node | REST API |
| Auth | API key in the X-Api-Key header | Through HubSpot, not a standalone Clearbit key |
| Rate limits | Per key, fixed window, separate per endpoint. Reported in the response headers. | Governed by HubSpot Credits, which reset monthly and do not roll over. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA |
| Best for | Best for building on top of | No longer sold on its own, now HubSpot Breeze Intelligence |
Pick each one when
People Data Labs
- You need an independent API, not one inside a CRM.
- Enriched records go inside a product you sell, which needs the redistribution license.
- Bulk loads into a warehouse are the workload.
Clearbit
- You are a HubSpot customer and the data never needs to leave.
- An existing Clearbit contract is still running.
- Enrichment inside the CRM workflow matters more than owning the pipeline.
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. People Data Labs lists its tiers, and Clearbit 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 | People Data Labs | Clearbit |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Self-Serve, From $98 | Not published |
| Tiers published | 3 | None |
| Free tier | Free plan, up to 100 credits per month with contact data obfuscated | Not sold standalone. Requires a paid HubSpot seat. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.28 per record | Not sold by the unit |
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.
People Data Labs
People Data Labs publishes 3 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from From $98 to Custom.
Free
- Full access to the Person APIs for testing
- Contact data is obfuscated, so emails and phones are masked
- No commitment, sign up and go
Self-Serve
- Contact data included and unmasked
- Access to premium fields
- Monthly or annual subscription
- CSV enrichment and email support
Enterprise
- Custom volumes and annual contracts
- Access to all APIs, plus Data License Feeds
- Formal data testing before you commit
- Additional field bundles
Clearbit
Clearbit 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.
What People Data Labs and Clearbit 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.
People Data Labs
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Clearbit
Publishes no price, so there is nothing here to model and the lines below say what to ask for.
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. Clearbit publishes no price, so nothing is modeled there and the panel says what to ask for instead.
How this plays out once it is running
Breeze Intelligence is metered in HubSpot Credits that reset monthly, do not roll over, and require a paid HubSpot seat to use at all. People Data Labs is the independent route: $0.28 a record, a published rate card, bulk endpoints built to load a warehouse. Putting enriched records inside a product you sell is the use case it is built around, and it licenses accordingly. Check the license first, because it varies sharply.
If you are already a HubSpot customer and the rows only ever need to land on a HubSpot contact, Breeze is the shorter path. For anything else, including anything where the data leaves HubSpot, People Data Labs is the one still available as a standalone API.
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.
People Data Labs
It is still a product you can buy
This sounds like a joke and it is the main finding. People Data Labs sells a standalone API with a published price and a signup form. Clearbit does not: clearbit.com now offers a customer login rather than a signup, and the enrichment is sold inside HubSpot as Breeze Intelligence.
A redistribution license, stated
People Data Labs is built around the use case of enriched rows appearing inside a product your customers log into and licenses accordingly. Check the license first, because it varies sharply and the penalty is account suspension rather than a fee. Several others here prohibit redistribution outright, and buying access licenses you to use the data, not to redistribute it.
Built for the warehouse rather than the row
Person, company, job title and school datasets under one key, with bulk and search endpoints designed for warehouse loads and Data License Feeds above that. Limits are reported in the response headers per key and per endpoint rather than published as one number, so design for a batch and read the headers.
Clearbit
If you are already on HubSpot, it is one fewer vendor
Breeze Intelligence runs on HubSpot Credits inside the CRM you already pay for. There is no second contract, no second key and no sync to maintain, which for a team whose rows never leave HubSpot is a real simplification rather than a compromise.
The data types are wider than the price suggests
Work email, firmographics, technographics and intent, against People Data Labs' person and company focus. If what you want is to score an inbound form fill with company size, stack and intent, that is a closer fit than a dataset vendor.
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.
People Data Labs
The highest price per record in this directory
About $0.28 a record, which is roughly fourteen times Apollo's per-credit rate. That gap is the license rather than the data, and if the rows are only ever read by your own reps you are paying for a permission you will never exercise.
The free plan obfuscates the thing you are testing
A hundred credits a month with contact data masked. You can check the shape of the records and not the quality of the emails and phones, which is the part you actually needed to evaluate. Budget for a paid test rather than trusting the free one.
Clearbit
You cannot buy it on its own at any price
There is no standalone Clearbit contract, no standalone key and no path to one. Access requires a paid HubSpot seat and authentication goes through HubSpot rather than through a Clearbit credential. If you are not a HubSpot customer, this comparison has one option in it.
Credits reset monthly and do not roll over
HubSpot Credits govern consumption and expire at the end of each month. For uneven enrichment volume that is the worst of both worlds: you cannot bank a quiet month and you cannot borrow against a busy one.
No redistribution position, and no MCP server
Nothing in the HubSpot terms gives you the right to put enriched rows inside a product you sell, and there is no MCP server. For the two questions this page is most often read for, the answer is no on both.
Using People Data Labs and Clearbit 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.
There is no sensible arrangement where you buy both, because one of them cannot be bought. The real question this page answers is which of two different situations you are in.
If you are a HubSpot customer enriching records that stay in HubSpot, Breeze Intelligence is the cheaper and simpler answer and People Data Labs is overkill. If the rows are going anywhere else, or into anything you sell, then Clearbit is not an option at all and the comparison is really People Data Labs against the cheaper providers in this directory.
The trap is reading this as a data quality question. It is an availability and license question, and the rate cards are downstream of both.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| People Data Labs | Work email, Personal email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, LinkedIn profile | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | Not stated |
| Clearbit | Work email, Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II 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 People Data Labs and Clearbit
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 People Data Labs 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
Clearbit does not return Personal email, Mobile phone and LinkedIn profile, which People Data Labs does. If anything downstream reads personal email, that is a change to your pipeline and not just to your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
People Data Labs authenticates with API key in the X-Api-Key header. Clearbit works through HubSpot, not a standalone Clearbit key.
The limits are the part that bites later. People Data Labs rate: Per key, fixed window, separate per endpoint. Reported in the response headers.
Clearbit rate: Governed by HubSpot Credits, which reset monthly and do not roll over. 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 People Data Labs
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 accuracy spread between vendors is smaller than the one inside your own list
it's nearly all the same at the end of the day... there's a marginal 5-10% difference between the vendors but overall 55-65% data accuracy / validity overall. [...] have a team of 20+ (or however many) outsourced data integrity workers through fiver or whatnot... it's what the rich tech companies like AirBnB and Uber do to have the most up to date data...
r/SalesOperations · November 2024 · 3 points
The range here lands on the assumption the waterfall stack on this site is modeled with, which is a 55% first pass. That figure is labeled as modeled on every page that uses it, because no provider in this category publishes a match rate you can hold it to, so an independent practitioner arriving at 55 to 65% is the closest thing to corroboration available. It also makes the case for the waterfall itself: if the best single source clears about 60%, the second provider is not a luxury.
The 5 to 10% spread between vendors is this commenter's estimate and nothing here verifies it, and the thread it comes from is a request for benchmarks that were never published. Read it as a reason to run your own test on your own rows rather than as a reason to skip one, and note that it argues against paying a premium for coverage claims, which is a different question from paying a premium for a redistribution license.
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: People Data Labs alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
People Data Labs alternatives
4A license written for redistribution, at the highest price per record in this directory. People leave over the second half.
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: Clay vs People Data Labs and Apollo vs People Data Labs. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
Apollo API vs People Data Labs
A go-to-market license at two cents a credit against a license written for redistribution.
Compare them →Clay vs People Data Labs
Coverage borrowed from 150 vendors against one dataset you are licensed to redistribute.
Compare them →Apollo API vs Clay
One key for the whole motion against a router sitting in front of 150 vendors.
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.
People Data Labs and Clearbit, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is People Data Labs or Clearbit cheaper?
Clearbit does not publish a price at any tier, so the two cannot be compared on cost. People Data Labs starts at $98/mo, which is as far as the comparison goes.
Can I try People Data Labs and Clearbit for free?
People Data Labs: Free plan, up to 100 credits per month with contact data obfuscated. Clearbit: Not sold standalone. Requires a paid HubSpot seat.
What are the rate limits on People Data Labs and Clearbit?
People Data Labs: Per key, fixed window, separate per endpoint. Reported in the response headers. Clearbit: Governed by HubSpot Credits, which reset monthly and do not roll over.
Do People Data Labs and Clearbit both have MCP servers?
Neither documents one, at the time of writing. Both are REST APIs you call directly.
Which is better, People Data Labs or Clearbit?
This comparison has an unusual answer: Clearbit is no longer sold on its own. clearbit.com now reads "Clearbit has joined HubSpot" and offers a customer login rather than a signup, and the enrichment lives inside HubSpot as Breeze Intelligence.
What are the downsides of People Data Labs and Clearbit?
Measured against each other rather than in general. People Data Labs: there is no documented MCP server, so an agent has to go through your own code. Clearbit: 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; there is no documented MCP server, so an agent has to go through your own code.
Can you use People Data Labs and Clearbit together?
There is no sensible arrangement where you buy both, because one of them cannot be bought. The real question this page answers is which of two different situations you are in.
Can I migrate from People Data Labs to Clearbit without losing data?
Not without losing a field. Clearbit does not return personal email, mobile phone and LinkedIn profile, which People Data Labs 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.