Cognism API review
Best for notified, DNC-screened contact data
POST /persons/filter?view=demographics&limit=25 Authorization: Bearer $COGNISM_TOKEN # 25 rows back = 25 search tokens, 0 credits # add view=contacts and those 25 rows cost 25 credits too # X-Rate-Results-Remaining tells you the token balance
The Cognism API is worth understanding for one structural reason: it meters you three separate ways, and the three are easy to confuse because only one of them behaves like a rate limit. Rate limits govern how fast you may ask. Search tokens govern how many rows you may receive. Credits govern how many contact details you may reveal.
You can be comfortably inside your rate limit, hold a healthy credit balance, and still have every request fail because the search tokens ran out.
The second thing is commercial. Cognism publishes no price. There are two prospecting plans, Standard and Pro, both with five seats included, and both say talk to sales.
What the pricing page does commit to is the shape of the credit model: one credit reveals one contact, there is no charge for viewing a contact you have already revealed, and the same credits work across the prospecting platform, the Enrich product and the API without a surcharge. That last point matters more than it sounds, because the CRM you are probably comparing this against charges extra for API access.
What you are actually buying is a compliance posture. Cognism notifies business contacts that it holds them within GDPR timeframes, and screens its telephone data against 15 major Do Not Call and TPS registries, including the UK TPS and CTPS, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Germany. It is ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certified and attested SOC 2 Type II.
If that is not what you need, there are cheaper rows elsewhere in this directory with a published rate card. If it is, very little else here competes.
The rest of the category is in the Enrichment APIs listing.
Three quotas, and the one that stops you is rarely the one you watched
Cognism documents these side by side, which is unusual and necessary. Each has its own window, its own signal and its own failure code, so the first job on any integration is working out which one your workload will exhaust first.
| Quota | What it meters | Window | How you read it | When it runs out |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rate limits | How fast you send requests | Fixed 60 seconds | RateLimit-* headers | 429 rate_limit_exceeded |
| Search tokens | Rows returned, and count calls | Your billing period | X-Rate-Results-* headers | 402 insufficient_budget |
| Credits | Contacts revealed | Your billing period | The Cognism platform, not a header | No documented error code |
Search tokens are the one people do not plan for. The API charges one token per row returned in the data array from POST /persons/filter or POST /companies/filter, and one token per call to either count endpoint regardless of how large the count is. An empty result page costs nothing, and dictionaries, intent topics, settings and health checks are not charged at all. So a broad search that returns 100 rows you then ignore has cost you 100 tokens and zero credits, and nothing in your credit balance will show it.
Requesting the contacts segment is what spends credits: POST /persons/filter?view=demographics,contacts returns emails and phone numbers, and every person record returned with that segment is one reveal. Searching without it, counting, and the demographics, education and pastCompanies segments cost no credits at all. The practical shape of a cheap integration is therefore two passes: search and filter on the free segments, then reveal only the rows that survived. Teams that request contacts on the first pass pay to reveal people they were always going to discard.
Cognism API pricing, plan by plan
Cognism API pricing is not published. That is the finding rather than a gap in this page: there is no rate card, no per-credit price and no plan price anywhere on cognism.com, and both prospecting plans route to a sales conversation. What follows is the structure Cognism does commit to publicly.
| Plan | What it includes | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | Core prospecting, 5 seats, firmographic, technographic and signal filters, AI account research, CSV export and enrichment, MCP and API access | Talk to sales |
| Pro | Everything in Standard, plus premium mobile data, mobile verification on demand, and buying intent | Talk to sales |
| CRM Enrichment | A separate product. Enrich a record once and Cognism maintains it; credits are only spent again when something material changes, such as a job move | Talk to sales |
| Extra credits | Purchasable at any point, on top of the seat allocation | Talk to sales |
Two things are worth taking from that table even without numbers. API and MCP access sit on both plans rather than behind the expensive one, which is the opposite of how Salesforce gates the API and Lusha throttles it below Pro. And the CRM Enrichment product meters maintenance rather than volume: you pay to learn a fact once, then pay again only when the fact changes. For a database that decays at the usual 2 to 3% a month, that is a genuinely different bill from re-enriching everything quarterly.
Both plans include five seats, which is a minimum commitment rather than a generous inclusion. If you want the API for an unattended pipeline and no humans will log in, you are still buying five seats to get it. That is the structural reason Cognism does not appear in cost-per-record comparisons on this site: without a published seat price there is no honest way to divide the bill by the rows, and anybody quoting you a Cognism cost per contact has either got a quote or made it up.
Per account, per operation, with separate windows
Cognism API rate limits are enforced per account and per operation in a fixed 60 second window, and each operation counts separately. Saturating search does not lock you out of counting, which is a more forgiving design than a single shared bucket.
| Operation | Routes | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| search | POST /persons/filter, POST /companies/filter | 500 req/min |
| count | POST /persons/filter/count, POST /companies/filter/count | 500 req/min |
| dictionary | GET /dictionaries/* | 500 req/min |
Read the headers, do not wait for the 429
Cognism says this explicitly.
- Every response carries RateLimit-* headers with your current standing.
- Cognism's own guidance is to slow down as RateLimit-Remaining approaches zero rather than back off after a 429.
- Search responses also carry X-Rate-Results-* for the token balance, which is a different quota entirely.
- If you need sustained throughput above 500 a minute on an operation, that is an account team conversation.
Two failures that look alike and are not
Different quota, different fix.
- 429 rate_limit_exceeded means you are going too fast. Retrying later works.
- 402 insufficient_budget means you are out of search tokens for the billing period. Retrying never works.
- The fix for a 429 is backoff. The fix for a 402 is a smaller limit or a narrower search.
- A generic HTTP client that retries on any 4xx will hammer a 402 pointlessly until the period resets.
The usual sizing mistake is to count the contacts you want to reveal, buy credits for them, and discover that finding those contacts consumed a separate allowance nobody mentioned. If you expect to review ten candidate rows for every contact worth revealing, you need roughly ten times as many search tokens as credits, and the two come from different places in the subscription. Work out the ratio from your own targeting before the first invoice rather than after it.
How to create a Cognism API key
There is no Cognism API key. Authentication is the OAuth 2.0 client credentials flow, which means no end-user sign-in and a short-lived token, and makes it a reasonable fit for scheduled jobs and agents rather than something bolted onto a user session.
Getting credentials
Machine to machine, from the platform.
- Sign in to the Cognism platform and open Settings, then M2M Connect.
- Generate a client_id and a client_secret.
- The secret is shown once, so put it in a secrets manager or an environment variable immediately.
- Exchange the pair for a short-lived access token and send it as a bearer token on every request.
What the credential can see
Your subscription, not more.
- Access is scoped to your account's subscription, compliance settings, search-token allowance and credit balance.
- The MCP server applies exactly the same rules, scoped to your own Cognism user.
- No end-user sign-in is involved in the API flow, which suits server to server work.
- Because the token is short lived, a client has to handle refresh rather than caching one forever.
Where the Cognism API documentation lives
The Cognism API documentation lives at docs.cognism.com, which is a ReadMe site and behaves like one in a useful way: append .md to any page URL for the Markdown version, and there is an llms.txt index covering every page plus the endpoints in OpenAPI. Note that cognism.com itself returns a styled 404 for several plausible developer URLs, so start from the docs host rather than guessing.
| Surface | Where | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | docs.cognism.com/docs/getting-started | The orientation page for the Cognism API documentation. |
| Authentication | docs.cognism.com/docs/authentication | The client credentials flow and where to generate the pair. |
| Credits and search tokens | docs.cognism.com/docs/credits-and-search-tokens | The three quotas side by side. Read this one first. |
| Rate limits | docs.cognism.com/docs/rate-limits | Per-operation limits and the header names. |
| API reference | docs.cognism.com/reference | Endpoint specifications and examples. |
| MCP server | docs.cognism.com/docs/mcp-server | The hosted server, its URL and its auth. |
| Agent index | docs.cognism.com/llms.txt | Every page as Markdown, and the endpoints as OpenAPI. |
Cognism also runs a hosted MCP server at https://mcp.cognism.com/mcp over Streamable HTTP, authenticated with OAuth 2.0 against your Cognism account or your organization's SSO. It exposes the same data and the same rules as the API: the assistant can only see what you can see, and search tokens and credits are spent exactly as they would be through code. That is the right design, and it also means an assistant left to explore can spend a real budget.
Cognism also ships an MCP server, and it is on the MCP page with the others in this directory.
Cognism's own product demo
Cognism publishes this on its own channel, so it is Cognism's account of Cognism, not ours. It is here because a rate card cannot show you the thing moving, and a few minutes of the product is faster than any paragraph on this page at telling you whether the shape of it fits yours.
YouTube · Cognism How to use Cognism for Sales 10:41 · Published August 2022Recorded in 2022, so treat the interface as dated. It is Cognism's own product walkthrough and the closest thing on their channel to one, because the channel is mostly sales content rather than product. Every figure on this page was read from Cognism's current pages, not from this.
Published 10 August 2022 on Cognism, the channel Cognism's own pages link to, and read on 13 October 2026. Nothing in it is a source for a price or a limit on this page: every figure in the tables above comes from a Cognism page.
Strengths and limits
Cognism is the compliance answer in this directory, and the pricing is the price of that answer.
What it does well
- Business contacts are notified of their inclusion within GDPR timeframes.
- Phone data is screened against 15 major Do Not Call and TPS registries, including UK TPS and CTPS, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Germany.
- ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certified, and attested SOC 2 Type II for security and availability.
- API and MCP access on both plans rather than gated behind the expensive one.
- The same credits work across the platform, Enrich and the API with no surcharge.
- No charge for viewing a contact you have already revealed.
- Three quotas, but all three are documented in one place with their headers and error codes.
- A hosted MCP server at a published URL, with OAuth and SSO.
Where it falls short
- No published price of any kind, so it cannot be compared on cost per record.
- Five seats minimum on both plans, even if only a pipeline will use the API.
- Search tokens are a second allowance that is easy to exhaust without noticing.
- Credits have no response header, so an integration cannot read its own balance.
- A 402 and a 429 need opposite responses and a naive client treats them alike.
- cognism.com serves a full-looking 404 page for several developer URLs, which wastes time.
Where Cognism 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 |
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.
If Cognism is not the answer
Four providers in the Enrichment APIs listing that solve the same problem differently. Each one is a trade, and the trade is named.
Apollo
$49/seat/moA 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.
Lusha
$37.45/mo annualThe 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.
LeadMagic
$99/moA 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.
Prospeo
$49/moStrong European data at the cheapest paid floor in this directory, with a free tier to measure your own match rate on before committing.
The full set, organized by the reason people leave, is on the Cognism alternatives page.
Cognism against the obvious rival
Same rate cards, read side by side, with the arithmetic done on a worked volume rather than left to you: Apollo vs Cognism, Cognism vs Lusha and Cognism vs ZoomInfo.
The same again, against the rest of the field: Cognism vs UpLead and Cognism vs RocketReach. Every pairing in the directory is on the compare hub.
Apollo vs Cognism
CompareThe cheapest published seat here against the only notified, DNC-screened database in the directory.
Cognism vs Lusha
CompareNeither publishes the number you need, but they withhold opposite halves.
Cognism vs ZoomInfo
CompareTwo quote-only databases, strongest on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
Before you build against it
Four things to settle first, each one read off Cognism's own pages. The ticks are remembered in this browser, so you can come back to a half-finished integration.
Who should actually buy this
Buy Cognism when the compliance posture is the requirement rather than a nice-to-have: you are calling mobiles in the UK or EU, somebody in legal has asked where the data came from, and the answer needs to be better than a shrug. Notified data and screening against 15 DNC and TPS registries is a genuinely different product from a scraped list, and nothing else in this directory offers it. That is also why the lack of a price is survivable; you are not buying rows at a unit rate, you are buying a defensible basis for calling people.
Do not buy it to save money on enrichment. With five seats minimum, no published rate and a separate token allowance, Cognism will not win a cost-per-contact comparison against Apollo, LeadMagic or Prospeo, and it is not trying to. If your rows are read by your own reps in a market where cold calling is unregulated, the compliance premium is buying you something you were not going to be asked about.
Whatever you buy, size the search tokens first. The credits are the number everybody negotiates and the tokens are the number that stops the pipeline, and they come from different parts of the same subscription. Work out how many rows you expect to look at per contact you actually reveal, because that ratio is the whole sizing exercise and nobody will volunteer it.
Compliant data is only worth it if the play is compliant too.
Notified contacts and DNC screening protect you right up until the sequence does something the data policy did not. Frontal builds the whole motion inside your own stack, so the compliance posture survives contact with the outbound.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
What Cognism users say, in their own words
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written and linked to the thread.
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.
Cognism API, answered
Is the Cognism API free?
No. No free tier and no published price. Both plans include 5 seats.
How much does the Cognism API cost?
Cognism does not publish a price, so entry is whatever sales quotes you. Billing is per seat, subscription and credit packs. Read from Cognism's own pricing page on 8 October 2026.
What are the Cognism API rate limits?
500 req/min per operation, separate windows. Plus search tokens and credits.
How do I get a Cognism API key?
OAuth 2.0 client credentials, from M2M Connect in platform settings. The current steps are in Cognism's own documentation, which is authoritative on anything that has changed since 8 October 2026.
Does Cognism have an MCP server?
Yes, at https://mcp.cognism.com/mcp. It is listed with the others on the MCP page.