What is the best B2B database in 2026?

Apollo.io claims 240 million contacts and 30 million companies. That makes it the largest database you can use without a contract, and the free plan has no expiry date. Searching is free too: you build and refine a list for nothing and only burn credits when you reveal an email or a phone number. One click exports up to 10,000 leads.

Paid plans are cheap by category standards. Basic is $49 per seat per month billed annually, or $65 month to month. Professional is $79. Watch the credit rules: credits are pooled across the team and do not roll over, and users often find the Basic allowance thin once they prospect every day.

Data quality is where opinions split. Apollo sits at 3.1 out of 5 on a large public review site with more than 1,300 reviews, almost as many one-star as five-star ratings. The recurring complaint is that a lot of emails are out of date. Run every list through a verifier before a campaign. For North American tech targets, Apollo is still the best volume for the money.

Cognism is the database most teams name when they sell into Europe. Its headline feature is Diamond Data: mobile numbers that a human has verified by phone. The vendor quotes 98% accuracy, but that figure covers the verified subset only, not the whole database.

There is no public price: everything goes through a quote, and you should plan for a five-figure annual commitment. Kaspr, further down this list, belongs to the same group and is the cheaper way in.

Users praise the quality of European mobiles. A notable share of negative reviews comes from people who were called and want to be removed, which is a reputational cost every contact database carries. Get the renewal notice period written into the contract before you sign.

Clay is not a database. It is a spreadsheet that queries more than 150 data providers one after another, a waterfall, until one of them returns the missing email, phone number or company detail. That makes it the widest coverage you can assemble, as long as someone on your team builds and maintains the tables.

Launch costs $185 a month, or $167 billed annually, for 2,500 Data Credits and 15,000 Actions. CRM sync needs the Growth plan at $495. The free plan is there to learn on, without phone numbers or CRM sync.

The limit is people, not data. Clay rewards teams with an operator who enjoys building workflows. If you only need emails for a list of names, a single enrichment tool does the job for a fraction of the price.

Dropcontact does not sell a database, and that is the point. You give it a first name, last name and company; it finds the professional email and validates it. The vendor says it uses its own algorithms on servers inside the EU and does not store a contact database to resell. If your buyers ask hard GDPR questions, this is the easiest story to tell.

Starter is €79 a month and Growth €120, with tiers from 500 to 150,000 credits a month, and annual billing takes 20% off. You pay per email found, not per row sent. 50 free credits let you run it on your own target list.

Reviews are excellent (4.6 from 48 reviews on one major site, 4.7 on another), praising email quality and support. Two caveats come up: it feels expensive below 1,000 emails a month, and the 99% it advertises refers to the validity of emails found, not to the share of contacts it finds. No mobile numbers.

FullEnrich runs a waterfall across several data vendors to find an email or a mobile number. It is the engine some European tools plug in for phones, and you can use it on its own. The entry plan is $29 a month for 500 credits, or $26 billed annually.

A mobile costs 10 credits, so 500 credits buy up to 50 numbers a month, about $0.58 per number found. That is expensive per contact, but you only pay for hits. For a rep calling forty hand-picked accounts, it beats a ZoomInfo or Cognism seat by a wide margin.

The limit: no company search. You bring the names, from Apollo, LinkedIn or your CRM, and the quality depends on vendors you do not choose.

Lusha is a browser extension: open a LinkedIn profile or a company website and it shows the contact's email and phone. Pricing is public, which is rare here. Free gives you 40 credits a month. Starter is $49.90 a month, or $37.45 billed annually, for 400 credits; Pro is $69.90 for 600.

Do the math first. An email costs 1 credit, a phone 5, so Starter buys 400 emails or only 80 numbers. On monthly plans unused credits roll over up to twice your allowance; on annual plans they reset at year end.

The compliance file weighs on the score. The CNIL, France's regulator, dropped its case after ruling GDPR did not apply to the US company, but Italy's data protection authority later fined Lusha €2 million and banned the processing. Public reviews are harsh (1.2 out of 5 from nearly 800 reviews), mostly people called on personal numbers and deletion requests left unanswered. Fine for a solo rep; a risk if your brand sells into Europe.

ZoomInfo is the US reference for B2B contact data. It does not publish prices. Expect about $15,000 a year for a first contract on an annual commitment, with credits that do not roll over.

That buys depth: org charts, intent signals and integrations that big sales teams rely on. The vendor claims 7.7 million contacts in France alone, its own figure. Outside large accounts, global databases tend to cover regional European SMBs less well than local tools.

Negotiate credits and the renewal date before anything else. For a team under ten reps, Apollo covers most of the same ground for a fraction of the price.

Kaspr is a LinkedIn extension owned by Cognism and the cheapest way to get European mobile numbers. Starter, at €45 or €59 per user per month depending on billing, includes unlimited B2B emails, 100 phone numbers a month and 12,000 exports a year. Business, at €79 or €99, raises that to 200 phones and 200 direct emails.

The catch is legal. In 2024 the CNIL, France's data protection authority, fined Kaspr €240,000 for collecting contact details of LinkedIn users who had hidden them, and ordered it to delete that data. Its database held about 160 million contacts at the time. Using the tool is not illegal, but you answer for the data you act on.

Public reviews are poor: 1.5 out of 5 from 88 reviews, citing a bot-only support desk that closes tickets and credits lost when you turn off auto-renewal. Others find the data relevant. If you use it, log every deletion request.