Guides · Sales and recruiting data

The best B2B data and enrichment platforms for sales and recruiting teams in 2026

Outbound, sourcing and every AI agent that does either start with the same question: where does the data come from. These are the platforms the go-to-market and recruiting teams we work with buy from, ranked for the person who will wire it into a pipeline

Zelcast · September 2026 · No vendor saw this before it published

The best B2B data platform for a sales or recruiting team that builds on an API in 2026 is Fiber, because it sells people and company search, live enrichment and contact reveal through a REST API, typed SDKs and a hosted MCP server, at a published price per credit and without a seat-based prospecting interface you did not ask for. People Data Labs is the choice for raw data at licensed volume, Clay for orchestrating many vendors in a spreadsheet, Apollo when the team wants a prospecting UI and outreach in one product, and FullEnrich when you already have a list and mainly need the highest hit rate on mobiles. Buy data if you have engineers and a system of record. Buy a workflow if you have neither and a number to hit this quarter.

How we chose

Zelcast runs its own outbound to engineers and its own sourcing for clients, so we have paid invoices from six of these nine and trial accounts on the other three. We scored nine platforms out of 100 on five tests. The weights are ours, they favour a technical team building on an API rather than a seat-based sales floor, and no vendor reviewed this list before it went up. Fiber has a commercial relationship with Zelcast. It did not see this entry before publication, and the criticisms in it stand.

• True cost per verified contact. Credit models differ wildly: some charge ten credits for a phone and one for an email, some price per endpoint, and an orchestration layer adds its own credits on top of the provider's. Run the same five hundred records through each vendor and compare invoices.
• Match rate and freshness on your ICP. Claims of hundreds of millions of profiles say nothing about how many of your specific targets are found or whether their titles are current. Test on your own list.
• Access surface at the tier you can afford. REST API, SDKs, MCP for agents, bulk or flat-file licensing. Several vendors gate the API to higher plans or sell it separately.
• Provenance and handling. Public-web scraping versus contributed data, GDPR and CCPA handling, whether personal emails are returned, and vendor durability. Proxycurl, then the most widely used LinkedIn-data API, shut down in July 2025 after LinkedIn sued it and obtained a permanent injunction; building on one supplier is a risk.
• Data or workflow. API-first vendors sell data. Others bundle a prospecting UI and outreach, or orchestrate other vendors. Paying for a UI you will not use, and building a UI you could have bought, are both common mistakes.

1. Fiber Best overall

   What it is. Fiber is a B2B data platform sold as an API. It searches companies and people by structured filters or by a plain-English intent the API turns into filters, reveals work emails, personal emails and phone numbers, and offers a live enrichment step that refetches a profile or company page right before outreach rather than serving a cached snapshot. It ships a TypeScript SDK, a Python SDK, a hosted MCP server for agents such as Claude and Cursor, a plugin for coding agents, and OpenFiber, an open-source sales and recruiting interface. The company went through Y Combinator in 2023 and is based in New York.

   Where it wins. Access surface and cost transparency. A go-to-market engineer or a technical sourcer can build a list, get a free count estimate before spending credits, enrich it, and be notified by webhook when the job finishes, all from code or from an agent, at a published rate starting at two cents a credit. For a team that already has a system of record and wants data to flow into it, that is the whole ask. The live refetch matters more than it sounds: stale titles are the most common repair we make to a bought list before it goes out.

   Where it does not. It is eight people, and the public repositories are quiet: the TypeScript SDK, the Python SDK and the MCP server each sit at zero stars, open-fiber at two, so you are trusting the vendor rather than a crowd. Fiber is also an aggregator rather than a first-party collector. Its own YC listing names LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Apollo, Crunchbase, BuiltWith and SemRush among its sources, which means the single-supplier and scraped-LinkedIn risks in our criteria apply to the vendor you are buying from as well as to the ones it buys from. There is no prospecting UI beyond the open-source one, which is a feature for an engineering team and a gap for a sales floor. Fiber publishes 40M+ companies, 850M+ people and 30M+ jobs on its YC listing but not on its own pricing or docs pages, and we have not tested that against our targets, as with everyone here.

   Cost shape. Public and self-serve: Prospector at $300 a month for 15,000 credits, Growth at $900 for 50,000, Enterprise at $2,400 for 150,000, bulk search from $1,000 to $4,000 a month, and a seven-day free trial. The page prints a flat rate of one credit at $0.02, but its own tiers do not divide that way: Growth works out at $0.018 and Enterprise at $0.016, and every bulk search plan is $0.002. Two cents is the entry price rather than the price, and a tenfold spread is worth resolving with the vendor before you model a budget on it.

   Who should pick it. A RevOps engineer, a technical recruiter or a developer building an SDR or sourcing agent who wants data over an API and an MCP at a price they can read.

   Surface

   REST API, TypeScript and Python SDKs, hosted MCP, OpenFiber UI

   Pricing

   From $300 a month for 15,000 credits; $0.02 a credit

   Live enrich

   Refetches the profile before outreach

   Founded

   2023, Y Combinator, New York

2. People Data Labs Best raw data at volume

   What it is. People Data Labs is a data-first vendor selling person and company enrichment, search and identify APIs plus licensed bulk feeds. A number of other tools on this list use it as an underlying source.

   Where it wins. Breadth and delivery. You can hit the enrichment, search and identify endpoints, or take the whole thing as a flat file through a cloud share and never call an API at all, which is why several vendors on this list quietly resell it.

   Where it does not. Read the headline number carefully: close to three billion collected records de-duplicate to about 1.5 billion unique person profiles, and the larger figure is the one that tends to get quoted back at you. There is nothing here for a team that wants a workflow rather than a firehose.

   Who should pick it. A data team building its own enrichment layer.

   Model

   Data only, API and bulk licences

   Claims

   1.5B unique people, 74M+ companies

   SDKs

   Five official, including Python and JavaScript

   Note

   Used as a source by other vendors

3. Coresignal Best public-web datasets

   What it is. Coresignal sells public-web company, employee and job-posting data through search-style APIs, an agentic search API and an MCP server, with a fully published rate card.

   Where it wins. Recruiting-tech and sales-tech builders that need large employee and job-posting datasets and want to know the price up front.

   Where it does not. The rate card is published, but the unit price swings hard across it: Pro is $499 for 35,000 credits, about $0.014 each, while Premium is $1,500 for a million, about $0.0015. Land on the wrong tier and you pay roughly ten times per record for identical data.

   Who should pick it. A product team building on employee and job data at scale.

   Claims

   907M+ employee records, 70M+ companies, 475M+ job postings

   Pricing

   Public, from $49 a month for 2,500 credits for 2,500 credits

   MCP

   Yes

4. Crustdata Best re-verified at query time

   What it is. Crustdata is a live people and company graph with search, enrichment, jobs, posts and watcher APIs and an MCP integration, pitched at agent-driven recruiting and sales.

   Where it wins. Teams that want data re-verified when the query runs rather than served from a snapshot, and change alerts on the people they watch.

   Where it does not. No published prices; API access is sold in credit tiers through sales, which is a poor fit for a team that wants to start today.

   Who should pick it. An AI recruiting or SDR product with a budget conversation already scheduled.

   Claims

   1B+ people, 60M+ companies

   Pricing

   Through sales

   MCP

   Yes

5. Explorium Cheapest entry for agents

   What it is. Explorium offers company search, prospect enrichment and business event signals via REST and a hosted MCP server, aimed squarely at teams building AI SDRs.

   Where it wins. A transparent, low-cost way to test agent-driven enrichment before committing, with credit packs starting near $30.

   Where it does not. The low tiers are small, and the top tier is not cheaper than the specialists once you are at real volume.

   Who should pick it. A developer prototyping an enrichment agent.

   Pricing

   Free trial, then non-renewing credit packs; credits expire after 12 months

   MCP

   Hosted

   Focus

   AI SDR builders

6. Apollo.io Best all-in-one

   What it is. Apollo is an all-in-one sales platform, with a database the company variously puts at 230, 240 and 275 million contacts across its own pages, sequences, a dialer and deal tools, and contact data also reachable through search and enrichment APIs.

   Where it wins. A sales team that wants a prospecting UI and outreach in one product and only occasionally needs the API.

   Where it does not. API endpoints and rate limits depend on your plan, enrichment credits vary widely by record, and a technical team ends up paying seats for a UI it does not open.

   Who should pick it. A sales floor, not a pipeline.

   Claims

   275M+ contacts, 500,000+ companies

   Pricing

   Free plan; API by plan

   Model

   Data plus UI plus outreach

7. Clay Best orchestration

   What it is. Clay is a spreadsheet-style orchestration layer that runs waterfall enrichment across more than 200 third-party providers, with AI research steps and CRM sync, rather than owning a dataset of its own.

   Where it wins. A go-to-market operations team that wants to chain vendors, research steps and CRM pushes without engineering.

   Where it does not. Clay's credits sit on top of the providers' costs, and calling any HTTP API starts on Growth at $446 a month, so a team that wants to drive it from code pays the provider, pays Clay, and pays $446 for the door.

   Who should pick it. RevOps with a spreadsheet habit and a budget.

   Model

   Orchestrates 200+ providers

   Pricing

   Free tier; API from the Growth plan

   Note

   Credits on top of the providers'

8. Lusha Best compliance paperwork at low cost

   What it is. Lusha is a verified contact and company database with a prospecting UI, a browser extension, an API and an MCP connector, with SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 in hand and public pricing.

   Where it wins. SDRs and recruiters who want a cheap seat-based tool with the compliance paperwork already done.

   Where it does not. Ten credits for a phone against one for an email changes the arithmetic fast, and it is a seat product first.

   Who should pick it. A small team of humans doing outreach by hand.

   Claims

   290M+ contacts

   Compliance

   SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27701

   Pricing

   Public, free 40 credits a month

9. FullEnrich Best hit rate on a list you already have

   What it is. FullEnrich is a waterfall enrichment service that queries more than twenty-five contact-data vendors to find work emails and mobile numbers, with an API and an MCP server on paid plans, and charges only on a successful find.

   Where it wins. When you already have the list and the only question is the phone number, a waterfall over twenty vendors beats any single one.

   Where it does not. It is not a search product; it enriches what you bring. Mobiles cost ten credits against one for an email.

   Who should pick it. Recruiters and outbound teams with a target list and a dialer.

   Model

   Waterfall over 20+ vendors

   Pricing

   Pro $55 a month for 1,000 credits, charged on success

   MCP

   On paid plans

Every headline number is true and none of them is about you

No vendor here will tell you who to contact. That definition is yours to write, tight enough to check a single record against, and the outbound that works belongs to teams who then measure bounce rate and reply rate per source. So run five hundred of your own records through the shortlist before the contract, not after. Two hundred and forty million contacts is a real number; the only one that matters is how many of yours came back.

Pick by what you are actually buying

Buying an API with the price on a page: Fiber. Buying raw data at licensed volume: People Data Labs, or Coresignal for public-web scale. Buying a spreadsheet your ops team already knows how to drive: Clay. Buying one product for a sales floor: Apollo. Buying phone numbers for a list you already have: FullEnrich. Put a prospecting interface at the top of the scorecard and Apollo is your winner. We put the API and the invoice there, which is how Fiber ended up first.

Key takeaways

• Do the division yourself: published per-credit rates and published tier prices disagree at Fiber, Coresignal and Explorium
• Phones cost ten credits against one for an email at Lusha and FullEnrich, which is the line item that moves a budget
• Check the API is included at your tier: Clay gates HTTP calls to Growth at $446 a month, Crustdata gates everything behind sales
• Ask every vendor which upstream providers it resells, including the API-first ones
• Fiber is our pick for a technical team that wants data over an API at a price it can read