Crunchbase alternatives

Reachkit makes a competing cold email tool with its own lead database, and it’s one of the eight options below. I checked each price on this page against the vendor’s own site in October 2026; numbers that come from someone else say who reported them.

Crunchbase is a research database of private companies, their funding rounds and their investors. Nothing on this list copies it one for one, so replace the job you actually used it for (prices as of October 2026):

• Contacts and sequences on a budget: Apollo, with a free plan and seats from $49 a month billed yearly.
• Contacts, intent data and a big team on one contract: ZoomInfo, sold by quote.
• Emails you only pay for when they verify: UpLead, from $99 a month, in its Valid Only download mode.
• Turning target accounts into a cold email campaign: Reachkit, from $39 a month per workspace.
• Custom research across many data sources: Clay, with a free plan.
• Company data with no subscription: Explorium, in one-time credit packs from $29.99.
• Company records inside your own product: People Data Labs, by API.
• Finding companies with AI web search: Exa, with $10 of free credits a month.

If you use Crunchbase to research investors and deals, this page won’t help much. The rivals named for that job on Hacker News and in a startup tool list are PitchBook and CB Insights, and I haven’t priced either here. For Crunchbase’s own plans and limits, see the Crunchbase profile.

Apollo is a contact database with email sequences, a dialer and a meeting scheduler in the same app. It counts 240M+ contacts at 30M companies, by its own figures. It suits sales teams that picked accounts in Crunchbase and then went looking for the people somewhere else.

Cost, October 2026: the free plan comes with 75 credits monthly. Paid seats run $49 (Basic) or $79 (Professional) a month on yearly billing, $65 or $99 month to month. One email uses 1 credit; one mobile number uses 8.

Good at:

• Finding people and emailing them happen in one place, with CRM sync to Salesforce, HubSpot and Pipedrive on every plan.
• An official MCP server lets Claude or ChatGPT search Apollo’s database (on paid plans) and draft sequences for you. Apollo’s help center puts the connector on every plan; its comparison chart limits the free-plan connectors to teams with a corporate domain.

Watch for: reviewers keep reporting bounces from emails Apollo had marked verified, and its own pages disagree on accuracy (91% in the help center, 98% in its AI fact sheet). Annual plans are non-refundable and renew unless you give notice 30 days before the end, so the renewal problem follows you here.

Compared with Crunchbase: Apollo is built for reaching people, Crunchbase for researching companies and funding. See the Apollo profile, Apollo alternatives or Reachkit vs Apollo.

ZoomInfo is a B2B contact and company database with intent signals, direct dials, org charts and CRM enrichment. It claims 500M+ contacts, 100M+ companies and 4,500+ intent topics. It fits larger teams that want the accounts, the people and the buying signals from one vendor.

Cost, October 2026: no list prices for paid plans. Across 1,577 deals, Vendr reports a $33,500 median per year (February 2026). The free Lite tier gives 10 credits monthly, and GTM.AI, ZoomInfo’s pay-as-you-go API and MCP, opens with 1,000 free data credits before charging $0.45 down to $0.25 a record.

Good at:

• Depth: phones, technographics and intent next to every company record.
• A written accuracy promise: when over 5% of contacts aren’t at the listed company, ZoomInfo must correct them within 30 days, or the customer may terminate and get a prorated refund.

Watch for: the annual contract can’t be cancelled partway through. It rolls over unless you opt out in time, and several sources say that window is 60 days. Outdated data, cancellation disputes and complaints from people listed in it drive its 1.8 on Trustpilot, while users give it 4.5 on G2 from about 9,200 reviews (October 2026). The Lite terms let ZoomInfo use data from the email account you connect.

Compared with Crunchbase: far more contacts and intent data, with stricter renewal terms than Crunchbase’s monthly Pro. See the ZoomInfo profile, ZoomInfo alternatives or Apollo vs ZoomInfo.

UpLead is a contact and company database that checks each email at the moment you reveal it. It lists 208.5M contacts and 20.9M companies, per its May 2026 release notes.

Cost, October 2026: Essentials includes 170 credits monthly for $99, which drops to $74 a month if you pay for the year. Plus adds technographics and enrichment with 400 credits for $199 ($149 on yearly billing). Professional is quoted. A credit covers one contact with its phone numbers, or one company.

Good at:

• Download in “Valid Only” mode and you’re charged just for addresses that verify.
• A 95% accuracy guarantee with credits back.

Watch for: the free trial lasts 7 days with 5 credits, then bills Essentials Annual upfront ($888 at list price) if you don’t cancel. On notice, UpLead’s terms want 60 days before any renewal, but its help center lets monthly plans cancel anytime. Reviewers raise automatic subscriptions too, and plans below Professional are single-user.

Compared with Crunchbase: contacts are the product rather than a Business add-on, and the monthly plan costs the same $99 as Crunchbase Pro. See the UpLead profile.

This is our product. If you used Crunchbase to choose companies and then pieced together contacts and a sender, Reachkit covers that second half in one workspace: it finds the people at those companies, verifies their emails and sends the campaign.

Cost, October 2026: $39 a month per workspace on Growth, or $29 a month paid yearly. That covers 1,000 lead credits, room for 5,000 contacts and 15,000 campaign emails each month. More credits are $25 per 1,000, and the 30-day trial needs no card.

Good at:

• Lead Finder filters 500M+ people and 70M+ companies by title, seniority, industry, size, revenue, founding year, technologies or a list of companies you name. Searches are free; you spend a credit only when a verified lead joins your campaign.
• One sentence becomes a campaign: the AI drafts the sequence and sizes the audience. Connect your own inboxes at no per-inbox charge, or have Reachkit set up Google or Microsoft ones at $5 per inbox monthly and $15 per domain yearly, with warmup started for you. The Claude and ChatGPT connector comes with every plan and is built to ask before it sends.

Watch for: no funding rounds, investors or predictions, so it doesn’t replace Crunchbase as a research tool. Email only: no phone numbers or LinkedIn steps. Expect verification of typically 70 to 95% on well-targeted searches, per our help center, and CRM sync plus the API only come with Scale, from $99 a month.

Compared with Crunchbase: keep your research wherever it lives, and pay one bill for the contacts and the sending. See pricing or Reachkit vs Clay.

Clay works like a spreadsheet where each row is a company or person, and every column can call a different data provider until one returns an answer. Claygent, its AI agent, reads the web for each company, so you can ask questions a fixed database never stored. Clay also sends email itself: Sequencer 2.0 reached general release in September 2026.

Cost, October 2026: free with 100 data credits and 500 actions a month. Launch costs $185 monthly or $167 on yearly billing, with 15,000 actions and data credits that Clay’s FAQ puts at 2,500 and its plan card at 3,000. Growth is $495, or $446 yearly.

Good at:

• A lookup that returns nothing costs no data credits or actions.
• Every plan includes unlimited seats. Clay’s pricing page counts 150+ data providers; other pages of its site say 200+ or 250+.

Watch for: G2’s summary mentions a steep learning curve, and paying for both actions and data credits makes a month’s spend hard to guess in advance. You need Growth for CRM sync, webhooks and the HTTP API. Clay’s terms forbid reselling data you get from it.

Compared with Crunchbase: you design the research yourself instead of reading a ready-made profile. See the Clay profile, Reachkit vs Clay or Apollo vs Clay.

Explorium sells B2B data to AI agents and sales teams through an API and a hosted MCP server. A query pulls companies that match your filters, and you then pay extra to enrich the ones worth keeping with firmographics, technographics, funding or contacts, plus business events on top. By Explorium’s count it covers about 150 million companies and roughly 800 million professional profiles.

Cost, October 2026: credit packs you buy once. The trial is 100 free credits for 90 days. After that, Lite costs $29.99 (500 credits), Starter $149.99 (5,000), Growth $749.99 (30,000) and Scale $7,499.99 (500,000). Each company fetched is 1 credit, an enrichment 1 to 5, a work email 2 and a phone number 5.

Good at:

• Nothing to cancel: there are no seats or subscriptions, and the pricing page says packs don’t renew automatically.
• Free statistics size an audience before you spend, and Vibe Prospecting runs the same search inside Claude with 200 free credits, which its pricing page calls both monthly and one-time.

Watch for: credits expire after 12 months and aren’t refundable. The pricing page says service stops when credits run out, while the developer docs now describe an opt-in auto-refill. Third-party listings such as G2’s still show an older pack lineup, so check prices on Explorium’s own page. Ratings are high but thin: 4.6 on G2 from 28 reviews (October 2026).

Compared with Crunchbase: built for pulling company data into your tools and agents rather than browsing profiles, with no renewal to forget. See the Explorium profile.

People Data Labs (PDL) is a data vendor for engineers: person and company records come through APIs or as bulk licenses, with no prospecting app and no sender (non-coders get a playground and CSV enrichment). It fits teams that want records flowing into their own software, rather than exports capped at a few thousand rows or an API priced by quote.

Cost, October 2026: the free plan gives 100 records a month with emails and phones hidden. Company Pro begins at $100 monthly for 1,000 company records, or $0.10 each, and the rate falls to $0.05 on the largest yearly self-serve tier. Person Pro begins at $98 monthly for 350 people. A 2024 help article prices funding details as a company add-on at $0.08 a record.

Good at:

• Self-serve per-credit rates are published in its help center, and you’re not billed for searches or enrichments that come back empty (Identify is billed per call rather than per profile).
• 76.6 million company records refreshed monthly, with five SDKs and a sandbox for developers.

Watch for: you need a developer, since there’s no list builder or extension, and there’s no official MCP server. Work emails are rare: PDL’s own stats put one on about 3.4% of person records. G2 shows just 17 reviews.

Compared with Crunchbase: published per-record prices where Crunchbase quotes its API. See the People Data Labs profile.

Exa is a web search API built for AI agents, running on its own index rather than wrapping Google. It has a company search with structured data, a people index of 1B+ profiles, and an Agent endpoint that builds lists from a plain-language brief. It suits builders who want to find companies by whatever criteria they can describe.

Cost, October 2026: pay as you go, no subscription. Your first team gets $10 of free credits each month, which covers 2,500 Instant searches, and no card is needed. Standard searches cost $4 to $7 per 1,000 requests. Agent runs bill compute and search calls, plus two cents for each email lookup and seven cents for each phone lookup.

Good at:

• Published per-request prices and a free monthly allowance, so a first test costs nothing.
• An official MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor, and Websets, its no-code list builder, exports people to Instantly, Smartlead, HubSpot, Salesforce and Clay.

Watch for: it’s a developer tool, and an Agent run’s compute cost isn’t known until it finishes (an auto run is capped at $5 by default). Websets prices its plans inside the app, not on Exa’s site. User reviews are scarce: G2 lists one, for Websets.

Compared with Crunchbase: Exa searches the live web instead of a curated database, so check what it returns before you rely on it. See the Exa profile.

Start with what you exported from Crunchbase last month, not what the plan promised.

• You exported companies and then hunted for people. Apollo if you want sequences in the same app, UpLead if you already have a sender and only want verified emails.
• You need contacts, intent and a big team on one contract. ZoomInfo, if its renewal terms work for you.
• The list was for cold email. Reachkit finds and verifies the people and sends from your inboxes or ones it sets up.
• You kept hitting the export cap. Explorium or People Data Labs, which charge per record instead of capping rows.
• You want answers no database stores. Clay for a no-code research table, Exa if a developer is building it.
• You research investors and rounds. None of these is built around that the way Crunchbase is, so stay or compare PitchBook and CB Insights.

Before you cancel, note your renewal date. Crunchbase cancellations take effect at the end of the paid period, with no prorated refunds.

Crunchbase is good at what it was built for: showing which private companies raised, from whom, and what might come next. If that’s your job, I’d stay, pay monthly and keep an eye on the renewal date.

If you used it as a prospecting list, you paid research prices for contact data that reaches far fewer organizations than the company data, behind a 2,000-row export cap. Buy contacts from a tool built for them instead. When the list feeds cold email, I’d like you to try Reachkit, where the people search, the verification and the sending sit in one workspace.

Related: Apollo alternatives, ZoomInfo alternatives and Apollo vs ZoomInfo.