Reachkit vs Hunter

Hunter is built around finding and verifying email addresses, and Reachkit around sending, from inbox setup to replies. Both send cold email, sell done-for-you inboxes, and include an official MCP server and unlimited users. They split on scale: Hunter charges per inbox past your plan’s allowance, and per inbox for its warmup add-on, while Reachkit includes unlimited inboxes and warmup on every plan. I checked every fact here in October 2026.

Pick Hunter if:

• Finding the right person’s email is your main job, and you want to see where each address came from.
• You send from a few inboxes, so the free plan or Starter at $49 a month covers it.
• Your CRM is Salesforce or Pipedrive, which Hunter syncs natively.

Pick Reachkit if:

• You plan to run dozens of inboxes and want to connect them free, with AI warmup on every one.
• You want one prompt to draft the sequence and size the audience together, plus done-for-you inboxes on Google or Microsoft (Hunter’s are Google only).

Hunter starts from the list, and Reachkit from the campaign. In Hunter you find people with Discover, Domain Search or the Email Finder, add them to a sequence, connect Gmail or Outlook with a sign-in (other providers over SMTP on paid plans) and handle DNS on domains you own, with Hunter’s guides and free SPF and DMARC generators.

Since April 2026, Hunter also sells managed inboxes: Google Workspace accounts at $6 a month on new domains from $16.51 a year, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured and usually ready within an hour.

In Reachkit, a one-line description of your buyer becomes a drafted sequence and an audience sized from 500M+ profiles. For sending, you order Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 inboxes ($5 each a month, with domains at $15 a year), and Reachkit registers lookalike domains, handles DNS, creates the mailboxes with your sender name and photo and starts warmup. It doesn’t publish a setup time.

Either way, new inboxes need patience: Reachkit wants three weeks of warmup at minimum, and Hunter’s Inbox Protection runs 30 days.

Hunter builds its data from the public web, like a search engine. It crawls about 30 million pages a day and has indexed 150 million professional email addresses. Domain Search shows where and when each address was found, the Email Finder labels guesses as guesses, and contacts whose public source disappears are removed after six months.

Every Email Finder result gets a free verification and a confidence score before you see it.

That precision is why some teams keep Hunter for finding while sending elsewhere: cold email is mostly list, and a list that’s right beats a bigger one that bounces. Reachkit’s Lead Finder works differently, searching 500M+ people by role, industry and company size and adding matches to a campaign at 1 credit per verified lead, refunded if no email verifies. The counts aren’t comparable: Hunter counts emails, Reachkit counts people.

Both tools start new inboxes slowly and leave open tracking off by default. Hunter’s link tracking starts off too, and Reachkit has none, which I think is right: tracking pixels are unreliable and hurt spam scores.

Hunter sets each connected inbox to 15 emails a day by default (new managed ones start at 3), and you raise it by hand or with the free Progressive Sending setting, up to 400 a day on Gmail and 250 on Outlook or SMTP. Its Inbox Protection add-on warms an inbox for 30 days with a private network of real inboxes while sequence sending waits.

Reachkit’s defaults come on every plan:

• Each new inbox’s campaign volume starts at 3 a day and climbs by 3 daily to a default of 20.
• Warmup is automatic for every inbox, with an AI composing each message.
• Imported CSVs get verified on the way in, and campaigns pause themselves when bounces top 5%.
• Done-for-you inboxes sit on separate lookalike domains, never your main one.

Hunter is ahead on monitoring: on paid plans it scores each inbox’s health and flags authentication or reputation problems. Reachkit doesn’t watch blacklists; its health score comes from where warmup emails land.

Both tools pull every inbox’s replies into one place the whole team can answer from; they differ in sorting and team setup.

Hunter’s Sequences Inbox filters replies by teammate, sequence or status, spots out-of-office replies and unsubscribe requests from common phrases, and lets you mark good outcomes as Successful. In Reachkit’s Unibox, an AI gives every reply one of 12 labels, such as Interested, Referral, Wrong Person or Out of Office.

For agencies, team setup matters more. A Hunter user can belong to only one team, joining one deletes that person’s own leads and sequences, and Hunter allows one account per person, so you can’t work inside several clients’ Hunter accounts at once, though an agency can still run all its clients from its own Hunter team. In Reachkit, one login switches between workspaces, one per client on its own plan, and you decide feature by feature what a client can see.

Both tools run an official MCP server; MCP is how AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT plug into other apps. Hunter opens more on cheaper plans; an assistant connected to Reachkit can take a campaign from brief to launch.

Hunter’s AI Writing Assistant, on paid plans, writes sequences from your persona, offer and tone in four languages, and can write a unique version of each email per recipient. Its MCP server, REST API and CRM sync for HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and Zoho come with every plan, Free included. One limit, per Hunter’s own agent guide: an assistant can build and start a sequence, but the first email must be written in Hunter’s dashboard.

Reachkit’s AI drafts the campaign and its audience, writes each warmup email and sorts replies. It stops there: no answering leads, no booking meetings. Through its MCP server, on every plan including the trial, an assistant can find leads, write and preview each email and launch, and it’s built to show the exact emails first and ask for your go-ahead. Reachkit’s REST API, webhooks and CRM sync need the Scale plan, $99 a month and up.

Prices come from each vendor’s public pricing page, checked October 2026: monthly billing, before tax.

A founder starting out: 10 inboxes on 5 domains, about 4,000 emails a month to 1,500 new prospects. Both sell inboxes, so it’s done-for-you on each side.

With your own inboxes, Reachkit is $39 plus the same top-ups and Hunter is $119 (Starter plus seven extra slots), mailboxes extra. Reachkit’s Growth holds 5,000 contacts at a time, so by month four you’d prune finished campaigns or upgrade.

An agency or growing team: 3 users, 60 inboxes on 20 domains, about 25,000 emails a month to 10,000 new prospects. Hunter’s self-serve plans connect at most 50 of your own inboxes (Enterprise, beyond that, has no public price), so this prices your own inboxes, mailboxes extra, with Hunter at 50.

Hunter’s Growth plan with 40 extra slots costs $549 instead, with no spare credits. Warmup for those 50 inboxes adds $375 a month on Hunter.

Reachkit’s first Scale tier holds 25,000 contacts, which fill up in under three months at this pace; the next tier, $239 with 12,500 credits, holds 60,000. With 60 done-for-you inboxes and 20 domains, Reachkit comes to about $549, or $564 on that next tier. On annual billing, Reachkit’s plans fall to $29 and $79 a month and Hunter’s to $34 and $209.

As of October 2026, Hunter rates about 4.4 on G2 from more than 650 reviews, 4.6 on Capterra from more than 700 and 4.2 on Trustpilot from about 350, and its Chrome extension holds 4.7 stars from about 12,500 ratings. Reviewers praise two things most: ease of use and accurate addresses.

The complaints that repeat:

• Credits at volume. One G2 reviewer put it plainly: “It’s easy to go through credits quickly…” Others call it expensive in bulk.
• Coverage gaps. Reviewers mention missing or incomplete results for smaller companies and less common addresses.

A 2024 r/agency thread comparing Hunter and Apollo shows both sides: one commenter chose Hunter for list building and outreach “…because of the cleaner, more reliable data”, while another found too few verified addresses in its database.

I’d send you to Hunter in three situations:

• You look up specific people and want proof. Hunter’s Email Finder and Domain Search show the public pages behind each address with a confidence score, and the Chrome extension works on any site. Reachkit’s Lead Finder is built for pulling whole audiences into a campaign instead.
• Your outreach fits in a few inboxes. Hunter’s free plan never expires and includes 50 credits a month, one inbox and 500-recipient sequences; Starter gives three inboxes and 2,000 credits for $49. Reachkit’s free trial ends after 30 days.
• You live in Salesforce or Pipedrive. Hunter syncs with both, plus HubSpot and Zoho, on every plan, and its API is open even on Free. Reachkit’s CRM sync covers HubSpot, Zoho, Odoo and GoHighLevel, on Scale only.

If finding addresses is your bottleneck, Hunter earns its place; if keeping many inboxes healthy is, that’s Reachkit’s job.

You don’t have to leave Hunter completely; some teams keep it for finding and move only the sending. My order:

1. Export your leads. CSV export works on every Hunter plan (Free caps it at 10 emails per domain), as do the API and Zapier. Add everyone who unsubscribed to Reachkit’s blocklist before the first send.
2. Move the inboxes you own. Disconnect your Gmail, Outlook or SMTP accounts from Hunter and connect them to Reachkit. Reputation sits with the mailbox and its domain, not with Hunter. Cancel Inbox Protection on them too, since Hunter bills each add-on until it’s cancelled.
3. Replace managed inboxes. Hunter built these mainly for its own Sequences, and they stop sending when the cancelled billing period ends. To keep a domain, ask Hunter’s support first; its help center mentions transfers to another registrar at a customer’s request. Otherwise, set up replacements and give them about three weeks of warmup while the old ones keep sending.
4. Rebuild the sequence. Paste your steps or let the AI draft new ones. Reachkit verifies CSV imports by default at 1 credit per 10 addresses, and you can skip that for free if Hunter just checked the list.

If you keep Hunter only for data, its API-only Data Platform starts at $61 a year for 1,000 searches and 1,000 verifications. Switching to it disconnects your inboxes and stops active sequences, so move the sending first. Budget an afternoon for inboxes you own and about three weeks for replacements.

Hunter earned its reputation on data and still does that part well: sourced addresses, verified finds and fair credit rules. Its sending grew fast in 2026 and works well at moderate volume. At scale I’d look elsewhere, because paying per inbox and per warmup under a 50-inbox self-serve ceiling is the wrong shape for cold email, which stays out of spam by spreading volume thin. Reachkit puts unlimited inboxes, warmup and the Unibox on one flat plan, and you can keep Hunter for finding. Try it for 30 days next to your Hunter account, no card needed.

Comparing data tools as well? See Reachkit vs Apollo, Reachkit vs Snov.io and Reachkit vs Clay, or read my guide to lead scraping for cold email.