Crunchbase is a sales intelligence platform with a massive company database and advanced filters, promising to help you find qualified prospects more easily.
While the platform may contribute to your outbound campaigns, it might be too expensive for small businesses and has data accuracy issues, according to some users. Even when correct, the information Crunchbase collects is mostly related to tech-based startups—in other sectors, data often seems to be incomplete.
Due to these limitations, users seek Crunchbase alternatives with a better benefit-to-cost ratio. In this guide, you’ll learn about the factors to consider in a viable Crunchbase replacement and discover four effective options.
How We Chose the Best Alternatives to Crunchbase
While examining potential Crunchbase alternatives, we’ve consulted our team of marketing and sales experts to see what they care about the most in a sales intel platform. The result is a list of five key factors:
- Data scope—Crunchbase mostly offers information on startup founders, investors, and other key personnel. Its replacement should provide more contact data in other industries 🔍
- Information accuracy—Since Crunchbase solely relies on its internal database, cross-referencing and confirming information with other sources is difficult. Ideally, a sales intelligence platform should collect data from multiple sources 🎯
- Usability—While Crunchbase has a clean and streamlined UI, its alternative should provide more features without additional clutter and reduced usability 💻
- Pricing—Smaller teams likely need a sales intelligence platform with a more flexible pricing structure than the one offered by Crunchbase, which is too expensive for companies with tighter outbound budgets 💲
- User reviews—We’ve examined reports from real users on popular review aggregate websites to learn about potential drawbacks and gauge the general impressions on each platform ⭐
Although the platforms we’ve chosen based on these criteria can be adequate alternatives to Crunchbase, you have to consider the specific needs of your team before deciding if the alternatives are suitable for you. Before picking a tool, consider the following factors as well:
- Size of your team
- Scope of your budget
- Currently used sales tools
The Best Crunchbase Alternative—Our Top Choices Reviewed
Among the many sales intelligence and data enrichment platforms that compete with Crunchbase, we’ve singled out the following four options as our top alternatives:
- Clay
- PitchBook
- Apollo.io
- Cognism
Clay
Clay is a data enrichment and outbound platform that provides access to prospect information from over 50 sources, including:
- Product Hunt
- Lob
- Outreach
- Hunter.io
- Prospeo
- SignalHire
Such a wide range of data sources eliminates the #1 issue with the majority of similar platforms—inaccurate data.
The best part is that you get access to the datasets of dozens of services without signing up for them and tying yourself up with a costly contract. All you have to do is buy Clay credits, and the platform searches for people and company data using an innovative process called waterfall enrichment. Clay browses databases one by one until it gets a hit, and you only pay for the data you’ll use. 🎯
Once you have the data you need, you can use Clay’s various automation and AI-driven features to streamline your campaigns. The platform doesn’t natively send emails, but you can export them to your CRM or sales execution platform like Outreach and Salesloft, thanks to Clay’s 100+ integrations.
Unlike most sales intelligence tools, Clay is transparent about its pricing. You can choose between the following plans:
- Free—$0 for 100 credits
- Starter—$149 per month for 2,000 credits
- Explorer—$349 per month for 10,000 credits
- Pro—$800 per month for 50,000 credits
- Enterprise—Custom pricing
Each paid plan includes a 14-day free trial, giving you plenty of time to try out all features and decide if Clay’s the right choice for your team.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✔️ More than 50 data sources ✔️ Waterfall enrichment ✔️ 100+ integrations ✔️ Flexible pricing & free trials | ❌ No native email-sending function |
PitchBook
If you’re interested in Crunchbase for its extensive data on private capital markets, PitchBook can be a decent alternative. This platform offers heaps of information on companies, investors, and other key decision-makers, including contact information for over 1.9 million professionals.
In terms of prospecting features, PitchBook lets you build lead lists based on a set of filters, including:
- Employee count
- Revenue
- Industry
- Specific investors
- Funding rounds
You can also use the platform to track relevant events, like new hires, mergers & acquisitions, and next funding rounds to make data-driven decisions on whether a company is a good fit.
Considering the amount of information it presents on any given screen, PitchBook’s UI is impressively streamlined and clutter-free.
Unfortunately, the platform doesn’t offer any outreach features, so it’s only useful for data enrichment without email management and outreach automation.
As far as pricing goes, there are two significant issues:
- High costs—PitchBook isn’t transparent about its pricing, but information found online suggests that it charges $25,000 per year for three users
- No free trial—While the PitchBook website claims you can get a free trial after asking for a quote, some users suggest that this is only a marketing ploy
According to another customer, there are also issues with data accuracy, as massive amounts of information on investors and companies are outdated or incomplete.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✔️ Information on 1.9 million professionals ✔️ In-depth system of filters and events ✔️ Streamlined UI | ❌ No built-in outreach features ❌ Data accuracy issues ❌ Lack of free trial |
Apollo.io
Apollo.io is a sales prospecting tool that provides access to over 270 million professional contacts, with crucial data points like job title and seniority level, email address, phone number, and social media profile.
Besides contact information on key decision-makers, you can use Apollo.io to learn more about a company’s industry, location, and tech stack. The platform also provides useful buyer intent insights, which show whether a company has expressed interest in a solution similar to yours in the past. 💡
Apart from data enrichment options, the main features of Apollo.io include:
- Built-in caller
- Task manager tool
- AI email writer
- Customizable sequences
While these options streamline a significant part of your outreach tasks, they’re not cheap. Apollo lets you choose between a free account and three subscriptions, which are priced as follows:
- Basic—$59/user per month
- Professional—$99/user per month
- Organization—$149/user per month
The costs can stack up if you have a large team, so Apollo.io isn’t the most cost-effective platform out there.
Another issue with the platform is the large number of bugs. According to multiple users, its built-in call function sometimes stops working randomly, which can negatively impact your cold-calling efforts. Others have noticed bugs in the data enrichment features as well.
Some users have also reported their emails being marked as spam and experiencing low deliverability, which is the exact issue a capable sales engagement platform should help you avoid.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✔️ Data on 270 million contacts ✔️ Various outreach automation features ✔️ Free account available | ❌ The platform can be buggy ❌ Data accuracy problems ❌ Expensive and limited paid tiers ❌ Low email deliverability |
💡 Bonus read: Interested in a more in-depth view of Apollo? Check out these guides on its:
- User reviews
- Pricing structure
- Alternatives
Cognism
Most sales intelligence platforms focus on contacts and companies based in Europe and North America. Cognism stands out by providing a large database of information on international professionals, including those based in the Pacific, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. 🌐
The data provided by Cognism includes:
- Emails and phone numbers
- Social media profiles
- Job information (title, seniority, department, etc.)
- Company size, industry, and tech stack
- Locations of headquarters and branches
- Intent signals (available in higher tiers)
You can use each of these data points as a filter, allowing you to pinpoint the most qualified prospects in Cognism’s database. After that, you’ll be able to compile lead lists or export the data to one of the supported integrations—mainly Salesforce, HubSpot, and Outreach.
Beyond this, Cognism doesn’t provide many other additional features. You’ll need another service for any email outreach or workflow automation options.
Unfortunately, the platform isn’t transparent about its pricing—to find out how much the service costs, you have to get in touch with their sales team. Still, we know that there is no free trial and you can choose between two paid tiers:
- Platinum—Access to the basic contact database, integrations with 3rd party tools
- Diamond—Expanded database, access to intent data, verified phone numbers
Even with the Diamond tier, many users have noticed data accuracy issues. This doesn’t come as a surprise because Cognism only enriches prospects with information from its internal database. Some customers have also noted that Cognism’s support team could improve in terms of the communication method.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✔️ Global data coverage ✔️ In-depth filter system ✔️ Some useful integrations | ❌ Somewhat inaccurate data ❌ Untransparent pricing ❌ Lack of free trial or account ❌ No outreach automation features |
💡 Bonus read: Want to read more user experiences? Check out this breakdown of Cognism reviews and see what real-life customers have to say.
The Verdict—Which Crunchbase Alternative Should You Use?
As you saw, there are various solutions worth considering over Crunchbase. Still, most of them come with a trade-off—you either miss out on:
- The necessary outreach features
- Solid and accurate data
- Sufficient value for money
Most importantly, many Crunchbase alternatives offer a single database, which makes them quite limited.
Even if you opt for a sales engagement tool with a massive database, you’ll still encounter unsuccessful searches. This means you either need to compromise your outreach campaign or spend even more money on another solution.
The only platform on our list that doesn’t expose you to such dilemmas is Clay. As mentioned, you get 50+ data sources for maximum coverage, which maximizes the hit rate. Better yet, this is only one of Clay’s main advantages. 🌈
Automate Your Campaigns With Clay
Besides highly accurate data from dozens of sources, Clay streamlines your outbound campaigns through several features, most notably:
- Claygent—Conversation-based AI assistant that runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can perform online research for you and scrape data based on custom prompts 🤖
- Templates—Pre-made Clay tables made by the community, which you can import and improve your outbound reach without any manual work 📑
- AI Email Builder—A capable AI writer that automatically pulls data from your Clay table to draft highly personalized emails in seconds 💌
These features combine with Clay’s advanced enrichment to ensure a single sales rep can complete the work of an entire team. That’s why Clay users often enjoy considerable cost savings and a tighter workflow.
Improve Your Outbound Campaign With Clay
To get started with Clay, follow these three easy steps:
- Head to the signup page
- Provide your account info
- Start exploring Clay’s various data enrichment features
For more tips on getting the most out of Clay, join the platform’s Slack community. More information is also available on Clay’s Learn hub and sales prospecting newsletter.
To see how your team can use Clay to write killer cold emails that convert, check out the video below:
