6 Best B2B Data Providers for India in 2026

A B2B data provider for India sells business contacts located in India, deep enough in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi NCR and Hyderabad to build a real list. Outbound teams, agencies and data engineers who sell into India need one. Most vendors print one worldwide total and leave India to the buyer.

Only two of the six below print an India figure: Lusha and ZoomInfo. Apollo, ContactOut and Cognism print none, so a free count or a sample has to settle it. We ran a free count on LeadOcean on 2026-10-01.

This page ranks six providers on India coverage alone, with list prices checked in September 2026. Read each rival on its own page: Lusha, ZoomInfo, Apollo, ContactOut and Cognism. Also see best B2B databases, best B2B data providers for the UK and best B2B data providers for APAC.

TL;DR

"1M records" means 1M work-email lookups that return a result, at list price.

What we evaluated

• Published India coverage: a figure for India, with a source we can link.
• Free coverage test: whether you can size an India audience, or test your own list, before you pay.
• Email and phone depth: whether the figure counts contacts with a usable email or phone, or only profiles.
• API and MCP: whether an agent or script can pull Indian records directly.
• Price at volume: flat, credits, seats or quote, and the cost of 1M records.

We ran counts on LeadOcean only. We ran no query on the rivals, so we print no hit rates for them. Vendor figures are vendor claims, and each vendor counts a "contact" its own way.

How to run the India coverage test. Take 25 contacts you really sell to, five each in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad and Pune. Use your own list, not ours. Run them through each free tier below and count how many return a work email, then how many return a mobile.

Free tiers are enough for this. Lusha Free gives 40 credits a month, Apollo Free 75, ZoomInfo GTM AI 1,000 data credits and LeadOcean 1,000 records, one-off. ContactOut Free gives 5 emails and 5 phones a day.

1. LeadOcean: best for API, agent and volume buyers

LeadOcean holds 693M people and 67M companies. It has a country filter with 254 codes, a city filter and a salesRegion filter. We ran count_leads for country: IN on 2026-10-01, which spends no records. India has 50,463,211 people across all email statuses.

18,292,888 of them have an email of any status. 7,162,915 have a mailable email, meaning verified, catch-all valid or catch-all. 2,168,411 have a verified email, and 4,350,523 have a phone number. That is about 14% mailable and 9% with a phone.

By city, mailable people (city keyword match) number 964,814 in Bengaluru or Bangalore, 839,839 across Delhi, New Delhi, Gurgaon, Gurugram and Noida, 692,217 in Mumbai and 443,379 in Hyderabad. 304,273 mailable people in India are C-Team. IT Services and IT Consulting is the biggest industry at 1,506,860 mailable people, ahead of Software Development at 529,451 and Financial Services at 463,391.

Here is the weak point: size. 3,590,653 of the 7,162,915 mailable people work at companies with 10,001 or more staff, which is half. Companies of 1 to 10 people hold 198,030 and companies of 11 to 50 hold 362,485. If you sell to Indian startups and small shops, run your own filters before you buy.

The REST call below sizes a narrow India audience for free, with count=true as a query parameter.

curl -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search?count=true" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"country": ["IN"], "city": ["Pune"], "jobLevel": ["C-Team"], "hasEmail": true, "limit": 1}'

That count is people with an email of any status, not a mailable count. Add emailStatus to narrow it. Over REST, meta.total stops at 100,000, so a country-wide India query returns a floor. Use the MCP count_leads tool for exact totals. The MCP server at https://api.leadocean.io/mcp exposes 13 tools and signs in with OAuth 2.1.

Pros

• A free, exact count for India with email status, phone, city, title and industry filters.
• Agency is $497 a month flat, with 200 requests a second per account and no credit meter.
• REST and MCP on every plan, including Free.
• Search by city, title, seniority and industry in one call.

Cons

• No rep workspace, sequencer, dialer or CRM.
• About 14% of India people are mailable, and half of those sit at companies of 10,001 or more.
• Lusha prints a larger raw India contact count (57.8M+ against 50,463,211).
• v2 contact lookups cost a record even on a miss, and Free is 1,000 records one-off.

Best for: engineers, agencies and agents that sell into India at volume and want a fixed bill.

Pricing: Free is 1,000 records, one-off, no card. Solo is $97, Agency $497 and Platform $1,997 a month, flat (LeadOcean pricing, October 2026).

2. Lusha: best for the largest published India table

Lusha prints the biggest India number here. Its data page lists India at 57.8M+ contacts and 2M+ companies, out of 515M+ contacts and 29M+ companies worldwide (Lusha data page, October 2026). Lusha shows 165M+ verified emails for the whole database, with no India split.

Those are contact counts, not mailable counts. Lusha does not say how many Indian contacts hold an email or a phone. An email costs 1 credit and a phone 5 (Lusha API docs, September 2026). The MCP server has 50 tools and shares the API credit pool (Lusha MCP docs, September 2026).

India coverage test. Lusha Free gives 40 credits a month, so you can look up 25 Indian contacts for work emails and read the hit rate yourself. A phone costs 5 credits, so a free month covers about 8 mobiles. The Prospecting API takes a countries filter and returns previews with a per-result charge (Lusha prospecting docs, September 2026). Free search through the API is capped at 100 requests a day.

Pros

• The largest published India table, with a company count beside it.
• Every plan includes an API key, Free included.
• MCP server with 50 tools.

Cons

• Credits end at a small plan: 1M work emails by bulk API is 1,040,000 credits.
• No public 1M price, and Scale is custom.
• No published email or phone split for India.

Best for: teams that want the widest India contact table and work in small batches.

Pricing: Free $0 for 40 credits a month. Starter $49.90 a month ($37.45 billed yearly). Pro $69.90 ($52.45). Premium $399.90 ($299.95) (Lusha pricing, September 2026).

3. ZoomInfo: best for India mobile counts

ZoomInfo is the only provider here that prints India mobiles. Its data page lists India at 29.3M contacts, 5.7M mobile numbers and 1.8M companies (ZoomInfo data page, October 2026). Mobiles are about 19% of its Indian contacts.

ZoomInfo's pay-as-you-go product, GTM AI, sells data credits from $20: $0.45 a credit at 100 and $0.25 at 100,000. Search and lookup are free, and a record is charged once per 12 months (GTM AI pricing, September 2026; GTM AI docs, September 2026). The free search is the useful part for an India test.

India coverage test. GTM AI Free includes 1,000 data credits, no card. Filter to India, read the result count, and spend credits only on the rows you keep. ZoomInfo has an official MCP server that works with Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor (GTM AI docs, September 2026).

Pros

• A published India figure for contacts, mobiles and companies.
• Free search, with a record charged once a year.
• Official MCP server and a free tier with API access.

Cons

• Its India contact table is about half the size of Lusha's (29.3M against 57.8M+).
• The public slider stops at 100,000 credits, so 1M is an Enterprise talk.
• Platform plan prices are not public in our read.

Best for: teams that need Indian mobile numbers and accept a sales call at volume.

Pricing: GTM AI pay as you go from $20, with 1,000 free data credits at signup (GTM AI pricing, September 2026). Platform plans are quoted by sales (ZoomInfo, July 2026).

4. Apollo: best for a free India count plus sequences

Apollo prints no India figure that we could find. Its data page lists 240M contacts and 30M companies worldwide, with no country split (Apollo data page, September 2026). You can measure India yourself, because Apollo's people search costs 0 credits and returns a total_entries count (Apollo API docs, September 2026).

Filter with person_locations[], which takes cities and countries. The search shows at most 50,000 records, 100 a page. An email costs 1 credit and a phone 8, and credits are per seat (Apollo API pricing, September 2026).

India coverage test. Apollo Free gives 75 credits a month and an API key. The free search needs an account on a work email. Search India, then Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi, read total_entries, and spend credits on your own 25 contacts. The MCP server is at mcp.apollo.io and works on any plan (Apollo MCP docs, September 2026).

Pros

• A free, public way to count Indian people by location.
• Sequences, dialer and extensions on the same plan.
• Official MCP server on every plan.

Cons

• Credits are per seat, expire each cycle and do not roll over.
• A phone costs 8 credits, and 1M emails means 250 to 400 seats.
• The search display limit is 50,000 records, so a country-wide India count needs narrow filters.

Best for: reps who want a free India count and a sequencer in one app.

Pricing: Free $0 (75 credits a month). Basic $65 per seat a month ($49 billed yearly). Professional $99 ($79). Organization $149 ($119) (Apollo pricing, September 2026). 1M work emails is $24,750 a month at list on monthly billing, from 250 Professional seats.

5. ContactOut: best for profile-led lookups outside the US

ContactOut prints no India figure either. Its global totals disagree by page: 350 million professionals on the homepage, 800 million on the data page (ContactOut, September 2026). It sells a regional plan for contacts outside the US. Regional Email is $25 a month ($19 billed yearly) and Regional Email + Phone is $49 ($39), against $49 and $99 for global coverage (ContactOut pricing, September 2026).

That regional price is the reason it ranks here. For a small India team that looks people up one at a time, it is the cheapest paid plan on this page. It is not a bulk source: self-serve fair use is 2,000 emails and 1,000 phones per account a month, with one user per company (ContactOut terms, September 2026).

India coverage test. ContactOut Free gives 5 emails, 5 phones and 5 exports a day, marked limited time. Run five of your own Indian contacts a day and note the hit rate. API keys come from a sales meeting, with no public price (ContactOut API, September 2026). The MCP page shows 15 tools (ContactOut MCP, September 2026).

Pros

• Regional plans start at $25 a month ($19 billed yearly).
• Profile-led lookups for people outside the US.
• MCP server with 15 tools.

Cons

• No India figure, and the global profile total differs by page.
• 2,000 emails per account a month and one user per company.
• No public API price. The People Search API allows 60 requests a minute.

Best for: recruiters and small sales teams that look up Indian contacts one by one.

Pricing: Regional Email $25 a month ($19 billed yearly). Regional Email + Phone $49 ($39). Global Email $49 ($39). Global Email + Phone $99 ($79) (ContactOut pricing, September 2026).

6. Cognism: best for teams that will take a quote and a sample

Cognism prints no India figure and no price. Its FAQ says only "hundreds of millions" of company and contact profiles worldwide, and that it does not usually make general coverage claims (Cognism FAQ, September 2026). India coverage has to come from a sample.

The API search takes a location filter with region and country sub-filters, and a count endpoint to size a list first (Cognism API docs, September 2026). One credit is one revealed contact. Plans are Standard and Pro, quote only (Cognism pricing, September 2026).

India coverage test. Ask for the free data sample. You describe your ideal customer profile and Cognism says it returns a sample with verified mobiles and emails in about 72 hours (Cognism data sample, September 2026). Tell them to build it from Indian accounts. Cognism's docs disagree on whether a count call costs one search token: the Credits page says yes, the endpoint tables say free (Cognism credits, September 2026).

Pros

• A location filter with region and country, and a count endpoint.
• A free data sample built on your own profile.
• MCP server with 15 tools, using the same tokens and credits.

Cons

• No public price and no India figure.
• The sample takes about 72 hours, not minutes.
• API search is limited to 500 requests a minute per operation.

Best for: teams that will go through sales and judge India coverage from a sample.

Pricing: No public price. Plans are Standard and Pro, quote only (Cognism pricing, September 2026).

Comparison table

How to choose

• Code, agents or volume: LeadOcean. Flat price, free exact India counts, REST and MCP on every plan.
• The widest published India table: Lusha, in small batches.
• Indian mobile numbers: ZoomInfo, and read its India row first.
• A free count plus a sequencer: Apollo, searched by person_locations[].
• Cheap one-by-one lookups outside the US: ContactOut Regional.
• A sample before a contract: Cognism, built from Indian accounts.

Verdict

LeadOcean wins for API, agent and volume buyers. It gives a free, exact India count with city, title and email-status filters, a flat $497 a month on Agency and an MCP server that returns records. Lusha wins for the widest published India table, and ZoomInfo for Indian mobile counts. Apollo is the pick for a free count and a sequencer, ContactOut for cheap regional lookups, and Cognism for buyers who want a sample first. Run the same 25 contacts through each free tier, then pay the one that finds the most.

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