7 best people data search APIs in 2026: detailed analysis

A people data search API lets code or an agent find professionals by title, company, location and seniority, then pull their contact details. Engineers, agencies, recruiters and RevOps teams use one when a list has to be built by a program, not by a person clicking.

Teams switch for three reasons. A credit meter grows with every search, a rate limit queues a batch job, or the tool has no way to plug into an agent. Several vendors here publish no price at 1M records at all.

We compared seven on public docs and pricing pages, September 2026. That includes Crustdata, People Data Labs, Coresignal, Apollo, ZoomInfo and RocketReach. We built LeadOcean, so we state its limits too. For a shorter ranking, see 7 best people search APIs.

TL;DR

The 1M column assumes 1,000,000 work-email lookups in one month. Where no public tier covers it, we say so and do not multiply a rate out.

What we evaluated

We asked every tool the same five questions, all answerable from public docs.

• Search filters: can you search by title, level, function, country, industry and headcount, and how many rows come back per page?
• Price at volume: what do 10k, 100k and 1M work-email lookups cost at list price, and what sits behind a sales call?
• Rate limit: how many requests can one key make before it gets a 429, and is the limit per second or per minute?
• Agent support: is there an official hosted MCP server, and what does a call cost?
• Contact data: does a search lead to an email and a phone, and does each email carry a status you can filter on?

The test. Send one query to each tool: VPs of Sales in Canada (jobLevel VP, jobFunction Sales & Business Development, country CA). On LeadOcean, a free count sizes it before you spend a record. On 2026-10-21 leadocean_count_leads returned 5,574 mailable people, meaning verified, catch-all valid or catch-all emails, out of 18,800 with no email filter.

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 '{"jobLevel":["VP"],"jobFunction":["Sales & Business Development"],"country":["CA"],"limit":1}'

We did not run paid accounts at the other six. Their figures come from public docs, so run the same query on two tools and compare the match rate on your own list before you commit.

Cost at volume. This is list-price arithmetic on work-email lookups, from each vendor's published credits and prices.

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

LeadOcean is one database of 693M people and 67M companies behind REST and a hosted MCP server. Search is GET|POST /v1/people/search with 50 people filters and 34 company filters. Pages return 1 to 100 rows, and one search pages to 10,000 rows.

Paid plans have a fair-use pace, not credits. Solo allows 10k enrichments every 5 hours and 50k a week. Agency allows 1M enrichments a day, raisable. Rate limits are per plan: 5 requests a second on Free, 50 on Solo, 200 on Agency and 10,000 on Platform.

The MCP server has 13 tools on every plan, and leadocean_count_leads and leadocean_count_companies are free. Email status comes back on every record with 13 values. See the people data API and the MCP guide.

Pros

• Flat price: $497 a month covers 1M enrichments, with no per-record meter or overage invoice.
• 200 requests a second per account on Agency, against per-minute limits on most rivals.
• Free counts size a list before you spend a record.
• Hosted MCP server with OAuth sign-in, so no key is pasted into a chat.

Cons

• Not live. The dataset refreshes monthly, so use a live-lookup tool for today's job change.
• No rep workspace, sequencer, dialer, CRM or Chrome extension. It is a data API and an Exports page.
• No name plus domain lookup. Search by domain first, then enrich by person_id.
• Bulk CSV export is not on Free.

Best for: engineers, agencies and RevOps teams who pull people data through code or an agent. Pricing: Free $0 for 1,000 records for life, Solo $97, Agency $497, Platform $1,997 a month (LeadOcean pricing, October 2026).

2. Crustdata: best for live, fresh people lookups

Crustdata sells people and company search with live endpoints for fresher answers. Search costs 0.03 credits per result. Person enrich costs 1 credit plus 1 for a business email, up to 7 with personal email and phone (Crustdata docs, September 2026).

The pricing page lists no plan names and no dollar price per credit, so you confirm cost in the dashboard. The cheaper contact-enrich endpoint needs an enterprise plan. Default limits are per minute: 30 on search and 15 on person enrich (Crustdata docs, September 2026).

A hosted MCP server exists at install.crustdata.com/mcp (Crustdata docs, September 2026). 1M work emails is 2,000,000 credits self-serve, which cannot be priced in dollars.

Pros

• Live endpoints for freshness-sensitive work such as recruiting and signals.
• Official hosted MCP server with OAuth and API-key access.
• Cheap search at 0.03 credits a result.

Cons

• No public dollar price, so you cannot cost a 1M run without a quote.
• Contact enrich is enterprise only; self-serve keys get a 403.
• Per-minute limits slow large pulls, and purchased credits expire (12 months per the docs).

Best for: teams that need fresh people data and will negotiate a contract. Pricing: No public price. A Crustdata blog post reports a lowest tier of $95 a month, which the pricing page does not list (Crustdata pricing, September 2026).

3. People Data Labs: best for dataset depth and schema

People Data Labs (PDL) is the large, well-documented option. Its full person dataset holds 2,466,510,427 profiles, and 592,376,573 have at least one email (PDL docs, September 2026). You can query any field in the person schema, 1 to 100 results per page (PDL docs, September 2026).

One credit is used per profile returned, and a 404 costs nothing. Pro starts at $98 a month for 350 credits, and PDL says a profile costs about $0.20 to $0.28 on Pro (PDL pricing, September 2026). Self-serve is meant for under about 100,000 profiles a year.

Person Search defaults to 10 requests a minute, while paid enrichment allows 1,000 a minute (PDL docs, September 2026). PDL has no official MCP server, only community ones.

Pros

• Largest public dataset in this list, with a deep person schema.
• Bulk enrichment of 100 people per request, and whole datasets can be licensed as files.
• Free plan of 100 credits a month with contact data obscured.

Cons

• Search is 10 requests a minute by default, so a search-heavy job queues.
• A search costs one credit per profile returned, so exploring is not free.
• No official MCP server and no public price at 1M.

Best for: data teams that build on a large schema or license files. Pricing: Free $0 for 100 credits a month. Pro from $98 a month, or $940 a year (PDL pricing, September 2026).

4. Coresignal: best for employee history and job data

Coresignal sells employee, company and job-posting data. Its homepage claims 907M+ employee records and 482M+ job postings. It fits market mapping and workforce analysis better than rep prospecting.

Pricing is credits. A Base or Clean record costs 10 credits, a Multi-source record 20, and contact enrichment 20. Plans run from Mini at $49 a month for 2,500 credits to Elite at $5,000 for 10,000,000 (Coresignal pricing, September 2026). Search preview returns up to 20 records per call.

Rate limits are per second: 5 on Free, Mini and Starter, 10 on Pro, up to 100 on Scale. The MCP server has 5 tools, and email_enrich costs 20 credits per email found (Coresignal docs, September 2026).

Pros

• Employee, company and job-posting data in one vendor.
• Published plan ladder with dollar prices from $49 a month.
• Official MCP server with OAuth 2.1.

Cons

• The Contact Enrichment API starts at Pro, not on Mini or Starter.
• 1M lookups at 20 credits is 20,000,000 credits, above any single plan.
• Neither employee data dictionary lists a phone field.

Best for: analysts and builders who need employee history and job postings. Pricing: Free trial of 2,000 credits for 7 days, then Mini $49, Starter $199, Pro $499 a month (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

5. Apollo: best for reps who also want outreach

Apollo is a sales platform with a people search API behind it. Every plan includes API access, and the official MCP server at mcp.apollo.io/mcp works on any plan, including Free (Apollo docs, September 2026).

Pricing is per seat plus credits. An email costs 1 credit, a phone number 8, and enrichment by API 1 to 9. Credits are pooled across the team and expire at the end of each billing cycle (Apollo pricing, September 2026).

Paid plans allow 200 search requests a minute and 50,000 a day, with enrichment at 1,000 a minute (Apollo docs, September 2026). At 1M work emails a month, the cheapest list route is 250 Professional seats at $99, which is $24,750 a month.

Pros

• Search, sequences and a dialer sit in the same tool as the API.
• Free plan with API access, and an official MCP server on every plan.
• Published per-seat prices.

Cons

• Per-seat pricing makes volume expensive, since credits do not roll over.
• A phone number costs 8 credits, and the price of an add-on credit is not public.
• Limits are per team, not per key.

Best for: sales reps who prospect and send from one login. Pricing: Free $0, Basic $65, Professional $99, Organization $149 per seat a month (Apollo pricing, September 2026).

6. ZoomInfo: best for pay-as-you-go credits with MCP

ZoomInfo's API product is GTM AI. It sells data credits pay as you go from $20, with no contract and no seat fee. Search, lookup and find-similar are free, and one data credit enriches one company, contact or intent record (GTM AI docs, September 2026).

The list price falls with the purchase size, from $0.45 a credit at 100 credits to $0.25 at 100,000 for $25,000. The slider stops there, and larger volumes go to Enterprise (GTM AI pricing, September 2026).

Rate limits are 5 requests a second on Builder, 25 on Standard and 35 on Scaling (GTM AI docs, September 2026). The official MCP server works with Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor. Batch enrichment takes only 25 records per call.

Pros

• Free search, so you size a list before you spend credits.
• Free tier of 1,000 data credits with MCP, API and CLI access.
• A record is charged once per 12 months.

Cons

• No public price at 1M. The top published pack is 100,000 credits.
• Batch enrichment of 25 per call makes bulk work slow.
• Rate limits start at 5 requests a second. Platform plans sat behind a bot check, so we do not price them.

Best for: teams that want pay-as-you-go credits and search that costs nothing. Pricing: Free 1,000 data credits, then pay as you go from $20 (GTM AI pricing, September 2026).

7. RocketReach: best for individual lookups

RocketReach is a lookup tool first, with an API on paid plans. Person search costs 1 Universal Credit per page of up to 100 results. A professional email costs 2 credits, a personal email 3 and a phone 6 (RocketReach docs, September 2026).

Monthly plans are reported at $69 for Essentials, $119 for Pro and $209 for Ultimate, because the pricing page blocks automated reads (G2, September 2026). The docs publish no dollar price per credit and no API plan price.

The global limit is 10 requests a second, with monthly person lookup caps from 5,000 to 200,000 (RocketReach docs, September 2026). The MCP server exposes 9 tools (RocketReach docs, September 2026).

Pros

• Search pages of up to 100 results cost 1 credit.
• Re-lookups of the same profile are free while the plan is active, and a miss costs nothing.
• Official MCP server with 9 tools.

Cons

• API access is set up through the API team, not a checkbox.
• No public price per credit or for the API, and no public price at 1M.
• The highest published lookup cap is 200,000 a month.

Best for: one recruiter or seller who looks up people one at a time. Pricing: Essentials $69, Pro $119, Ultimate $209 a month, reported (G2, September 2026).

Comparison table

How to choose

• You pull data in code or through an agent: pick LeadOcean for the flat price and the per-second limit.
• You need freshness above all: pick Crustdata and ask for a quote.
• You build on a large schema or want files: pick People Data Labs.
• You study employee history or job postings: pick Coresignal.
• You prospect and send from one login: pick Apollo.
• You want pay-as-you-go with free search: pick ZoomInfo GTM AI.
• You look up a few contacts by hand: pick RocketReach.

Verdict

For API and agent buyers, LeadOcean wins on price at volume and rate limit: $497 a month covers 1M enrichments, and no rival publishes a 1M price. Crustdata wins for live freshness and People Data Labs for raw dataset depth. Coresignal wins for job and employee history, Apollo for reps who want outreach in the same tool, and ZoomInfo GTM AI for free search. RocketReach suits one person doing lookups by hand. Compare plans on the pricing page.

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