Cognism vs Coresignal (2026): Data, Pricing and API Compared

Cognism is the better buy when your reps dial mobiles and can live with a quote. Coresignal is the better buy when engineers need raw profile volume and job postings at a price they can read. They are different products. Cognism is a sales platform with an API. Coresignal is a data API with no sales app.

Verdict

• Pick Cognism if your team phones buyers and wants phone-verified mobiles, Do Not Call checks and a prospecting app. Expect a sales call before you see a number.
• Pick Coresignal if you build products or pipelines and want a large raw profile set, job postings and public per-credit prices. It carries no phone numbers in its employee dictionaries.
• Pick neither if you pull people and contact data through an API and want one flat bill. LeadOcean Pro is $499 a month with no seats and no credits.

Side by side

All figures checked in September 2026. Where a vendor prints nothing, the cell says "Not published".

Data and coverage

Coresignal publishes a size and Cognism does not. Coresignal's homepage claims 907M+ employee records, 70M+ company records and 482M+ job postings (Coresignal, September 2026). Cognism's FAQ says "hundreds of millions" of profiles and adds that it does not usually make general coverage claims (Cognism FAQ, September 2026).

Raw size is not usable size. Coresignal sells professional profiles, and contact data sits in a narrow slice of them. Professional email and a four-value status (verified, matched_email, matched_pattern, guessed_common_pattern) appear in the Multi-source Employee data dictionary. The Base Employee API pages list no email field, and neither dictionary lists a phone field (Coresignal data dictionary, September 2026).

Cognism is the reverse. It is built around contact details: emails, direct dials and phone-verified mobiles. Its Diamond Data page claims over 10M phone-verified contacts, on-demand verification in under 48 hours and Do Not Call cross-referencing in 15 territories (Cognism Diamond Data, September 2026). Pro adds intent data from Bombora, with up to 12 topics (Cognism pricing, September 2026).

Coresignal covers a second axis Cognism does not. It sells job postings at 1 credit each and a Real-time Employee API that fetches a live profile for 12 credits (Coresignal docs, September 2026). Cognism lists company events as a search filter but sells no jobs dataset.

Neither vendor publishes a country split or an email count. If you need one region, test it on a real list before you sign. For Coresignal's MCP server, note that it excludes EEA and UK employees from email lookups (Coresignal MCP docs, September 2026).

API and developer experience

Coresignal is self-serve and Cognism is gated. Coresignal gives you a key from its dashboard and you send it in an apikey header (Coresignal authorization, September 2026). Cognism needs a package with API access, then OAuth 2.0 client credentials from Settings, M2M Connect. Access tokens last 1,200 seconds (Cognism authentication, September 2026).

Coresignal Base Employee search, from its docs. Search is free and returns IDs, so you pay 10 credits a profile when you collect each one (Coresignal docs, September 2026).

curl -X POST 'https://api.coresignal.com/cdapi/v2/employee_base/search/filter' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'apikey: '"$CORESIGNAL_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"headline":"CSO","location":"United States","industry":"Information Technology"}'

Cognism person search, from its docs. You first exchange your client ID and secret for a bearer token. Adding view=contacts returns emails and phone numbers and spends one credit per person (Cognism credits, September 2026).

curl --request POST \
  --url 'https://api.cognism.com/persons/filter?limit=10&view=contacts' \
  --header 'authorization: Bearer '"$COGNISM_TOKEN" \
  --header 'content-type: application/json' \
  --data '{"person":{"jobTitle":{"include":["Chief Sales Officer"],"match":"ONCE"},"location":{"country":{"include":["United Kingdom"]}}}}'

The two flows differ in shape. Cognism returns the person and contacts in one search call. Coresignal splits it: search for IDs for free, then collect each profile, or send a Bulk Collect job for up to 10,000 records (Coresignal bulk collect, September 2026).

Rate limits favour Coresignal at the top. Cognism allows 500 requests a minute per account per operation, about 8 a second, and sets higher limits per package (Cognism rate limits, September 2026). Coresignal runs 5 a second on trial, Mini and Starter, 10 on Pro, 50 on Premium and 100 on Scale (Coresignal rate limits, September 2026).

Paging differs too. Cognism search returns 1 to 100 records a page, with cursor paging to 100,000 records per journey (Cognism pagination, September 2026). Coresignal search preview returns up to 20 records a call and up to 1,000 through 50 pages (Coresignal docs, September 2026).

Both have a hosted MCP server billed like the API. Cognism's has 15 tools and OAuth 2.0 (Cognism MCP, September 2026). Coresignal's has 5 tools and OAuth 2.1, and its entity_search costs 20 credits a call (Coresignal MCP, September 2026).

Pricing

Coresignal prints every price and Cognism prints none. The worked example is 10,000 and 1M work-email lookups a month. Coresignal bills a contact enrichment at 20 credits, so that is 200,000 credits and 20,000,000 credits. Prices are monthly list first, billed-yearly after.

Coresignal arithmetic at 10,000. 10,000 x 20 credits = 200,000 credits. Growth holds 150,000 credits at $1,000, which is too few. The cheapest single plan that covers 200,000 is Premium, at $1,500 for 1,000,000 credits. Billed yearly, Premium is $16,200 a year, or $1,350 a month (Coresignal pricing, September 2026). The page marks Premium, Scale and Elite as contact-sales while also showing Get started buttons, so confirm checkout before you plan on it.

Coresignal arithmetic at 1M. 1,000,000 x 20 credits = 20,000,000 credits. No single public plan reaches that. The largest, Elite, is $5,000 a month for 10,000,000 credits, or $54,000 billed yearly ($4,500 a month). That covers 500,000 lookups. Nothing above Elite is priced, and buying two Elite plans in one month is not documented, so 1M lookups is a quote (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

Record type changes the math. Base employee records cost 10 credits, so 1M Base profiles is 10,000,000 credits, one Elite month at $5,000. But Base employee records carry no email, so that is a profile pull, not a contact pull. Search is free either way (Coresignal docs, September 2026).

Cognism arithmetic stops at the credit, because no price exists to multiply. One credit is one revealed contact. Each seat includes an allocation and you can buy more, but no allocation or credit price is published (Cognism pricing, September 2026). Search also spends tokens, 1 per record returned.

At the 500 a minute limit and 100 records a page, 1M records is 10,000 search calls, about 20 minutes of calls. Cognism's docs disagree on count calls: the Credits page says each costs 1 search token, while the Introduction and Endpoints pages say counts are free (Cognism credits, September 2026). A revealed contact is free to view again, and a credit is used again only if the person changes jobs (Cognism pricing, September 2026).

Time matters at volume. One million single collects at Coresignal's 10 requests a second on Pro is about 28 hours of calls. At Elite's 100 a second it is under 3 hours. Bulk Collect cuts that to 100 requests of 10,000 records.

Where Cognism wins

• Phone-verified mobiles. A claimed 10M+ phone-verified contacts and on-demand verification in under 48 hours is the reason to pay (Cognism Diamond Data, September 2026).
• Do Not Call checks. Cognism cross-references DNC lists in 15 territories. A team that cold-calls needs that.
• A prospecting product. It ships an app for reps, with Bombora intent data on Pro (Cognism pricing, September 2026). Coresignal has no sales app.
• Contacts in one call. A person search with view=contacts returns emails and phones together, with no collect step.

Where Coresignal wins

• Prices you can read. Eight plans from $49 to $5,000 a month are on one page (Coresignal pricing, September 2026). Cognism gives a quote only.
• Size and breadth. 907M+ employee records, 482M+ job postings and live profile fetches cover signals Cognism does not sell.
• Self-serve start. A 7-day trial with 2,000 credits needs no sales call, and the MCP docs say trial credits work with the server (Coresignal docs, September 2026).
• Higher rate ceilings. 100 requests a second on Scale and 100+ on Elite, against 500 a minute per operation at Cognism by default.
• Datasets. Flat-file datasets start from $1,000 a month (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

If you need volume through an API

LeadOcean is the data layer only, with no seats and no credits. The Free plan gives 1,000 records one-off with no card, and Pro is $499 a month flat. Both get the same REST API, a 12-tool MCP server and POST /v1/exports for bulk CSV, up to 50,000 rows a request. The dataset holds 693M people, 366M with an email and 166M with a phone. See pricing for the fair-use terms.

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