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

Cognism is the better buy when your reps dial mobiles and accept a quote. Crustdata is the better buy when a developer wants a wide index, live signals and pay-per-call credits. Both have an API and an MCP server. Neither prints a dollar price at 1M records.

Verdict

• Pick Cognism if your team phones buyers and wants phone-verified mobiles, Do Not Call checks and intent data. Expect a sales call before you see a number, and a package of 5 seats.
• Pick Crustdata if an engineer is building on people, company, job and post data, wants a self-serve key and needs live fetch or change watchers. Expect to ask sales for a dollar price per credit.
• Pick neither if you pull records through an API at volume 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

Crustdata prints a size and Cognism does not. Crustdata's homepage claims 1B people (Crustdata, 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). Neither number is audited, so a bigger claim is not proof of more matches on your list.

Company counts are muddy on the Crustdata side. Its homepage states both 60M companies and 200M+ companies, so this page quotes neither. Cognism prints no company count either.

Phones are where the two split. Cognism 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). Crustdata prints no phone count. It sells a phone number as +2 credits on a person enrich, and its contact endpoint adds 0.5 credits for a verified email (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).

Quality shows up differently. Cognism exposes dataQuality and lastConfirmed as person search filters (Cognism API reference, September 2026). Crustdata returns four email statuses: deliverable, catch_all, invalid and unknown (Crustdata contact docs, September 2026).

Scope differs too. Crustdata also indexes jobs and social posts, and can fetch live web pages and profiles (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026). Cognism adds Bombora intent data on its Pro plan (Cognism pricing, September 2026).

API and developer experience

Crustdata is self-serve and Cognism is gated. Crustdata uses a Bearer key and an x-api-version: 2025-11-01 header on every request (Crustdata docs, 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, so a long job refreshes its token every 20 minutes (Cognism authentication, September 2026).

Cognism person search, from its docs. Adding view=contacts returns emails and phones and charges one credit per person returned, and limit=10 also spends 10 search tokens (Cognism credits, September 2026).

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

Crustdata person enrich, from its docs. It takes up to 25 profile URLs a request and returns the base profile for 1 credit (Crustdata docs, September 2026).

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.crustdata.com/person/enrich \
  --header "authorization: Bearer $CRUSTDATA_API_KEY" \
  --header "content-type: application/json" \
  --header "x-api-version: 2025-11-01" \
  --data '{"professional_network_profile_urls": ["https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe/"]}'

The shapes differ. Cognism searches by filter and reveals contacts in the same call. Crustdata enriches by profile URL. On a self-serve key a business email is +1 credit on person enrich, so a work-email lookup is 2 credits (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026). The cheaper Contact Enrich endpoint needs an enterprise plan, and self-serve keys get a 403 (Crustdata contact docs, September 2026).

Rate limits are the sharpest gap. Cognism allows 500 requests a minute per account per operation in a fixed 60-second window, and sets more per package (Cognism rate limits, September 2026). Crustdata defaults to 15 a minute on person enrich and 30 on search, and says raising the limits means writing to Crustdata (Crustdata rate limits, September 2026).

Time matters at volume. At 100 records a page and 500 calls a minute, 1M Cognism records is 10,000 search calls, about 20 minutes (Cognism pagination, September 2026). On Crustdata, 1M single-profile enrich calls at 15 a minute is 66,667 minutes, about 46 days. Batching 25 URLs a request cuts that to 40,000 calls, or 2,667 minutes, about 44 hours.

Both have a hosted MCP server on the same billing as the API. Cognism's has 15 tools, mapped one to one onto the API, with OAuth 2.0 sign-in (Cognism MCP, September 2026). Crustdata's takes OAuth for interactive clients and an API key for code (Crustdata MCP, September 2026).

Pricing

Neither vendor prints a dollar price, so neither worked example can end in dollars. The example below is 10,000 and 1M work-email lookups a month. The table counts what each vendor meters and stops where the public numbers stop.

Cognism arithmetic. One credit is one revealed contact, charged per person record returned with the contacts view, and a search token is charged per record returned (Cognism credits, September 2026). Each seat includes an allocation and you can buy more, but the allocation and the credit price are not published (Cognism pricing, September 2026). Cognism's docs disagree on count calls: the Credits page says each costs 1 search token, the Introduction and Endpoints pages say counts are free.

Crustdata arithmetic. A work-email lookup is 1 base credit plus 1 for the business email, so 2 per person. A search result alone is 0.03 credits, so 10,000 results is 300 credits (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026). Dollars equal credits times your quoted price per credit, and that price is not public (Crustdata pricing, September 2026). A Crustdata blog post reports a lowest tier from $95 a month, but the pricing page does not list it (Crustdata blog, September 2026).

Credits age differently. Re-viewing a revealed Cognism contact is free, and a credit is spent again only if the contact changes jobs (Cognism pricing, September 2026). Crustdata's docs say purchased credits expire 12 months after purchase (Crustdata credits, September 2026). A Crustdata blog post from 30 July 2026 says 6 months (Crustdata blog, September 2026), so confirm the term before you buy in bulk.

The practical result: get a written quote from both at your volume and compare credits per record, not list prices.

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 Do Not Call lists in 15 territories. A team that cold-calls needs that.
• Intent on Pro. Intent data uses Bombora Company Surge, with up to 12 topics from over 11,000 (Cognism pricing, September 2026).
• Faster calls. 500 requests a minute per operation against Crustdata's 15 to 30 defaults.

Where Crustdata wins

• Self-serve access. A developer gets a key and sends a request without a package check.
• Live data and watchers. Job search, social posts, live web fetch and entity watchers at 5 credits per changed person on the 30-day SLA (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).
• Pay per call. Search is 0.03 credits a result and a contact-enrich miss is not billed. A light, selective user may spend less than a seat package.
• A larger claimed index. 1B people on the homepage against "hundreds of millions".

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, and the limit is 100 requests per second per key. It has no rep workspace. See pricing for the fair-use terms.

FAQ