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

Cognism and Dealfront both sell B2B contact data to European-leaning teams, but they solve different problems. Cognism is a prospecting platform built around phone-verified mobiles. Dealfront is a website visitor and prospecting product. Since March 24, 2026 it trades as Leadfeeder, and this page uses both names (Leadfeeder rebrand FAQ, September 2026).

Verdict

• Pick Cognism if reps call mobiles, especially in Europe. It claims 10M+ phone-verified contacts and screens Do Not Call lists in 15 territories. Expect a sales call, because it publishes no price.
• Pick Dealfront if you want to see which companies visit your site, then enrich them. Paid plans have a price you can read, from $79 a month billed yearly.
• Pick neither if you need millions of records through an API. Neither publishes a 1M price. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month, flat.

Side by side

Data and coverage

Neither vendor gives a clean contact total. Cognism says "hundreds of millions" of profiles and adds that it does not usually make general coverage claims (Cognism FAQ, September 2026). Dealfront claims 400M verified contacts and 60M companies (Leadfeeder, September 2026). These are vendor claims, so the sizes are not comparable.

Neither publishes how many contacts carry an email or a phone. Test on your own list before you buy. Run the same 500 people through each and compare match rates.

Phones are where the products split. Cognism sells 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). The Pro plan adds buying-intent data and on-demand verification (Cognism pricing, September 2026).

Dealfront gets phones from a third-party waterfall at 1 credit per contact with email and phone. Email only is 0.2 credit (Leadfeeder credits help, September 2026). It publishes no phone verification claim.

The core of Dealfront is different from either list. It shows which companies visit your website, then pushes them to your CRM. Lite is free. Paid plans add contact enrichment, which spends credits (Leadfeeder pricing, September 2026).

API and developer experience

Both are REST APIs with an MCP server. Setup differs. Cognism uses OAuth 2.0 client credentials and a 20-minute token. Dealfront uses one header plus an account ID.

Cognism's flow is count, then search, then reveal. You create a client ID and secret under Settings, M2M Connect, then trade them for a token that lasts 1,200 seconds (Cognism docs, September 2026).

curl --request POST --url https://cognism-production.eu.auth0.com/oauth/token \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{"grant_type":"client_credentials","client_id":"YOUR_CLIENT_ID","client_secret":"YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET","audience":"https://api.cognism.com"}'

curl --request POST --url 'https://api.cognism.com/persons/filter?limit=25' \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $COGNISM_TOKEN" \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{"person":{"jobTitle":{"include":["VP Sales"],"match":"ONCE"}},"company":{"location":{"type":"hq","country":{"include":["United Kingdom"]}}}}'

Search costs 1 search token per record returned. Emails and phones come back only when you add view=contacts, and each person returned that way costs 1 credit (Cognism credits and search tokens, September 2026). The docs disagree on count calls. The Credits page says a count costs 1 search token, and the Endpoints page says counts are free (Cognism endpoints, September 2026). Budget 1 token per count until Cognism settles it.

Dealfront's API is two steps. Search returns contact summaries and costs no credits. Retrieving deep data by ID costs 1 credit unless you opened that contact in the last 12 months (Leadfeeder OpenAPI spec, September 2026).

curl -X POST "https://api.leadfeeder.com/v1/contacts/search?account_id=123456" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: $LEADFEEDER_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"departments":["marketing_department"],"hierarchy_levels":["top_management"],"filters":{"has_email":true}}'

curl "https://api.leadfeeder.com/v1/contacts?ids=CONTACT_ID&account_id=123456" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: $LEADFEEDER_API_KEY"

Dealfront keys belong to one user and do not expire. Retrieve takes up to 100 IDs per call (Leadfeeder API docs, September 2026).

Rate limits are tight on both. Cognism allows 500 requests a minute per operation, about 8 a second, and raises it per package. Dealfront allows 10 a second per key and 100,000 requests a month, which it says the account manager can raise. Both return a 429 when you go over.

On MCP, both host a server with OAuth sign-in and no key pasted into a chat. Cognism's has 15 tools that map one to one onto its API. Dealfront's is marked beta.

Pricing

Cognism sells seats with a credit allocation and publishes no dollar price. Dealfront sells plan tiers, then spends credits per action. Neither lists a price per extra credit, so compare them in credits and volume.

At 10,000 records a month

For Cognism, 10,000 revealed contacts is 10,000 credits. Paging through them costs another 10,000 search tokens, one per record returned. Cognism does not publish the credit allocation per seat or a price per credit, so no dollar total exists (Cognism pricing, September 2026).

For Dealfront, take 10,000 contacts. With email only that is 10,000 x 0.2 = 2,000 credits. With email and phone it is 10,000 x 1 = 10,000 credits (Leadfeeder credits help, September 2026).

Activate tops out at 1,500 credits a month, so the email-only job needs Scale. Scale lists 1,000 credits at the entry tier and 5,500 at the top (Leadfeeder help, September 2026). The phone job needs 10,000, nearly twice the top tier.

Scale runs from $599 to $2,089 a month billed yearly. Dealfront does not say which tier holds 2,000 credits (Leadfeeder pricing, September 2026). Syncing each record to your CRM costs one more credit.

At 1M records a month

For Cognism: no public 1M price. A million contacts is 1,000,000 credits, plus search tokens. The highest public tier is Pro, 5 seats, quote only (Cognism pricing, September 2026). We do not multiply a rate out to 1M, because none exists.

On speed, 1M records is 10,000 search calls at 100 records a page. At 500 calls a minute that is about 20 minutes of calls (Cognism rate limits, September 2026). Credits and tokens are the limit, not speed.

For Dealfront: no public 1M price. 1M email-only contacts is 1,000,000 x 0.2 = 200,000 credits. Divide by Scale's top allowance of 5,500 and that is about 36 months of it. With phones it is 1,000,000 credits (Leadfeeder pricing, September 2026).

Each key allows 100,000 requests a month, so one key cannot run 1M single lookups without a quota increase. Retrieve takes up to 100 IDs a call, so batched it is at least 10,000 calls plus the searches that find the IDs (Leadfeeder rate limits, September 2026). Credits are the real ceiling. Above Scale it is an Enterprise quote.

Where Cognism wins

• Phone-verified mobiles. A 10M+ verified-contact claim, on-demand verification and Do Not Call screening are built for dialing teams.
• Do Not Call screening. It cross-references Do Not Call lists in 15 territories (Cognism Diamond Data, September 2026).
• A wider sales workspace. AI account research, an AI persona builder, CSV enrichment and CRM enrichment sit in the app (Cognism pricing, September 2026).
• Faster API paging. 100 records a page and cursor paging to 100,000 per journey, with no monthly request cap listed.

Where Dealfront wins

• Visitor identification. It shows which companies are on your site now. Cognism's pricing page lists no such product, and it is what Dealfront is built around.
• Plans you can read. Discover, Activate and Scale each have a list price. Cognism's plans do not.
• A free tier that keeps going. Lite has no end date, and paid plans start with a 14-day trial, no card (Leadfeeder pricing, September 2026).
• API, MCP and exports in the plan. Both come with any paid plan that has API access, and Scale lists unlimited data exports.

If you need volume through an API

We build LeadOcean, so weigh this section accordingly. LeadOcean holds 693M people, 366M of them with an email and 166M with a phone number, plus 63M companies. You reach them over REST and MCP. Free is 1,000 records, one-off, with no card. Pro is $499 a month, flat, with no credits and a limit of 100 requests per second per key (LeadOcean pricing, September 2026).

For bulk work, POST /v1/exports returns up to 50,000 rows per request, so 1M rows is 20 calls over two days. The app also has an Exports page with a filter builder and CSV download (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). There is no visitor identification, sequencer or dialer. Past the fair-usage line a very large month is paced down, and one email to support raises the headroom. See the Cognism alternative page for a line-by-line version.

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