Cognism vs Hunter.io (2026): Data, Pricing and API Compared

Cognism is a sales intelligence platform built around phone-verified mobiles. Hunter.io is an email finder with an outreach suite, priced in public credits. Pick Cognism to dial mobiles. Pick Hunter to find emails cheaply and send from one tool.

Verdict

• Pick Cognism if your reps call mobiles and you accept a quote instead of a price. Its phone verification and Do Not Call cross-referencing are the reason to pay.
• Pick Hunter.io if you find emails by domain or by name, want a price you can read today, and are happy to send from the same product. Its Free plan and paid plans from $49 a month ($34 billed yearly) fit small teams.
• Pick neither if you pull people and companies in code or through an agent at volume. Cognism will not print a price, and Hunter bills a credit per email. LeadOcean is a flat $499 a month for that job.

Side by side

Cognism and Hunter change plans often. Every figure above was checked in September 2026 at the linked page.

Data and coverage

Cognism does not publish a contact count. Its FAQ says it holds "hundreds of millions" of company and contact profiles and that it does not usually make general coverage claims (Cognism FAQ, September 2026). You cannot size it before a call.

Hunter publishes no database size. Its homepage counter shows 150,430,313 email addresses verified (Hunter, September 2026). That is a usage counter, not a people database. Hunter returns an address, a confidence score and sources, plus a position when it has one.

Phones are where the two split. Cognism claims over 10M phone-verified contacts, and says its team verifies a number on demand in under 48 hours (Cognism Diamond Data, September 2026). It also cross-references Do Not Call lists in 15 territories.

Hunter returns a phone_number on some records and publishes no phone count (Hunter API docs, September 2026). Do not buy Hunter as a phone source.

Search depth differs too. Cognism's people search has 13 person filter fields and 21 company filter fields (Cognism API reference, September 2026). Hunter's Domain Search filters by seniority, department and job title inside one domain you already know (Hunter API docs, September 2026).

API and developer experience

Both tools have a REST API and a remote MCP server. The difference is how you get a token and what a request starts from.

Cognism uses OAuth 2.0 client credentials, created under Settings, M2M Connect. Access tokens last 1,200 seconds, so a long job refreshes its token. API and MCP access need a package that includes it (Cognism authentication, September 2026).

This is the people search from Cognism's reference, with placeholder values.

curl --request POST \
  --url "https://api.cognism.com/persons/filter?limit=100" \
  --header "authorization: Bearer $COGNISM_TOKEN" \
  --header "content-type: application/json" \
  --data '{"person":{"jobTitle":{"include":["CTO"]},"contact":{"mobilePhone":{"exists":true}}}}'

Search pages run 1 to 100 records, default 50, with cursor pagination to 100,000 records per journey (Cognism pagination, September 2026). Search tokens are charged per record returned. A contact reveal costs a credit. 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).

Hunter authenticates with one key, passed in the X-API-KEY header, the api_key query parameter or a Bearer token. Its core call starts from a domain. This is the Email Finder example from its docs, with placeholder values.

curl "https://api.hunter.io/v2/email-finder?domain=acme.com&first_name=Jane&last_name=Doe" \
  -H "X-API-KEY: $HUNTER_API_KEY"

Hunter documents limits per endpoint, not per plan. A rate-limited call returns 403, and a call over your credit quota returns 429. That is the reverse of what most clients expect (Hunter API docs, September 2026).

On MCP, Cognism's server has 15 tools: people and company search and count, eight dictionary lookups and three account settings tools. They map one to one onto the API and spend the same tokens and credits (Cognism MCP docs, September 2026). Hunter's server is included in every plan at no extra cost (Hunter MCP, September 2026).

Pricing

Hunter has a price you can read. Cognism has a quote. That is the whole pricing story, and the arithmetic below shows it.

Cognism. The pricing page lists Standard and Pro, each with 5 seats, and says pricing is tailored by product, team setup and usage. One credit reveals one contact. Each seat includes an allocation, and more credits can be bought, but no credit price or allocation size is published (Cognism pricing, September 2026).

Hunter.io. Monthly plans are Free at $0 for 50 credits, Starter at $49 for 2,000, Growth at $149 for 10,000 and Scale at $299 for 25,000. Billed yearly they drop 30% to $34, $104 and $209 a month (Hunter pricing, September 2026). One credit is one email found. A search that finds nothing costs no credit (Hunter help center, September 2026).

Hunter 10,000 arithmetic: one credit per email found, so 10,000 emails use the 10,000 credits in Growth. Hunter 1M arithmetic: 1,000,000 credits at $0.0069 is $6,900 (Hunter Data Platform, September 2026). The all-in-one route costs more at that size, and credit packs cap at 180,000 per purchase on Scale.

For Cognism, 1,000,000 contacts means 1,000,000 credits, plus search tokens per record returned. With no list price there is nothing to multiply, so we will not invent a figure. Ask for a written quote at your volume.

Time is a cost too. At 500 requests a minute, 1,000,000 single Email Finder lookups take 2,000 minutes, about 33 hours. A Cognism pull at 100 records a page is 10,000 search calls, about 20 minutes (Cognism rate limits, September 2026).

Where Cognism wins

Phone-verified mobiles. Cognism claims 10M+ phone-verified contacts and verifies on demand in under 48 hours (Cognism Diamond Data, September 2026). Hunter publishes no phone verification and no phone count. For a dialing team the choice is clear.

Do Not Call checks. Cognism cross-references Do Not Call lists in 15 territories. We found no Do Not Call screening on the Hunter pages checked. If your reps cold-call, that check matters.

Search depth and intent. Cognism's schema has 34 filter fields across people and companies, and Pro adds Bombora intent data with up to 12 topics (Cognism pricing, September 2026). Hunter starts from a domain.

Higher limits by package. The 500 requests a minute default is per operation, and Cognism raises it per package. Hunter documents fixed per-endpoint limits.

Where Hunter.io wins

A price on the page. Hunter lists Free, Starter, Growth and Scale, with a 1,000,000-credit Data Platform price of $6,900. You can budget before you talk to anyone. Cognism asks for a call first.

Small volume. Starter is $34 a month billed yearly, and the Free plan renews 50 credits every month. A team finding a few hundred emails a month pays a fraction of any quote.

One product for find, verify and send. Hunter bundles email finding, verification and automated outreach sequences (Hunter, September 2026). Cognism sells data and a prospecting app.

API access without a package check. Hunter's API and MCP server work on every plan, including Free. Cognism's need a package that includes them.

If you need volume through an API

LeadOcean is a data API and MCP server for people and company records. It holds 693M people, 63M companies, 366M people with an email and 166M with a phone number. Free gives you 1,000 records, one-off, with no card. Pro is $499 a month, flat, with no credits and no per-record price.

Both REST and the 12-tool MCP server work on every plan. POST /v1/exports returns up to 50,000 rows per request, so a 1M-row pull is 20 calls over two days. Rate limit is 100 requests per second per key.

LeadOcean has no dialer. If your reps dial mobiles, Cognism still fits. See pricing.

FAQ