Cognism vs Lead411 (2026): Data, Pricing and API Compared

Cognism and Lead411 both sell B2B contact data with an API, but they are built for different teams. Cognism sells phone-verified mobiles with a European focus, priced by quote. Lead411 sells export-capped plans with direct dials, intent and a published $49 entry price.

Verdict

• Pick Cognism if your reps dial mobiles, especially in Europe, and you want phone verification and Do Not Call screening. Expect a sales call, because Cognism publishes no price.
• Pick Lead411 if you sell in the US, Canada or northern Europe and want direct dials, Bombora intent and a price you can read from $49 a month. It fits small volume and teams that work in its app.
• Pick neither if you need volume through an API at a price you can read. Neither tool has a public 1M price. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month, flat.

Side by side

Data and coverage

Neither vendor publishes a verifiable count of emails or phones. Cognism says "hundreds of millions" of profiles and adds that it does not usually make general coverage claims (Cognism FAQ, September 2026). Lead411 says "millions" and gives no number (Lead411, September 2026).

Phones are the clearest difference. 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). Lead411 includes direct dials on Ignite and Blaze and leaves them out of Spark (Lead411 pricing, September 2026). It does not publish how many contacts have one.

Geography differs too. Lead411 lists 13 countries: the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand and Sweden (Lead411 FAQ, September 2026). Cognism positions itself around Europe (Cognism, September 2026), but we found no country list on the pages we checked. If you sell into Germany, France or Spain, test both on a sample of your own accounts.

Intent data is on both, with different gates. Cognism includes Bombora Company Surge on Pro, with up to 12 topics (Cognism pricing, September 2026). Lead411 also licenses Bombora, but only on annual plans. It is not in annual Spark and is an add-on on annual Ignite (Lead411 pricing, September 2026).

API and developer experience

Both tools have a REST API, and both gate it behind a package. Cognism uses OAuth 2.0 client credentials. You create a client ID and secret under Settings, M2M Connect, and trade them for a token that lasts 1,200 seconds (Cognism authentication, September 2026). People search is POST /persons/filter.

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.cognism.com/persons/filter?limit=25 \
  --header "accept: application/json" \
  --header "content-type: application/json" \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $COGNISM_TOKEN" \
  --data '{"person":{"jobTitle":{"include":["Head of Sales"],"match":"ONCE","exact":true},"contact":{"email":{"exists":true}}}}'

That request is trimmed from the reference example (Cognism API reference, September 2026). Search tokens are charged at 1 per record returned, and credits at 1 per contact revealed (Cognism credits docs, September 2026). The docs disagree on count calls: the Credits page says each costs 1 search token, while the Endpoints and MCP pages say counts are free. Ask Cognism before you budget for sizing calls.

Lead411 has a V3 API with an OpenAPI 3.1 spec and a Postman collection. It takes an X-API-KEY header, a bearer token or email and password login (Lead411 API docs, September 2026). Looking up one employee is a POST.

curl -X POST "https://api.lead411.com/v3/employee/getEmployeeInformation" \
  -H "X-API-KEY: $LEAD411_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"employee_id": 12345}'

Unlocking a record is a separate call, POST /employee/unlock_employee_record, and it draws down an unlock_quota. The docs do not say how a record reveal maps to the "exports" the pricing page sells, so ask Lead411 before you size a plan.

For agents, Cognism is the easier start. Its MCP server uses OAuth sign-in, has 15 tools and maps one to one onto the API. Lead411's server returns 401 until Lead411 Support enables it, and its docs do not list the tools.

Pricing

Lead411 is the only one of the two with a price you can read, and it stops being readable once volume rises. Cognism has no public price at any size. Prices below are monthly list first, billed-yearly figures after.

Cognism (Cognism pricing, September 2026): Standard and Pro, five seats each, no dollar amounts. One credit reveals one contact. Each seat includes a credit allocation of unpublished size, and extra credits can be bought at an unpublished price.

Lead411 (Lead411 pricing, September 2026): Spark is $49 a month for 1,000 exports, or $490 billed yearly (about $40.83 a month). Ignite lists from $150 a month, or $1,500 billed yearly ($125 a month), with "1000+" exports. Blaze is unlimited and priced by quote.

10,000 records a month

Take 10,000 work-email lookups. Each one is a credit at Cognism and an export at Lead411.

• Cognism: 10,000 credits. No list price exists, so we cannot show a dollar figure. Search at 100 records a page is 100 calls, well inside 500 a minute.
• Lead411: Spark stops at 1,000 exports a month. Ten times that means Ignite, from $150 a month, and the page shows no cap beyond "1000+". Ignite varies by team size, so we cannot give an exact 10,000 price.

1M records a month

Cognism needs 1,000,000 credits in a month, plus search tokens per record returned. At 100 records a page, that is 10,000 search calls. At 500 calls a minute, that is about 20 minutes of calls. The price is a quote: No public 1M price.

Lead411 has no public 1M price either. Spark is a rate of $0.049 an export, but it stops at 1,000 a month, so it is not a price you can pay at volume. Ignite shows "1000+", and unlimited exports sit on Blaze, which is by quote.

Get both quotes in writing before you compare. For reference, a flat $499 a month works out to about $0.05 a record at 10,000 and about $0.0005 at 1M.

Where Cognism wins

Cognism wins on phones and on Europe. It claims 10M+ phone-verified contacts and on-demand verification in under 48 hours (Cognism Diamond Data, September 2026). It also cross-references Do Not Call lists in 15 territories. For a team that cold-calls, that is the reason to pay.

It also wins on API and agent readiness. The API has published limits, 500 requests a minute, and an MCP server with 15 tools that any package with access can use (Cognism MCP docs, September 2026). Lead411 publishes no rate limit number and gates its MCP server by approval.

Where Lead411 wins

Lead411 wins on price transparency at the bottom. Spark is $49 a month for 1,000 exports, with verified emails, advanced search and a Chrome extension (Lead411 pricing, September 2026). Cognism asks for a sales call before it shows any number.

It also wins on direct dials without a quote. Ignite includes direct phone numbers, API access, CRM customizations and company news from $150 a month. Lead411 also syncs to more than 25 CRMs in one click (Lead411 FAQ, September 2026). If you sell into the 13 countries it lists, the narrow focus is a feature, not a limit.

If you need volume through an API

Both tools get opaque once you move from a rep's list to a pipeline. LeadOcean is a data API with a hosted MCP server and nothing else. Free gives you 1,000 records, one-off, with no card. Pro is $499 a month, flat, with no seats and no credits.

It covers 693M people and 63M companies over REST and MCP, at 100 requests per second per key on every plan. POST /v1/exports returns up to 50,000 rows per request, and the app has an Exports page with a filter builder and a price preview. A very large month is paced down rather than cut off. It has no sequencer, dialer, phone verification or intent feed.

FAQ