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

Prospeo is the one that prints a price. Cognism is the one built for phone-verified mobiles. Neither prints a price at 1M records, and both meter every reveal in credits. The numbers below come from each vendor's own pages, checked in September 2026.

Verdict

• Pick Cognism if your reps dial and want phone-verified mobiles, on-demand verification and intent data in one app. Cognism claims over 10M phone-verified contacts and Do Not Call cross-referencing in 15 territories (Cognism Diamond Data, September 2026).
• Pick Prospeo if you buy by the verified email and want to read the price before you talk to anyone. A credit costs $0.0245 on Starter and $0.0166 on Pro, and a lookup that finds nothing costs nothing (Prospeo pricing, September 2026; Prospeo help center, September 2026).
• Pick neither if you pull data in code at volume and want a flat bill. Both meter every reveal, and at 1M records Cognism is a quote and Prospeo is a stack of seats. LeadOcean fits that case and is covered below.

Side by side

Every cell links to the page it came from. "Not published" means the vendor prints no figure.

Data and coverage

Prospeo prints a size and Cognism does not. Prospeo claims 280M leads and companies and 143M verified emails (Prospeo, 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.

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). Prospeo publishes no mobile count. It sells a mobile at 10 credits, with the email included (Prospeo help center, September 2026).

Quality is sold differently. Cognism exposes dataQuality and lastConfirmed as person search filters (Cognism API reference, September 2026). Prospeo charges only for a verified email, and its homepage claims 98% data accuracy and weekly refreshed data (Prospeo, September 2026). Test both on your own list.

Search differs in depth. A Cognism search page holds 1 to 100 records (Cognism pagination, September 2026). A Prospeo search request returns up to 25 results with no contact data, for 1 credit (Prospeo help center, September 2026). The bigger spend comes when you enrich them.

Signals differ too. Cognism's Pro plan adds Bombora Company Surge intent data, with up to 12 topics (Cognism pricing, September 2026).

API and developer experience

Cognism is gated and Prospeo is self-serve. 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 every 20 minutes (Cognism authentication, September 2026). Prospeo uses one X-KEY header.

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"]}}}}'

Prospeo person enrich, from its docs. It takes a name plus a company website and returns the profile and a verified email in one synchronous call. The flags only_verified_email and enrich_mobile control when credits are spent (Prospeo enrich docs, September 2026).

curl -X POST "https://api.prospeo.io/enrich-person" \
  -H "X-KEY: $PROSPEO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"only_verified_email": true, "data": {"first_name": "Jane", "last_name": "Doe", "company_website": "acme.com"}}'

The shapes differ. Cognism searches by filter and reveals contacts in the same call. Prospeo enriches a known person, or enriches a person_id returned by search. A miss costs nothing, and re-enriching the same record within 90 days is free (Prospeo enrich docs, September 2026).

Rate limits cut the other way. 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). Prospeo's Starter and Growth enrich at 5 a second, and Pro at 30 a second with 500,000 requests a day (Prospeo 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. Prospeo's Pro daily cap is 500,000 enrich requests, so 1M single lookups is two days of calls. Bulk enrich takes 50 records a request.

Counts are unsettled on the Cognism side. The Credits page says each count call costs 1 search token, while the Introduction page and the MCP tool table say counts are free (Cognism credits, September 2026). Budget 1 token a count until Cognism settles it.

Prospeo's own pages disagree on the Free plan. The pricing table shows no public API and no rate limits on Free. The help center lists limited access at 1 request a second, 20 a minute and 50 a day (Prospeo help center, September 2026). Test a free key before you plan around it.

MCP follows the same split. Cognism's server has 15 tools: company and people search and count, 8 dictionary lookups and 3 account settings tools. They map one to one onto the API and use the same tokens and credits (Cognism MCP docs, September 2026). Prospeo's has 8 tools, including search_person, enrich_person and a free search_suggestions (Prospeo MCP docs, September 2026).

Pricing

Cognism prints no dollar price, so its half of every example stops at credits. Prospeo prints one. The example uses work emails only, one credit each, every lookup a hit. A Prospeo mobile costs 10 credits, so a phone pull multiplies the count by ten. Prices are monthly list first, billed-yearly after.

10,000 records a month

• Cognism: 10,000 revealed contacts is 10,000 credits, and searching for them also spends 1 search token per record returned. Cognism publishes no credit price and no seat price, so there is no dollar figure (Cognism pricing, September 2026). The seat allocation is not published either.
• Prospeo: one Growth seat gives 5,000 credits for $99. The 5,000-credit add-on is $90. That is 10,000 credits for $99 + $90 = $189 a month. Billed yearly, 2 Growth seats at $888 a year each give 120,000 credits for $1,776, or $148 a month (Prospeo pricing, September 2026).

At 10,000 a month only Prospeo gives you a number to budget against.

1M records a month

• Cognism: 1,000,000 revealed contacts is 1,000,000 credits plus search tokens. No list price exists to multiply, so this page does not guess. No public 1M price. Ask for a written quote (Cognism pricing, September 2026).
• Prospeo: no single tier reaches 1M. On monthly billing the cheapest public mix is 44 Pro seats: (1,000,000 - 350,000 add-on credits) / 15,000 = 43.3, rounded up to 44, and 44 x $249 = $10,956. Add the 350,000-credit add-on at $3,500. That is 1,010,000 credits for $14,456 a month. Billed yearly, 3 Pro seats at $2,241 plus the 500,000-credit yearly add-on at $4,500 is $11,223 once, with 1,040,000 credits upfront (Prospeo pricing, September 2026).

Prospeo publishes nothing above 350,000 add-on credits a month or 500,000 a year. Extended pricing is enabled on request, so a real quote for 1M may differ from the list arithmetic (Prospeo help center, September 2026).

Rollover. Prospeo credits never roll over (Prospeo help center, September 2026). Cognism says viewing a revealed contact again is free, and publishes no rollover rule (Cognism pricing, September 2026).

Where Cognism wins

Phone-verified mobiles. Cognism publishes a phone-verified count, offers on-demand verification and cross-references Do Not Call lists in 15 territories. Prospeo publishes no phone count.

A sales app with intent. Cognism ships a prospecting app, with intent data on Pro. Intent uses Bombora Company Surge with up to 12 topics (Cognism pricing, September 2026).

A flat rate limit. 500 requests a minute per operation beats Prospeo's Starter and Growth search limits of 30 and 60 a minute (Prospeo rate limits, September 2026). Prospeo's Pro plan raises search to 180 a minute and enrich to 1,800.

Where Prospeo wins

A price you can read. Prospeo prints a plan price, a credit price and an add-on table. Cognism prints none of them. You can budget Prospeo before a sales call.

You pay for results. Credits are charged on verified emails, a miss costs nothing, and a repeat lookup inside 90 days is free (Prospeo enrich docs, September 2026).

Self-serve to start. Prospeo has a Free plan and a Starter plan at $49 a month per user (Prospeo pricing, September 2026). Cognism sells Standard and Pro by quote.

A published path to volume. Add-ons run to 350,000 credits a month at $0.01 a credit, and to 500,000 a year at $0.009. Cognism prints nothing at any volume.

If you need volume through an API

LeadOcean is a people and company data API with a hosted MCP server, with no seats and no credits. Free gives 1,000 records one-off with no card, and Pro is $499 a month flat with the whole database over REST and MCP. Export up to 50,000 rows per request with POST /v1/exports, so a 1M-row pull is 20 requests over two days, and call count_leads first because counts are free. It is the data layer only, with an export app but no rep workspace, dialer or Chrome extension, so reps who dial should keep Cognism. See LeadOcean pricing and the Cognism alternative.

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