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

ContactOut wins for people who work from LinkedIn and need phones. Hunter wins for anyone who wants to read the API price before a sales call. At 1M records Hunter prints a price ($6,900 once), and ContactOut prints none.

Verdict

• Pick ContactOut if you recruit or sell from LinkedIn in a browser and want direct dials. It claims 100M direct dials, a Chrome extension and a search portal (ContactOut homepage, September 2026).
• Pick Hunter if you find work emails by domain or name through an API, and want a credit price you can budget. Growth is $149 a month for 10,000 credits (Hunter pricing, September 2026).
• Pick neither if you pull people and company data in code at volume. ContactOut's API has no public price, and Hunter's credits scale with every record. A flat-price API option is covered in the last section.

Side by side

Data and coverage

ContactOut is the bigger people dataset on paper, and Hunter is the narrower email index. ContactOut's data page claims 800 million people profiles, 200 million work emails, 150 million personal emails and 100 million direct dials (ContactOut data, September 2026). Hunter's homepage shows 150,430,313 verified email addresses and no people count (Hunter, September 2026).

ContactOut disagrees with itself on size. The data page says 800 million and the homepage headline says 350 million. The MCP page says more than 600 million (ContactOut data, September 2026; ContactOut homepage, September 2026; ContactOut MCP, September 2026). Ask which number your plan reaches.

The two start from different places. ContactOut starts from a LinkedIn profile and returns work emails, personal emails and phones. Hunter starts from a domain or a name plus a domain. Domain Search lists the addresses it has found at one company, and Email Finder returns the likeliest address for a person.

Hunter says its index is built from the open web, from pages it crawls every day (Hunter Data Platform, September 2026). Each found address comes back with a verification result and, when public, the URLs where it was seen. That record of origin is useful when you must justify why you hold an address.

ContactOut says its data refreshes hourly and every contact is "triple-verified". Those are claims on its marketing pages, not figures with a method behind them (ContactOut data, September 2026). Treat them as claims until you run your own sample.

Personal emails and phones are ContactOut's edge. Hunter publishes no phone count, and its docs show an optional phone_number field on results. If you need mobiles, test a sample of your own list in both before you buy.

API and developer experience

Hunter hands you a key on sign-up, and ContactOut makes you book a meeting. That one fact decides a lot of buying. Both are REST APIs with a key in a header. Placeholders below stand in for real people.

ContactOut, contact info for one LinkedIn profile.

curl "https://api.contactout.com/v1/people/linkedin?profile=https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe&include_phone=true" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --header "Accept: application/json" \
  --header "token: $CONTACTOUT_API_TOKEN"

It uses 1 email credit if an email is found and 1 phone credit if a phone is found (ContactOut API docs, September 2026). A miss returns a 404. This endpoint takes a LinkedIn URL.

Hunter, find an email by name and domain.

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

Hunter charges 1 credit per email found and nothing if none is found (Hunter help, September 2026). One quirk: a rate-limited call returns 403, and 429 means you ran out of credits or plan quota (Hunter API docs, September 2026).

For bulk work, ContactOut has two routes. The v1 bulk endpoint takes 100 LinkedIn profiles per request. The v2 route takes 1,000 and runs as a background job you poll by job_id or receive on a callback URL (ContactOut API docs, September 2026). Hunter's bulk route is file-based: upload a CSV to Bulk Email Finder and download the result.

On limits, ContactOut is tighter where it matters for lists. People Search runs at 60 requests a minute. Most other endpoints allow 1,000 a minute (ContactOut API docs, September 2026). Hunter allows 500 a minute on Email Finder and 300 on Email Verifier, per endpoint, not per plan.

Both have an MCP server. ContactOut's has 15 tools and gives 600+ free credits at onboarding (ContactOut MCP, September 2026). Hunter's is included in every plan and takes an API key in a header, or OAuth where your client supports it (Hunter MCP, September 2026).

Pricing

ContactOut sells monthly plans and hides the API price. Hunter sells credits and prints the ladder. Figures use the monthly list price first, with the billed-yearly price after it.

At 10,000 work emails a month

• ContactOut: no public price. Email is $49 a month ($39 a month billed yearly). Email + Phone is $99 a month ($79 billed yearly). Both are one user per company, with 300 or 600 exports a month (ContactOut pricing, September 2026).

"Unlimited" is capped at 2,000 email credits and 1,000 phone credits per account per month (ContactOut terms, September 2026). Arithmetic: 10,000 / 2,000 = 5 accounts' worth of email credits. One user per company rules that out, so volume means the Team / API plan.

• Hunter: Growth includes 10,000 credits for $149 a month, or $104 a month billed yearly (Hunter pricing, September 2026).

At 10,000 a month only Hunter has a price you can read. ContactOut's self-serve plans cost less but stop at 2,000 emails.

At 1M work emails

• ContactOut: no public price at 1M. The highest public tier is Email + Phone at $99 a month ($79 billed yearly), and the API is quote only.
• Hunter: 1,000,000 Search credits on the Data Platform cost $6,900, paid once and valid 12 months. That is $0.0069 a credit (Hunter Data Platform, September 2026). Above 1,000,000 credits is custom.

The all-in-one route costs more on Hunter. Scale is $299 a month ($209 billed yearly) for 25,000 credits, and credit packs cap at 180,000 per purchase (Hunter help, September 2026). At 1M, use the Data Platform.

A Hunter credit is one email found. A ContactOut API credit is one email, one phone or one search, and its docs give no dollar price per credit (ContactOut API docs, September 2026). Do not compare the two as like for like.

Where ContactOut wins

Phones and personal emails. It claims 100M direct dials and 150M personal emails, and one call returns both (ContactOut homepage, September 2026). Hunter publishes no phone count.

A workflow for people in a browser. ContactOut has a Chrome extension, a search portal, email campaigns and a free tier of 5 emails a day (ContactOut pricing, September 2026). A recruiter can start in minutes with no key and no code.

A larger claimed dataset. 800M profiles against 150M email addresses. Even at ContactOut's own lower 350M figure, it indexes people, not just addresses.

Where Hunter wins

A price you can read. Hunter prints a monthly ladder, a credit price and a 1M figure. ContactOut prints Contact Us for the API (Hunter pricing, September 2026).

A free API key. Every Hunter plan, Free included, has REST access and an MCP server using your credits. You can test a full integration before paying anything.

Bulk finding. Bulk Email Finder takes up to 50,000 rows per file, and verification is built into each find (Hunter help, September 2026). Hunter also has Sequences if you want to send from the same tool.

If you need volume through an API

LeadOcean is a people and company data API with a hosted MCP server and no credits. It holds 693M people and 63M companies, with 366M people that have an email and 166M that have a phone number. Free gives you 1,000 records one-off with no card, and Pro is $499 a month, flat. Export rows with POST /v1/exports, 50,000 per request, or count an audience for free over MCP first. LeadOcean has no extension and no sequencer, so you export and send elsewhere (LeadOcean pricing).

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