Coresignal vs Crustdata (2026): Data, Pricing and API Compared

Coresignal and Crustdata both sell people and company data by the credit through an API. They differ on what a credit costs. Coresignal prints a dollar price for every plan. Crustdata prints credits per call and no dollars.

Verdict

• Pick Coresignal if you need job postings, raw profile volume or flat-file datasets, and want a price you can read first. It lists 907M+ employee records and 482M+ job postings.
• Pick Crustdata if you need live web data, social posts or change watchers, and you accept a quote for the dollar price. It claims 1B people on its homepage.
• Pick neither if you need contact data at volume through an API at a price you can read. Neither publishes a 1M price. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month, flat.

Side by side

Data and coverage

Coresignal publishes more than Crustdata does, and Crustdata claims the bigger people index. Both numbers are marketing claims, so test them on your own list.

Coresignal's homepage lists 907M+ employee records, 70M+ companies and 482M+ job postings, with company data delivered daily (Coresignal, September 2026). Crustdata's homepage claims 1B people (Crustdata, September 2026).

Crustdata's company count is unclear. The same homepage states 60M companies in one place and 200M+ in another, so this page quotes neither.

Email works differently on each. Coresignal's multi-source employee records carry a professional email with four status values: verified, matched_email, matched_pattern and guessed_common_pattern. Its Base Employee API pages list no email field (Coresignal data dictionary, September 2026).

Crustdata returns email statuses deliverable, catch_all, invalid and unknown. The dedicated contact endpoint needs an enterprise plan, and self-serve keys get a 403 (Crustdata contact docs, September 2026).

Phone is the gap. Coresignal lists no phone field in either employee dictionary, so a dial list needs a second source. Crustdata prices phone at +2 credits on person enrich and 2 credits on contact enrich. It publishes no coverage figure (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).

Coresignal's MCP email lookup excludes employees in the EEA and UK (Coresignal MCP docs, September 2026). Test that first if your list is European.

API and developer experience

Coresignal is built to search for free and collect by ID or URL. Crustdata is built to search a large index cheaply and enrich what you pick. Both are credit-metered REST APIs with a hosted MCP server.

Coresignal sends the key in an apikey header (Coresignal docs, September 2026). The collect call takes a shorthand name from a profile URL and costs 20 credits on the multi-source API (Coresignal docs, September 2026).

curl -X GET \
  "https://api.coresignal.com/cdapi/v2/employee_multi_source/collect/jane-doe" \
  -H "accept: application/json" \
  -H "apikey: $CORESIGNAL_API_KEY"

Search by filter or Elasticsearch DSL is free and returns IDs. You pay when you collect, and a search preview costs 10 to 20 credits (Coresignal docs, September 2026).

Crustdata sends a Bearer key and requires an x-api-version header. Person enrich takes up to 25 profile URLs and returns the base profile for 1 credit (Crustdata docs, September 2026).

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.crustdata.com/person/enrich \
  --header "authorization: Bearer $CRUSTDATA_API_KEY" \
  --header "content-type: application/json" \
  --header "x-api-version: 2025-11-01" \
  --data '{"professional_network_profile_urls": ["https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe/"]}'

Search is cheap. It costs 0.03 credits a result, more if you filter on or return premium fields (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).

Rate limits are the sharpest difference. Coresignal ties speed to the plan, from 5 to 100 requests a second. Crustdata's defaults are 15 requests a minute on enrich and 30 on search (Crustdata rate limits, September 2026). At 25 URLs a request, 15 requests a minute is 375 profiles a minute.

Both have an MCP server. Coresignal's has 5 tools and bills entity_search at 20 credits a call. Crustdata's is at install.crustdata.com/mcp, with OAuth for interactive clients.

For bulk work, both cap an async job at 10,000 records or identifiers. A million rows is at least 100 jobs on either one.

Pricing

Both charge credits per call, so compare them on the same task: a work-email lookup. Figures use the monthly list price first, with the billed-yearly price after it.

At 10,000 work emails a month

Coresignal: 10,000 lookups x 20 credits = 200,000 credits. Contact enrichment starts at Pro, and Growth stops at 150,000 credits. That leaves Premium at $1,500 a month for 1,000,000 credits, or $1,350 a month billed yearly. You use a fifth of it, so $0.15 a lookup on the monthly price (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

The pricing page shows Get started buttons on Premium, Scale and Elite, but its page data marks all three as contact-sales. Expect a sales step at this size (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

At small scale the plan matters more than the rate. Pro is $499 for 35,000 credits, which is 1,750 lookups, about $0.29 each.

Crustdata: 10,000 x 2 credits (1 base plus 1 business email) = 20,000 credits on /person/enrich. On the enterprise-only contact endpoint it is 10,000 credits. No public price per credit, so no dollar total (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).

At this size Coresignal is the only one you can price from public pages. A Crustdata blog post reports a lowest tier from $95 a month, but the pricing page does not list it (Crustdata blog, September 2026).

At 1M work emails a month

Coresignal: no public 1M price. 1,000,000 lookups x 20 credits = 20,000,000 credits, and no public plan reaches that. The top plan, Elite, is $5,000 a month for 10,000,000 credits ($4,500 billed yearly), which covers 500,000 lookups (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

Coresignal lists no plan above Elite and does not document stacking two Elite plans. Ask for a quote at this volume.

Crustdata: no public 1M price. 1,000,000 x 2 = 2,000,000 credits on /person/enrich, or 1,000,000 on the contact endpoint. Dollars equal credits times your quoted price per credit, which is not public (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).

Call GET /account/endpoints on Crustdata to see the credit cost on your own account.

Credit expiry differs too. Coresignal monthly plans reset each cycle, and Premium, Scale and Elite roll credits over for 3 months. Annual credits last 12 months (Coresignal docs, September 2026). Crustdata's docs say purchased credits expire 12 months after purchase (Crustdata credits, September 2026). A Crustdata blog post from 30 July 2026 says 6 months, so confirm the term before you buy in bulk.

Where Coresignal wins

• A public price ladder. Seven paid plans from $49 to $5,000 a month, and most plans list a yearly price 10 percent lower.
• Job postings. 482M+ postings at 1 credit each. Crustdata searches jobs too, at 0.03 credits a result.
• Speed you can read. A rate limit per plan, up to 100+ requests a second. Crustdata enrich defaults to 15 a minute.
• Free search. Search by filter or DSL costs nothing. You pay only to collect.
• Datasets. Flat files from $1,000 a month for teams that load a warehouse.

Where Crustdata wins

• Live data. Web page fetch, social post search and live profile endpoints. Coresignal has only a Real-time Employee API, at 12 credits a record.
• Change watchers. A person watcher costs 5 credits per changed person at the 30-day SLA (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).
• Cheap discovery. Search at 0.03 credits a result, and a miss on the enterprise contact endpoint is free.
• A larger claimed people index. 1B on its homepage, against 907M+ at Coresignal.

If you need volume through an API

We build LeadOcean, so weigh this section accordingly. LeadOcean holds 693M people and 63M companies, reachable 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. The app has an Exports page with a filter builder and CSV download (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). It has no job postings or live web data. See the Coresignal alternative page for a line-by-line version.

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