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

Coresignal and Hunter.io both sell contact data by the credit, but they start from different places. Coresignal is a profile, company and job-posting database. Hunter.io is a work-email finder with a verifier, sequences and a browser extension attached.

Verdict

• Pick Coresignal if you need job postings, raw profile volume, or flat-file datasets. It lists 907M+ employee records and 482M+ job postings, and it searches by filter for free.
• Pick Hunter.io if the job is finding and verifying work emails, one company or one person at a time, then sending. Paid plans start at $49 a month, and it publishes a 1M price.
• Pick neither if you need phone numbers and people search at volume through an API on a flat bill. Coresignal lists no phone field and no 1M price, and Hunter's 1M price is a one-off credit pack. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month.

Side by side

Data and coverage

Coresignal publishes record counts and a data dictionary. Hunter publishes one number, the count of verified email addresses. Both 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). Hunter's homepage lists 150,430,313 verified email addresses (Hunter, September 2026). The two numbers measure different things: Coresignal counts profiles, Hunter counts addresses.

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).

Hunter verifies every address Email Finder returns, and the status is valid, accept_all or unknown. For accept-all domains the score estimates the chance the address is real. A call that finds nothing costs no credit (Hunter API docs, September 2026).

Phone is thin on both. Coresignal lists no phone field in either employee dictionary. Hunter returns phone_number in its responses when it has one, and it publishes no count of how often that is.

Search is the other difference. Coresignal filters people and companies in bulk, with 37 employee filters on the Base API (Coresignal docs, September 2026). Hunter starts from a domain or a company, and its Discover call lists companies by industry, headcount and location.

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. Hunter is built to turn a name and a domain into one verified address. Both have a hosted MCP server.

Coresignal sends the key in an apikey header. 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).

Hunter's Email Finder takes a domain plus a first and last name, or a LinkedIn handle. It bills 1 credit when it finds an address (Hunter API docs, September 2026).

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 also offers a test-api-key that validates your parameters and returns a dummy response, which makes a first integration cheap.

Rate limits differ in kind. Coresignal ties speed to the plan, from 5 to 100+ requests a second. Hunter documents limits per endpoint, not per plan: Email Finder allows 15 a second and 500 a minute.

Error codes trip people up on Hunter. A 403 means you hit the rate limit, and a 429 means you used up your credits (Hunter API docs, September 2026).

Both have an MCP server. Coresignal's has 5 tools and bills entity_search at 20 credits a call. Hunter's is included on every plan, free accounts too, and uses your plan credits (Hunter MCP, September 2026).

Pricing

Compare the two on one 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 Pro holds 35,000 credits, which is 1,750 lookups. Growth holds 150,000, or 7,500 lookups. That leaves Premium at $1,500 a month for 1,000,000 credits, or $1,350 a month billed yearly (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

You use a fifth of Premium, so $0.15 a lookup on the monthly price. Premium credits roll over for 3 months (Coresignal docs, September 2026).

Premium shows a Get started button, but the pricing page flags Premium, Scale and Elite for a sales contact, so expect a call (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

Hunter.io: 10,000 emails found x 1 credit = 10,000 credits. Growth is $149 a month for 10,000 credits, or $104 a month billed yearly. That is $0.0149 a lookup on the monthly price, and misses and repeat lookups in a billing period cost nothing (Hunter pricing, September 2026; Hunter help center).

Monthly credits do not carry over. At this size Hunter is about a tenth of Coresignal's price for the same task.

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. For 20,000,000 credits you ask for a quote, so do not multiply a plan rate out and call it a price.

Be careful with the cheaper-looking number. 1,000,000 Base records is 10,000,000 credits, one Elite month at $5,000. Base employee records carry no email, so that is not an email cost.

Hunter.io: $6,900. 1,000,000 lookups x 1 Search credit = 1,000,000 credits at $0.0069 each, bought once on Data Platform and valid 12 months (Hunter Data Platform, September 2026).

The all-in-one plans do not reach that volume. Credit packs cap at 180,000 credits per purchase on Scale (Hunter help center, September 2026). Above 1,000,000 credits, Hunter's price is custom.

Where Coresignal wins

• Job postings. 482M+ postings at 1 credit each. Hunter has none.
• Raw profile volume. 907M+ employee records and 70M+ companies, with daily company updates.
• 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.
• Speed you can scale. A rate limit per plan, up to 100+ requests a second.

Where Hunter.io wins

• A public 1M price. $6,900 against Coresignal's "ask for a quote".
• Email as the core job. Every address found is verified, and a miss is free.
• Cheap at small volume. Starter is $49 a month, or $34 billed yearly, and Free renews 50 credits every month.
• A browser and outreach workflow. Chrome extension, Sheets add-on and Sequences, so you can find and send in one product. Coresignal has none of these.
• MCP on every plan. The free plan includes the server, with a test key to try the API.

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). Phone numbers sit on 166M people at GET /v2/people/phone. It has no job postings, Chrome extension or sequencer. See the Coresignal alternative page for a line-by-line version.

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