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

Coresignal and Icypeas both sell B2B data through an API, but they sell different things. Coresignal is a bulk source of employee, company and job records. Icypeas is an email finder and verifier that charges per email found.

Verdict

• Pick Coresignal if you need job postings, company signals, raw profile volume or licensed datasets. It lists 907M+ employee records and 482M+ job postings.
• Pick Icypeas if you already know the name and the domain and want a cheap, verified work email. A found email is 1 credit, and 10,000 a month is $89.
• Pick neither if you need to search by filter and pull contact data at volume. Coresignal has no public 1M price and Icypeas is $3,992 a month at 1M. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month, flat.

Side by side

The two columns are not like for like. A Coresignal record is a full profile. An Icypeas credit is one email.

Data and coverage

Coresignal is bigger and broader. Icypeas is narrower and aimed at the email.

Coresignal lists 907M+ employee records, 70M+ companies and 482M+ job postings, with company data delivered daily (Coresignal, September 2026). Icypeas quotes 575M business professionals and 62M company profiles (Icypeas features, September 2026). On raw records Coresignal is ahead.

Email works differently in each. Coresignal's multi-source employee records carry a professional email with four status levels: verified, matched_email, matched_pattern and guessed_common_pattern. Its Base Employee API pages list no email field (Coresignal data dictionary, September 2026). Icypeas finds an email from a name and a domain, and its pricing lists catch-all verification on every plan (Icypeas pricing, September 2026).

Phone is thin on both sides. No phone field appears in either Coresignal employee dictionary. Icypeas quotes 280M phone numbers on its features page. Its pricing page lists Phone Finder as coming soon, and its credit table has no phone route (Icypeas credit cost, September 2026). Test on a sample before you rely on either for a dial list.

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

Freshness differs too. Coresignal states daily company updates on its homepage and sells a Real-time Employee API at 12 credits a record (Coresignal docs, September 2026). Icypeas does not publish a refresh cadence on the pages we read, so test an email on a sample before a large send.

API and developer experience

Both are REST APIs, and both bill per successful call. The difference is the input. Coresignal collects a profile by ID, profile URL or shorthand name. Icypeas finds an email from a first name, a last name and a domain.

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

Icypeas takes the key in an Authorization header. The email search is asynchronous. It returns an _id, and you read the result a few seconds later from /api/bulk-single-searchs/read (Icypeas docs, September 2026).

curl -X POST "https://app.icypeas.com/api/email-search" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: $ICYPEAS_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"firstname":"Jane","lastname":"Doe","domainOrCompany":"acme.com"}'

Search is where they split. Coresignal search by filter or Elasticsearch DSL is free and returns IDs, and you pay when you collect. A search preview costs 10 to 20 credits a call (Coresignal docs, September 2026). Icypeas Find People costs 0.02 credit a result, with free counts (Icypeas credit cost, September 2026).

Rate limits are tight on both. Coresignal ties speed to the plan, from 5 requests a second to 100+. Icypeas allows 10 calls a second on email search and 1 bulk call a second with up to 5,000 rows (Icypeas docs, September 2026). Icypeas says limits can change at any time.

Both have an MCP server, and both are billed through the same credits as the API. Coresignal's has 5 tools. entity_search costs 20 credits a call,, and an email lookup bills only when an email is found. Icypeas hosts one at https://mcp.icypeas.com/mcp with 21 tools.

Pricing

Price both as work-email lookups. That is 20 credits on Coresignal and 1 credit on Icypeas, assuming every lookup finds an email. Icypeas does not charge for a search that finds nothing.

At 10,000 records a month

Icypeas: 10,000 lookups x 1 credit = 10,000 credits. Advanced is $89 a month for 10,000 credits, which is $0.0089 an email. Billed yearly it is $890 for 120,000 credits, or $74.17 a month (Icypeas pricing, September 2026). Prices are plus VAT.

Coresignal: 10,000 lookups x 20 credits = 200,000 credits. Contact enrichment starts at Pro with 35,000 credits, and Growth stops at 150,000. That leaves Premium at $1,500 a month for 1,000,000 credits, or $1,350 a month billed yearly ($16,200). That is $0.15 a lookup on the monthly price (Coresignal pricing, September 2026). Monthly Premium is self-serve (Get started opens sign-up), while the yearly plan goes through Contact us (Coresignal pricing, October 2026).

If you want profiles and not emails, the sum changes. 10,000 Base records x 10 credits = 100,000 credits, which fits Growth at $1,000 a month. Base employee pages list no email field.

At this size Icypeas is far cheaper for emails. Coresignal's price buys a whole record, not an address.

There is one more difference in how a miss is billed. Coresignal deducts credits for each successful (200) collect or enrich request (Coresignal docs, September 2026). Icypeas charges only when it finds an email (Icypeas credit cost, September 2026).

At 1M records a month

Icypeas: 1,000,000 lookups x 1 credit = 1,000,000 credits. The 1,000,000-credit monthly tier is $3,992, or $0.003992 a credit. Billed yearly, 12M credits cost $39,920, which is $3,326.67 a month (Icypeas pricing, September 2026). If only half the lookups find an email, the 500,000-credit tier at $2,245.50 would cover it. The tiers sit in the page's credit selector, re-read in October 2026.

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, which covers 500,000 lookups (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

Two Elite months at $0.0005 a credit would come to $10,000. That figure is derived, not published, and Coresignal does not document buying two Elite plans in one month. Ask for a quote and do not read $10,000 as a price.

The throughput is a second constraint. At 10 calls a second, 1,000,000 single email searches take about 28 hours of continuous calling. Icypeas bulk search takes up to 5,000 items per call, so 1M rows is 200 bulk calls (Icypeas docs, September 2026). Coresignal Bulk Collect takes 10,000 records per request, so the same count is 100 requests (Coresignal docs, September 2026).

Where Coresignal wins

• Signals. 482M+ job postings at 1 credit each, historical headcount and daily company updates.
• Raw size. 907M+ employee records and 70M+ companies, against 575M and 62M.
• Full profiles. One collect returns experience and company fields, not just an address.
• Bulk and datasets. Bulk Collect takes 10,000 records per request, and flat-file datasets start at $1,000 a month (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).
• Higher speed ceiling. Up to 100+ requests a second on the top plans.

Where Icypeas wins

• Cheap emails. $0.0089 an email at 10,000 a month, against $0.15 a lookup on Coresignal Premium.
• A low entry. Basic is $19 a month, and unused credits roll over with no expiry (Icypeas pricing, September 2026).
• A public price at 1M. $3,992 a month is on the page. Coresignal has none.
• Pay for hits only. A search that finds nothing costs no credit.
• More MCP tools. 21 against 5, on every plan.

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).

You search by filter, not by name. For bulk work, POST /v1/exports returns up to 50,000 rows per request, and the app has an Exports page with a CSV download (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). See the Coresignal alternative page or the Coresignal alternatives roundup.

Related comparisons: Prospeo vs Icypeas, Hunter vs Icypeas, FullEnrich vs Icypeas. Back to all comparisons.

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