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

Lusha and Coresignal both sell B2B people data on credits, but they sell different things. Lusha is a contact platform with a Chrome extension, direct dials and a price list you can read. Coresignal is a raw data provider: employee profiles, company records and job postings, with email on only part of the employee data.

Verdict

• Pick Lusha if your reps need emails and direct dials, a Chrome extension, and a public price for small volumes. It also has an API key and a 50-tool MCP server.
• Pick Coresignal if you build a product, a model or a research workflow on raw profiles, companies and job postings. It has no phone field and no contact-first workflow.
• Pick neither if you need contact data in volume through an API at a price you can read. Neither publishes a price at 1M records. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month, flat, with no credits.

Side by side

Data and coverage

Lusha publishes contact counts. It states 525M+ contacts and 29M+ companies, with 165M+ emails and 117M+ direct dials (Lusha homepage, September 2026). That is about 31% of contacts with an email and 22% with a direct dial. All four numbers are Lusha's own.

Coresignal publishes record counts, not contact counts. It claims 4.5B+ records, including 907M+ employee records, 70M+ company records and 482M+ job postings (Coresignal homepage, September 2026). It says company data is delivered daily.

The two numbers are not like for like. A Coresignal employee record is a professional profile with experience, education and skills. A Lusha contact is built to be reached.

Email and phone are where the products split. Coresignal documents a professional email and a four-value status (verified, matched_email, matched_pattern, guessed_common_pattern) on Multi-source Employee records. Its Base Employee pages list no email field, and neither dictionary lists a phone field (Coresignal data dictionary, September 2026).

If your outbound needs a dial, Coresignal means a second vendor. If you need job postings or workforce history, Lusha has no equivalent.

Test on your own list before you buy. Run the same 30 people through both and compare match rate and bounce rate.

API and developer experience

Both have REST APIs and an official MCP server. Lusha gives every user an API key on every plan, Free included, according to its API guide. Its pricing page lists API as a feature from Pro, so confirm that before you build on Free (Lusha API guide, September 2026; Lusha pricing, September 2026).

Lusha's V3 API takes a batch of contacts by name and domain, LinkedIn URL or email. Search shows what is available, and revealing the email or phone is a second call that spends credits (Lusha API overview, September 2026).

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.lusha.com/v3/contacts/search \
  --header "api_key: $LUSHA_API_KEY" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "contacts": [
      { "clientReferenceId": "my-ref-1", "firstName": "Jane", "lastName": "Doe", "companyDomain": "acme.com" }
    ],
    "options": { "includePartialProfiles": true }
  }'

An email costs 1 credit and a phone number 5. One contact with both costs 7 through a single API request (Lusha API guide, September 2026). The API guide says a request costs at least 1 credit even with no data. The billing FAQ says a no-match request is free (Lusha billing FAQ, September 2026). The docs disagree, so ask Lusha before you plan around misses.

Coresignal searches with Elasticsearch DSL or search filters, and search itself is free. You then collect each record by ID, profile URL or shorthand name. A Multi-source Employee collect costs 20 credits (Coresignal docs, September 2026; Coresignal pricing, 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"

The Contact Enrichment API costs 20 credits a call and is included from the Pro plan up, not on Mini or Starter (Coresignal pricing, September 2026). The pages we read do not say whether a REST call that finds no email is charged. On MCP, misses are free.

Rate limits favor Coresignal at the top. Premium allows 50 requests a second and Scale 100, but Mini and Starter allow 5. Lusha's limits are per minute: Free and Starter 40, with 100 requests a day, and Premium 300 a minute with 18,000 a day. Lusha's V3 page adds a default ceiling of 25 requests a second per account (Lusha rate limits, September 2026).

On bulk, Coresignal moves 100 times more per request. Lusha's bulk calls stop at 100 records, so a million rows is 10,000 calls. Coresignal's Bulk Collect takes 10,000 records and runs asynchronously.

MCP is a size gap. Lusha runs 50 tools on the same credit pool as the REST API. Coresignal runs 5 tools with OAuth 2.1. Its entity_search costs 20 credits a call, and it excludes EEA and UK employees from email lookups (Coresignal MCP docs, September 2026). Its docs list email_enrich at 10 credits per email found, while the live server text and the pricing page say 20. We use 20 until Coresignal aligns its docs.

Pricing

Both print their plans. Neither prints a price at 1M records. Prices below are monthly list first, billed-yearly figure after it, in USD.

Lusha's public plans (Lusha pricing, September 2026):

Lusha raises credits in steps inside each plan. The largest public step is Premium at 10,000 credits a month for $977.40, or 120,000 credits a year for $9,539.10. Scale is a custom quote.

Coresignal's public plans (Coresignal pricing, September 2026):

Credits per call differ. Coresignal charges 10 for a Base record, 20 for a Multi-source record or a contact enrichment, and 1 for a job posting (Coresignal docs, September 2026). Lusha charges 1 for an email, 5 for a phone and 1 per 25 results on a bulk request (Lusha credits, September 2026).

10,000 work emails a month

• Lusha, by bulk API: 10,000 email credits + 10,000 / 25 = 400 request credits = 10,400 credits. The largest monthly step is 10,000 credits for $977.40, so the last 400 credits have no listed price.
• Lusha, email and phone: 10,000 x (1 + 5) + 400 = 60,400 credits. That is six times the largest monthly step.
• Coresignal, Contact Enrichment API: 10,000 x 20 = 200,000 credits. Growth holds 150,000, so the fit is Premium at $1,500 a month ($1,350 billed yearly) with 1,000,000 credits and a 3-month rollover.

1M work emails a month

• Lusha: No public 1M price. 1,000,000 + 1,000,000 / 25 = 1,040,000 credits, which is 104 times the largest monthly step. Scale is custom.
• Coresignal: No public 1M price. 1,000,000 x 20 = 20,000,000 credits, twice the 10,000,000 in Elite, the largest listed plan at $5,000 a month.

Do not multiply a credit rate out to 1M and call it a quote. Ask each vendor for a written number at your volume, and ask what a miss costs.

Where Lusha wins

• Direct dials and emails. 117M+ direct dials and 165M+ emails on Lusha's own count, against no phone field at Coresignal.
• A price you can read at small volume. A Free plan with 40 credits and plans from $49.90 a month.
• Rep tools. A Chrome extension, CRM integrations and 26 buying signals refreshed weekly (Lusha homepage, September 2026).
• A large MCP tool set. 50 tools, so an agent can search, enrich and pull signals in one place.

Where Coresignal wins

• Job postings and workforce data. 482M+ job postings and 907M+ employee records, which Lusha does not offer.
• Free search. Searching by filter or Elasticsearch DSL costs nothing. You pay when you collect.
• Bulk and speed at the top. 10,000 records per Bulk Collect request, and 50 to 100 requests a second on Premium and Scale.
• Datasets. Flat files from $1,000 a month, priced by contract (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

If you need volume through an API

Neither tool prints a price at 1M records, and both bill by credit. LeadOcean is a people and company database with 693M people, 366M with an email and 166M with a phone number, over REST and MCP. The Free plan gives 1,000 records, one-off, with no card, and Pro is $499 a month, flat, with no credits.

POST /v1/exports returns up to 50,000 rows per request, so a 1M-row pull is 20 calls over two days (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). LeadOcean has no Chrome extension, job postings or buying signals. It is a data source for code and agents. See the pricing page or LeadOcean as a Lusha alternative.

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