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

Pick Lusha if reps will reveal contacts in a browser extension and you want a price you can read. Pick Crustdata if you build in code or with agents and want a large people index with jobs and change data. At 1M work emails a month, neither publishes a price.

Verdict

• Pick Lusha if reps work contacts inside the Chrome extension and CRM apps, and you want public plan prices from $49.90 a month (Lusha pricing, September 2026).
• Pick Crustdata if you want API-first search at 0.03 credits a result, a 1B-person index, and job, post or change-watcher data that a contact database lacks (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).
• Pick neither if you pull people and company data by API in volume and need a bill you can forecast. Both sell credits and neither lists a 1M price. LeadOcean is one option, covered below.

Side by side

Data and coverage

Lusha publishes its coverage. Its homepage states 525M+ contacts, 29M+ companies, 165M+ emails and 117M+ direct dials, with 26 buying signals refreshed weekly (Lusha homepage, September 2026). That is the only one of the two that tells you how many records carry an email or a phone.

Crustdata claims 1B people on its homepage. It gives two different company counts, 60M in one place and 200M+ in another, so this page quotes none (Crustdata, September 2026). Its index also covers jobs, social posts and company signals, not just contacts.

Crustdata publishes no count of people with an email or a phone. It prices them instead: a business email is +1 credit and a phone is +2 on person enrich (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026). Email status values are deliverable, catch_all, invalid and unknown (Crustdata contact docs, September 2026).

A bigger index is not a better hit rate. Run a sample of your own contacts through both before you commit.

API and developer experience

Both have a REST API and a hosted MCP server. They differ in what a call costs and how fast you can make them. Placeholders below stand in for real people.

Lusha, find a contact by name and company domain and reveal the email.

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

The reveal is the step that spends credits (Lusha API overview, September 2026). One email is 1 credit and one request is 1 more, so a single-contact call is 2 credits by the API guide's rule (Lusha API guide, September 2026). The same call takes up to 100 contacts (Lusha API docs, September 2026).

Crustdata, get a business email for a person by profile URL.

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.crustdata.com/person/contact/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"], "fields": ["contact.business_emails"]}'

That costs 1 credit per matched person, and a miss is free. It needs contact-enrich access on an enterprise or higher plan, and self-serve keys get a 403 (Crustdata contact docs, September 2026). On a self-serve key, a work-email lookup goes through /person/enrich at 2 credits: 1 base and 1 business email (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).

Rate limits split them. Lusha Premium allows 300 requests a minute, 1,800 an hour and 18,000 a day per key (Lusha API guide, September 2026). Crustdata defaults to 15 a minute on person enrich (Crustdata rate limits, September 2026).

At those limits, 1M contacts at 100 per Lusha request is 10,000 requests, about 5.6 hours at the hourly cap. On Crustdata, 1M single lookups at 15 a minute take about 46 days. At the contact endpoint's 25 identifiers per request it is about 1.9 days (Crustdata contact docs, September 2026). Batch jobs take up to 10,000 identifiers asynchronously (Crustdata batch docs, September 2026).

Pricing

Lusha bills credits inside seat-based plans. Crustdata bills credits and prints no dollar price per credit. Figures use the monthly list price first, with the billed-yearly price after it.

At 10,000 work emails a month

• Lusha: 10,000 email credits plus 10,000 / 25 = 400 request credits on the bulk API, so 10,400 credits. The top public monthly step is 10,000 credits at $977.40 a month (Lusha pricing, September 2026). Billed yearly, Premium at 120,000 credits is $9,539.10, about $794.93 a month.
• Crustdata: 10,000 x 2 credits (1 base + 1 business email) = 20,000 credits on /person/enrich, or 10,000 on the enterprise-only contact endpoint. No public price per credit, so no dollar total (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).

A full 10,000-credit Premium month covers about 9,600 work emails (9,600 + 384 request credits = 9,984). At this size Lusha is the only one you can price from public pages. A Crustdata blog post reports a lowest tier from $95 a month, but its pricing page does not list one (Crustdata blog, September 2026).

At 1M work emails a month

• Lusha: 1,000,000 email credits plus 1,000,000 / 25 = 40,000 request credits, so 1,040,000 credits. That is 104 times Premium's top monthly step. No public 1M price. Scale is a custom quote with 50%+ off the price per credit, and no rate is published (Lusha pricing, September 2026).
• Crustdata: 1,000,000 x 2 = 2,000,000 credits on /person/enrich, or 1,000,000 on the contact endpoint. No public 1M price (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).

Do not multiply either vendor's credits by a guessed rate. Ask each for a quote on your volume. Crustdata also lets you call GET /account/endpoints with your key to see the credit cost on your own account.

Search on Crustdata is cheaper: 0.03 credits a result, so 1,000,000 results is 30,000 credits before any enrichment.

Two caveats. Lusha's API guide says a request costs at least 1 credit even with no data. Its V3 billing FAQ says nothing is deducted when nothing matches (Lusha API guide, September 2026; Lusha billing FAQ, September 2026). Budget for the worse case. On Crustdata, the docs say purchased credits expire 12 months after purchase (Crustdata credits, September 2026). A Crustdata blog post from 30 July 2026 says 6 months (Crustdata blog, September 2026), so confirm the term in your dashboard before you buy in bulk.

Where Lusha wins

• A rep workspace: a Chrome extension and native CRM apps in the same product (Lusha homepage, September 2026).
• A price you can read. Plans, credit steps and seat counts are public, from Free to Premium.
• Published coverage: 165M+ emails and 117M+ direct dials, where Crustdata publishes none.
• Higher API limits: 300 a minute on Premium against 15 on Crustdata's person enrich.
• An API key on every plan, Free included, and 26 buying signals refreshed weekly.

Where Crustdata wins

• A larger claimed people index: 1B on its homepage, against 525M+ contacts at Lusha.
• Job search, social posts, live web fetch and change watchers in the same API.
• Cheap discovery. Search is 0.03 credits a result, and a contact lookup with no match is not billed.
• Bigger bulk jobs: up to 10,000 identifiers in one batch, against 100 per Lusha request.
• No seats. You buy credits, not users.

If you need volume through an API

LeadOcean is a data API and MCP server with no seats and no credits. It is not a rep workspace, so there is no Chrome extension. Pro costs $499 a month flat, with unlimited searches, enrichments and lookups. The Free plan gives 1,000 records one-off with no card (LeadOcean pricing, September 2026). Both plans get the same REST API and 12-tool MCP server at 100 requests per second per key. POST /v1/exports returns up to 50,000 rows per request (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). Compare it on a list you already know, then read the Lusha alternatives and pricing.

FAQ