People Data Labs vs Cognism (2026): Data, Pricing and API Compared

People Data Labs (PDL) is a data API you pay for by the credit. Cognism is a sales platform you pay for by the quote. Pick PDL if you build products on raw data, and Cognism if reps dial mobiles, especially in Europe.

Verdict

• Pick People Data Labs if you are an engineer or data team that wants a documented REST API, a public entry price and a huge person dataset. It also fits you if you need licensed data files for a warehouse.
• Pick Cognism if your team sells by phone and wants verified mobiles, Do Not Call screening and a prospecting app with intent data. Expect a sales call before you see a price.
• Pick neither if you need millions of records a month through an API or an agent with a bill you can predict. PDL prices that volume by quote, and Cognism prices every volume by quote. See the LeadOcean section below.

Side by side

Sources are in each cell and were checked in September 2026. Both vendors change plans and counts often, so confirm before you buy.

Data and coverage

PDL has the bigger dataset on paper, and Cognism has the more checked phone data. Those are different promises, so do not compare the headline numbers as if they measure the same thing.

PDL publishes exact counts. The full person dataset holds 2,466,510,427 profiles. The email dataset has 592,376,573 profiles with at least one email, and the mobile phone dataset has 470,338,967. The company dataset has 76,606,079 records (PDL datasets, September 2026; PDL company stats, September 2026). These are record counts. A record with an email is not a verified, deliverable email, so test match quality on your own list.

Cognism does not publish totals. Its FAQ says "hundreds of millions" of company and contact profiles and adds that it does not usually make general coverage claims (Cognism FAQ, September 2026). What it does claim is narrower. Its Diamond Data page says over 10 million phone-verified contacts, on-demand verification in under 48 hours, and Do Not Call cross-referencing in 15 territories (Cognism Diamond Data, September 2026).

If you need breadth for enrichment at scale, PDL's published counts are easier to size. If you need a mobile number a rep can call tomorrow, Cognism's verification is the feature you are paying for.

API and developer experience

PDL is the easier API to try. You sign up, copy a key and send a request. Cognism needs a contract with API access enabled, then client credentials, then a token that expires every 20 minutes.

PDL enrichment is one GET with the key in the X-Api-Key header. A match returns 200 with a likelihood score from 1 to 10. No match returns 404, and you are charged per match (PDL docs, September 2026).

curl -G "https://api.peopledatalabs.com/v5/person/enrich" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: $PDL_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "profile=linkedin.com/in/seanthorne"

This is the profile lookup from PDL's quickstart (PDL quickstart, September 2026). Bulk enrichment takes up to 100 people in one POST to /v5/person/bulk, and Person Search is a separate endpoint with its own 10 requests a minute default.

Cognism has no self-serve key. You generate a client_id and client_secret under Settings, M2M Connect, exchange them for a token that lasts 1,200 seconds, and send it as a bearer token (Cognism auth, September 2026). Search is a POST with filter objects.

curl --request POST "https://api.cognism.com/persons/filter?limit=10" \
  --header "authorization: Bearer $COGNISM_TOKEN" \
  --header "content-type: application/json" \
  --data '{"person":{"jobTitle":{"include":["Head of Sales"],"match":"ONCE"},"contact":{"email":{"exists":true}}}}'

The body follows the persons filter reference (Cognism API reference, September 2026). Search returns 1 to 100 records a page, and each record returned costs one search token.

On MCP the gap is clear. Cognism runs a hosted server at mcp.cognism.com/mcp with 15 tools that map onto its API, billed with the same tokens and credits (Cognism MCP docs, September 2026). PDL lists no official MCP server in its docs or llms.txt, only community ones that PDL does not publish (PDL llms.txt, September 2026).

Pricing

PDL is the only one of the two with a price you can read. Cognism publishes no dollar figure at any volume, so there is nothing to multiply.

PDL plans. Free is $0 for up to 100 credits a month, with contact data obscured. Pro starts at $98 a month for 350 credits, which is $0.28 a credit. Billed yearly it is $940 a year, or $78 a month (PDL pricing, September 2026). PDL says Pro person profiles cost about $0.20 to $0.28 each, depending on volume and subscription (PDL blog, September 2026).

Cognism plans. The pricing page lists Standard and Pro, five seats each, and says pricing is tailored to product, team setup and usage. One credit reveals one contact, and each seat includes an allocation of unpublished size (Cognism pricing, September 2026).

Worked example at 10,000 records a month

The PDL rows use the top and bottom of PDL's own Pro range. PDL does not publish the exact rate at 10,000 a month, so treat $2,000 to $2,800 as an estimate, not a quote. Self-serve Pro is also meant for volumes below roughly 100,000 person profiles a year, and 10,000 a month is 120,000 a year (PDL blog, September 2026). You may land in Enterprise already.

Worked example at 1M records a month

Both vendors: no public 1M price. PDL sends volume above the self-serve ceiling to Enterprise and sales. Cognism sells every tier by quote. We do not multiply a rate out to 1M, because neither vendor has published one.

What we can state is time. PDL enrichment runs 1,000 requests a minute on paid plans, so 1M single lookups is 1,000 minutes of calls, about 17 hours. Bulk requests cut that by up to 100 times. Cognism allows 500 search calls a minute, so 1M records at 100 a page is 10,000 calls, about 20 minutes, before tokens and credits.

Where People Data Labs wins

• A price you can start with. Pro is $98 a month and the credit rule is public. You can test the API on the free plan before you talk to anyone.
• Published scale. 2.47 billion profiles, 76.6 million companies and exact phone and email counts let you size a project up front.
• Data delivery options. Bulk enrichment, Snowflake, Databricks and licensed data feeds suit teams that want the data inside their own stack (PDL, September 2026).
• A cleaner developer start. Key in a header, one GET, 404 when nothing matches and no charge for it.

Where Cognism wins

• Verified mobiles. Over 10 million phone-verified contacts and on-demand verification. PDL publishes counts of phone records but makes no phone-verification claim on the pages we checked.
• Compliance for outbound calling. Cognism says it cross-references Do Not Call lists in 15 territories. PDL has no equivalent in the pages we checked.
• A working sales product. Intent data on Pro, contact reveal in an app and five seats per plan. PDL is an API and does not come with a rep workspace.
• An official MCP server. An agent can search and count Cognism data today, inside your package.

If you need volume through an API

LeadOcean is a third option for teams that pull records in code or from an agent. It has 693M people and 63M companies behind REST and an MCP server, and every plan includes both. Free is 1,000 records one-off with no card. Pro is $499 a month, flat, with no credits and no per-record price.

Bulk export is POST /v1/exports, 50,000 rows per request, and the app has an Exports page with a filter builder and CSV download. At 10,000 records a month, that is $499 against an estimated $2,000 to $2,800 on PDL Pro. It has no phone verification, Do Not Call screening or dataset licence, so it does not replace either vendor for those jobs. See LeadOcean pricing.

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