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

People Data Labs (PDL) and Coresignal both sell professional profile data through an API, but they sell different things. PDL is a person and company data API priced per match. Coresignal is a profile, company and job-posting data source priced in credits, with flat-file datasets on top.

Verdict

• Pick People Data Labs if you need contact data. It publishes 592M profiles with an email and 764M with any phone, and it bills per match with no plan to outgrow at small scale.
• Pick Coresignal if you need job postings, fresh company data or an official MCP server. Its price ladder is public up to 10,000,000 credits a month.
• Pick neither if you need 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.

Side by side

Data and coverage

PDL is bigger on person records and deeper on contact data. Coresignal is wider: it adds job postings and company signals. The counts are not like for like.

PDL lists 2.47B person profiles, but only part of that carries contact data. Its email dataset is 592M profiles and its mobile dataset is 470M. Coresignal lists 907M+ employee records and 4.5B+ records across all its datasets (Coresignal, September 2026).

Coresignal publishes no count of profiles with an email or a phone. Its 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 at all (Coresignal data dictionary, September 2026).

On the MCP server, email lookups exclude employees in the EEA and UK (Coresignal MCP docs, September 2026). If your list is European, test that first.

Phone numbers are a clear gap. PDL says 764M profiles have a phone. No phone field appears in either Coresignal employee dictionary, so a dial list needs another source.

Coresignal's edge is signals. It sells 482M+ job postings at 1 credit each, and company data it says is delivered daily (Coresignal pricing, September 2026). If hiring triggers drive your outbound, that matters more than a contact count.

Test before you buy. Coresignal's free trial gives 2,000 credits for 7 days, about 100 multi-source records. PDL's Free plan gives 100 credits but obscures contact data, so seeing its emails means paying for Pro.

API and developer experience

Both are REST APIs with a one-call enrichment path. PDL matches on a profile, email or phone and returns one record. Coresignal collects a record by ID, profile URL or shorthand name, and bills per record.

PDL sends a key in the X-Api-Key header to GET /v5/person/enrich. A match returns 200 and is billed. A miss returns 404 and is not (PDL docs, September 2026).

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

Coresignal sends a key in an apikey header (Coresignal docs, September 2026). The collect call takes a shorthand name taken 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/seanthorne" \
  -H "accept: application/json" \
  -H "apikey: $CORESIGNAL_API_KEY"

Search works differently. Coresignal search by filter or Elasticsearch DSL is free and returns IDs. You pay when you collect, and a search preview costs credits (Coresignal docs, September 2026).

Rate limits scale in different ways. PDL allows 1,000 enrichment calls a minute on paid plans, about 17 a second. Person search is only 10 a minute by default (PDL usage limits, September 2026). Coresignal ties speed to the plan: 5 a second up to Starter, 10 on Pro, 50 on Premium, 100 on Scale (Coresignal rate limits, September 2026).

For bulk work, Coresignal's Bulk Collect is asynchronous and takes up to 10,000 records per request. PDL bulk enrichment takes 100 people per request, and larger files come through an annual Data License (PDL Data License, September 2026).

On MCP, only Coresignal ships an official server. It signs in with OAuth 2.1 at https://mcp.coresignal.com/mcp/v2 and has 5 tools. entity_search costs a flat 20 credits a call, and entity_fetch costs 20 credits per employee or company record (Coresignal MCP docs, September 2026). Email lookup through MCP costs 20 credits per email found, and misses are free, according to the live server's own tool text. The docs page still lists 10 credits per email, so budget 20 until Coresignal corrects it.

PDL lists no MCP server in its docs or llms.txt, and only community servers exist (PDL llms.txt, September 2026).

Pricing

PDL charges per credit, and one credit is one matched profile. Coresignal sells monthly plans that hold a credit balance, and each record type burns a set number of credits. To compare them, convert both to cost per contact lookup.

At 10,000 records a month

Take 10,000 work-email lookups. Coresignal bills contact enrichment at 20 credits a call, so 10,000 x 20 = 200,000 credits. Contact enrichment is included from Pro upward, and Growth stops at 150,000 credits (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

That leaves Premium: $1,500 a month for 1,000,000 credits, or $16,200 billed yearly, which is $1,350 a month. Your 200,000 credits use a fifth of it. That works out to $0.15 a lookup on the monthly price. The pricing page shows a Get started button on Premium. It does not say whether the plan is self-serve or sold by contact, so confirm how you buy it (Coresignal pricing, October 2026).

For PDL, 10,000 profiles is 10,000 credits. PDL says Pro profiles cost about $0.20 to $0.28 each, depending on volume and plan. So 10,000 x $0.20 = $2,000 and 10,000 x $0.28 = $2,800 (PDL blog, September 2026). PDL does not publish its rate at 10,000 credits a month. That price sits in the credit selector behind the dashboard login, so these two figures are the ends of PDL's stated range, not a quote.

The unit differs. A PDL credit returns a full profile with contact data. A Coresignal lookup returns an email, and a multi-source record adds experience and company fields.

At small scale the order flips. Coresignal Pro is $499 for 35,000 credits, which is 1,750 lookups, or about $0.29 each. PDL's entry rate is $98 for 350 credits, or $0.28 each.

PDL points buyers above about 100,000 profiles to Enterprise. Its docs and blog disagree on whether that is per month or per year (PDL blog, September 2026).

At 1M records a month

For 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.

Two Elite months at $0.0005 a credit would come to $10,000. That is derived, not published, and Coresignal does not document buying two Elite plans at once (Coresignal pricing, September 2026). Ask for a quote.

For PDL: no public 1M price. Self-serve Pro stops near 100,000 profiles, and above that PDL quotes Enterprise only. Do not multiply the Pro rate out to 1M and call it a quote.

Where People Data Labs wins

• Contact data. 592M profiles with an email, 470M with a mobile and 764M with any phone, by PDL's own stats.
• Bigger person dataset. 2.47B profiles against Coresignal's 907M+ employee records.
• Cheap to start. Pro begins at $98 a month, and a miss is free.
• Small self-serve steps. You buy 350 credits, not a plan sized in the tens of thousands.

Where Coresignal wins

• Signals. 482M+ job postings, historical headcount and company data, none of which PDL's person API sells.
• Official MCP. An OAuth 2.1 server with 5 tools, which PDL does not have.
• A public price ladder. Eight plans from $49 to $5,000 a month, with rate limits up to 100+ requests a second.
• Bulk and datasets. Bulk Collect takes 10,000 records per request, and flat-file datasets start at $1,000 a month.
• Cheaper at 10,000 lookups. About $0.15 each on the monthly Premium price, against PDL's $0.20 to $0.28.

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 also has an Exports page with a filter builder and CSV download (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). It has no job-posting data. See the PDL alternatives roundup or the PDL alternative page for a line-by-line version.

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