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

People Data Labs (PDL) and Crustdata both sell B2B people and company data through an API, but they price it differently. PDL charges per matched profile and publishes its rates. Crustdata charges in credits and publishes no dollar price per credit.

Verdict

• Pick People Data Labs if you need a large profile dataset with published email and phone counts, fast enrichment, or licensed bulk files. You pay per match, and a miss is free.
• Pick Crustdata if you want search-first discovery, live web and job data, change watchers or an official MCP server. Search costs 0.03 credits a result, and a hosted MCP server is documented.
• Pick neither if you need volume through an API at a price you can read. Neither publishes a 1M price. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month, flat.

Side by side

Data and coverage

PDL publishes the bigger numbers. It lists 2.47B person profiles, with 592M carrying an email and 470M a mobile number. Crustdata's homepage claims 1B people and gives no email or phone count (PDL datasets, September 2026; Crustdata homepage, September 2026).

The two counts are not like for like. PDL's 2.47B is its full dataset, and many records are thin. Its email dataset of 592M is the figure to compare against any contact-ready claim.

Company counts are murkier on the Crustdata side. Its homepage shows 60M companies in one place and 200M+ in another, so this page quotes neither as a single figure. PDL lists 76.6M company records (PDL company stats, September 2026).

The products also differ in what they index. Crustdata describes one graph built from web pages, with search, enrich and watch on top. It also sells live endpoints for profiles, jobs, posts and web pages. PDL is a dataset you query by match.

Contact data is gated differently. PDL's Free plan obscures contact data, so you pay to see emails and phones. Crustdata's dedicated contact endpoint needs an enterprise plan, and self-serve keys get a 403 (Crustdata docs, September 2026).

Test on your own list before you buy. Run the same 500 people through each and compare the match rate and the email status mix. A LinkedIn URL matches far more reliably than a name alone.

API and developer experience

Both are REST APIs with a one-person enrichment call, and both skip the charge on a miss. They differ in rate limits, batch size and how you reach contact data.

PDL takes an X-Api-Key header on 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"

Crustdata takes a Bearer key and a required x-api-version header on POST /person/enrich. The body holds up to 25 profile URLs (Crustdata docs, September 2026).

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.crustdata.com/person/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/abhilashchowdhary/"]}'

Rate limits are the sharpest difference. PDL allows 1,000 enrichment requests a minute on paid plans, per key, in a fixed one-minute window. Its Person Search allows only 10 a minute by default (PDL usage limits, September 2026).

Crustdata defaults are the reverse. Person enrich is capped at 15 a minute and person search at 30. The contact endpoints are grouped with the live endpoints, and raising those limits is described as constrained (Crustdata rate limits, September 2026).

For big lists, Crustdata leans on async batch jobs. A batch person enrich takes up to 10,000 identifiers a job, and each account has a cap on active jobs (Crustdata batch docs, September 2026). PDL's bulk call takes 100 people per request, synchronously.

On MCP, only Crustdata has an official server. It signs in with OAuth for interactive clients and takes an API key as a bearer token for code. PDL lists none in its docs, and only community servers exist (Crustdata docs, September 2026; PDL llms.txt, September 2026).

Pricing

PDL charges one credit per matched profile. Crustdata charges credits per call and adds more for each premium field. To compare them, count what a work-email lookup costs on each.

At 10,000 records a month

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, February 2026). Those two numbers bound PDL's stated range and are not a quote. PDL does not publish the price at 10,000 credits a month. The credit selector in its dashboard shows it after you log in.

For Crustdata, a work-email lookup on /person/enrich is 1 credit for the base profile and 1 for a business email. So 10,000 x 2 = 20,000 credits. Adding a phone number costs 2 more, which makes 10,000 x 4 = 40,000 credits (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).

Crustdata does not publish what a credit costs in dollars. The docs say the dollar value depends on plan and entitlement. A blog post reports a lowest tier from $95 a month, but no credit allowance is published, so 20,000 credits cannot be priced.

Discovery is cheap on Crustdata. Search is 0.03 credits a result, so pulling 10,000 people to review costs 300 credits before you enrich any.

At 1M records a month

For PDL: no public 1M price. Self-serve Pro stops near 100,000 person profiles, and above that PDL quotes Enterprise only (PDL blog, September 2026). Its docs and blog disagree on whether that ceiling is per month or per year. Do not multiply the Pro rate out to 1M and call it a quote.

For Crustdata: no public 1M price. 1,000,000 x 2 = 2,000,000 credits for work emails on /person/enrich. The enterprise-only /person/contact/enrich is 1 credit for a business email, so 1,000,000 credits. Dollars equal credits times a per-credit price you only get from sales.

Credit expiry adds a planning wrinkle. Crustdata's docs say purchased credits expire 12 months after purchase (Crustdata credits, September 2026). A Crustdata blog post from 30 July 2026 says 6 months, so confirm the term in your dashboard before you buy in bulk.

Where People Data Labs wins

• Published coverage. 2.47B profiles, 592M with an email and 764M with any phone, all on PDL's own stats pages.
• A price you can read. Pro is $98 a month for 350 credits, and PDL states a $0.20 to $0.28 range per profile.
• Enrichment speed. 1,000 requests a minute on paid plans against Crustdata's 15 by default.
• Licensed bulk files. An annual Data License delivers person data to S3, GCP or Azure (PDL docs, September 2026).

Where Crustdata wins

• Official MCP server. Hosted at install.crustdata.com/mcp, with OAuth and an API key option.
• Low-cost discovery. Search is 0.03 credits a result, and lookups that match nothing are not billed on the contact endpoint.
• Live data and watchers. Live profile, job, post and web endpoints, plus watchers that flag a changed person or company (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).
• Faster search. 30 person searches a minute by default against PDL's 10.

If you need volume through an API

We build LeadOcean, so weigh this section accordingly. LeadOcean holds 693M people and 63M companies, and you reach them over REST and MCP. Free is 1,000 records, one-off, with no card. Pro is $499 a month, flat, with 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 has an Exports page with a filter builder and CSV download (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). There is no change watcher or live web fetch. If you need those, keep Crustdata for them and compare the data source. See the PDL alternative page for a line-by-line version.

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