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

People Data Labs (PDL) and Explorium both sell B2B data to developers, but they package it differently. PDL is a person-data API priced per match, with licensed bulk files. Explorium is a people, company and event data platform priced in prepaid credits, with an MCP server.

Verdict

• Pick People Data Labs if you are a developer who wants the biggest person dataset, deep phone coverage or licensed bulk files. You pay per match, and a miss is free.
• Pick Explorium if you want company data, events and an official MCP server in one vendor. Small buyers also start cheaper, from $29.99 for 500 credits.
• Pick neither if you need 1M records a month at a price you can read. PDL has no public 1M price, and Explorium's list price is about $30,000 for 1M work emails. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month, flat.

Side by side

Data and coverage

PDL is bigger on people. Explorium is bigger on companies. PDL lists 2.47B person profiles and 76.6M companies, while Explorium claims 767M+ professional profiles and 146M+ business entities.

The counts are not like for like. PDL's 2.47B is its full person dataset, and only part of it carries contact data. The email dataset is 592M profiles, and the mobile dataset is 470M. Explorium publishes no email or phone counts, so you cannot compare contact coverage on paper. Its homepage also quotes 150M+ companies and 800M+ people in other copy, so treat its figures as rounded marketing numbers.

Phones are where PDL leads on paper. It lists 764M profiles with any phone number. Explorium returns a mobile number and a phone list from its contact endpoint, but it does not say how many profiles hold one.

Matching works differently. PDL takes a LinkedIn URL, email, phone or name plus company in one enrichment call. Explorium runs a two-step flow: match a person to a prospect_id, then enrich that ID. A name alone never matches. It needs a company name or a business ID beside it (Explorium docs, October 2026).

Explorium returns an email status of valid, invalid or catch-all with each professional email (Explorium docs, October 2026). The PDL Free plan hides emails and phones, so you cannot see the contact data you are about to buy until you upgrade.

Test on your own list before you commit. Run the same 500 people through each vendor and compare match rate and email status. On PDL you will need a paid plan to see the contact fields.

API and developer experience

Both are REST APIs with an API key. They differ in how many calls a lookup takes, how fast you can run them, and what an agent can reach.

PDL sends the key in an 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/jane-doe"

Explorium sends the key in an API_KEY header. You first call POST /v2/prospects/match to get a prospect_id. Then you call the contact endpoint with the ID and the contact types you want (Explorium docs, October 2026).

curl -X POST "https://api.explorium.ai/v2/prospects/contact_information/enrich" \
  -H "API_KEY: $EXPLORIUM_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"prospect_id": "PROSPECT_ID_FROM_MATCH", "parameters": {"contact_types": ["email"]}}'

Rate limits shape how each one scales. PDL limits are per key in a fixed one-minute window and separate per endpoint. Enrichment allows 1,000 a minute on paid plans, but Person Search allows 10 a minute by default (PDL usage limits, September 2026).

Explorium has one limit for the key: 200 queries per minute in a 60-second sliding window. A bulk request of 50 IDs counts as 50 queries, not 1. Going over returns a 429 with a Retry-After header (Explorium docs, October 2026).

For big jobs, PDL bulk enrichment takes 100 people per request. Explorium sync calls take 50 IDs. Its async jobs take up to 10,000 records from an uploaded CSV of IDs and run for at most 24 hours (Explorium docs, October 2026).

On MCP, only Explorium has an official server. AgentSource MCP has 11 tools at https://mcp.explorium.ai/mcp and uses an API key. Fetch tools cost 1 credit per returned result, and the statistics tools are free (Explorium MCP docs, October 2026). PDL lists no MCP server in its docs or GitHub organization, and only community servers exist (PDL llms.txt, September 2026).

What a miss costs is a gap on the Explorium side. The match docs say an unmatched record returns prospect_id: null, but they do not say whether that spends a credit. The pricing page does not either.

Pricing

PDL charges one credit per matched profile. Explorium charges credits per action: 2 for a work email, 5 for a phone or both. To compare them, convert both to a cost for the same job.

At 10,000 records a month

Take 10,000 people. For PDL that is 10,000 credits. Pro costs $98 for 350 credits, which is $0.28 a credit, so 10,000 x $0.28 = $2,800. PDL says Pro profiles run about $0.20 to $0.28, so the stated range is $2,000 to $2,800 (PDL blog, September 2026).

Billed yearly, the entry plan is $78 a month for the same 350 credits. That is about $0.223 a credit, or about $2,229 for 10,000. PDL does not publish the rate near 10,000 credits, because its credit selector sits behind login. Treat these as ranges, not a quote.

At 10,000 a month you pass 120,000 a year. PDL points buyers above roughly 100,000 profiles to Enterprise. Its docs say per record and its blog says per year (PDL blog, September 2026).

For Explorium, 10,000 work emails is 20,000 credits at 2 each. Four Starter packs give exactly 20,000 credits: 4 x $149.99 = $599.96. With phones at 5 credits, 10,000 lookups need 50,000 credits. A Growth pack (30K, $749.99) plus four Starter packs (20K, $599.96) comes to $1,349.95 (Explorium pricing, October 2026).

Two caveats apply. Explorium does not publish what the match step costs, so these figures are a floor. And a PDL credit returns a full profile, while 2 Explorium credits return one email.

At 1M records a month

For PDL there is 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. One fact is public: at 1,000 enrichments a minute, 1M single calls take 1,000 minutes, about 17 hours.

For Explorium, 1M work emails is 2M credits. The cheapest published pack is Scale, 500K credits at $7,499.99 ($0.015 a credit). So 4 packs x $7,499.99 = $29,999.96 at list. With phones, 1M lookups is 5M credits, which is 10 packs and $74,999.90 (Explorium pricing, October 2026).

Enterprise is a custom quote with volume discounts, so a negotiated price could be lower. The rate limit is the other cost. At 200 queries a minute, 1M rows take 5,000 minutes, about 3.5 days, unless you buy more query capacity.

Where People Data Labs wins

• Bigger person dataset. 2.47B profiles, 592M with an email and 764M with any phone, by PDL's own stats.
• Licensed bulk files. An annual Data License delivers person data to S3, GCP or Azure (PDL docs, September 2026).
• Faster enrichment. 1,000 a minute on paid plans, against Explorium's 200 queries a minute.
• One call per person. Enrichment takes a LinkedIn URL or email directly, with no match step first.

Where Explorium wins

• Company breadth. 146M+ business entities against PDL's 76.6M companies, by each vendor's own count.
• An official MCP server. AgentSource MCP is documented, with 11 tools and free statistics tools to size an audience before you pull.
• Events. It tracks business and prospect events such as funding rounds, hiring and M&A (Explorium MCP docs, October 2026). The PDL pages checked show no equivalent.
• A cheaper start. Lite is $29.99 for 500 credits, against $98 a month for PDL Pro.

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 a 12-tool MCP server with OAuth sign-in. Free is 1,000 records, one-off, with no card. Pro is $499 a month, flat, with unlimited searches and lookups and 100 requests per second per key (LeadOcean pricing, September 2026).

For bulk work, POST /v1/exports returns up to 50,000 rows per request, and the app has an Exports page with a CSV download (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). LeadOcean is smaller than PDL on people and has no event stream like Explorium. See the People Data Labs alternative page and the Explorium alternative page for line-by-line versions.

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