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

People Data Labs (PDL) and Prospeo both sell B2B contact data over an API, but the products differ. PDL is a large profile dataset, priced per match. Prospeo is an email and mobile finder, priced per seat plus credits.

Verdict

• Pick People Data Labs if you are a developer who needs raw profiles, phone counts at scale or licensed bulk files. You pay per match, with no seats, and a miss is free.
• Pick Prospeo if you want verified emails and mobiles at a low, readable price, an official MCP server, and a Chrome extension for reps. Its entry prices are far below PDL's.
• Pick neither if you need volume through an API at a price you can read. PDL has no public 1M price, and Prospeo at 1M is a stack of seats plus add-ons. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month, flat.

Side by side

Data and coverage

PDL is far bigger on paper. It lists 2.47B person profiles and 76.6M companies. Prospeo's API docs say 200M+ contacts and 30M+ companies. The counts are not like for like.

PDL's 2.47B is its full person dataset, and only part of it carries contact data. Its email dataset is 592M profiles and its mobile dataset is 470M. Prospeo prints 143M verified emails on its homepage, and no phone count.

Phones are the clearest gap on paper. PDL says 764M profiles have any phone and 470M have a mobile. Prospeo publishes no mobile count and charges 10 credits for each one it finds (Prospeo help center, September 2026).

The two sell different things. PDL returns a full profile per match, and contact data is one part of it. Prospeo returns a verified email, and charges only for verified matches when you set only_verified_email.

Match rate depends on your input, not the vendor's size. A LinkedIn URL or a work email matches far better than a name alone. Run the same 500 people through each free plan and compare. PDL's Free plan obscures contact data, so paid access is needed to see its emails and phones.

API and developer experience

Both are REST APIs with one-person enrichment calls, and both charge only when data comes back. The differences are auth, rate limits and MCP.

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"

Prospeo authenticates with an X-KEY header and takes a POST to /enrich-person. You need a LinkedIn URL, an email, or a name plus a company website. Set only_verified_email to pay only for verified matches (Prospeo docs, September 2026).

curl -X POST "https://api.prospeo.io/enrich-person" \
  -H "X-KEY: $PROSPEO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"only_verified_email": true, "data": {"first_name": "Eva", "last_name": "Kiegler", "company_website": "intercom.com"}}'

A search is a separate call on both. PDL Person Search allows only 10 requests a minute by default, so a search-heavy job queues unless you ask for more (PDL usage limits, September 2026). Prospeo search is 1 credit per page of up to 25 results, and the results carry no contact data until you enrich them.

Rate limits shape how each one scales. PDL limits are per key in a fixed one-minute window: 1,000 enrichments a minute on paid plans. Prospeo limits are per plan and include a daily cap. Starter allows 2,000 enrich requests a day, Growth 5,000 and Pro 500,000 (Prospeo rate limits, September 2026).

On MCP, only Prospeo has an official server. It runs at https://mcp.prospeo.io with 8 tools, and the tools spend the same credits as the API. PDL lists no MCP server in its docs, and only community servers exist (PDL llms.txt, September 2026).

Free plan API access on Prospeo is not settled by Prospeo. The pricing table shows none. The help center lists limited API access at 50 requests a day. The API docs intro says free API access for all users (Prospeo pricing; Prospeo help center, October 2026; Prospeo API docs, October 2026). Test a Free key before you plan around it.

Pricing

PDL charges per credit, and one credit is one matched profile. Prospeo charges per user each month, and each seat comes with a credit grant. To compare them, convert both to cost per record.

At 10,000 records a month

For Prospeo, take 10,000 verified emails at 1 credit each. On monthly billing, Growth gives 5,000 credits per seat at $99. One seat plus the 5,000-credit add-on at $90 is 10,000 credits for $189. Two Growth seats is 2 x $99 = $198 (Prospeo pricing, September 2026).

On yearly billing, 10,000 a month is 120,000 credits a year. Growth gives 60,000 per seat at $888, so 2 x $888 = $1,776 a year, or $148 a month. A mobile costs 10 credits, so 10,000 mobiles is 100,000 credits.

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). PDL does not publish the exact rate at 10,000 credits a month. It shows in the credit selector behind login, so read $2,000 to $2,800 as a range, not a quote.

The unit matters. A PDL credit returns a full profile, and Prospeo's email credit returns one verified email. Per email, Prospeo is at least ten times cheaper at this size.

At 1M records a month

No single Prospeo tier reaches 1M credits. The cheapest public path on monthly billing is 44 Pro seats at $249 plus the 350,000-credit add-on at $3,500. The arithmetic: (1,000,000 - 350,000) / 15,000 = 43.3, so 44 seats x $249 = $10,956, plus $3,500 = $14,456 a month for 1,010,000 credits (Prospeo pricing, September 2026).

On yearly billing, 3 Pro seats at $2,241 plus the 500,000-credit yearly add-on at $4,500 is $11,223 once, with 1,040,000 credits delivered upfront. That is a one-off, not a monthly figure. Add-ons follow the billing period, so a yearly seat cannot pair with a monthly add-on.

Prospeo publishes nothing above 350,000 add-on credits a month or 500,000 a year. The help center says its standard list runs to 3.5M credits a year. It says extended pricing is enabled on request, so ask support above 500,000 (Prospeo help center, October 2026). Mobiles at 1M are 10M credits, and no public plan sells that.

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

Where People Data Labs wins

• Scale of data. 2.47B profiles, 592M with an email and 764M with any phone, by PDL's own stats.
• Bulk files. An annual Data License delivers person data to S3, GCP or Azure (PDL docs, September 2026).
• No seats. You pay per match and a miss is free. Nobody buys logins they never use.
• Bigger batches. Bulk enrichment takes 100 people per request against Prospeo's 50.

Where Prospeo wins

• Price at small and mid volume. Starter is $49 for 2,000 credits. The same 10,000 emails cost about $189 on Prospeo and $2,000 or more on PDL.
• Official MCP server. Connect it to Claude or Cursor and credits work the same as the API.
• A usable Free plan. It gives 100 credits a month, while PDL's Free plan obscures contact data.
• An app for reps. A Chrome extension is on every plan, and Growth adds HubSpot and Salesforce sync (Prospeo pricing, September 2026).

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 unlimited searches and lookups 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, a column picker, a price preview and CSV download (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). There is no Chrome extension or CRM sync. If your reps live in an extension, keep Prospeo for that and compare the data source. See the PDL alternative page and PDL alternatives for line-by-line versions.

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