Best B2B Lead Databases in 2026: Size, Freshness, Accuracy, and Price Compared

Key Aspects When Assessing a Lead Database

A lead database has several characteristics that will make the service offered more or less useful.

The 4 main evaluation criteria are:

• Size (how many profiles?)
• Data freshness (how frequently are profiles updated?)
• Data hygiene (which data fields are normalized? Has the data been altered by unsafe operations? Are the data models consistent over time?)
• Price

I am deliberately leaving aside enrichment with contact data (emails, phone numbers) in order to focus our attention on decision-maker profiles, excluding contact data.

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How to Evaluate a Lead Database

Measuring the Size of a Lead Database

There is a very simple technique for determining the total size of a lead database: run a people search using the “Headcount” filter and select all available headcount ranges. The number of results gives you the size of the database.

Example:

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You can use the same approach to obtain the total number of companies. Below, we can see that Prospeo has 24M companies in its database (screenshot taken in May 2026):

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If the “headcount” filter is not available, another method is to use a negative filter. For example, run a search for people “not living in Luxembourg.” (Luxembourg is a very small European country) Then add the number of results obtained to the results returned by the reverse search: “people living in Luxembourg.” This gives you the worldwide total.

This method also helps identify data providers whose marketing claims are sometimes somewhat far removed from reality.

As we saw above, Prospeo’s database contains 269M profiles. Yet its website promises 280M and sometimes “300M+.”

Here are some more discrepancies we identified between the marketing claims and the product reality (supported by screenshots taken in summer 2025):

The champions of exaggeration are Wiza (+170%), Success.ai (+530%), and GetProspect (+1000%).

The bottom line: don't take marketing claims at face value. Always verify them yourself.

Below are the results of our tests, updated in spring 2026:

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Another interesting test is to measure a lead database’s coverage rate against a major source, such as LinkedIn. Even though LinkedIn is not the only source for finding leads, it is an essential source of information. Using LinkedIn as a “gold dataset” therefore makes sense.

The protocol is as follows:

1. Create a somewhat random list of 1,000 profiles on Sales Navigator. Vary geographies and company sizes. Include profiles that are frequently requested, but also profiles from the “long tail” (using very precise filters).
2. Extract your list with a tool such as ProntoHQ, Evaboot, Vayne.io, Scrupp.io or Skrapp.com.
3. Use the API of the lead database under review to see which profiles are present in that lead database. Most lead databases have an API endpoint that lets you submit a LinkedIn profile URL and receive the profile content in return if that profile is present in the database.

Alternatively, if you want to avoid scraping Sales Navigator, you can simply export all of your LinkedIn connections. LinkedIn has a native feature for doing this.

Here are the results:

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Measuring the Refresh Frequency of a Lead Database

Here again, we will use LinkedIn as the source of truth.

The protocol is as follows:

1. Create a list of 1,000 profiles on Sales Navigator using the “Changed jobs” search filter. This filter displays only people who have changed jobs within the last 90 days:

2. Extract your list with a tool such as ProntoHQ, Evaboot, Vayne.io, Scrupp.io or Skrapp.com.
3. Use the API of the lead database under review to see which profiles are present in that lead database. Ask an LLM to verify that the latest professional experience returned by the API of the lead database under review matches the latest professional experience shown in Sales Navigator.

Here are the results:

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Evaluating Data Cleanliness

This section requires more technical skills.

The idea is to test the following points:

• Is the JSON structure of profiles consistent from one profile to another? Are there variations?
• What is the fill rate for the different fields? Note that some fields may be empty because the person who owns the profile did not fill in that field in the first place. You will therefore need a gold corpus for this assessment.
• Are fields sometimes filled with the wrong values? As with the previous point, this check requires a gold corpus.

Here are the results of our assessment:

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Identifying the Cost per Lead

The difficulty here comes from the fact that not all data providers use the same pricing model.

Prospeo, for example, charges only for contact data but does not allow users to export profiles without contact data.

Apollo claims to provide unlimited access to profile browsing, but charges “export credits” when you want to download the data. In addition, Apollo does not truly offer unlimited browsing, since the platform imposes “fair use” rules that limit browsing to around 2,000 viewed profiles per day (depending on the subscription).

Find below an overview of the costs per data provider:

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The large pricing gap between Icypeas and all the other data providers above comes from the fact that Icypeas allows users to export profiles without contact data, whereas the others only allow exports of profiles that have already been enriched with an email address, which necessarily makes them more expensive.

However, even when email enrichment is included with Icypeas, the cost per 1,000 exported and enriched leads increases from $0.10 to $5.10. Icypeas therefore remains a much more cost-effective solution.

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Conclusion: Summary Table of the Characteristics of the Best Lead Databases in 2026

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Here is a global table gathering the results of the different measurements carried out for you in May 2026:

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The databases studied here are among the best on the market. Each of these products represents thousands of hours of work and reflects a series of technical and functional choices.

Here are our takeaways to help you choose the best data partner:

➡️ If you are a beginner user and need an easy-to-use UI, the right choice is: Prospeo.

➡️ If your main focus is data quality, the best choice is: Icypeas.

➡️ If you manage a team of 10 to 50 salespeople, need features related to supervising your team BUT are still budget-sensitive, the right choice is probably: Apollo.

➡️ If your primary goal is to leverage high-quality bidstream-based intent data, go with ZoomInfo.

➡️ If you have a large sales team AND focus on EU phone numbers, we recommend: Cognism.

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