Search “best B2B data providers” and look at who wrote the top ten results. A data provider. Ranking itself first. Every single time.

Here’s the definition those articles skip: B2B data providers sell information about businesses and the people who work in them — contact details, firmographics, and buying signals — so sales teams can find and reach prospects. They fall into four types: sales intelligence platforms, browser extension tools, list brokers, and signal providers.

Which type you need depends on your team size, where your buyers spend time, and whether timing matters in your sales. Most comparison articles flatten all four into one ranked list, which is how a two-person sales team ends up on a demo call for a £20,000 platform built for fifty-seat SaaS teams.

This guide compares the four types honestly — real pricing, real limitations, including our own. If you’re buying specifically for the UK market, we’ve also written a UK-specific comparison of B2B data providers that walks through each price tier in detail.

The Four Types of B2B Data Provider

Before comparing names, understand the categories. Each type sells a different product, at a different price, to a different buyer. Getting the category right matters more than getting the vendor right.

1. Sales intelligence platforms (ZoomInfo, Cognism)

The enterprise tier. Full databases of hundreds of millions of contacts, CRM integrations, intent data, and compliance tooling. Priced for sales teams of ten or more.

ZoomInfo starts at roughly $14,995 per year for its Professional plan, but most teams end up paying $30,000–$60,000 once seats and credits are added. Annual contracts are mandatory, and renewals often climb 10–20%. It’s the market leader in North America. UK coverage exists but thins out fast in trade sectors like hospitality and care.

Cognism is quote-based, with reported platform fees of $15,000–$25,000 per year plus $1,500–$2,500 per user. It has the strongest UK and European coverage of any platform, and its phone-verified data is checked against do-not-call lists — genuine compliance work, not a marketing line. If you run a 10+ person sales team selling into the UK and Europe, Cognism is probably the right answer.

If you run a two-person sales team, neither platform is built for you, and no discount changes that. The database is the product, and you’d be paying for millions of records you’ll never call.

2. Browser extension tools (Kaspr, Lusha, Apollo)

The affordable middle. These tools pull contact details from LinkedIn profiles and company websites, priced per user per month with credit limits.

Kaspr (owned by the Cognism group) starts around $49 per user per month, or €30–45 in European pricing. Lusha starts around $29–37 per user per month with a free tier of 5 credits. Apollo has a free plan worth testing before you spend anything, though it cut its free email credits sharply in late 2025 and its UK coverage is shallower than its US database.

The catch is structural, not vendor-specific: these tools find people who are on LinkedIn. Office-based professionals in tech, finance, and marketing — yes. Restaurant owners, care home managers, builders, and haulage operators — mostly not. If your buyers run trade businesses, the extension finds nothing to extract, no matter how many credits you buy. If email is your main channel, our guide on buying a B2B email database covers what these tools deliver against what brokers sell.

3. List brokers (Selectabase, Corpdata)

The oldest category. You specify sector, location, and company size; the broker sells you a CSV. In the UK, Selectabase has sold business data since 1995 and offers a self-serve list builder with live counts. Corpdata has supplied UK email, postal, and telemarketing lists for over twenty years. Both are UK-native and ICO-registered — which matters, because much of the cheap list market is not.

The going rate for UK B2B lists is around £275–£350 per thousand records. That buys a snapshot: accurate at the moment of purchase, decaying from that point on, with no refresh and no ongoing verification.

One honest note on the state of this market: Marketscan, one of the UK’s largest brokers, closed in 2025, with Selectabase absorbing its customers. The static-list business is consolidating, and the reason is the product’s shelf life — more on that below. For how to choose and use a broker list well, see our guide to B2B marketing lists.

4. Signal and trigger providers (B2B Data Scouts)

The category the vendor listicles never mention. Instead of selling who exists, signal providers sell when a business needs you — based on a public trigger event. A restaurant fails its hygiene inspection: it needs pest control and deep cleaning this week. A care home registers with the CQC: it needs staff and equipment from scratch. A homeowner files a planning application: trades will be quoting within the month.

The economics are different because the timing is different. Trigger-based prospecting generates 20–35% response rates, against 5–10% for cold outreach from a static list — and average cold email converts at around 0.2%.

This is the category we’re in, so weigh our bias accordingly — and here’s the honest version. B2B Data Scouts sells UK signal subscriptions from £150 per month, plus verified lead lists from 5p per lead if you need contact volume rather than triggers, and profession-filtered email lists built from Companies House records. Delivery is a CSV. No platform, no seats, no annual contract.

The trade-off is volume. A signal subscription delivers the 30–100 businesses that hit a trigger event this week, not 5,000 contacts a month. If your service doesn’t map to a public trigger event, or your sales cycle runs six months, signal data is the wrong product for you and we’ll tell you so.

B2B Data Providers Compared: The Table

Provider Type Entry price UK coverage Best for
ZoomInfo Sales intelligence platform ~$14,995/yr (real spend $30k–$60k) Decent, US-first Enterprise teams selling into North America
Cognism Sales intelligence platform Quote-based, ~$15k–$25k/yr + per seat Strongest of any platform 10+ seat teams selling into UK/EU
Apollo Database + extension Free plan; paid scales per user Shallow outside tech Testing purchased data at zero cost
Kaspr LinkedIn extension ~$49/user/mo LinkedIn-dependent Prospecting office-based buyers on LinkedIn
Lusha LinkedIn extension ~$29–37/user/mo LinkedIn-dependent Cheapest paid test of contact data
Selectabase UK list broker Pay per record (~£275–£350/1k market rate) UK-native One-off UK campaign lists, self-serve
Corpdata UK list broker Custom per 1,000 UK-native UK telemarketing and postal lists
B2B Data Scouts Signal & trigger provider Lists from £50/1k; signals from £150/mo UK only 1–5 person teams selling trigger-driven services

Prices verified July 2026. Platform pricing is quote-based and drawn from reported customer contracts — treat the enterprise figures as ranges, not rate cards.

Where B2B Data Providers Get Their Data

Provenance predicts quality. Every B2B data company draws from some mix of four sources.

Public records. Companies House filings, regulatory registers, government inspection databases. Free to access, legally clean, and refreshed on the government’s schedule — which for many registers means weekly or daily. This is the raw material behind both our lead lists and our signal feeds.

Web scraping. LinkedIn profiles, company websites, directories. This is where extension tools get their contacts. Fresh at the moment of capture, then decaying silently — and blind to anyone without a web presence.

Licensed and traded databases. Brokers buy from other brokers. The same core records circulate through the market for years, which is why the £300 list you bought has already been worked by other sales teams in your sector.

User-contributed data. The big platforms grow their contact counts partly through CRM-sync programmes: customers share their address books in exchange for credits. Effective for scale, murkier for freshness.

When you compare B2B data providers, ask where the segment you’re buying actually came from and when it was last verified against a live source. A record pulled from a government register this week and a contact scraped eighteen months ago and resold twice are not the same product, even at the same price.

The Real Cost of B2B Data Is Time, Not Price

Whichever provider you pick, one fact applies to every static database and every CSV: B2B contact data decays at 22.5–70.3% per year. Within twelve months, 70.8% of business contacts change at least one data point — a job title, a phone number, a company that no longer exists.

The same research puts the cost at 27.3% of sales working hours wasted on bad data. For a two-person sales team, that’s roughly one full day per week spent calling numbers that don’t connect. The subscription fee is rarely the expensive part.

This is why “which provider has the most contacts” is the wrong question. Bigger databases decay just as fast — there’s simply more of them decaying. The better questions are how recently the segment you’re buying was verified, and whether you need a database at all or just the businesses that need you this month.

How to Choose a B2B Data Provider

You run a 10+ person sales team with a real CRM workflow — buy a platform. Cognism for UK/EU coverage, ZoomInfo for North America. The price is high because the product is built for your scale, and cheaper tools will cost you more in workarounds.

Your buyers are office-based professionals active on LinkedIn — start with an extension. Lusha or Kaspr, under £40 per month, is the cheapest fair test of whether purchased contact data converts in your sector. Try Apollo’s free plan first and spend nothing.

You need a one-off list for a specific UK campaign — use a broker. Selectabase or Corpdata will sell you a compliant CSV. Budget for decay and use the list within weeks, not months.

You run a small team selling a service that a public event makes urgent — buy signals. Pest control, deep cleaning, healthcare recruitment, medical supplies, construction trades. Fewer records, but every one comes with a documented reason to call this week.

You need both contacts and timing — combine cheap lists with a signal layer. This is the setup most UK SMEs actually land on: a verified list for baseline coverage of your patch, and a trigger feed so the hottest prospects get called first. It costs less than one Kaspr seat.

Yes — with rules. Under PECR, the consent requirement for marketing emails does not apply to corporate subscribers, so you can email limited companies without prior opt-in. But sole traders and many partnerships count as individuals, named contacts’ details are still personal data under UK GDPR, and any legitimate provider should hand over its ICO registration number without hesitation.

The compliance burden sits with you as well as the provider, so it’s worth ten minutes to understand it — we’ve broken down the full rules in plain English in our guide to compliant B2B data.

B2B Data Providers: FAQ

What is a B2B data provider?

A company that sells information about businesses and their people — contact details, firmographics, and buying signals — so sales teams can find and reach prospects. The four types are sales intelligence platforms, browser extensions, list brokers, and signal providers.

How much does B2B data cost?

Platforms run $15,000–$60,000 per year. Extensions start around $29–$49 per user per month. UK broker lists cost roughly £275–£350 per thousand records. Signal subscriptions run £150–£600 per month, and verified lead lists start around £50 per thousand.

What is the best B2B data provider for a small business?

Whichever type matches where your buyers are. Buyers on LinkedIn: an extension under £40 per month. Trade-sector buyers who aren’t on LinkedIn: a UK broker or a signal provider. The most common mistake small businesses make is buying an enterprise platform’s cheapest tier and getting an enterprise product with the useful parts removed.

What is the difference between contact data and signal data?

Contact data tells you who exists and how to reach them. Signal data tells you when a business needs you, based on a trigger event like a failed inspection or a new registration. Contact data suits volume outreach; signal data suits small teams selling services an event makes urgent.

If that last category sounds like your business — a small sales team, UK trade-sector buyers, a service people need at a specific moment — the cheapest way to find out is to see the data itself.

We’ll send you a free sample: 10–20 real leads from your area, each with the business name, contact details, and the specific trigger event behind it. Call three of them and judge for yourself.