Are you searching for a solution that can fetch B2B profile data at scale? Or maybe you read about People Data Labs, and now you want to explore alternatives. Either way, you've come to the right place.
Let's dive deep into alternatives to People Data Labs and which ones you want to pick when.
Methodology
First, we'll outline some important metrics that great B2B data enrichment providers should have. Then, we'll compare People Data Labs and each alternative to give you a good picture of the playing field. Finally, we compare the six providers based on each metric one by one.
B2B data enrichment provider metrics
Freshness
Common wisdom states that everyone wants fresh, live data. But that's only sometimes true. The pinnacle of a provider is that it allows customers to control the freshness of data received, offering cheaper data when freshness is not a concern.
For example, if you are looking for job posting data, you do need fresh data. However, cached data would suffice if you only wanted to match a company URL with its name because a company's name and URL will only change occasionally.
When exploring the different providers, understand their data freshness guarantee. Review their documentation and determine whether they provide the option to control data retrieval from cache or to scrape live.
Data points
Currently, you might only be looking for a specific set of data points. Even if you've identified that one provider which offers what you need for now, you might need additional data points in the future. Consider committing to a provider with an exhaustive set of data points so you don't accrue technical debt from day one.
We've heard countless stories of people having to switch providers after realizing the limited data points available or having to engage different providers for different sets of data - making their workflow a mess.
Legal compliance
Generally, you won't get into legal trouble if something bad happens regarding your data provider. If anything, the providers are the ones who'll get into trouble (if they employ illegal tactics like Mantheos). What you don't want, though, is having to migrate your already-integrated applications and workflow when something does happen.
And so, it's best to find a provider that is legally scraping data. After all, web scraping is indeed legal per the US court ruling.
Pricing
No matter if you are in a small or large company, pricing matters. As a small company, you need pricing flexibility based on what you use and not get tied down to a fixed plan. As a larger company, you will benefit from good enterprise packages to ensure that your large-scale data operations do not incur uncontrollable costs.
A summary of People Data Labs & five alternatives
People Data Labs
People Data Labs scrapes public data and works with third-party partners to get private data. Then it packages this data into datasets that customers can call using APIs. It isn't developer-focused, but with quite a comprehensive range of data points available, it's arguably the most complete in the list. Though they are guilty of breaking down one data point into many granular forms, which inflate the absolute quantity.
Proxycurl
Proxycurl is a developer-focused company that provides a huge portfolio of API endpoints which scrape and enrich profiles, providing a huge amount of data points. Depending on their use cases, customers can use Proxycurl's APIs flexibly and integrate them into any existing applications and workflows. Proxycurl also sells datasets of person and company profiles with millions of samples for enterprise customers looking for scale.
ReachStream
ReachStream is a B2B sales and marketing data platform offering contact, company and technographic data for prospecting. Its main offering is a simple, user-friendly platform where you can view unlimited contact and company profiles, along with unlimited contact data updates for free. Additionally, ReachStream offers a monthly renewable freemium plan, letting users test the application and download data for free.
ReachStream provides large, diverse datasets that are affordable for many businesses. A valid competitor to People Data Labs.
Coresignal
Coresignal's main offering is not data scraping but selling datasets. Coresignal's datasets also consist of public and private data, which they either scraped themselves or acquired through third-party means. They also have live scraping APIs, but these are more limited in scope.
Bright Data
Bright Data does not scrape data for you but provides proxies for your own scrapers. They also sell templates of scrapers that you can build on. In 2022 they did launch a new line of dataset products, whose variety rivals or even exceeds that of Coresignal's datasets.
PhantomBuster
PhantomBuster does offer scraping services, however, in a different way from the norm. Instead, they have you use your own accounts to scrape for private data. At this point, this in itself is already a red flag in legal compliance as it involves scraping private data. Private profiles do return additional data that you can't get from public profiles; however, it has limitations: Low rate limit and legal risk. Customers can only scrape 80 profiles per day before their account gets blocked by LinkedIn. You definitely don't want that to happen!
Reviewing each provider against the metrics
Now comes the fun part, diving into the metrics and comparing the providers against each other.
Freshness
Most providers let customers pull data from their datasets via APIs, with data only updated monthly. The exception is Proxycurl, which allows for flexibility here: You can request cached or up-to-a-month-old data.
- People Data Labs - Datasets from which APIs are called are updated monthly by default
- Proxycurl - Flexibility in choosing between freshly-scraped data, <= 29 days old or possibly > 29 days old
- ReachStream - Database is updated monthly through a 7-tier manual and AI verification process
- Coresignal - Datasets are updated monthly; a separate option is available for live scraping via APIs
- Bright Data - Autonomy on freshness is in the customer's hands as they build the scrapers; datasets are updated monthly by default
- PhantomBuster - Only scraped live
Data points
People Data Labs brags about having >200 data points per profile, but they achieve this number by splitting the data down to their most granular forms. For example, a single location address is split into 12 different fields! Some examples: location_street_address, location_address_line_2, location_continent, location_country, location_region, etc. If we clean up the data types for comparison, Proxycurl comes in second with a comprehensive suite of data fields after People Data Labs.
- People Data Labs - Arguably the most complete on the list
- Proxycurl - Comprehensive coverage for both people and companies profiles
- ReachStream - 20+ contact and company data points with comprehensive contact, firmographic and technographic data
- Coresignal - Missing important data points such as contact info (phone numbers & emails)
- Bright Data - Similar to Coresignal; however, they have more data points than Coresignal as Bright Data scrapes for any data visible on a website
- PhantomBuster - Advantageous in having private profile data via private profile scraping; however, limited exactly because of that as platforms greatly limit scraping frequency
Legal compliance
GDPR and CCPA are the basic compliance standards for the data industry. People Data Labs has an edge with additional compliance besides GDPR and CCPA. On the other end, PhantomBuster is only GDPR-compliant, rightly so, as they scrape private profiles - which is a huge risk in itself. Web scraping is legal with court precedent; however, there's a grey line, and that grey line is scraping private profiles.
- People Data Labs - GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 & ISO 27001-compliant
- Proxycurl - GDPR & CCPA-compliant
- ReachStream - GDPR, CCPA, ACMA, EDPS, CAN-SPAM, and ANTI CAN SPAM act-compliant
- Coresignal - GDPR & CCPA-compliant
- Bright Data - GDPR & CCPA-compliant
- PhantomBuster - GDPR-compliant only
Pricing
Here, we are comparing the cheapest monthly plan of each provider:
- Get the number of profiles available via that monthly plan
- Calculate the cost per profile.
Of course, the more expensive monthly and annual plans would lower the cost per profile.
And here are the results:
- People Data Labs - $98/mo for 350 profiles ($0.28/profile)
- Proxycurl - $49/mo for 2500 profiles ($0.02/profile)
- ReachStream - $99/mo for 5000 profiles ($0.02/profile)
- Coresignal - from $800/mo (incomplete pricing info)
- Bright Data - $500/mo for 86k profiles ($0.006/profile) (not a direct comparison as this pricing is for their scraper builder)
- PhantomBuster - $69/mo for 1470 profiles ($0.047/profile)
There you go! We tried to compare them as faithfully as possible across all metrics to give you a good picture of comparing People Data Labs and the other providers.
So, who's the best alternative to People Data Labs?
Our verdict:
Proxycurl is the most flexible yet with high data quality for your data needs. The pricing is also very competitive.
And here's the summary comparing all providers:
- People Data Labs - If you only care about the maximum number of data points, you can choose this one, but it's so expensive that it's probably not worth it, especially since you cannot get fresh data.
- Proxycurl - Probably your best choice for most use cases. Inexpensive, built for developers, and lets you choose your data freshness level.
- ReachStream - provides large, diverse datasets that are affordable for many businesses. A valid competitor for People Data Labs.
- Coresignal - You are required to buy in bulk, but it does offer a lot of datasets.
- Bright Data - Go here if you want to build and host your own scraper.
- PhantomBuster - Probably avoid because of legal compliance issues.
Proxycurl is the best alternative to People Data Labs. Not only that, but you'll be better off with Proxyurl than you might be with People Data Labs.
Proxycurl's advantages:
- Data freshness
- Rate limit
- Pricing
- Accuracy
People Data Labs' advantages:
- Slightly more comprehensive list of data points. But check out Proxycurl's while you're at it. It's an impressive array of its own!
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