Cognism Pricing Plans—A Comprehensive Guide

Cognism maintains a large database of B2B contact information, mostly consisting of the key decision-makers' phone numbers and emails. Besides the size of its database, Cognism’s main selling points are its global coverage (spanning Europe, Asia, and North America) and its integrations with other sales tools. 

To help you decide if the platform is a cost-effective way to reach more qualified prospects, we’ve filtered through dozens of user reviews and consulted our industry experts. 

Our guide will delve into the details of Cognism pricing and explore the features you receive in each tier. You’ll also learn about an alternative solution that can provide more value for your money in the long run.

Cognism Feature Overview

According to Cognism, its database has verified information on hundreds of millions of contacts worldwide. Besides the data itself, Cognism provides access to the following features:

1. Prospector 🕵️‍♀️
2. Contextual data 🗂️
3. Advanced data verification ✅ 
4. Browser extension 🌐

The Prospector section is the focal point of the entire platform. It relies on a system of filters, which you can use to set criteria that correspond to your ideal customer profile (ICP) and quickly find the most qualified prospects. 

In order to help you reach prospects more efficiently, Cognism’s database includes more than contact information. Besides finding emails and mobile numbers, you can use the platform to access the following types of data:

• Account data—Company sizes, locations, relevant technologies, and industries
• Event data—Job join dates, funding and hiring news, buyer intent info

This data provides valuable context to your outreach and helps you determine which prospects are more likely to convert at the moment. Cognism is fully compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and its contact data includes information pulled from global Do Not Call lists. You can use it to avoid wasting time on non-receptive prospects. 

To ensure its database only contains up-to-date information, Cognism claims to use a cutting-edge combination of manual and AI verification—although it's unclear whether it routinely checks all data or only contact details like phone numbers and emails. 

Cognism also provides access to a Chrome browser extension, which lets you import data from LinkedIn and corporate websites and enrich the prospects you’re currently viewing. 

Cognism Price Plans

Unfortunately, Cognism isn’t transparent about its pricing. Its website contains no information on how much different tiers cost, and you have to contact the sales team to get specific details. 

While no official information is available, one user stated that Cognism cost their team around €20,000 (about $21,700) per year. What we do know is that each user gets a custom-tailored price upon contact, depending on their industry, company size, and chosen contract length. Based on these factors and your needs, you’ll be able to choose from one of the following Cognism tiers:

1. Platinum
2. Diamond

For more information on the features available in each plan, consult the table below: 

Unlike most other sales intelligence tools, Cognism charges a flat rate for database access instead of selling credits that users spend on individual actions. 

Users in both tiers can use the Chrome extension and integrate Cognism with the following tools:

• Salesloft
• Outreach
• Hubspot
• Salesforce

Besides the subscription, all Cognism users also pay a flat platform access fee. This additional expense covers customer support, onboarding, and data maintenance costs. 

The platform doesn’t disclose anything else about its pricing publicly, so there’s no information on monthly and annual commitments or a per-user price. 

Bonus read: To learn more about the cost-effectiveness of Cognism’s alternatives, check out our pricing guides for: 

• Apollo
• Outreach
• Salesloft
• Gmass
• Clearbit

Is Cognism Worth It? 

Many sales data providers focus on Europe and North America without up-to-date information about companies and decision-makers in other areas. 

If you’re targeting prospects in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, or the Middle East, paying for a Cognism subscription may be worth it. You’ll receive access to a large database of contact information that’s harder to find elsewhere. 

While the platform’s database has an impressive geographical reach, there are other factors you should take into account before making an informed decision. 

Let’s review some of the users' experiences with Cognism and some potential drawbacks. 

Cognism—User Experiences

According to online reports, users are generally satisfied with Cognism. The platform has a decent score on popular review sites, which you can see in the table below:

The majority of the positive reviews praise Cognism’s wide geographical coverage, dependable GDPR compliance, and verified contact information. 

That said, some users expressed dissatisfaction with Cognism’s sales tactics. 

Some customers reported that the minimal commitment to the platform is a 6-month contract, which they weren’t happy about due to the lack of a free trial. According to another customer, Cognism isn’t transparent about its contract auto-renewal—potentially leading to users paying longer than intended. 

For a company that prides itself on data accuracy, the reports of high bounceback and low deliverability due to invalid email addresses are also worrisome. In many reviews, Cognism’s support team was labeled inefficient due to email-only communication—there’s no phone line or live chat option. 

According to some users, Cognism’s prospecting filters also leave room for improvement. They only let you decide between generic verticals instead of specific niches. For instance, there’s only one filter for software development in general, instead of multiple ones for different types of software. 

Naturally, while you should take individual experiences with a grain of salt, Cognism comes with a few objective drawbacks you should consider before committing to a contract. 

Objective Shortcomings of Cognism

Cognism provides some value to anyone looking to enrich their prospects and discover new ones, but it also has some notable disadvantages, such as:

• Untransparent pricing 
• Lack of a free trial
• No email outreach features 
• Only one database

Since Cognism doesn’t release pricing information publicly, comparing its cost-effectiveness with similar data providers is difficult. Although the platform states that it charges a maintenance fee, its exact cost is also undisclosed. The lack of transparency opens the door to other hidden or barely visible expenses—particularly problematic for smaller teams on a tight budget. 

There’s no free trial either, so you can’t try out the platform before buying. You can schedule a demo with the sales team, but it’s not as interactive and dependable as testing Cognism with your prospects and search prompts. 

The website hosts an interactive demo, but you can only follow predetermined steps. Completing the demo amounts to little more than getting a passive presentation of the platform’s Prospector tool. 

Beyond prospect enrichment, the platform doesn’t do much for your outbound efforts and you’ll have to rely on other software for email outreach features. Even if you’re satisfied with this, note that Cognism only provides data from a single database—there’s no way to cross-reference the information with other sources within the platform. 

For a platform that sources data from dozens of databases and uses AI to scrape millions of online sources while also automating your email outreach, check out Clay. 

Start Cost-Effective Outbound Campaigns With Clay

Clay is an AI-powered sales intelligence platform that surges the effectiveness of your outbound campaigns by enriching your prospects at scale with contact information, company data, and job-specific details.

Unlike Cognism and other single-source data providers, Clay enriches your prospects with vast amounts of data from over 50 sources, including, but not limited to:

• Hunter.io
• SignalHire
• Owler
• Prospeo
• Debounce

The best part—you don’t need separate accounts and subscriptions for each data provider, and there’s no need to copy and paste information from every source manually. Clay’s powerful waterfall enrichment automates the process and examines each source sequentially until you find the necessary information. 

This approach significantly cuts down your costs for two reasons:

1. You don’t need a huge team of sales reps to find and organize the data manually 
2. Using Clay credits, you only pay for the data you get 

Thanks to Clay’s automated prospect enrichment, you’ll save hundreds of hours and get the most accurate info—you can easily cross-reference data from multiple sources. 

Compared to Cognism, Clay is much easier to fit into your current sales stack because it supports integration with over 100 other platforms. 

Want to see Clay’s automated enrichment & integrations in practice? Take a look at the video below:

Turbocharge Your Outbound Processes With Clay’s AI

Clay’s AI automation can streamline your outbound efforts in multiple ways, including:

1. Collecting and organizing data from online sources
2. Generating personalized emails that convert

With Clay, you don’t have to rely solely on data from prospect databases. Thanks to Clay’s AI web scraper, Claygent, you can quickly find additional information from any online source without manually Googling and going through countless web pages.

Thanks to Clay’s integration with one of the most advanced AI models in the world, OpenAI’s GPT-4, you can process and summarize information from thousands of online sources in mere minutes. You’ll receive easily understandable insights that you can use for a more personal approach to each lead. 

Once you have all the information you need, the platform’s AI email builder will generate highly personalized AI messages for each prospect individually. You’ll be able to scale up your outbound processes at a fraction of the price you’d pay a team of sales reps to research and write the emails manually.

After that, you can export the emails to popular email senders Clay integrates with, like:

• Instantly
• Outreach
• Salesloft
• Smartlead

For more use cases and info on the technology powering Clay, you can: 

1. Sign up for the Clay newsletter 📰
2. Join the platform’s Slack community 🤝
3. Check out the Learn hub 📖

Set Your Outreach Campaign up for Success With Clay

Unlike Cognism, Clay offers transparent pricing and a functional free plan that you can use to try out all the core features of the platform. For more credits and advanced options, check out one of Clay’s affordable paid plans:

Each of the paid plans also includes a 14-day free trial, allowing you to test-drive all features before paying. 

To try them out and get started with Clay, follow these three quick steps:

1. Visit the signup page
2. Provide your email and password
3. Explore Clay’s data enrichment and AI automation features 🤖