Clearbit Alternatives After HubSpot and What to Use Now

If HubSpot is your CRM, the first Clearbit alternative to check is the one already in your account. Clearbit pointed users of its discontinued free tools to HubSpot's Breeze Intelligence. HubSpot's own guide describes record enrichment built into the CRM. The credit details are in the cost table below.

If your records live in Salesforce, Pipedrive or another CRM, start from the job and pick the tool second:

1. Name the job Clearbit did for you: filling in records, finding emails, spotting website visitors, shortening forms or serving logos.
2. Pick a tool built for that one job. Apollo, Lusha, UpLead, Kaspr, Hunter and Leadfeeder are the usual first candidates for the jobs in the table below.
3. Test it on 100 records you already know are correct before you sign anything.

What happened to Clearbit, and when?

HubSpot owns Clearbit now, and the free Clearbit products have been switched off. Clearbit's own changelog dates every step:

On the way out, Clearbit sent free-tool users to Breeze Intelligence, HubSpot's data layer. The changelog says Breeze offers features similar to the free tools: data enrichment, form shortening and buyer intent.

Do you even need to leave if you are on HubSpot?

Often you do not. HubSpot's data enrichment guide describes a feature that fills company and contact fields on your HubSpot records, the record-enrichment job. Three details in it catch people out.

It matches on very little. For a contact, HubSpot matches on the work email plus the first and last name. For a company, it uses the domain. A record with a personal address and no company domain gives it almost nothing to match on.

It ships switched off. Automatic enrichment starts off for contacts and for companies alike.

It protects existing data unless you tell it otherwise. Existing values stay in place unless you overwrite them by hand or turn on the setting that overwrites incorrect enrichment values.

On cost, the guide is plain. Enrichment itself uses no HubSpot Credits. Smart properties, a separate feature, do use them, so check which of the two your team has switched on. The data is drawn from public web information, outside providers and the commercial dataset HubSpot maintains.

Run this test before you pay anyone:

1. Is HubSpot your system of record? Check where your reps actually update deals and contacts.
2. Do you only need company and contact fields? That means industry, size, location, job title and similar fields.
3. Is automatic enrichment switched on? If it is off, a Super Admin can switch it on in settings.
4. Do you need enriched data outside HubSpot? For example through an API, inside your own product, or in a data warehouse.

If your answers are yes, yes, fixable and no, stay. Switch enrichment on, write down your overwrite rule, and spend the budget somewhere else.

If you answered no to the first question or yes to the fourth, you need another source. The table below shows which kind.

Which Clearbit alternative fits the job Clearbit did for you?

"Clearbit" meant different things to different teams, from shorter forms to filled CRM fields to logos inside an app. One big data contract bought to cover all of it means paying for jobs you may no longer need done.

How to read the table:

If two rows apply, start with the one closest to revenue. For most B2B founders that is email finding, or record enrichment for outbound lists. Logos can wait a week.

Visitor identification and form shortening only pay off if inbound traffic is a real channel for you. If your pipeline comes from outbound, put those two rows last.

Buy intent data only when the market is large. I use intent data when the total market is big enough for signals to mean something. Say a market has 2,000 companies and only about 10 show intent signals. I skip intent data there and write one offer that fits all 2,000. Intent data works as an add-on to a good list.

What do the alternatives cost?

These prices do not share one basis, and I am not going to force them into one. Each row shows the vendor's own currency and billing basis. I list only the tools whose price terms I could check against a public source at the time of writing. The others publish plans on their own pricing pages, so check those directly before you buy.

A founder testing alone can run the 100-record test below on one month of an entry paid plan from a finder that publishes its price, such as Hunter. Spend enterprise money only after a cheaper tool fails it in the markets you sell to.

Then size the plan to the real list, not the test. I want a first list of at least 20,000 contacts. Hunter's Starter plan gives 2,000 credits a month, and finding one email costs 1 credit. A 20,000-contact list therefore needs about ten such months of credits before you verify anything.

Credits per month decide your real cost long before the sticker price does. For scale: to get 30 to 35 booked B2B sales calls a month, I plan on contacting at least 10,000 people a month, so the credit volume for that list is the real budget line.

The ZoomInfo range is Vendr's own marketplace data from deals made through Vendr, so read it as what those buyers paid. The same page says annual prepayment is standard, and that price escalation clauses of 5 to 10% a year are typical. Negotiate that clause before you sign, because it compounds every renewal. Teams that outgrow an entry finder usually weigh Clay against ZoomInfo next, and teams already on Apollo compare their Apollo options.

If you would rather compare cost per contact than cost per plan, see what B2B contact data costs per contact.

There is one more cost question founders ask: who pays for the data when an agency runs outbound for you? In my agency's engagements, the client pays for tools, data, sending domains and mailboxes directly, separate from our monthly fee.

The stack differs for every client, depending on industry, market, sending volume and sales team size. Whoever runs your outbound, ask whose name is on each data license before the work starts.

What should Salesforce, Pipedrive and other CRM users do?

HubSpot's guide describes enriching the contacts and companies in your HubSpot account. If Salesforce, Pipedrive or another CRM is your system of record, your records live elsewhere, so you need a separate source.

What matters is how the enrichment tool writes into your CRM. Work through these steps in order:

1. Shortlist only tools that connect natively to your CRM, or offer an API your team will actually maintain. A tool that needs a weekly CSV import becomes a chore somebody quietly stops doing.
2. Write your overwrite rule before the first sync. Decide field by field what the tool may change and what stays owned by your reps. A rep who sees a title they confirmed on a call replaced by an older one stops trusting the CRM.
3. Give every field one source. If two tools write to the same field, nobody knows which value is current.
4. Add a second source only when your test shows a real coverage gap. Whether a gap justifies a cascade of providers is the question behind waterfall enrichment.

How do you test a replacement on 100 records before you pay?

Most trials test a tool on records nobody can check. Use records where you already know the truth.

1. Pull 100 records you know are right. Use customers, live deals and people you have spoken to this year, whose title and email are confirmed.
2. Split them across the markets and company sizes you sell to. For example, take 25 records from each of four cells: two regions times two size bands. A tool that is strong in one region can be thin in another.
3. Lock the true values in a separate sheet. Give the tool only what it would get in real life: a name and a company domain.
4. Run the same 100 records through each candidate. Free plans cover far fewer than 100 lookups (Hunter's free plan, for example, gives 50 credits a month). Buy one month of the entry paid plan for your two finalists. Use free plans only for a 25-record pre-screen.
5. Score every field against your locked sheet, using the scorecard below.
6. Verify every returned email with NeverBounce or DeBounce before you count it as valid.

The bounce rule is the one I never bend: every address gets verified before anything is sent. A single failure on records you already confirmed is a fail, because the real list will be messier than your test.

Pick the tool that wins on email and title in the cells you sell to most, provided it passes the bounce rule. Match rate on its own flatters a tool. More returned records with wrong titles lose to fewer records with the right ones.

Mailbox providers judge your list the same way. Gmail's sender guidelines ask senders to hold spam rates under 0.10% in Postmaster Tools and never to reach 0.30%. They also tell senders not to purchase email addresses from other companies. Complaints count against your sending domain, whichever vendor supplied the address.

When is the data tool not the problem?

Most founders blame the data first. A new data tool will not fix a reply rate on its own.

I have watched one cold email go out from two companies. Not a word in it changed. One company got a 7.5% reply rate. The other got 2%. The difference sat with the sender and what prospects found when they looked that sender up. A better enrichment vendor does not close that gap, and clever wording will not rescue a weak list or a sender nobody trusts.

Prospects do not care which CRM or data vendor you pay for. Buyers see one message from one person and decide whether that person looks worth answering.

The other half is how the list gets built. My team builds lists from several sources side by side, including RocketReach, ZoomInfo and Sales Navigator, and I would put a list built that way against a scraped one every time.

For a UK social media marketing agency, we pulled lists from Sales Navigator, Apollo and UpLead across 3 niches. Over 12 months, LinkedIn and email outreach to those lists booked 714 sales calls. Cheap lists bought from freelancers go the other way: low open rates and high bounces.

Before you blame the data, check three things in this order:

1. Was the list built for one clear audience?
2. Was every address verified?
3. Is the sender's profile worth replying to?

If all three hold and replies are still weak, then test a new data source.

What changes if you prospect into the EU or UK?

GDPR adds duties when enriched data comes from a vendor rather than from the person, and switching tools does not remove them. This is not legal advice.

Under Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR, legitimate interests can be a lawful basis, unless the person's rights and freedoms override them. Article 14 then applies, because the data reached you from a source other than the person. You must tell them:

• who you are
• why you process their data, and on what legal basis
• which legitimate interest you rely on
• which categories of data you hold
• the source the data came from

The deadline is a reasonable period, at the latest one month. If you use the data to contact the person, you must tell them at that first communication.

In practice, your first email to an EU prospect should say where you got their details. Prefer vendors that let you answer that question for each record. Here is what each data provider says about GDPR.

UK email adds another layer. PECR regulation 22 restricts unsolicited marketing email to individual subscribers. Regulation 2 treats limited companies and other incorporated bodies as corporate subscribers. The consent rule therefore bites on sole traders, while email to a limited company's staff falls outside regulation 22.

A sole trader must have opted in, or you must qualify for the soft opt-in, which also demands an easy refusal route at collection and in each later email. Whatever the recipient type, put a plain opt-out line in every UK email and honor every refusal.

German-speaking markets call for extra care. A fresh enrichment vendor does not change this. If a client asks us for German buyers, I tighten our own rules and move that outreach to LinkedIn.

An enriched email address in Germany, Austria or the Czech Republic stays unused unless a compliant basis exists. Wherever you send, keep an exclusion list of everyone who opts out, and check every new campaign against it so those people are never contacted again.

Name the job Clearbit did for you, test replacements on 100 records you can check, verify every address, then pay.

Not sure which Clearbit job you still need done? Book a call and send me the 100 records you plan to test with. I will tell you what I would check first.