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Saniya Sood
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Published May 14, 2025 · Updated October 7, 2026
The short answer: a sales prospecting tool does three things: finds the people who fit your ICP, gives you a way to reach them (a verified email, a mobile, a LinkedIn profile), and tells you when to reach out. The six below are the ones a B2B team under about fifty people will actually shortlist. Apollo and Saleshandy bundle data with sending; Cognism, UpLead and Lusha are contact databases priced by the credit; Valley (our tool) starts from buying signals and ends in a sent, personalized message. Entry prices run from free to about $100 a month; Cognism is quote only.
Disclosure: Valley makes one of the tools below and competes for part of this budget. Our entry is marked. Every price was read from the vendor's own pricing page on October 6 or 7, 2026.
► Prospect from people already showing intent: 7 days free on LinkedIn and email
What a prospecting tool should do
Find: search by title, company size, industry, technology, and ideally by behaviour (who viewed your profile, who engaged with a post, who just changed jobs).
Reach: a verified work email or mobile, or a LinkedIn route that does not get an account restricted.
Time: a reason to write this week, not a static list that was true in January.
Hand off: the record lands in your CRM or sequencer without a CSV.
How we checked
Plan names, prices, credit allowances and trial terms were read from each vendor's pricing page on October 6 or 7, 2026. Feature claims are the vendors' own unless stated. We have not run the six side by side on one list.
Give your sales team
an unfair advantage.
Tool | What it is | Starting price | Trial | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Valley (our tool) | Signal-based outbound: find, research, write, send | $149/seat/mo billed quarterly ($199 monthly) | 7 days | Teams that want warm prospects contacted, not listed |
Saleshandy | Cold email + lead finder | $34/mo annual ($41 monthly) | 7 days | Email-first teams on a budget |
Cognism | Contact database + intent | Not published; 5 seats included per package | Not stated | Phone-first teams needing verified mobiles |
Apollo | Database + sequencer | Free; Basic $49/user/mo annual | 14 days | Small teams wanting data and sending in one tool |
UpLead | Contact database | $99/mo ($74 annual) | 7 days, 5 credits | Clean exports with a stated accuracy guarantee |
Lusha | Contact database + extension | Free (40 credits); $49.90/mo | Free plan | Individual reps who need a few numbers a day |
1. Valley: prospecting that starts from intent (our tool)
Valley finds prospects from live buying signals (profile views, post engagement, website visitors, job changes, funding rounds) or from a list you upload, qualifies each person against your ICP, researches them on the open web and writes a personalized LinkedIn or email message you approve before it sends. The output is a conversation, not a spreadsheet.
Pricing: Starter $199 per seat a month or $149 billed quarterly (LinkedIn, email as an add-on); Plus $299 or $249 quarterly with 1,000 email messages a month, onboarding and a CSM; Growth $499 with $300 of credits a month. 7-day trial, payment method required.
Honest cons: it is not a bulk contact database; bring a list from Apollo or Cognism if the gap is phone numbers.
Read next: Valley pricing explained.
2. Saleshandy: cold email with a lead finder bolted on
Saleshandy is a cold-email platform (unlimited sending accounts, warm-up, sequences) with a built-in lead finder that spends credits on verified emails and phones. The appeal is one bill for finding and sending.
Pricing: Starter $34 a month on annual billing ($41 monthly) with 2,000 active prospects, 6,000 emails and 1,500 lead-finder credits a month; Pro $76 ($99 monthly) with 30,000 prospects and 4,000 credits; Scale $149 ($189 monthly) with 8,000 credits. One credit reveals an email, six a phone number. 7-day trial.
Honest cons: email only; LinkedIn is not a channel, and the lead finder is a waterfall of other vendors' data rather than its own.
3. Cognism: verified mobiles, priced by quote
Cognism is a compliance-first B2B database: emails, phone-verified mobiles, firmographics, technographics and, on the Pro package, Bombora intent data. The pricing page shows two Sales Prospecting packages, Standard and Pro, each with 5 seats included, and no prices.
Pricing: not published. One credit reveals one contact, viewing it again is free, and a credit is spent again only when the person changes jobs. CRM Enrichment is sold as an add-on or on its own.
Honest cons: no self-serve plan and no public price, so it is a sales conversation before it is a tool.
Read next: Cognism pricing explained.
4. Apollo: the public price list
Apollo combines a large contact database with email sequencing, a dialer and basic intent, and prints its prices. Credits are pooled across the team: 1 for an email, 8 for a phone number, no rollover.
Pricing: Free; Basic $49, Professional $79 and Organization $119 per user a month on annual billing ($65 and $99 monthly for the first two; Organization is annual only, minimum 3 seats). 14-day trial with 75 credits.
Honest cons: accuracy varies by region, and sending from your own mailboxes makes deliverability your job.
Read next: Apollo pricing and credits explained.
5. UpLead: a stated 95% accuracy guarantee
UpLead is a contact database that verifies emails at the moment you export them and states a 95% accuracy rate. It is deliberately simpler than Apollo: no sequencer, no dialer, just the list.
Pricing: Essentials $99 a month for 170 credits ($74 a month on annual billing, 2,040 credits a year); Plus $199 for 400 credits ($149 annual) with technographics and advanced filters; Professional by quote with intent data and API access. 7-day trial with 5 credits; extra credits $0.60.
Honest cons: credit counts are small for the price; teams exporting hundreds of contacts a week outgrow Plus fast.
6. Lusha: the free tier and the browser extension
Lusha lives in a browser extension: open a LinkedIn profile, reveal the email or mobile, push it to the CRM. The free plan makes it the cheapest way to test whether a database covers your market at all.
Pricing: Free with 40 credits a month; Starter $49.90 a month for 400 credits ($37.45 a month annual); Professional $69.90 for 600 ($52.45 annual); Premium $399.90 for 3,400 ($299.95 annual). An email is 1 credit, a phone number 5.
Honest cons: thinner coverage outside North America and Western Europe, and no signals of any kind.
► Want to see signal-based prospecting on your own ICP? Book a demo
Give your sales team
an unfair advantage.
Pick by the bottleneck. If reps have names but no numbers, buy a database and compare the cost of one verified phone: 5 credits at Lusha, 6 at Saleshandy, 8 at Apollo, one credit at Cognism (price unknown). If reps have numbers but no reason to call, buy signals. If reps have both and still do not send, the gap is the writing and the follow-up, which is the layer Valley sells.
Three questions for any vendor
What does one credit buy, and do unused credits roll over?
Is the price per user, per seat or per LinkedIn account, and what is the minimum?
Where does the tool stop: a list, a verified record, or a sent message?
Where Valley fits
Valley (our tool) sits after the database: it watches for intent, qualifies, researches and writes, and a person approves every message. Teams keep a database for cold lists and use Valley for the warm ones. Plans from $149 per seat a month billed quarterly. The method behind every comparison on this site is on how we compare outbound tools.
► Start with the people already looking at you: 7 days free
FAQ
What are the best sales prospecting tools? For a B2B team under fifty people: Apollo or Saleshandy if you want data and sending together, Cognism, UpLead or Lusha if you want a database, and Valley if you want signal-based outreach that ends in a sent message.
What is the best free prospecting tool? Apollo's free plan and Lusha's 40 free credits a month are the two usable free tiers. Both are capped by credits and suit one rep, not a team.
What is a B2B prospecting tool? Software that finds people who fit your ideal customer profile and gives you a verified way to contact them, sometimes with a signal that tells you when.
Is LinkedIn a prospecting tool? Sales Navigator is the search layer; it finds people but does not give you emails or phones, and sending beyond InMail needs another tool.
How this page was made: the facts were read from the sources named in the text on October 7, 2026; drafted with AI assistance; fact-checked, reviewed and edited by Saniya Sood.
