ContactOut vs LeadMagic
 ContactOut |  LeadMagic | |
|---|---|---|
| Sentiment | ||
| Score | 44/100 | 68/100 |
| Rank in category | #3 | #1 |
| Rated comments | 18 | 21 |
| Best for | Recruiters who need personal email addresses; Pulling emails for contacts found on LinkedIn | Budget teams running their own enrichment waterfall; Finding work emails and mobiles for contacts scraped from Apollo or LinkedIn; A second-pass check on unknown or failed emails |
| Skip it if | Sending to its emails without a separate verification step; Users who only want a simple LinkedIn lookup | Teams that need ZoomInfo-level coverage from one source; Senders who cannot add a separate catch-all verifier |
| Starting price | $39/mo | $83/mo |
| Pricing (vendor-stated) | Limited-time free tier (5 emails, phones and exports a day, one user). Email plan $49/mo monthly or $39/mo billed annually; Email + Phone $99/mo monthly or $79/mo billed annually; both single-user. Cheaper regional plans exclude US data (from $19/mo billed annually). Team and API plans are sales-led. | Essential is $99/mo billed monthly for 5,000 credits, or $990/yr (about $83/mo); tiers run up to Ultimate at $849/mo for 100,000 credits, with Enterprise from $2,490/quarter. No free plan or free credits; a paid plan is required at signup, and failed lookups cost nothing. |
About 18 first-hand, non-promotional comments, many from recruiters, give a mixed but mostly favourable picture: ContactOut is rated for personal emails and for pulling contacts from LinkedIn profiles, while several senders report that not every email is verified and bounces follow, and views on its phone numbers are split. Promotion is heavy: the corpus filter already dropped 81 repeat-promoter comments, an Apollo employee called out astroturfing for ContactOut in one r/coldemail thread where several accounts praised it within days in February 2026, a September and October 2025 burst of 'tried it, tech team was great' testimonials was excluded, and many criticisms came only inside pitches for Prospeo, FullEnrich and other tools, so those are not counted either.
Users like
- Strong on personal email addresses; a tech recruiter who tried it alongside RocketReach found it the stronger of the two for personal emails[1][2]
- Works well for LinkedIn-sourced lists; one user who has used a dozen data tools says it stands out across almost every vertical when starting from LinkedIn[1][2][3]
- Email accuracy is rated well by some users, including one team reporting under 2% bounces on LinkedIn-sourced lists[1][2]
- Helps recruiters find hard-to-reach passive candidates[1]
Users complain about
- Not every email it returns is verified; several users report bounces and say results need a separate verification pass[1][2][3]
- Phone coverage was poor for SaaS contacts in one user's experience, and another found its numbers less accurate than ZoomInfo's (other users rate its mobiles well)[1][2]
- Has grown from a lookup tool into a broader sales platform; a user who only needed LinkedIn lookups found it overkill and left, and another barely used it because the interface was confusing[1][2]
- You are locked into its credit-based pricing model, which one user cites as a reason to build their own sourcing instead[1]
Independent users describe LeadMagic as a cheap, pay-as-you-go email and mobile finder that slots into a waterfall, usually alongside Apollo or inside Clay, and that also works as a second-pass verifier. About 21 non-promotional comments carry an opinion, mostly brief and positive, centred on price and on finding emails and phones Apollo misses. The criticism is thinner but specific: one user says it has been failing them lately, and its handling of catch-all addresses is contested, with one user calling its 'valid catch-all' results unreliable and another praising its catch-all marking. Promotional comments are a smaller share than for most tools here, mostly plugs for other scrapers and verifiers plus a same-day cluster of Prospeo plugs, one of which knocks its mobile numbers.
Users like
- Cheap and pay-as-you-go; users call it the low-cost option for volume, one putting it at a tenth of Apollo's cost[1][2][3][4]
- Finds emails other sources miss, such as a contact's new address after a job change when Apollo still had the old one[1][2][3]
- Used for mobile numbers too, with users reporting better mobile coverage than Apollo[1][2][3]
- Doubles as a verifier: users run it as a second pass on unknown emails, then use its finder to replace invalid ones[1][2][3]
Users complain about
- One user says it charges for 'valid catch-all' results that are not reliable, forcing either lower coverage or a separate catch-all verifier (another user disputes this and praises its catch-all marking)[1]
- Consistency is questioned: one user says it has been failing them recently[1]
- Lacks the phones and emails that big databases like ZoomInfo collect from customer CRMs, so coverage trails them[1]