ContactOut vs Lusha
 ContactOut |  Lusha | |
|---|---|---|
| Sentiment | ||
| Score | 44/100 | 43/100 |
| Rank in category | #3 | #4 |
| Rated comments | 18 | 21 |
| Best for | Recruiters who need personal email addresses; Pulling emails for contacts found on LinkedIn | Individual reps doing occasional lookups on a budget; A secondary source alongside another database; Small teams starting on a free plan |
| Skip it if | Sending to its emails without a separate verification step; Users who only want a simple LinkedIn lookup | Enterprise or Fortune 500 prospecting; Large list building with fine-grained filters; Teams that cannot absorb bounces from unverified emails |
| Starting price | $39/mo | $37.45/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. | Free plan with 40 credits per month. Paid plans per the pricing page's plan data: Starter $37.45/mo billed annually ($49.90 monthly) for 400 credits per month, Pro $52.45/mo annually ($69.90 monthly) for 600, Premium $299.95/mo annually ($399.90 monthly) for 3,400; Scale is custom. An email reveal costs 1 credit and a phone number 5. The page does not state whether prices are per user; teams above 5 users are sent to sales. No free trial beyond the free plan. |
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 see Lusha as a budget-friendly lookup tool that some find more accurate than Apollo for emails and phone numbers, useful as a second source or for one-off lookups. The trade-off is uneven accuracy (users report invented emails, invalid numbers and roughly 50/50 hit rates), thin coverage for enterprise and EMEA work, and weak filtering and credit terms. More than half of the Reddit mentions were promotional: one cluster of comments repeats 'Lusha for accuracy, Apollo for volume' in vendor terms, and many replies to Lusha complaints exist to plug alternatives (Bookyourdata, UpLead, ContactOut, FullEnrich and others), so this rests on about 21 independent opinions, most of them brief.
Users like
- Budget friendly, with free credits that make it easy to start and combine with Apollo[1][2][3]
- Some users find its emails and numbers more accurate than Apollo's or ZoomInfo's, though it returns fewer results[1][2][3][4]
- Phone numbers, including mobiles, work fairly well for some teams despite occasional misses[1][2]
- Useful as one of two sources: users pair it with Apollo, and one found it surfaced far more decision makers than Apollo for the same companies[1][2][3]
Users complain about
- Accuracy is unreliable for some: users report about 50/50 accuracy, invalid numbers that hurt domains, and one domain owner traced made-up email addresses sent to his company back to Lusha[1][2][3][4]
- Falls short against premium providers: it lost to ZoomInfo and Cognism in US and EMEA tests and was not enough for Fortune 500 IT prospecting[1][2][3]
- Filtering and user experience are weak, and one user calls the UX horrible enough to make it 2 to 3 times more expensive in practice[1]
- Credit terms frustrate users: no refunds for bad data, CRM saving gated on the first paid tier, and a search limit that appeared without notice[1][2]