ContactOut vs RocketReach
 ContactOut |  RocketReach | |
|---|---|---|
| Sentiment | ||
| Score | 44/100 | 17/100 |
| Rank in category | #3 | #13 |
| Rated comments | 18 | 15 |
| Best for | Recruiters who need personal email addresses; Pulling emails for contacts found on LinkedIn | Small teams that need a backup source for emails and phone numbers; Filling gaps in a multi-provider enrichment waterfall |
| Skip it if | Sending to its emails without a separate verification step; Users who only want a simple LinkedIn lookup | Buyers expecting one provider to cover all their enrichment; Teams sensitive to data-subject complaints and opt-out friction |
| Starting price | $39/mo | $27/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. | Essentials (email only) from $27/mo billed annually ($329/yr); Pro (email and phone) $69/mo billed annually ($829/yr); Ultimate $142/mo billed annually ($1,699/yr). Annual plans have unlimited lookups with capped exports (1,200 to 20,000 a year); monthly billing caps lookups at 100, 250 or 1,000 and costs more. Team plans start at $6K a year. A free account includes 5 lookups; no ongoing free plan. Figures are USD list prices; UK visitors are shown GBP (Essentials £21/mo billed annually). |
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 discussion is thin: roughly nine non-promotional comments give a buyer's opinion. Users who like RocketReach treat it as a secondary source, a backup lookup or an extra step in an enrichment waterfall that catches some contacts other providers miss; critics call it average at best and poor value, so overall data quality is contested. About half of the mentions are promotional, including a June 2025 cluster of four accounts steering readers to UpLead, four Mystrika replies in one thread on 2024-12-25, and a wave of ContactOut praise in recruiter threads. Many of the remaining comments come from people trying to remove their own data from the site, which is worth weighing if compliance matters to you.
Users like
Users complain about
- Poor value for some buyers: one says they paid too much for what they got, another calls it average at best and no better than Apollo, with transactional customer service[1][2][3]
- People listed in its database report that opt-out requests failed or went unanswered until they escalated, and one links a $1.6M Illinois privacy class-action settlement; others say a GDPR request worked within days[1][2][3][4][5]