Make this comparison fit your situation
Three quick choices. No extra page and no hidden score shown.
You work as
Recruitment team
Budget pressure
The static comparison stays the source; this only re-weights the fit for your context.
Cognism
B2B contact and company data sold in five-seat packages with a credit allowance, where one credit reveals a full contact including mobile numbers. Price on request.
Lusha
B2B contact data platform that returns email addresses and phone numbers for people you have already identified, through a browser extension, the platform or an API. Runs on credits.
Cognism vs Lusha
Cognism charges one credit for a whole revealed contact, mobile included, and sells it as a five-seat platform; Lusha charges per data point, where a phone number costs five times an email, and neither publishes a price.
Quick verdict
CloseBoth are defensible. A small number of criteria decide it.
Choose Cognism if
- Your outreach runs on the phone and you need the unit cost of a mobile number to be predictable — one credit reveals the contact whether you take the email or the mobile
- You have roughly five people who need access, which is what both Standard and Pro include, so the bundle is the shape of your team rather than a surcharge
- You intend to enrich your ATS or CRM automatically and want the same credits to work across the platform, the enrichment product and the API without renegotiating the unit
Choose Lusha if
- Your outreach is mostly email, where a data point costs 1 credit and the five-seat entry bundle would be three seats you do not need
- You want the lookup to happen in the browser extension where the work already happens, sharing one balance with the platform and the API
- You want searching itself to cost nothing and to spend credits only on the specific data points you decide to reveal
Neither, if
- You expect to discover candidates by skill or experience — both start from a name you already have, and neither is a sourcing tool
- You need a cost per revealed contact before you commit: neither vendor publishes one, so no honest comparison of totals is possible here
- Your compliance posture requires knowing the origin and lawful basis of every personal contact detail — SourcrLab has verified neither vendor's claims on that
The credit models are documented on both sides and they genuinely separate the two products for phone-heavy work. What is missing is the thing that would settle it commercially: neither vendor publishes a price, so no cost per revealed contact exists on either side, and Benelux match rates are unestablished for both.
Summary
Choosing where a recruiter's contact details come from: the tool that turns a name into a working phone number or email address
What they have in common
Both reveal contact details for people you have already identified, and neither finds candidates by skill or experience — that is a sourcing tool's job. Both charge in credits, both charge once per revealed contact however often you look at it later, and neither publishes what a credit costs.
Where they really differ
What one credit buys. Cognism's credit reveals the contact including the mobile number; Lusha prices an email at 1 credit and a phone number at 5. If your channel is the phone, the same credit allowance means something five times smaller on one side than the other.
Who this decision is for
A desk that already knows who it wants to reach and is deciding how its phone-number budget should behave — typically a team large enough that the credit table, not the licence, is what determines the annual cost.
Summary
Comparing Cognism and Lusha on features, pricing, and recruiter fit.
Side by side, on what decides it
The deciding criterion here is: Whether you are buying phone numbers or email addresses, because the two credit models price those two things completely differently
| Decision factor | Cognism | Lusha |
|---|---|---|
| What one credit buys | One revealed contact, email or mobile, charged once | 1 credit for an email or company record; 5 credits for a phone number |
| The shape of the entry point | Five seats included in both Standard and Pro | One balance shared across the platform, the browser extension and the API |
| Automated enrichment | CRM Enrichment and Data-as-a-Service sit outside both packages as add-ons; the credits carry over but the access does not | The API runs on the same balance but charges a minimum of 1 credit per request even when nothing is returned, plus 1 credit per batch of up to 25 results |
| What happens to credits you do not use | Not established in Cognism's brief | Monthly plans roll over to twice the monthly allowance; annual credits expire at renewal; free plans do not roll over |
| Published price | None. Standard and Pro both end in Talk to sales | None. The vendor's pricing page did not serve plan details on 12 August 2026 |
| Coverage in the Benelux | Match rates in the Benelux are not established | Data coverage in the Benelux is not established |
Also weighs on it: How many people actually need a seat · Whether automated enrichment is in the plan or an add-on · How unused credits behave at the end of a period
Commercial facts
Only compare claims that SourcrLab can currently support. Unknowns stay unknown; verify buyer-critical details before purchase.
| Decision factor | Cognism | Lusha |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Enterprise | Freemium |
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Free trial | No | No |
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Add SourcrLab in GoogleWhere Cognism wins
The mobile number does not cost extra
A revealed contact is one credit whether you take the email or the mobile, and looking at it again later is free. For a desk that works the phone, that single design decision is the difference between a credit budget that lasts the year and one that runs out in the spring.
The credits do not change unit when the work does
The same credits work across the prospecting platform, CRM enrichment and the API without a surcharge. A team that starts with manual lookups and later automates its enrichment is not renegotiating what it buys halfway through the contract year.
Where Lusha wins
You can buy exactly the number of seats you have
Cognism's entry point is five seats in both packages, which a two-person desk cannot use. Lusha is bought per user, so a small team is not paying for three colleagues it does not have in order to reach the product at all.
The rules of the credit table are written down
The documentation prices each data point, states that searches cost nothing, and sets out how rollover and expiry work. Neither price is public on either side, but on this one you can at least model the consumption before you ask what a credit costs.
Trade-offs that apply either way
Neither price is public, so the totals cannot be compared
Cognism ends both packages in Talk to sales, and Lusha's pricing page did not serve plan details when it was checked. Any cost-per-contact comparison between these two is arithmetic performed on a number nobody outside the two sales teams has, and this page will not perform it.
Both are a layer, not a source of candidates
Neither product answers the question of who to approach. They both start from a person you have already identified somewhere else, which means the sourcing subscription that finds those people is a separate line in the budget on either path.
European personal data is your question to ask, not theirs to answer
Both vendors describe their compliance posture; SourcrLab has verified neither, and the catalogue previously carried one of those claims as if it were a feature. Read the trust centre and the contract yourself, because the lawful basis for personal contact data on European candidates is not something a comparison page can settle for you.
Reading the two price models
- Neither package has a published price, so cost cannot separate these two and this page does not pretend it can. What can be compared is the shape of the bill, and the shapes are genuinely different.
- Read any credit allowance you are quoted against the unit it buys. On Lusha a plan sized in credits is worth a fifth of its headline number if calling is your channel, because a phone number is 5 credits against 1 for an email.
- Ask both vendors for the same thing: the all-in annual figure at your seat count for the number of mobile numbers you actually expect to reveal. That question is answerable by a salesperson and is not answerable from any published page.
Best by scenario
A six-person agency desk that cold-calls candidates daily
The seat count matches the five-seat bundle and the work is phone-first, which is precisely where one credit per whole contact beats five credits per number.
Two in-house recruiters who mostly send email
At 1 credit per email address and no five-seat floor, the smaller team is not buying three seats it cannot use to reach a unit price it will rarely stress.
A team whose real problem is that it does not know who to call
Both start from a name. The budget belongs in a sourcing tool first, and a contact-data layer only becomes worth paying for once there is a list to enrich.
What this comparison does not know
Unknowns stay unknown. Verify these with the vendor before deciding — they are the gaps that would change the answer.
- What either vendor charges — no price is published on either side
- Match rates and data coverage in the Benelux, for both
- Whether either vendor's compliance claims hold — SourcrLab verified neither
- What Lusha charges for additional credits beyond a plan