Phone Numbers Lookup API, the comparison

You are using a tool like Captain Data, Clay or Surf, and you need to integrate a phone numbers lookup API inside.

There are several elements to consider when choosing such API, but the most important are price and accuracy.

In this article, you will find a complete comparison to help you make the best choice.

Number of Mobile phone numbers found by API

One of the most important things when buying a phone numbers API is the number of phone numbers you can find.

It’s useless to pay for a service that will not find anything.

So we proceeded to do a few tests; we bought subscriptions to Lusha, Apollo, Kaspr, and Datagma.

We conducted a simple experiment. First, we scraped 400 random LinkedIn profiles using Captain Data template named Search Sales Navigator Leads.

The search criteria we used were location (respectively, North America, United Kingdom and India), job title (marketing and CEO), headcount (51-200 and 5000-10,000), and industries (Software Development, Banking, and Healthcare).

We then enriched the data with phone numbers using Captain Data Integration.

Here is the result we got:

Then we also did the same on a UK sample.

Some extract of our test process :

Of course, these numbers must be taken into perspective with other factors. Are the number correct? Hard to say, as you need to call everyone.

But some phone numbers you paid are landline numbers; in this case, you spent way too much. In the detailed explanation below, you will see that on a list of “mobile numbers” sold by Apollo, only 11% were mobile numbers, and the other 89% was landline numbers;

Price of Phone Numbers API comparison

After the number of phones found, the second criterion we must compare is pricing:

Price per credit and API Access

All services do not offer API in all their plans.

For Kaspr & Lusha you need to take the enterprise plan (named Scale on Lusha, and Custom on Kaspr) to access the API.

These plans begin at an average of $7000 a year, so it’s only affordable for some.

Datagma and Apollo offer API access in all plans. They start at $39 for Datagma and &49 for Apollo. 

Secondly, it’s interesting to check the price paid per number.

The more expensive your plans are, the less the price per phone number is.

For example, for Lusha, in the Pro plan, the price is $0.,75 per credit; for Datagma it’s 0.58 per credit; and for Kaspr, it’s 0.6 per credit, while for Apollo, it’s $2 per phone number. 

However, you can buy extra Apollo credits, starting at 0.20 per phone number, but they do not rollover; if you don’t use them immediately, you lose them. With Kaspr, you will pay 730 euros for 1000 credits.

Ability to only have mobile phone numbers.

When you use a chrome extension, you usually have a preview of the data you will get, so for some phone numbers; you can preview if it’s mobile phone numbers or not. 

However, this feature is not available with API for all services.

It is available for Datagma, where all the numbers we give you are certified Mobile Direct Line Phone Numbers.

You will pay only for mobile phone numbers. If the phone delivered is not a mobile phone, you are not paying anything.

Apollo says they only deliver mobile phone numbers, but when you check deeply, you can see that half the numbers they give are not mobile phone numbers.

For example, we did a little test with Apollo, asking them to enrich a list of French C-Level (we use French people cause it’s easier for us to see if the numbers are mobile or not, as all mobile number in France begins with +33 6 or +33 7)

In this file, all the numbers in yellow are sold as mobile numbers, but they are landline numbers.

And further, all numbers in red are not french numbers, so those numbers are not false. Only one seems correct on a list of 9 phone numbers, meaning you pay 9x the price.

Unlike Datagma, with Lusha & Kaspr, you can choose to have only phone numbers.

This way, you will be charged only if the API delivers you a phone number, but you cannot specify to have only mobile phone numbers. 

It will happen that you will pay for landline numbers, but of course, mobile phone numbers have different values than HQ phone numbers, so you are paying too much for something useless.

Moreover, with Kaspr, if you specify in the API the settings: Only phone numbers (even landline) will you pay twice the price like you can see in this Kaspr documentation:

Rollover of credits

Rollover of credits means that your unused credits will continue to roll over each month as long as you have a subscription to a service.

This way, you are not in a hurry at the end of the month to burn all your non-spent credits. 

Lusha, Datagma, and Kaspr propose this feature but not by Apollo;

It means you have to calculate precisely what you need cause Apollo will put every credit remaining in the trash. 

Account pausing

What happens when you stop your subscription?

With Apollo, Kaspr & Lusha, you will lose your unused credits, but with Datagma, you can pause your account as many times as you want. 

This way, you get your credits back when you decide to take a new plan! 

Numbers of free emails included.

We all know that email and mobile phone numbers do not have the same value.
So it’s weird when you use Lusha or Kaspr to pay the same price for an email and a phone.

Both services charge you one credit by email.

Even if here we are speaking about API to find mobile phone numbers, it’s fair to add that Apollo and Datagma offer many emails in all their plans.

For Apollo, even if they call this unlimited, it’s only 10 000 emails per month, and for Datagma, it’s between (3750 and 45 000).

So which one to choose?