Sales Prospecting Tools: 8 Compared by the Job They Do

Sales prospecting tools do one of four jobs. They hold a contact database, find contact details for a person you picked, copy leads from public pages or send the first messages. A sales team that sells by job title should start with a database such as Apollo or Lusha. An agency that sells websites to local businesses needs a list of businesses and a reason to write, and Leadodo is built for that.

This page compares 8 tools and Leadodo. Every detail about another product comes from that product's own website, read on Nov 10, 2026. The page does not rank them. It makes no claim about their data, their support or their results.

What are sales prospecting tools?

Sales prospecting tools are software that helps a seller find people or companies to contact and get a first message to them. Sales prospecting software is the same category under another name. The 8 products on this page are sorted here by four jobs.

1. Hold a database. You search records with filters and contact the matches. Apollo, Lusha and LeadIQ sit here.
2. Find contact details. You bring a name, a company domain or a LinkedIn profile, and the tool returns an email address or a phone number. Kaspr, Hunter and Snov.io sit here.
3. Copy leads from public pages. The tool reads map listings, directories or social profiles and hands you rows. PhantomBuster and Outscraper sit here.
4. Send. The tool runs your messages on a schedule. Five of the 8 sites name a channel the product sends on. Lusha's pricing page also lists email sequences.

Six of the 8 sites name sales teams, sales reps or revenue teams among their users. The databases behind prospecting tools for sales teams are counted in people. Apollo and Lusha count contacts, and LeadIQ and Kaspr count profiles. A local business is a place with an owner, which is a different kind of record.

The tools are one half of the work. The other half is the routine, and our guide to sales prospecting as a weekly routine covers it.

How do the 8 prospecting tools compare?

They differ most in where the leads come from and in the channels they send on. The first table shows both. The second shows the lowest paid plan each site showed on Nov 10, 2026.

Every count is the company's own figure. The last column follows from the channels each site names, and a product may have added one since.

Each price is the lowest paid plan the product's own page showed on Nov 10, 2026, with the billing words the page used. Outscraper has tiers and no plans, so its row gives the first paid tier of one service. Where a page did not label the billing period, or did not open, no price is quoted. Plans and credits change, so open the page before you budget.

Which sales prospecting tools hold a contact database?

Apollo, Lusha and LeadIQ. Each sells access to records of people and companies and counts usage in credits. They suit a seller who targets people by job title.

Apollo

Apollo's site describes a B2B contact and company database with a workspace "for prospecting, outreach, and dialing". Its data page says the database holds "240M+ global contacts" and "30M+ global companies". The same page names its sources, and local business data from Google Maps is among them. You search with what the site calls "65+ filters". Sequences then run steps across email and calls, and a parallel dialer logs each call to a CRM.

The pricing page counts usage in credits. An email costs 1 credit and a phone number costs 8.

Pick it over Leadodo when you sell to companies by job title and want the database, the email sequences and the dialer in one product. Its homepage names sales reps, RevOps and marketers, from small business to enterprise. That is a different job from the one Leadodo is built for, which is finding businesses with weak websites and starting the conversation.

Lusha

Lusha's data page headline reads "The B2B data behind your team and AI". The site says the database holds "515M+ Contacts" and "29M+ Companies", with "132M+ contacts in the United States". It says contact fields refresh weekly. The product list covers prospecting search, enrichment, lead scoring, lookalikes and a Chrome extension. It syncs with Salesforce, HubSpot, monday and Zoho.

Lusha is a contact and company database. Its pricing page lists "Automated email sequences" under the Free plan, and the pages read say no more about sending. Revealing a verified email address costs 1 credit and a phone number costs 5.

Pick it over Leadodo when you need email addresses and phone numbers for named people, inside a CRM you already run. Its homepage speaks to "revenue teams of all sizes", and its FAQ names recruiting teams. Enrichment is on Lusha's product list, and Leadodo is built for another job.

LeadIQ

LeadIQ's homepage describes it as "Global data to enrich, track, prospect, personalize, and automate sales". Its pricing FAQ says you query "a live dataset of 750 million+ professional profiles, refreshed every month". The Prospector captures leads in the browser through a Chrome extension and syncs them to a CRM. Other parts track job changes of past buyers and show signals such as hiring. The site also lists an AI Outbound Message Writer and a Power Dialer marked BETA.

The pages read do not say that LeadIQ sends email itself. Its homepage names integrations with Outreach and Salesloft. An email costs 1 credit and a phone number costs 10.

Pick it over Leadodo when your reps prospect in the browser and already send through a sales engagement tool. The pricing page says Pro is for "growing sales teams" and Enterprise is for "established sales teams".

Which prospecting tools find contact details for people you picked?

Kaspr, Hunter and Snov.io. You bring a LinkedIn profile, a name or a company domain, and the tool returns an email address or a phone number. Hunter and Snov.io also send.

Kaspr

Kaspr shows phone numbers and email addresses for people on LinkedIn, through a Chrome extension that works on a prospect's profile. Its homepage describes it as European contact data and says it holds contact data "for over 200m+ profiles". It says the data comes from "over 150 sources" and does not name them. The site also lists bulk enrichment of lead lists, a dashboard, integrations and an API.

Kaspr supplies data. The pages read do not say that it sends messages.

Its pricing page showed a Starter plan and a Business plan, priced per user in euro. The page did not label the billing period, so no price is quoted here.

Pick it over Leadodo when you find your prospects on LinkedIn one person at a time and want a phone number to call. The homepage names sales teams, recruiters and founders.

Hunter

Hunter calls itself an "email outreach platform to find verified decision makers and turn them into leads". Domain Search lists the email addresses of a company. Email Finder returns one person's address, and Email Verifier checks whether an address is valid. Its data page says "150M Professional email addresses indexed." The same page says information that no longer has a public source is removed after six months. Sequences send cold emails. The pages read mention no LinkedIn, phone or post.

Prices are flat. Every plan lists "Unlimited team members" who share one pool of credits. One found email costs 1 credit, and the page says "If the email address can't be found, it's free."

Pick it over Leadodo when you already know which companies you want and need an email address at each one, plus email sequences. The homepage names founders, marketers, sales teams and product owners.

Snov.io

Snov.io finds contact details and runs outreach to them. Its Email Finder searches by name, by company, by domain and on LinkedIn. The email finder page says the database holds "500M+ B2B email addresses", and the pricing page says the B2B data is "reverified monthly". Campaigns run across email and LinkedIn. Email warm-up and a sales CRM sit in the same product. LinkedIn automation is an add-on, priced per LinkedIn account slot.

The Starter, Pro and Custom Ultra cards say "Includes unlimited team seats".

Pick it over Leadodo when you want one product that finds an address and sends email and LinkedIn steps to people at companies. The homepage names no role or industry, and the site menu has an Agency page.

Which prospecting tools copy leads from public pages?

PhantomBuster and Outscraper. Each reads public sources such as map listings and social profiles and hands you rows. Our guide to Google Maps scrapers explains what such a list holds and what it still lacks.

PhantomBuster

PhantomBuster's help center calls it "a no-code, cloud-based platform for lead generation and outreach automation." A Phantom automates one task, such as extracting leads or sending connection requests. A Workflow runs several steps in one sequence. It works on LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Google Maps, Instagram and other platforms, and the help center says "Not all platforms support every type of automation." It collects leads from public sources and enriches them with emails and job details. It also sends LinkedIn connection requests and messages. The site names no contact database.

Plans are counted in execution hours and slots per workspace, and the help center says plans "are not differentiated by number of users." Its pricing page did not open on Nov 10, 2026, so no price is quoted here.

Pick it over Leadodo when LinkedIn is your main channel and you want to build your own automations. Its help center names sales and SDR teams. Our page on LinkedIn automation tools covers that group.

Outscraper

Outscraper is a pay as you go service that extracts business data from Google Maps and other sites. It delivers the data as files or through an API. Its Google Maps Scraper exports fields such as name, category, phone, website and rating. Other services add emails and social links for a domain, validate email addresses and look up phone numbers. The pages read give no record count and no refresh interval.

Outscraper supplies data and sends nothing. Its pricing page says "No monthly fees. No recurring billing."

Pick it over Leadodo when you want raw rows for a trade and an area, paid per record, and you have your own way to judge and contact them. The Google Maps scraper page names digital marketers, data analysts, researchers and developers.

Where does Leadodo fit, and where does it not?

Leadodo fits an agency that sells websites, SEO or marketing to local businesses. It does not fit a sales team that sells to companies by job title.

Leadodo is software for web design and marketing agencies. It finds businesses, scores their websites and runs outreach to the ones with the weakest sites. That covers three jobs.

1. Find. Leadodo finds businesses with a Google Maps scraper and a database of 460M+ contacts. You search by industry, area and company size, plus 20+ more filters. Lead Discovery can filter for businesses that have no website.
2. Choose. Twip AI scores every website in a search out of 100 across 10 domains. Lower means a weaker website and a better lead. Sites that score below 40 form the shortlist.
3. Contact. Your Outbound Machine runs six steps over 19 working days. A posted letter arrives on day 1, emails follow on days 4, 7 and 11, and LinkedIn steps come on days 15 and 19. The sequence stops for a business the moment it replies.

The difference is the second job. Several of the 8 tools score leads or track signals such as hiring and intent. Leadodo scores the prospect's own website, which is the thing a web agency sells.

That choice matters. In our own test of 3,570 cold emails, businesses with the weakest 20% of websites were about 3.2 times more likely to reply positively than a random sample from the other 80%. The test covered Dutch companies and email only. The method is in our write-up of the test. Our guide to lead scoring with the website as the score shows the same idea by hand on a short list.

Now the limits. Leadodo is built for one job, finding businesses with weak websites and starting the conversation. The 8 tools above do other jobs. Keep your CRM for what follows. If you sell software to finance directors, start with a database from the first group. If you only need an owner's email for a list you already trust, an email finder is enough.

Leadodo never contacts anyone itself. You send, under your own name.

How do you choose sales prospecting software?

Start from the job that is slowest for you today. Then put five questions to each tool.

1. Which of the four jobs does it do? Name the job before you read the feature list.
2. Does it cover the businesses you sell to? Ask for 50 sample rows in your own trade and area.
3. What does one credit buy? On the pricing pages of Lusha, Apollo and LeadIQ, a phone number costs 5, 8 and 10 times as many credits as an email.
4. Which channels does it send on, and under whose name?
5. What is left to you once the list exists? The last column of the first table is a starting point.

A database row and a scraped row hold different fields. Our guide to what is inside a B2B database lists them.

Questions

What are the best sales prospecting tools?

There is no single answer, and this page does not rank the 8. The best sales prospecting tools for you are the ones that do the job you lack. A team that sells by job title starts with a database. An agency that sells to local businesses starts with a list of businesses and a way to choose among them.

Are there free sales prospecting tools?

All 8 sites named a free plan, a free amount or a trial on Nov 10, 2026. Apollo, Lusha, Kaspr, LeadIQ, Hunter and Snov.io each listed a free plan. Outscraper listed the first 500 businesses free on its Google Maps Scraper. PhantomBuster listed a 14-day trial followed by a Free plan.

What is the difference between a prospecting tool and a CRM?

A prospecting tool finds people or companies you do not know yet. A CRM stores the ones you are already talking to and tracks each deal. Apollo, Lusha, LeadIQ and Hunter each list a sync with CRMs such as Salesforce and HubSpot. Snov.io lists a sales CRM of its own.

Do prospecting tools send the messages too?

Some do. On the pages read, Apollo names email and phone, Hunter names email, Snov.io names email and LinkedIn, and PhantomBuster names LinkedIn. LeadIQ names a dialer marked BETA. Lusha's pricing page lists email sequences. Kaspr and Outscraper supply data only. In our notes of Nov 10, 2026, none of the 8 names a posted letter as a channel.

Which prospecting tools work for local businesses?

Tools that start from map listings fit local businesses, because a local business is a place before it is a job title. Outscraper and PhantomBuster both work on Google Maps. Apollo's data page names local business data from Google Maps among its sources. Leadodo finds businesses with a Google Maps scraper and a database of 460M+ contacts, then scores each website.

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Checked on Nov 10, 2026. Every detail about another product comes from its own website on that date. If a detail about your product is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.

Next step. Run one search by trade and area, and see every website in it scored. See Lead Discovery.