Short answer: ContactOut is built for finding a person's email and phone number, especially from a LinkedIn profile, with a Chrome extension and flat monthly plans. People Data Labs (PDL) is a developer data layer for full person records at scale. Diffbot is a web-wide Knowledge Graph where people are one entity type among many. Pick by what you need back: contact details, a structured profile, or connected entity data.

All three can enrich a person record, which is why they get compared. But they are built for different buyers, and the pricing units aren't comparable at a glance: ContactOut sells plans with daily or monthly export limits, PDL sells credits per record returned, and Diffbot sells processing credits where one enriched person costs 25 of them. This guide lines them up on the same terms. Every price and plan detail was checked on the vendor's own pages in September 2026.

ContactOut vs PDL vs Diffbot at a glance

What is ContactOut best for?

ContactOut is best known as a LinkedIn contact finder, and that's where it shines. You open a profile, the Chrome extension shows the person's emails and phone numbers, and you move on. It can return more than one address per person, not only a work email, and it runs a dedicated recruiter offering alongside its sales one.

Plans on contactout.com/pricing (September 2026, global data coverage):

ContactOut also offers a cheaper option that excludes US, UK and Canada data. Two things to read closely: "unlimited" is governed by a fair use policy in ContactOut's terms, and exports are capped per month, which matters more than lookups if you need data in a CRM. Individual plans are limited to one user per company, so a team or programmatic use case means a sales conversation.

Non-work addresses are useful for recruiting and a compliance question for B2B outbound, especially when contacting people in the EU. Decide your policy on personal addresses before you enrich, not after.

What is People Data Labs best for?

PDL describes itself as a data layer that other products are built on. Its own reference guide lists a person dataset of 1.5 billion+ unique individuals, with fields like work history, education, skills, location, email and LinkedIn and GitHub identifiers. It doesn't offer outreach tools or a prospecting extension, by design.

Plans on peopledatalabs.com/pricing/person (September 2026):

• Free: up to 100 credits a month for testing the Person APIs. Emails, phone numbers and addresses are obfuscated.

• Pro: starts at $98 a month for 350 credits, with contact data, premium fields and CSV enrichment. Monthly or annual.

• Enterprise: custom pricing, annual contracts, data license feeds and SSO.

At the entry Pro tier that works out to about $0.28 per credit ($98 / 350), and PDL says volume discounts kick in as usage grows. Beyond the Person Enrichment API, PDL offers person search, identify, company enrichment and search, job postings and cleaner endpoints, plus Snowflake and Databricks data sharing for large customers. PDL lists ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance.

PDL fits best when engineers own the integration and you want the deepest structured profile per person. It's a poor fit for a rep who just needs a phone number right now. We cover the platform in more depth in how People Data Labs works.

What is Diffbot best for?

Diffbot crawls the public web and structures it into a Knowledge Graph it describes as "over 10 billion entities," covering organizations, people, articles and more. Its Enhance API takes identifiers you already have, such as a name or URL, matches them to an entity and returns what the graph knows about it.

Plans on diffbot.com/pricing (September 2026):

The unit that matters for people enrichment: Knowledge Graph Enhance costs 25 credits per entity record, or 100 with a refresh. So the Free plan covers about 400 enriched records a month, and Startup about 10,000, which is roughly $0.03 per record before refreshes. Diffbot bills monthly with no long-term contract.

Diffbot is strongest when relationships matter: who works where, which companies connect to which people and news, and research questions that span entity types. If all you need is a verified email for a named prospect, it's more machinery than the job requires.

Which people enrichment provider has the best data?

There's no independent, like-for-like accuracy benchmark across these three, and match rates vary a lot by region, seniority and industry. The useful question is which one returns the fields you need, for your contacts, at a cost you can live with.

• For reachable contact details (email, mobile), ContactOut is the most focused of the three.

• For full profiles (employment history, education, skills), PDL returns the most structured fields per person.

• For connected context (a person's links to companies, articles and other entities), Diffbot is the only one built around a graph.

Whichever you use, verify emails before they go into a sequence. Finding an address and confirming it's deliverable are separate steps, and a bounced campaign costs more than the verification.

How do you choose between ContactOut, PDL and Diffbot?

Choose ContactOut if

• Your team works profile by profile from LinkedIn

• You need phone numbers and more than one email per person, for example for recruiting

• Nobody on the team wants to touch an API

Choose People Data Labs if

• You're building person data into a product, model or internal tool

• Work history and skills matter as much as contact details

• You expect volume high enough to negotiate Enterprise pricing

Choose Diffbot if

• You need people linked to organizations, news and other web entities

• You also want web extraction or natural language APIs under one plan

• Your use case is research or data products rather than outbound

Can you use ContactOut, PDL and Diffbot together?

Yes. All three are built-in providers on Databar, so you can call them from one table, the API or an AI agent without three separate contracts. Credit costs in Databar's catalog as of September 2026:

The bigger benefit is ordering them in a waterfall. The "Email by link" waterfall can try ContactOut before PDL (alongside Findymail, Prospeo, RocketReach, LeadMagic and others), and the reverse email lookup waterfall can try Diffbot at 3.5 credits before PDL at 20. The waterfall stops at the first provider that returns data, and lookups that return nothing aren't charged, so putting cheaper providers first keeps cost down without giving up the expensive fallback. Email waterfalls can also run a verifier such as ZeroBounce on what they find. See how waterfall enrichment works for ordering tips, reverse email lookup for the email-first path, and enriching LinkedIn profile URLs at scale for the LinkedIn-first path. Provider details live on the ContactOut, People Data Labs and Diffbot pages. For the company side of the same decision, read Clearbit vs Apollo vs LeadMagic.

FAQ

Is ContactOut really unlimited?

ContactOut's Email and Email + Phone plans advertise unlimited emails (and phones on the higher plan), but its pricing page ties that to a fair use policy and caps exports at 300 or 600 per month. For bulk CRM enrichment, the export cap is the number to plan around.

Does People Data Labs have a free plan?

Yes, for testing. The Free plan gives up to 100 credits a month, but emails, phone numbers and addresses are obfuscated. Contact data starts on Pro, from $98 a month for 350 credits (September 2026).

How many Diffbot credits does one person enrichment use?

Diffbot's pricing page lists Knowledge Graph Enhance at 25 credits per entity record, or 100 credits with a refresh. The free 10,000 monthly credits cover about 400 standard enrichments.

Which is best for enriching a CRM in bulk?

PDL is designed for bulk and programmatic enrichment, and Diffbot's Enhance API also accepts datasets. ContactOut's self-serve plans cap monthly exports, so bulk use usually means its Team/API plan. If you want all three without separate contracts, a waterfall on Databar runs them per row and bills only the provider that returns data.

Do I still need email verification after enrichment?

Yes. Treat a found email and a deliverable email as different things. Run results through a verifier before sequencing, especially for older records and catch-all domains.

Compare them on your own contacts

The only accuracy number that matters is the one from your own list. Databar's 14-day trial comes with 100 credits, enough to run a sample through ContactOut, PDL and Diffbot side by side. Start free or Book a founder demo.