Best Free B2B Data Providers 2026: 12 Free + Freemium Platforms That Work

Last updated April 2026.

"Free B2B data" is one of the most-searched and most-misleading phrases in sales tooling. Type it into Google in 2026 and the first ten results are almost identical: a roundup of "free" tools where eight of the twelve aren't free at all — they're 7-day trials, credit-card-required "starter" tiers, or freemium products that gate the only feature you actually need (verified emails, mobile numbers, exports) behind a paywall.

This guide draws a hard line. Free means you can use the product indefinitely without entering a credit card and without a hard time-bound trial. Freemium means there's an ongoing free tier with credits that reset monthly — useful for individual SDRs, hobbyists, and stack-builders, but not for teams. Free trial is its own category and we flag it explicitly when we list one (Wiza is the only trial here; we kept it because the trial is genuinely usable and conversion is not coercive).

The bigger trap isn't the trial — it's the upgrade ladder. Apollo Free gives you 50 credits a month and a workflow that's clearly designed to make you hit the wall by day three. ZoomInfo, Cognism, Lusha, and Seamless don't appear in this guide because they don't offer real free tiers in 2026 — only sales-team trials gated on a discovery call. Free in this guide means free that you can rely on this month, next month, and the month after, even if your usage is small.

A note on geographic coverage: most of the freemium tools below are heavily US-prevalent. Apollo, Hunter, ContactOut, and Wiza all have stronger US coverage than EMEA, and noticeably weaker APAC coverage. We flag this in each review because "free" doesn't help if the data isn't where your buyers are.

How we built this guide

We started from a list of 47 tools that show up in "free B2B data" search results, then applied four filters. First, the free tier must be persistent — if it's a 7-day trial dressed up as "free", we cut it (with one exception, Wiza, where the trial mechanics are clean). Second, the tool must produce structured B2B data: contacts, companies, intent, firmographics, technographics, or relationship signals. We excluded pure CRMs, dialers, sequencers, and email senders — those belong in our free AI sales tools guide. Third, the data has to be usable: searchable, exportable to at least CSV, and not watermarked or blurred. Fourth, the company has to be solvent and the tool actively maintained as of April 2026 — we removed three tools that had quietly gone EOL since the last refresh.

We then ran each surviving tool through a hands-on workflow: signed up with a fresh email, used the free tier as published, attempted exports, hit the credit cap, and noted what the upgrade path actually costs. Where we already had an enterprise account (Apollo, Hunter), we logged out and re-created a free account to verify the free experience matched what new users see in 2026, not what we remember from 2024.

For the public-data sources (LinkedIn free, GitHub, Companies House), we tested whether the data is realistically extractable at the volume a small team needs without violating ToS or triggering anti-automation friction. LinkedIn passed for manual prospecting only; GitHub and Companies House passed for both manual and API access.

The verdict

If you can only pick one free tool for 2026, Apollo.io Free is the strongest all-rounder — its 50 monthly credits cover most early-stage prospecting and the data quality is competitive with paid mid-market providers. Pair it with Hunter.io Free for email verification and LinkedIn for relationship context, and you have a stack that gets a bootstrapped team to product-market fit without spending a dollar on data.

For technical-buyer prospecting, the highest-leverage free source is GitHub — it's both a contact graph and an intent signal, and almost nobody is using it well. For UK and Ireland prospecting, Companies House is genuinely free and genuinely good; nothing in the paid tier of any provider matches it for officer-level data.

Conflict-of-interest disclosure. Knowlee is the publisher of this guide and we ship our own B2B data product (Knowlee 4Sales). We list Knowlee as entry #12 below and we disclose plainly: there is no free tier. Including ourselves at the bottom of a "free providers" list is awkward but accurate — readers comparing free tools deserve to know the alternative when free runs out, and lying about a free tier we don't offer would be worse than the awkwardness.

1. Apollo.io Free — the default freemium baseline

The free tier: 50 mobile credits and 100 export credits per month, unlimited email credits with caveats, sequences capped at low volume, basic CRM included. No credit card required to start.

Apollo became the default "free B2B data" answer around 2022 and held the position by being the least-bad freemium experience in the category. The free tier in 2026 is more limited than it was two years ago — credits got tighter, mobile pulls now cost more credits each, and some filters are paywalled — but it's still the most usable starting point for an individual SDR.

What works: the database is large (Apollo claims 275M+ contacts, US coverage is genuinely strong), filters are sane, the in-product Chrome extension makes LinkedIn enrichment painless, and the sequencer doesn't feel like a downgrade compared to dedicated tools. The CRM is basic but real.

What doesn't: 50 monthly credits go fast. Mobile data is heavily gated. Email verification on the free tier is single-pass and you'll see the usual freemium pattern of "we found 40 contacts, but only 12 have verified emails — upgrade to see the rest". International data outside the US is thinner; EMEA is okay, APAC is patchy.

Use it when: you're an individual SDR or founder doing fewer than 50 outbound contacts per month, or you want to test the data quality before committing to a paid plan. Upgrade trigger: you find yourself rationing credits within the first week of the month. The Basic plan ($49/mo as of April 2026) is a reasonable next step; full Pro features start at $79/mo.

2. Hunter.io Free — email finder, low ceiling, honest

The free tier: 50 monthly searches (find email by name + domain) and 50 verifications. No credit card required.

Hunter has stayed in this guide for five years because it does one thing — find and verify email addresses — and does it without the dark patterns. The free tier is small but it's real: 50 searches mean 50 actual API responses, not 50 page views that mostly return "upgrade to see this email".

What works: domain search shows a public-facing list of names + emails for any company domain you query, useful for understanding org structure. The Chrome extension lights up email candidates on any company website. The verification API is widely respected and the false-positive rate on confirmed-deliverable addresses is the lowest in the freemium tier. Hunter also publishes its verification methodology plainly, which most competitors don't.

What doesn't: 50 searches is genuinely small if you're prospecting daily. There's no contact database — you can't browse for "VPs of Engineering at SaaS companies in Boston". Hunter only finds emails when you already know the person and company.

Use it when: you have a list of named targets and need verified emails, or you want to verify emails another tool gave you. Upgrade trigger: you're consistently hitting 50 searches per month. The Starter plan is $34/mo for 500 searches as of April 2026. If you only need verification (not finding), see our email finder tools comparison for cheaper specialists.

3. LinkedIn — free profile + InMail credits

The free tier: unlimited profile browsing within reason (rate limits exist but are generous for normal use), free messaging to 1st-degree connections, 5 InMail credits per month if you're on free Premium trial, search filters limited compared to Sales Navigator.

LinkedIn isn't a "tool" in the freemium sense but it's the largest free B2B contact graph on the planet and the highest-quality intent signal source we have. We list it second because most "free B2B data" guides skip it on the pretext that it's not a database — which is silly, because every other tool in this list is essentially scraping or re-packaging LinkedIn anyway.

What works: profile data is the source of truth for job titles, tenure, and skills. Free search lets you filter by company, title, and geography. Engagement data — who liked what, who commented where — is a stronger intent signal than most paid intent products. Boolean search works on the free tier. Connection requests with notes are still allowed (sparingly) and InMail credits stack if unused.

What doesn't: no export, no API access on the free tier, no advanced filters (function, seniority level, years in role) without Sales Navigator. Aggressive scraping triggers account restrictions fast and has cost more than one founder their account.

Use it when: you're researching specific accounts, building target lists by hand, or monitoring intent through engagement. Upgrade trigger: you need advanced filters or export at volume. Sales Navigator is $99/mo as of April 2026; for most teams it pays for itself within a month.

4. GetProspect Free — list builder for LinkedIn pages

The free tier: 50 valid emails per month, basic LinkedIn integration, CSV export. No credit card required.

GetProspect sits in the same category as Apollo and Hunter but with a sharper LinkedIn-page focus. The free tier is small but the workflow is good — you paste a LinkedIn search URL, GetProspect extracts the people, finds emails for as many as it can within your credit budget, and hands you a CSV.

What works: the LinkedIn-page-to-CSV workflow is genuinely fast. CSV exports include the LinkedIn URL, which most freemium tools omit on the free tier. Email verification quality is acceptable, not best-in-class.

What doesn't: 50 valid emails per month is a hard ceiling and the tool doesn't tell you how many credits a search will consume until you run it, which makes credit budgeting awkward. Coverage outside the US and Western Europe is uneven.

Use it when: your prospecting workflow is LinkedIn-search-to-CSV and you don't yet need volume. Upgrade trigger: you want more than ~30 prospects per week, or you need predictable credit consumption. Paid tiers start at $49/mo for 1,000 valid emails.

5. Snov.io Free — closer to a sequencer than a database

The free tier: 50 credits per month covering email finder, verifier, and a small drip campaign quota. No credit card required.

Snov is a multi-tool: email finder + verifier + sender + small CRM. The free tier is small but you can run end-to-end campaigns inside the same product, which is rare at this price point.

What works: domain search, single-email finder, email verifier, and drip-sender all share the same credit pool — you decide where to spend. The Chrome extension is solid. Free-tier deliverability through Snov's sending infrastructure is acceptable for testing.

What doesn't: the multi-tool surface area means none of the components is best-in-class; if you only need email finding, Hunter is better, and if you only need sequencing, dedicated sequencers do it better. Free credits burn fast when you're running a real sequence.

Use it when: you want to test a full prospect-to-send workflow on one platform before paying for separate tools. Upgrade trigger: you're testing a real campaign and need deliverability monitoring. Paid plans start at $39/mo.

6. ContactOut Free — Chrome extension for LinkedIn

The free tier: 30 emails and 3 phone numbers per month via the Chrome extension, plus a small "AI search" allowance. No credit card required.

ContactOut earned its reputation as the recruiter's email finder and quietly became one of the better B2B sales tools for finding personal email addresses (not just work). The free tier is modest but honest.

What works: the extension surfaces personal Gmail and Yahoo addresses on LinkedIn profiles when work email isn't easily findable — useful for senior buyers who guard their corporate inbox. Mobile number coverage in the US is among the best free tiers we tested. The "AI search" feature lets you describe a prospect ("CFO at SaaS companies in Austin with 50-200 employees") and get a list, which is a generous free-tier feature.

What doesn't: 30 emails per month is small. EMEA mobile coverage is much weaker than US. Some personal emails are stale (people change Gmails less often than work emails, but profiles do drift).

Use it when: you're prospecting executive buyers who don't respond to corporate-email outreach, or when you need US mobile numbers and your other free tiers are dry. Upgrade trigger: consistent need for more than 30 emails per month. Paid plans start at $79/mo.

7. Wiza — 7-day trial, included with disclosure

The free trial: 7-day trial with a meaningful credit allowance, no credit card required for the trial start (this is unusual and we verified it as of April 2026).

We included exactly one trial in this guide because Wiza's mechanics are honest: you don't have to put a card on file to start the trial, you don't get charged automatically when it ends, and the trial credits are enough to actually evaluate whether the data quality is worth paying for. Most "free trials" in this category fail at least one of those tests.

What works: Wiza's LinkedIn-list-to-CSV workflow is one of the best in the category, and during the trial you can export at meaningful volume. The export includes verified emails, mobile numbers, and LinkedIn URLs in one file. Bulk verification quality is good.

What doesn't: it's a trial, not a free tier — after 7 days you have no ongoing free access. If you don't have a clear use case lined up before you sign up, you'll waste it.

Use it when: you have a one-time list-build need (a conference, a new territory, a specific account list) and you want to evaluate Wiza for a possible paid commitment afterwards. Upgrade trigger: the trial ended and you liked it. Paid plans start at $83/mo.

8. GitHub — for technical-buyer sourcing

The free tier: GitHub itself is free; the API is rate-limited but generous (5,000 requests per hour authenticated).

GitHub is the most under-used free B2B data source in 2026 and the highest-leverage one if your buyer is technical. It's free not because of a freemium tier — it's free because the data is public. Engineers list employer, role, skills, and projects in their profile. Companies expose their stack through their organization page, contributors, and public repositories.

What works: technographic data is more accurate on GitHub than on any paid technographics provider, because it's behavioral evidence (people actually committing code in a language) rather than inferred from job postings or website crawls. You can detect early adoption of new tools weeks before it shows up in BuiltWith or Wappalyzer. Hiring signals are stronger — if a company starts contributing to a new framework, they're hiring for it. The API is well-documented and the rate limits accommodate small-team usage without a paid plan.

What doesn't: GitHub is not a contact database in the SDR sense — you don't get verified emails or phone numbers. Profile completeness varies; many engineers list a city but not a current employer. Privacy norms are stricter; cold outreach to a developer based on their GitHub activity needs to be earned, not blasted.

Use it when: your ICP is technical buyers (CTOs, VP Engineering, lead developers, DevRel teams) and your product touches developer workflows. Upgrade trigger: you've maxed out the free API rate limits, in which case GitHub Enterprise or paid wrappers (Sourcegraph, OSS Insight) become relevant.

9. Crunchbase Free — company-side firmographics

The free tier: basic company profiles, founding info, headcount range, latest funding round. Search is limited; advanced filters and full executive lists are paywalled.

Crunchbase is more valuable as a company-side source than a contact-side source, and the free tier reflects that. You get enough to qualify a company — funding stage, approximate headcount, recent news, key executives — but not enough to build a contact list directly.

What works: funding-round data is the cleanest free source we've found for "did this company just raise" — a primary signal for outbound timing. Recent news scraping is decent. Free search returns enough to build a target-account list manually (50-100 companies a month is realistic).

What doesn't: full executive directories are paywalled, advanced filters (industry, geography intersection) are paywalled, and CSV export is paywalled at meaningful volume. Smaller companies (under ~25 employees, pre-Seed) are sparsely covered.

Use it when: you're building a target-account list and need funding-stage filtering. Upgrade trigger: you need export at volume or intersection filters. Pro plans start at $49/mo.

10. Companies House — actually free, UK + Ireland

The free tier: completely free, no account required, no credit card, no rate limit gating for normal use. The API is free with a registered key.

This is the unicorn of the list. Companies House is the UK government's official corporate registry. It is not freemium, not a trial, not a "starter tier" — it is the public record of every UK company, with officer-level data, filing history, and registered addresses. The Irish equivalent (CRO) is similarly free with smaller coverage.

What works: officer data is authoritative, current, and exportable. Filing history reveals corporate events (new directors, address changes, dissolutions) that are leading indicators for outbound timing. The API is well-documented. PSC (people with significant control) data shows real ownership, which paid tools often guess at.

What doesn't: emails and phone numbers aren't there — Companies House is a register of corporate facts, not a sales-contact database. You'll combine it with an email finder. Coverage is UK and Ireland; for other countries, similar registries exist (Germany's Handelsregister, France's Infogreffe, the EU's BRIS) but they're inconsistent in quality and access.

Use it when: UK or Ireland prospecting at any volume. Upgrade trigger: none — there's no upgrade. If you need data from another jurisdiction, see our USA B2B data providers guide for the equivalent landscape.

11. Common Room Free — community-led signal

The free tier: Common Room offers a free tier for community-driven signal capture (Slack, Discord, GitHub, social) with a meaningful workspace allowance. No credit card required.

Common Room is in this guide because in 2026 the highest-quality intent signals aren't on intent-data brokers' websites — they're in the public conversations your prospects are already having. Common Room aggregates those conversations and tags people across them.

What works: free-tier signal capture across community surfaces is unique in the market — most competitors gate this behind enterprise pricing. You get a unified view of who's active in your community sources. The free tier is real-team usable for a small founding-team motion.

What doesn't: Common Room isn't a contact database — it's a signal layer. You'll still need an email finder to act on the signals. The free tier caps integrations and historical lookback.

Use it when: your motion is community-led (open-source, devtools, prosumer SaaS) and you want to surface intent signals you can act on. Upgrade trigger: you've validated the motion and need historical analytics or larger integration depth. Paid plans start in the low four-figures per month.

12. Knowlee 4Sales — no free tier, demo + sandbox only

The "free" tier: none. We offer a 30-minute walkthrough demo with a sandbox account. There is no perpetual free plan.

We listed Knowlee 4Sales last because it's the alternative when a free stack runs out, but we won't pretend we offer a free tier we don't. Knowlee 4Sales is an agentic operating system for outbound — research agents, list builders, enrichment, and a graph that compounds across every campaign. It's not designed for an individual SDR doing 50 contacts a month; it's designed for teams running 10x to 100x that volume with audit-trail and AI Act-shaped governance built in.

What works (when you've outgrown free): the system replaces the manual stack-of-stacks (Apollo + Hunter + LinkedIn + ContactOut + sequencer + dialer + CRM) with a single agentic layer. Every prospect, every signal, every decision lands in a knowledge graph the rest of your team's agents can read. There's an explainable record for every outbound action — who decided what, on what evidence, at what cost. That's table stakes once you're in regulated industries or selling to risk-conscious enterprises.

What doesn't: there's a real onboarding lift, and the pricing assumes you're past the bootstrapped stage. If you're still finding fit and your free stack is working, stay on the free stack — we'll be here when you outgrow it.

Use it when: the manual stack is consuming more than two SDR-days a week of integration toil and the audit/governance side is becoming a real concern.

How to compose a free B2B-data stack

A working free stack in 2026 has three layers and uses each tool for what it's actually good at, not what its marketing claims.

Discovery layer. This is where you find prospects you didn't know existed. Apollo.io Free is the default for general B2B; LinkedIn (free profile) is the default for relationship-based discovery; GitHub is the default for technical buyers; Common Room is the default for community-led motions. You'll typically use two of these — one breadth (Apollo or LinkedIn) and one depth (GitHub or Common Room). Don't try to use four; you'll burn credits across all of them and not master any.

Enrichment layer. Once you have a name and a company, this layer fills in email, phone, and verification. Hunter.io Free is the default email finder. ContactOut Free is the default for personal-email and US-mobile fallback. GetProspect Free is the default if your workflow is LinkedIn-page-to-CSV. Pick one primary and use the other as fallback when the primary draws blanks.

Verification layer. This is the most under-respected part of a free stack. A bad email destroys your sender reputation, and free email-finder tools are honest about their false-positive rates only if you ask. Hunter's free verifier is the strongest default. Snov's verifier is acceptable. Use the verification layer on every email before you send — even emails another tool flagged as "valid", because their definition of valid is rarely yours. We unpack this in detail in our email verification pipeline guide.

Cross-cutting: the public sources. Companies House (UK/IE), GitHub (technical), and Crunchbase (funding) sit alongside the three layers because they don't fit the discovery-enrichment-verification pattern — they're reference sources you query when you need specific kinds of truth. Add them to your stack from day one and the rest of your stack works better, because the data you pull from freemium tools is always cleaner when you can cross-check it against an authoritative public source.

A realistic free stack for an individual SDR in 2026 looks like: Apollo Free (discovery, 50 credits/mo) + Hunter Free (verification, 50 credits/mo) + LinkedIn (relationship + intent) + Companies House or GitHub (cross-check, free unlimited). That's enough for ~150 high-quality outbound contacts per month, which is more than most early-stage founders can follow up on properly anyway.

For a deeper comparison of paid alternatives once you've outgrown free, see our free ZoomInfo alternatives roundup and our Hunter.io alternatives guide.

When free breaks

Free stacks fail in three predictable ways and recognising the failure mode early saves money.

Volume break. You're consistently rationing credits in the first ten days of the month, you're keeping browser tabs open across four free tools to stretch them, and you're spending more time on stack-management than on selling. At this point the implicit cost of free (your time) is higher than a paid plan would be. The fix is to consolidate onto one paid tool that covers most of what your free stack covered, then keep one or two free tools as specialised fallbacks (LinkedIn, GitHub, Companies House are all worth keeping forever).

Quality break. Your bounce rate is creeping up, prospects are saying "you have my old email", or your messages are landing in spam more often than they used to. Free tiers tend to expose less-fresh data than paid tiers because the providers refresh popular paid records first. The fix is to move email verification to a paid plan even if you keep the rest of the stack free.

Coverage break. You're prospecting outside the US (especially in EMEA enterprise or APAC), or you're prospecting in a niche (manufacturing, public sector, healthcare) where Apollo and similar US-centric tools are thin. Free tiers don't fix coverage gaps; they expose them. The fix is to add a regional or vertical specialist to the stack, often paid, while keeping the free tools for the segments they cover well.

The other thing that breaks free stacks is process drift: a free stack works for one SDR with discipline; it falls apart with three SDRs sharing logins, no audit trail, and no shared definition of "verified". That's the threshold where governance — not data quality — is the upgrade trigger.

FAQ

Are any of these "free" tools actually free, or are they all just trials? Apollo, Hunter, GetProspect, Snov, ContactOut, and Common Room have ongoing free tiers with monthly credit resets — those are real free tiers. LinkedIn, GitHub, Companies House, and Crunchbase (basic) are free in the public-utility sense — no upgrade path because there's no upsell on the free behavior. Wiza is the only trial we included, and we flag it explicitly. Nothing else in this guide will charge you a credit card if you don't choose to upgrade.

What's the best free B2B data tool for someone just starting out in sales? Apollo.io Free + Hunter.io Free + LinkedIn. That's it. Don't try to compose a stack of six free tools on day one — you'll spend more time managing logins than calling prospects. Add the others as specific gaps appear: GitHub when you start prospecting technical buyers, ContactOut when senior-buyer email finding becomes a problem, Companies House if you sell into the UK.

Is there a free alternative to ZoomInfo? Not at ZoomInfo's coverage and depth — that's an honest answer, not a sales pitch. Apollo Free + Hunter Free + LinkedIn covers about 60% of ZoomInfo's value for a single SDR doing US prospecting at small volume. For team-volume usage, see our free ZoomInfo alternatives page for the closest substitutes (most are freemium with paid upgrades, not strictly free).

How much does a typical SDR spend on B2B data once they outgrow free? The 2026 baseline for a single SDR doing real outbound volume is $100-200/mo for one paid all-in-one (Apollo Basic, Hunter Starter, or similar) plus $99/mo for LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Below $200/mo total, you're either undertooled or you're using the free stack with discipline.

Can I scrape LinkedIn for free instead of paying for these tools? Technically yes, practically no — LinkedIn's anti-automation has improved and account restrictions are fast and often permanent. The risk-adjusted cost of a banned LinkedIn account (which is usually irreplaceable) is much higher than the cost of a freemium tool that does the lookup safely. Use the official free tier for manual prospecting and let tools that have negotiated access do the at-scale work.

Are these free tiers GDPR-compliant for EU prospecting? Free-tier compliance is the same as paid-tier compliance — the tool's processing legality doesn't change with the price. The bigger question is whether you, as the controller, have a lawful basis (legitimate interest plus a balancing test, typically) for outbound. Most of these tools provide DPAs even on free tiers, but the responsibility for documenting your basis sits with you. We cover this thoroughly in AI Act compliance for sales tools.

Does using free tools mean lower data quality? Sometimes. Free tiers often expose the same database as paid tiers but with credit caps; data quality per record is similar. The exception is freshness — providers re-verify popular paid records first, so a free-tier email is statistically slightly more likely to be stale than a paid-tier one. Always run a verification step (Hunter Free, even on emails another tool already verified) before sending.

Reviews above reflect the free-tier mechanics as of April 2026. Vendors change pricing and credit allowances frequently — always confirm current terms on each provider's pricing page before committing time to a stack.