Sales Navigator alternatives, compared on what you still do by hand

You are paying $119.99 a month for Sales Navigator, or you are about to, and you want to know whether something cheaper does the same job.

The lists that answer this question all rank on the same two axes: what it costs and how many contacts are in the database. Neither tells you the thing that decides whether the tool saves you time, which is how many of the results are wrong and how much of the work you are still doing yourself.

What Sales Navigator costs, and what is the same on every tier

From LinkedIn's own plan comparison: Core is $119.99 a month, or $1,079.88 billed annually. Advanced is $159.99 a month, or $1,799.88 annually. Advanced Plus has no published price and requires a conversation with a sales representative.

The part worth knowing before you consider upgrading: several of the headline numbers do not change between tiers. All three plans include 50 InMail credits a month and 50+ advanced search filters. All three cap saved leads and accounts at 10,000 per user. LinkedIn's account types page sets out the full matrix.

What you actually buy going up is collaboration, then CRM. Core is a single seat. Advanced adds multiple users, uploading a book of business by CSV, Smart Links, Buyer Intent signals, TeamLink and usage reporting. Advanced Plus adds only CRM-side capability: two-way sync with HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle Sales and Salesforce, embedded profiles, ROI reporting and licence assignment by CRM role. No numeric seat minimum is published for it.

One InMail detail that changes how you budget the tier: LinkedIn states you cannot purchase additional InMail credits, and that all subscription types get the same allocation. Credits accumulate to a ceiling of 150 and expire 90 days after they roll over. Our piece on what Sales Navigator's limits actually are covers the rest of that mechanism.

What LinkedIn will not tell you

The most useful sentence LinkedIn publishes about its own product is an admission.

On the commercial use limit, which throttles profile searching and viewing on free and Premium accounts, LinkedIn's help centre states: "We are not able to display the exact number of searches or views you have left and we also cannot lift the limit upon request."

So the number does not exist publicly. Every page you find quoting a specific figure is guessing. What LinkedIn does publish is the mechanics. The limit resets at midnight PST on the first of each calendar month. Profile searches, browsing through People Also Viewed, and viewing member profiles on the People tab of a LinkedIn Page all count against it. Searching by name from the top search box, browsing your own first-degree connections from the Connections page, and searching jobs do not. Cancelling a Premium subscription drops you back to the basic limit and does not reset it.

And the phrasing on upgrading is precise in a way the marketing is not: moving to Premium Business, Recruiter Lite or Sales Navigator will "increase the number of profile searches and views." Increase, not remove.

What the alternatives charge

All figures below come from each vendor's own pricing page, read on 1 September 2026.

Two things fall out of that table that no ranking gives you.

Who publishes a price at all. ZoomInfo and Cognism do not, on any tier. ZoomInfo's own pricing FAQ goes further and rebuts its competitors in writing: "despite claims from Cognism, Demandbase, Lusha, Apollo, and others, ZoomInfo's pricing does not start at $15,000." It declines to say what it does start at. If you have been comparing on a ZoomInfo figure you read somewhere, that is a vendor telling you the figure is wrong.

Seat minimums, which are almost never in the comparison. Kaspr's Organization tier is annual-only with a five-user minimum. Apollo's $119 tier requires three seats. Those turn a per-seat price into a floor.

Two tools are missing prices here on purpose. Lusha's pricing page is a slider whose tier prices move with the credit volume you select, and it was running a promotion with list prices struck through, so any single figure would be both incomplete and temporary. Its own pricing page and its own documentation also disagree on how many credits a phone reveal costs. Skrapp's pricing could not be read directly, so it is left out rather than repeated at second hand. Both absences are the honest version of a comparison table.

Every accuracy figure in this market is the vendor's own

The numbers you will see quoted: Cognism 85% data accuracy, ZoomInfo up to 95%, Lusha 98% on email and 86% on phone, UpLead a 95% guarantee. Not one of them comes with a sample size, a date, or any audit of the figure itself. ZoomInfo at least describes a verification process in general terms, involving natural language processing, machine learning and several hundred human researchers, which is more than the others offer and still not a measurement.

The comparisons are no better. Amplemarket published an eight-platform framework scored across 231 points, in which Amplemarket scores 219. Cleanlist deserves credit for saying the quiet part in its own guide: "We did not run a first-party bake-off for this guide," and "Where a vendor publishes an accuracy figure, it is theirs, not ours." Its own test covers its own product and it flags that itself.

There is no independent measurement of data accuracy for any tool on this shelf. Our piece on the accuracy claims these vendors publish about themselves goes through them one at a time.

If the tool is a browser extension, read LinkedIn's terms first

Several tools on this shelf work by running inside your browser while you use LinkedIn. That is worth understanding before you build a process on one, because LinkedIn publishes a position on it.

LinkedIn's help centre on prohibited software states that it does not permit third-party software, crawlers, bots, browser plug-ins or extensions that scrape, modify the appearance of, or automate activity on its website, and quotes Section 8.2 of its own User Agreement. The prohibitions listed there include using software or scripts to scrape or copy profiles and other data, using automated methods to add or download contacts or send messages, copying or distributing information obtained from the service including through data aggregators or brokers without consent, and circumventing use limits such as search results.

LinkedIn's stated consequences are account restriction or closure. The line that matters commercially is the other one: users of such tools also risk that "any prohibited tools they're using may become non-operational without notice."

Which products fall inside that description depends on how each one is built, and we have not verified the architecture of each tool in the table above, so this article does not tell you which of them LinkedIn's policy covers. That is a question to put to the vendor directly, and the answer worth having is not whether they think they comply but whether their product needs a browser extension to work at all. A tool that reaches its data through its own API is not exposed to this. One that runs inside your LinkedIn session is. What is not in doubt is that LinkedIn has published the position, and that not one of the nineteen alternatives pages examined for this article mentions it. A tool that stops working in a quarter is a cost, and it belongs in the comparison.

Read the byline on any alternatives list

Of nineteen pages ranking on this query, eleven were published by a company that sells one of the tools.

Of those eleven, five include themselves in their own ranking, and all five put themselves first. Cognism, ListKit, Boomerang, ZoomInfo and Salesmotion all place themselves at number one, and Salesmotion labels it "Our Pick."

The exceptions are more interesting than the rule. Kaspr publishes a twenty-item list and leaves itself out of it, placing Cognism first instead, with a note that Kaspr is part of the Cognism Group. GiveMeLeads publishes fifteen items and omits itself, promoting itself in the page furniture rather than the ranking. Three vendors whose names come up constantly in this category have not published such a page at all.

None of this makes the lists useless. It does mean the ranking is an advertisement, and the useful content is the feature detail underneath it.

The same test applies here. Tamozo sells a tool in this market, so this page has a stake in what you conclude, and you should read it the way the paragraph above tells you to read the others. What we have tried to do differently is publish no ranking, recommend no tool including our own, and cite every price to the vendor's own page so you can check it rather than trust us. The one thing we ask you to take on faith is nothing at all: run the test in the next section against us too.

What none of these lists compares on

Not one of the nineteen pages compares tools on precision: how many of the results are the wrong company, the wrong seniority, or a person who left two years ago. Every page uses database size as the proxy for quality, which measures the opposite thing. A larger database returns more results, and more results is only better if you were not going to check them.

That is the number that decides your week. If a search returns 400 companies and 90 of them fit, you have three days of manual review ahead of you and no tool did it for you. Our piece on Apollo alternatives for people who send by hand works through the same trade-off from the other end of the shelf, and alternatives for a company under fifty people covers the small-team end.

So run the test yourself, on a trial, before you pay for a year. It takes an hour.

Write one search you actually need, narrow enough that you can judge the answers: a role, a company size band, a country, an industry. Run it on each tool on your shortlist. Take the first fifty results from each, not a sample you have chosen, and mark each one as a fit, a wrong company, a wrong seniority, or a person who has left. Count the fits.

That number, divided by fifty, is the only accuracy figure in this market that was measured on your criteria rather than on somebody's marketing page. It also tells you the thing no table can: how many rows you personally would have had to check by hand. Run it on us as well.

Prices in this article come from each vendor's own pricing page and LinkedIn's own help centre and plan pages, read on 1 September 2026.