Review of Prospecting Platforms May 2025

ZoomInfo Pros: ZoomInfo stands as the well-established and trusted leader in B2B sales intelligence. It's the clear winner when it comes to database size and quality, offering the most comprehensive collection of business contacts available. The platform provides direct phone numbers and verified email addresses, along with detailed company information including revenue estimates, employee headcount, office locations, and ownership structure details. Cons: Cost is the primary drawback—ZoomInfo is by far the most expensive option in the market. However, like most enterprise software, pricing is negotiable, so be sure to push for additional discounts beyond their initial offer. The platform also lacks some of the AI-enabled search capabilities for discovering target companies that other tools provide. While other platforms excel at company discovery, ZoomInfo shines once you have a solid list of target companies and need the best contact information to connect with decision-makers. Grata Pros: Grata is a well-established and trusted M&A intelligence platform, widely used by Fortune 500 companies and industry professionals for deal flow generation. The platform excels at targeting companies that may be ready to sell, making it particularly valuable for acquisition-focused outreach. Cons: Like ZoomInfo, Grata commands premium pricing compared to other prospecting tools. While sponsorships are available to searchers partnered with select firms (which can make the cost more reasonable), a significant limitation is that the platform only provides email addresses—no phone numbers are included. This lack of phone contact information was ultimately a deal-breaker for our needs. Inven Pros: Inven offers excellent AI-powered features that help generate highly targeted company lists. During our evaluation, it consistently produced the most accurate lists of companies matching our specific search criteria. The platform includes intent data to help identify companies that may be considering an exit. Pricing is more reasonable than both ZoomInfo and Grata. Their contact database aggregates information from multiple sources and includes both phone numbers and email addresses. Cons: While the quantity and quality of contacts surpasses both Grata and Apollo, it still doesn't match the comprehensive coverage and accuracy of ZoomInfo's database. Apollo.io Pros: Apollo's biggest advantage is affordability—it's significantly cheaper than all other options and even offers a free account to get started. The platform provides decent list-building capabilities and company search functionality for identifying target prospects. Cons: The quantity and quality of contact information is notably limited compared to premium alternatives. While Apollo offers both phone numbers and email addresses, the results are often incomplete or less reliable, which can impact outreach effectiveness. Ultimately for our search we decided to pony up the money for ZoomInfo and plan to augment it with Apollo for help building targeted lists of companies matching our search criteria. Once we exhaust the capability of these two tools we will consider adding Inven to our stack to help us identify more companies. These were the 4 tools we evaluated, curious if anyone has experience with other tools, especially if there's better options we didn't consider.