In-depth comparison of the top-notch email finders

When it comes to B2B Outreach and cold-email, there's one important thing that the best lead generation agencies know : you should never buy databases, you should build them yourself.

🧐 There are different ways to create your own databases and find the right emails. In most cases, these leads can be found on LinkedIn. It's important to remember that software programs that provide direct access to databases on their platform are actually based on LinkedIn and copy the data, trying as best they can to keep all this data up to date, which is very complicated. That's why it's better to go directly to the source and have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account, which gives you access to advanced profile searches, with all the filters you need to extract the data.

So the first step is to scrape LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can use the scrapper available directly in Emelia, it's much easier to use and allows you to exceed the natural limit of 2500 extractable contacts, but that's the subject of another article : Scraper LinkedIn Sales Navigator. 

🔍 The main question of this article is : once we've extracted a list, what are the best email finder, email enrichers available on the market and what sets them apart ?

Founded in 2021, Emelia started out as a simple cold-emailing platform with the primary aim of making cold-emailing accessible and scalable, when at the time many platforms charged very high prices per connected mailbox and didn't allow you to scale your processes with functionality like multi-sender that allows you to run large campaigns, or severely limited the number of contacts per campaign.

Since then, Emelia has been adding features, always with the same goal in mind : to make things accessible and scalable.

One of the notable differences between Emelia and many email finders is that Emelia only deducts your credits if they actually find an email address. Whereas other enhancers charge on a per-search basis. That makes a huge difference! On average, an email finder finds between 30% and 70% of the list, depending on the type of list you have.

📊 So if we compare Emelia and Dropcontact, for example (which we'll go into in more detail below)

✅ Emelia : $19 - 1000 credits

❌ Dropcontact : $24 - 1000 credits

Apart from being $5 cheaper than the advertised price, the real price is almost double or even triple.

At Dropcontact, you upload a list of 1000, they find 400 for example, it still debits the 1000 credits.

At Emelia, you import a list of 1,000, they find 400, and you still have 600 credits left to pass on other files.

This is one of the first major differences.

The second is obviously the quality of the email addresses found. Each email finder finds different results, depending on the methods used. Emelia's power lies in the combination of its email finder technology and the data it gathers from its customers' email campaigns.

Emelia finds many more 100% reliable email addresses and this is very important for the deliverability of your mailboxes in the long term. If you have too many hard bounces, then you risk lowering the rate of your emails ending up in your prospects' main inbox.

✅ Less expensive

✅ Only debits credits if they find

✅ Better-quality emails

✅ Integrated into your cold emailing tool

✅ Has a scrapper from LinkedIn Sales Navigator

✅ Fast, direct customer support from the founders

A pure player in email search, Enrow is all about enrichment - that's all it does, and does it well. Like Emelia, Enrow only debits credits if they are found. Prices are affordable and the platform is constantly evolving, with an API for those who want to automate part of their process.

Enrow is ideal for those who already have their own data extraction methods and are only looking for pure enrichment. For all upstream and downstream enrichment, it's up to you to find the right software.

• Pure player in email search

• An API

• Quality emails

• Affordable prices

A leader and forerunner in the email finder french market, Dropcontact enjoys a high profile in its home market thanks to blog articles covering a wide range of cold-emailing topics, and participation in a number of podcasts and industry events.

Of course, when you say "leader", you often say "I'm taking advantage of this to charge high prices", but there's no denying that Dropcontact is a quality software package.

Unlike the other software programs mentioned, Dropcontact does more than just find email addresses; it also finds information such as company registration numbers. This explains why they charge even if they can't find the email.

Where Dropcontact comes into its own, is for large companies that can afford it, is in connecting their CRM to Dropcontact, which will automatically update the customer and prospect files in the CRM with a great deal of information.

But for those who simply want to find the email addresses of their prospect lists, then it's best to go for another choice if you don't want to pay for other company information that doesn't interest you.

• An API that can be connected to CRM

• In-depth information on enriched companies.

• A blog full of cool info

• Good customer support.

Formerly called Email Hunter, created in 2015, Hunter.io is a forerunner in its field, with the opposite path of Emelia, they started with email finder to become also cold email software afterwards.

Hunter.io is a big company and deals with big customers, which is why they can afford very high prices, both for email retrieval and for their cold-email platform.

Their entry price, 49€, doesn't allow much and you'll quickly be limited and have to take the extra credits which are 10€ for 100 email addresses (when at Emelia for the same price you get 500).

Even their highest public package, €499, is very limited in terms of email enrichment and emailing for afterwards. If you really want to scale your processes, you're going to need a custom plan, and you're going to have to hang on when they tell you the price.

Find the best alternatives to Hunter.io in just one click!

Anymailfinder has a handy extension that installs on your Google Chrome and lets you browse linkedin, and when you're on someone's profile there's a "find email address" button, which is very handy for finding email addresses manually on a small scale.

Anymailfinder also allows bulk searches with file import, and has an API to automate some of its processes. They also only charge per email found. Although 2 times more expensive than Emelia, Anymailfinder remains affordable and very practical for unit searches based on LinkedIn profiles. Their extension also allows you to scrape the basic LinkedIn search, without needing LinkedIn sales navigator, but this search is often much less precise and with a lot of waste. And it's not very scalable, as it will extract a maximum of 1,000 contacts, whereas with Emelia's scraper you can scrape up to 80,000 contacts automatically.

I hope this article comparing the best email finders gives you an overview of the strengths and limitations of each tool according to your needs. Whether you're looking for an affordable solution, maximum accuracy, or advanced features like CRM integration, there's a perfect tool for you.

🚀 Clearly, Emelia.io is the tool that brings together all the features you need for successful B2B prospecting, at an ultra-transparent and fair price.