The best B2B database for France

What Sales Navigator does very well, and where it stops

Let's start by giving it credit, because it deserves it. Sales Navigator is still the best B2B data source in the world, and the freshest: profiles are updated by the people themselves, and most databases on the market are built on LinkedIn anyway. If your outreach is international, that is where to go.

Three limits do show up in daily use. First the price of the subscription. Then exports, capped at 2,500 profiles per 24 hours: Emelia's automatic splitting takes you up to 80,000 profiles on one search, but it is still work spread over several days. Finally accuracy: on broad searches, Sales Navigator brings back noise, people who do not really match your target.

What a French database adds on top

Start with the order of magnitude, because it frames the debate: 26 million companies and 29.2 million contacts for France alone. Basile cross-references five families of sources: company registries (INSEE, Infogreffe, BODACC: SIREN number, legal form, share capital, directors), Google Maps (addresses, opening hours, phone numbers, ratings and reviews), public LinkedIn profiles (team size, industry, description), the web (websites, published emails and phone numbers) and annual accounts (revenue, net income, headcount).

Open a contact's record. You will find their LinkedIn link, their description, their job title, everything an extraction would have given you. But also, and this is where it changes in nature, the real figures on their company: revenue, and whether the company is in receivership or liquidation. You know who you are writing to before you write.

These are exactly the pieces of information Sales Navigator will never have, not out of weakness but by design: it is not specialized in France, and those registers are of no interest to it.

The data is queried, not extracted

The fundamental difference is not the volume, it is the nature of the access. On LinkedIn, you pull profiles one search at a time, within caps, over several days. On a database, you query and you get.

Everything is already correlated: the LinkedIn profile, the legal entity and the Google listing point to the same reality, without you having to reconcile three files by hand. And the data is refreshed every month.

Why export quotas are deliberately high

Many platforms limit you to a thousand contacts a month. That produces two effects, both of them bad. You extract sparingly, so you never dare to explore. And once the contacts are out, you tell yourself you paid for them, so you use them, even the ones that do not fit.

The opposite reasoning is healthier, and AI makes it possible. Extract broadly, then filter. No extraction is 100% perfect, whatever the source. Hand your file to an assistant and ask it to discard the profiles that do not match your target, explaining who you are aiming at. Doing that sorting by hand, reading the descriptions one by one, was a nightmare as recently as two years ago. It is not anymore.

That is why the export quotas are generous: so you can pull the raw material out and sort it afterwards, rather than rationing it up front.

The plans, and the only number that really matters

Entry is at €29 excluding VAT per month, a launch price during the open beta, with unlimited browsing of the data and all the sources. A free trial lets you test before subscribing. What separates the plans is not how rich the data is, identical everywhere, but the export volume:

Prices change: check Basile's website for today's price.

API access deserves a moment of its own, because its value is not the one you would expect. It is not just for developers: it lets you plug Basile into an assistant, Claude or another one, and that is where it gets interesting for a salesperson.

Here is the concrete case. You struggle to set the right filters, or your target is not one but three: three different searches, three exports, three files to merge by hand before you can do anything at all. With the API plugged into an assistant, you describe your target in plain English. It builds the queries, runs them all, and hands you back a single merged file.

That said, if you are starting out, the entry plan does the job perfectly well. The API answers a need for volume and a way of working, not a shortcoming of the platform.

What the cross-referencing makes possible, and almost nobody else does

The real value is not the volume, it is the fact that these sources are linked to each other. Take an example that looks trivial and is not: filtering companies by collective bargaining agreement, then getting the LinkedIn profiles of their directors.

That kind of query crosses three data worlds that normally have nothing to do with each other. The collective agreement comes from the legal registers, the company from INSEE, the director's profile from LinkedIn. All three have to be matched up beforehand, row by row, for a single search to be able to run across them.

That is also why Basile is not only for cold email: phone outreach, and everyone whose job is to build and maintain databases, get value from it too.

The filter to tick before any people search

One reflex that will save you paying for unusable rows. In the people search, right at the top, turn on the with LinkedIn link filter.

For a LinkedIn campaign, the reason is obvious: without a profile URL, no action is possible on those contacts.

For phone outreach, it is less intuitive but just as true. Finding a mobile number relies on the person's LinkedIn profile to identify them. Without that link, phone enrichment has nothing to work with.

Exporting, or building lists inside Basile

Once your search is done, there are three ways out. A direct CSV export. Sending to Emelia, which creates the lead list without going through a file. Or adding to a Basile list, contact by contact or by selecting the whole search at once.

That third option has an upside people underestimate, and it is worth the detour if you work at high volume.

What the subscription already includes, at no extra cost

The subscription gives you access to the data. And inside that data, there is already plenty to reach people with.

You will find generic email addresses and landline numbers, sometimes even a few mobiles. This is information published by the companies themselves, on their website or their Google Maps listing: the contact@, the info@, and the numbers shown in the footer. With small tradespeople, it is not unusual for the published number to be a mobile, but in most cases it is a landline.

This data comes at no extra cost. It was public, and it is there.

What requires enrichment

Two things cannot be picked up off a website and therefore need separate treatment: named email addresses, the firstname.lastname kind, the person's own work address, and mobile numbers.

For those, you need enrichment, and two ways of paying coexist: Basile's wallet, or your Emelia credits.

Basile wallet or Emelia credits

Emelia runs on credits, like most international tools, because it is built for volume: 1 credit per email found, 50 per number found, in packs from 1,000 to 100,000 credits, as a monthly subscription or a one-off payment. Subscription credits roll over as long as the subscription is active; one-off credits never expire.

Basile runs on a wallet. No credits, no enrichment subscription, no minimum amount: you top up your balance by whatever amount you want, and it stays available until you have spent it. Prices are per unit: 5 euro cents per email found, 50 euro cents per mobile number found. In both cases, you only pay for what is found.

The reading is simple. For emails, Emelia credits come out cheaper from the first pack, and up to ten times cheaper at high volume. For numbers, the gap only opens up with the large packs: on a small pack, the Basile wallet is actually the better deal.

If your outreach is occasional and targeted, the wallet saves you a subscription for three searches. If it runs at scale, buy credits. Above €10,000 of top-up, Basile's rates are negotiable.

The two tools plug into each other

Nothing forces you to pick a side, and there are two ways to combine them depending on where you prefer to work.

Enrich in Emelia. You extract your contacts from Basile, send them to an Emelia list, and run the email search there with your credits. That is the natural path when the list then goes into a campaign.

Enrich in Basile with your Emelia credits. In Emelia, open Settings > API & Webhooks, create a key with Create new key if you do not have one, then copy it with Copy key. Paste it into Basile's settings: the emails and numbers you dig out from Basile then use your Emelia credits rather than your wallet.