People Data Labs (PDL) licenses a large B2B dataset you query or ingest at scale. The best alternatives to PDL differ less in how many records they hold than in how completely each record is filled and how current it is.
People Data Labs (PDL) licenses a large B2B dataset you query or ingest at scale. The best alternatives to PDL differ less in how many records they hold than in how completely each record is filled and how current it is.
Choose People Data Labs for dataset breadth and bulk delivery, Coresignal for job postings depth, Crustdata for change monitoring, and an enrichment API when you need complete, current records at the point of use.
The short version. Four providers, four shapes. People Data Labs sells a dataset to license. Coresignal sells breadth across companies, employees and job postings. Crustdata sells signals that fire when something changes. Enrich Layer returns one enriched record on demand, stamped with when it was last updated.
A record count tells you how many rows exist, but not how many of those rows contain the field you need.
PDL publishes field-level fill rates for every field in their dataset. That's more transparency than almost anyone in this category offers, and it's the only reason there are real numbers to show at all. Here is what their published statistics say, as of data version 35.1 on 7 September 2026.
Their company dataset holds 74,785,388 records (People Data Labs company stats, data version 35.1, checked 7 September 2026). Across those records:
| Field | Populated |
|---|---|
| Industry | 75.2% |
| Location | 90.5% |
| Website | 47.6% |
| Employee count | 25.2% |
| Inferred revenue | 26.5% |
| Founded year | 22.5% |
| Funding details | 0.4% |
| Total funding raised | 0.0% |
Their person dataset holds 2,465,457,822 records (People Data Labs dataset stats, data version 35.1, checked 7 September 2026). Across those:
| Field | Populated |
|---|---|
| Name | 100% |
| Work history | 37.8% |
| Job title | 22.6% |
| Employer name | 22.1% |
| Work email | 3.5% |
If you read those tables carefully, you'll notice a couple of interesting things.
Some fields are strong. Industry and location are populated on the large majority of company records, and that's useful if industry and location are what you need.
The firmographic fields that most buyers evaluate on are thinner. Roughly one company record in four carries an employee count, which means that fewer than one person record in four carries a job title or an employer name.
Publishing those numbers is a service to buyers. It also makes People Data Labs the only one of these four you can check before you commit.
Coresignal and Crustdata don't publish field-level fill rates. Neither did Enrich Layer, until now. One vendor discloses, and the rest ask you to take the headline number on faith.
So you need to ask every provider you're evaluating, including us, for the fill rate on the three fields your product depends on. Notice who can answer immediately, who has to go and check, and who changes the subject to their total record count.
| Dimension | People Data Labs | Coresignal | Crustdata | Enrich Layer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | A dataset to query or license | Datasets and APIs across companies, employees and jobs | A live graph with search, enrichment and monitoring | An enriched record returned on demand |
| Published fill rates | Yes, field by field | Not published | Not published | Not published |
| Distinctive depth | Scale of the person dataset | 475M+ job postings with history to 2020 | Watcher API for change signals | 28 fields in a single company call |
| Freshness signal | Dataset versioning | States real-time access | States continuous re-verification | meta.last_updated on every response |
| Delivery | Bulk and API | Flat files and APIs | REST API, MCP, bulk datasets | Per-call API |
| Best suited to | Hosting your own data layer | Breadth across three datasets | Reacting to change | Enrichment at the point of use |
Stay with People Data Labs if you're licensing a dataset rather than calling an API.
If your plan is to ingest tens of millions of records into your own warehouse and run your own resolution and enrichment on top, People Data Labs is built for that whereas Enrich Layer isn't. Enrich Layer does not offer bulk list or database delivery.
Three more verifiable reasons to consider:
If dataset breadth and bulk delivery are what your product needs, you're probably set with People Data Labs.
Coresignal sells breadth across three connected datasets rather than depth in one.
As of 7 September 2026, Coresignal's own site states 4.5B+ total records: 70M+ company records with 500+ data fields, 907M+ employee records with 300+ data fields, and 475M+ job postings with 85+ data fields.
Company and employee data runs back to 2016, job postings to 2020. Delivery is available as flat files or APIs, and they publish an Agentic Search API and an MCP server. They state certification by the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative and that they collect only publicly available business data.
Choose Coresignal for job postings. 475M+ postings with five years of history is a dataset neither People Data Labs nor Enrich Layer offers. If your question involves hiring signals, labor market trends, or tracking what a company is recruiting for over time, Coresignal is the strongest option in this comparison and it is not close.
Crustdata sells change rather than state.
As of 7 September 2026, Crustdata's own site describes a live graph covering 1B people, exposed through Company and People Enrichment APIs, Company and People Search APIs, a Jobs API, a Posts API, and a Watcher API, with delivery by REST, MCP, or bulk dataset. They describe their freshness approach as continuous re-verification rather than a periodic archive rebuild.
Choose Crustdata for monitoring. The Watcher API has no equivalent among the other three providers here. Most enrichment APIs, Enrich Layer included, answer the question "what is true about this person or company right now." Crustdata is built to answer "tell me when that changes." If your product reacts to job changes, funding events, or hiring shifts, that's a different architecture and Crustdata is the one that has it.
Enrich Layer returns a complete, current record for one person or company at the moment you ask for it.
The clearest fit is enrichment inside a live workflow, such as a form submission or a CRM update, where the answer is needed in the request rather than in tomorrow's batch.
The same shape helps when you want the whole picture of one company without joining several requests. A single company call returns 28 top level fields, including industry, headquarters, locations, company size, founded year, specialities, similar companies, affiliated companies, and funding data. The public API specification lists all 28.
Record age matters most when it's part of your decision. Every Enrich Layer response includes meta.last_updated, so you always know how old the record you just received is, and meta.thin_profile, which tells you when a record is sparse rather than letting you discover that downstream.
Person profiles are served within a 29 day staleness window. Person Lookup returns four similarity scores between 0 and 1 rather than a single opaque match flag, so you can set your own confidence threshold instead of accepting ours. The US person dataset covers 245M records.
Enrich Layer also commits to no breaking API changes without 30 days notice.
Enrich Layer does not offer bulk dataset delivery, job postings history, or change monitoring. For those, People Data Labs, Coresignal, and Crustdata are the better fits.
The provider comparison matters less than the test you run. Apply the same questions to every option.
Fill rate on your fields, not overall coverage. A provider with 2 billion records and 3% work email coverage is a worse fit than one with 200 million records and 40%, if work email is what your product needs. Ask for the fill rate on your three most important fields.
Recency per record, not a refresh policy. "Updated monthly" describes a process, whereas a timestamp is fact. Ask which one you get.
Match transparency. When a provider returns a record for an ambiguous input, can you see how confident the match was, or only that a match happened? Opaque matching means you cannot tune the tradeoff between coverage and correctness.
Delivery shape. A dataset license and a per-call API are different products with different costs and different failure modes. Decide which one your architecture actually needs before comparing anyone on data quality.
We've written about this at length in our guide to evaluating a data enrichment provider, which covers the five structural dimensions in more depth.
It depends on the shape of your problem, not on which provider is best overall.
Choose People Data Labs if you're licensing a dataset to host and enrich yourself, and you want the largest person dataset in this comparison.
Choose Coresignal if you need job postings, hiring signals, or breadth across companies, employees and jobs in one place.
Choose Crustdata if your product reacts to change and you need monitoring rather than lookups.
Choose Enrich Layer if you need complete, current records returned inside a live workflow, and you want to know how old each record is when it arrives.
If two of those describe you, you probably need two providers.
Run the same sample through every provider on your shortlist, and measure it the same way each time.
Take 500 to 1,000 records that look like your real workload, not a curated sample and not the provider's demo list. Send the identical list to each provider.
Then measure fill rate on the specific fields your product uses, not overall match rate. Measure how many returned records carry a recency signal you can act on. And spot check 20 records by hand against the live source, because a field being populated and a field being correct are different claims.
Most providers here, including Enrich Layer, offer a way to run this without a commitment. Our own walkthrough of that process is in how to test and evaluate a data enrichment dataset.
Who are People Data Labs' main competitors? In the API and dataset category, the closest are Coresignal, Crustdata, and Enrich Layer. They differ by shape rather than by quality. People Data Labs licenses datasets, Coresignal covers breadth across companies, employees and jobs, Crustdata monitors change, and Enrich Layer enriches on demand.
Which B2B data provider is the best? There's no single best provider, it's more about which shape fits your architecture. Decide first whether you need a dataset to host, breadth across datasets, monitoring, or per-call enrichment. This will help you decide faster than any quality comparison.
How much do People Data Labs cost? People Data Labs publishes plan tiers on their own pricing page, and pricing in this category changes often enough that any figure quoted here would be stale before you read it. Check their pricing page directly.
Does a bigger dataset mean better coverage? No. A record count measures how many rows exist. Coverage measures how many of those rows contain the field you need. People Data Labs publishes both, which is why the gap is visible at all. Most providers publish only the first number.
Can I use more than one provider? Yes, and many teams do. Change monitoring, job postings history, and real time enrichment are different products. Trying to force one provider to cover all three usually costs more than running two.
Enrich Layer is built around what a record contains and how current it is, rather than around a headline number.
A single company call returns 28 fields, so the common case does not require joining several requests to assemble one picture.
Every response carries meta.last_updated, so record age is data you receive rather than a policy you are asked to trust. Every response also carries meta.thin_profile, so you can tell a sparse record from a complete one before you use it. Person Lookup exposes four similarity scores rather than one match flag, so you decide what confidence threshold your product needs.
The benefit is that you always know what you received.
That's also why you should demand fill rates from every provider on your shortlist, including us. A vendor that won't tell you how complete its records are is asking you to find out in production.