ZoomInfo or Lusha: the annual contract or the credit card?

The enterprise standard and the expense-card tool

ZoomInfo is the incumbent. Its August 2026 release describes 500 million contacts and 100 million companies, intent data, technographics and a growing execution layer: Copilot Workspace launched in October 2025 and GTM Studio arrived with the company's new ticker, GTM, in May 2025. It is sold on annual contracts, sales-led, with no self-serve trial. Prices are not published; guides that track them put the entry point around $15,000 a year for three seats and 5,000 credits, with a reported median near $32,000. Its own security page lists ISO 27001, ISO 27701, TRUSTe and SOC 2 Type II. ZoomInfo's website returned an error to our crawler, so positioning quotes come from its press releases.

Lusha is the opposite purchase. A rep signs up free, gets 40 credits a month and upgrades to Starter at $49.90 or Professional at $69.90 without talking to anyone. Emails cost one credit, phones five. The database is smaller, 290 million contacts by Lusha's count. There is no dialer, but email sequences and 24 buying signals were added in 2025.

Where each one breaks

The top ZoomInfo complaint is not data. It is the contract: auto-renewal with reported uplifts of 10 to 20 percent and a cancellation window of 60 to 90 days that catches teams that did not diarise it. Accuracy is reported as weaker outside the United States. One Capterra reviewer calls the intent data consistently inaccurate. Capterra scores it 4.1 from 322 reviews with 3.5 for value.

Lusha's complaints are smaller in money and larger in compliance. Credits spent on stale records are not refunded, European coverage thins outside the UK and in July 2026 Italy's regulator fined Lusha two million euros and ordered deletion of Italian residents' data. Capterra scores it 4.0 from 398 reviews.

The honest summary

If you have a twenty-seat sales team selling to US enterprises and need org charts and intent, ZoomInfo is still the default and its price reflects that. If you have three reps who need numbers for the accounts they already chose, Lusha does the job for the price of a lunch. Most companies asking this question are somewhere in between. For them the answer is usually neither alone.

How to choose

Choose ZoomInfo if

• You run a sales team of ten or more selling to US mid-market and enterprise accounts
• You need org charts, technographics and intent, with someone who will actually use them
• You can put a renewal reminder in three calendars 120 days before the anniversary

Choose Lusha if

• You have a handful of reps who need reveals for accounts they already picked
• You want monthly billing and a free plan to test with
• Your buyers are in the US or UK

Choose neither alone if

• You have no research process. Both products tell you who exists. Neither tells you who has a reason to buy this month, which is the only list worth emailing

How we treat databases

Several of our clients keep a ZoomInfo or Lusha subscription and we use it as one source among several. The order of operations is what makes the difference: we find a signal first, confirm the account fits, then pull contact data from the provider most likely to be right for that geography, then verify every address before it is sent. Anything that fails verification is dropped, not guessed.

That discipline is why our bounce rates stay under 2 to 3 percent and why the meetings we book are with people who had a reason to answer. Whichever database you own, the work between the export and the meeting is the part we run.