ContactOut is a simple yet versatile tool designed to help anyone find the email address and phone number of a business professional. With a simple name search, you’ll have instant access to ContactOut’s database of 300 million users and contact information. But is ContactOut right for you? Read on for our complete review, including ContactOut’s pros, cons, pricing information, and popular use cases.
ContactOut: The Good and The Bad
Our team here at Crazy Egg conducted extensive research on real user reviews from trusted review sites to determine the strengths and weaknesses of ContactOut. We used this information, combined with our personal experience testing ContactOut, to highlight where the tool shines and some areas where it falls short.
What ContactOut is Good At
ContactOut stands above the crowd with its sales and recruiting capabilities. It’s easy to use, has a huge library of contacts in its database, and users love the ContactOut chrome extension. Continue below to learn more about ContactOut’s strengths.
Extensive Database: ContactOut has a massive library of professionals in its database. This includes 150 million personal email addresses, 200 million work emails, and 100 million direct-dial phone numbers. The database also has 300 million professional profiles and 30 million company profiles.
Based on the sheer volume of contact information and the reviews from real users, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll find either an email address or phone number for the person you’re looking for. For those planning to use ContactOut to search for prospects or job candidates without using a name to start the search, there’s no shortage of potential options for you to consider.
Simple and Easy to Use: ContactOut is one of the most straightforward email search engines on the market. There’s virtually no learning curve, and you can start searching for contact information within seconds. To test the usability for yourself, create a free account on ContactOut with just an email address. The platform even lets you sign up using your Google or Microsoft Outlook accounts to register with a single click.
Once you’re in, it’s just a matter of searching for a name and waiting for the database to provide the person’s profile or contact information. The user interface is pretty bare-bones, which is a good since you won’t be overwhelmed with many bells and whistles. You can easily integrate the tool into your existing workflow, even if you need to bounce back and forth between multiple screens while using it.
Chrome Extension: In addition to using ContactOut’s search engine, lots of user reviews praise the tool’s extension for Google Chrome. This extension lets you find someone’s contact information directly on LinkedIn—without leaving your web browser or switching pages to your ContactOut account. In fact, several users mentioned that they’d used similar Chrome extensions in the past, but ContactOut works better than all of them.
Using the Chrome extension is very straightforward. Once installed, you’ll see a small ContactOut button on the right side of your web browser. So whenever you land on someone’s LinkedIn profile, you just need to click the button, and a slider will pop out displaying all available contact information for that particular user profile. You can even save the person’s contact information or add their address to an email campaign with a single click.
Sales and Recruiting: Compared to other email search engines, ContactOut shines for sales and recruitment use cases. That’s because the database contains so much information about a person’s business profiles and work contact information. It’s not one of those basic people-finders that give you a person’s home address history, which is typically useless for sales reps and recruiters.
It also integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, so you can quickly add contact information to your CRM and run campaigns with just a few clicks. For recruiters, ContactOut also integrates with popular ATS systems like Greenhouse, Lever, and Bullhorn.
LinkedIn Contact Finder: While ContactOut has data from other sources, it excels in extracting contact information from LinkedIn profiles. Based on reviews from real users, it’s clear that the vast majority of people using ContactOut are using it strictly to find emails and phone numbers through LinkedIn names, profiles, and URLs.
Whether you just need to find a single email address or phone number on LinkedIn or you’re going to use it for bulk lists, ContactOut has an option that fits your needs. It’s also nice knowing you can search for LinkedIn contacts through the search portal and the Chrome extension.
Affordable: ContactOut offers an exceptional value to its users. It’s tough to find anyone complaining about how much they’re paying for the service, which is usually a common issue in this category.
If you only plan to use ContactOut for the occasional search, you likely won’t need to upgrade beyond the free forever plan. With premium plans starting at just $79 per month for up to 6,000 emails and 600 phone numbers per year, this is a reasonable price to pay for any high-volume business user. A single sale or candidate placed can cover your entire cost for the year.
What ContactOut is Lacking
There are a handful of areas where ContactOut falls short. The tool isn’t always accurate, and it requires the use of third-party tools to complete your desired goals. Read on to learn more about these drawbacks as you decide whether ContactOut is right for you.
Accuracy: One common theme throughout the user reviews of ContactOut is tied to the tool’s accuracy—or rather inaccuracy. The information isn’t always verified, so you can expect to get some email addresses that are either outdated or simply wrong. This is especially true if you’re searching for someone’s phone number, as there are more reports of incorrect phone numbers than inaccurate email addresses.
If someone switches jobs fairly often, there’s a decent chance that their business email address on ContactOut may be old. There seems to be a significant lag in the platform gathering updated and accurate contact information, and it’s clear this isn’t happening in real-time. If you plan to use ContactOut for recruiting or sales prospecting, just set the expectation for yourself that you will get some bouncebacks.
Requires Manual Inputs: ContactOut does have a bulk data enrichment feature. But getting the contact information for a bulk list of people isn’t as easy as you’d expect, and it requires quite a bit of manual input on your end. This feature is ultra-specific and requires you to have a CSV-formatted list of LinkedIn URLs for the contact information you’re looking for.
It seems like most users find it easier to simply search for email addresses and phone numbers one at a time. Alternatively, the ContactOut chrome extension can help you find the email or phone number of someone on LinkedIn while you’re looking at the person’s profile. But if you want to just take a list of 500 names and do a bull search for their contact information in seconds, this probably isn’t the best tool for you.
Leads Aren’t Qualified: ContactOut provides the email addresses of the people you’re searching for. But it doesn’t qualify prospects or candidates for you. So you’ll still have to go through the process of qualifying those leads either before you search for them in ContactOut or after you have their contact information.
Generally speaking, lists of qualified candidates are a bit more expensive. ContactOut is reasonably priced for what you’re getting. So while there is still some extra work to be done on your end, it’s not like you’re overpaying for the results in ContactOut’s database.
No Built-In Sales or Applicant Tracking Features: ContactOut positions itself as an email finder for sales reps and recruiters. But it’s worth noting that the platform is a simple email search engine and database. It’s not a fully-featured applicant tracking system (ATS) or sales CRM.
The platform does integrate with Salesforce and popular ATS systems. But if you’re using something other than Salesforce or one of the supported ATS tools, you’ll have to manually enter the contact information you find on ContactOut to your preferred system. Then you’ll have to run your desired campaigns from those third-party platforms, as opposed to doing everything under one roof with ContactOut.
Not Ideal For Finding Personal Contact Info: ContactOut is definitely intended for business professionals. More specifically, it’s built for sales and recruitment purposes. So if you’re trying to find your neighbor’s home phone number or get the personal cell phone number of your kid’s teacher, you’re not going to be able to find it on ContactOut.
While ContactOut does have personal email addresses in its database, several users complained that they’re inaccurate. It also seems that the vast majority of contact information on ContactOut is coming from LinkedIn, and the tool claims to have 75% of LinkedIn users in its database. But with 900 million users on LinkedIn and 300 million business professional contacts ContactOut, there appears to be some discrepancy here.
ContactOut Pricing & Options
ContactOut is an email search engine and contact finder. It’s a subscription-based service with both annual and month-to-month pricing options. There’s also a limited free plan that’s suitable for occasional searches of up to 40 emails per month.
Overall, ContactOut is designed for two primary use cases—sales and recruiting. Each of these options gives you access to the same base functionality of the tool but with subtle differences in terms of usage, integrations, and price. We’ll break down these two use cases and pricing options in greater detail below.
ContactOut For Sales
If you’re a B2B sales rep, you can use ContactOut to find email addresses and phone numbers for prospects. There are a couple of different ways to approach this, including ContactOut’s search engine and Chrome extension for finding contact information directly on LinkedIn. Both of these options are fast and straightforward ways to find the information you need before starting a new sales campaign.
Within the ContactOut search portal, you can narrow down and customize your searches to focus specifically on decision-makers or whoever you’re trying to target. The platform has more than 20 search filters, including company revenue, business size, and technologies used. Sales reps can also integrate ContactOut directly with Salesforce and Linkedin Sales Navigator.
The ContactOut sales plan costs $79 monthly and is limited to a single user per company. There’s no discount for an annual contract, but you will get all your search credits upfront if you sign up for annual billing. The base plan supports 6,000 emails and 600 phone numbers per year. If you want to add additional users or learn more about an unlimited email search option, reach out to the ContactOut sales team for more information.
ContactOut For Recruiting
ContactOut makes it easy for recruiters to find prospective hires’ email addresses and phone numbers. You can use the tool to search for someone’s personal email address in case they’re currently employed and you don’t want to send them job opportunities to their work email. The search portal even lets you filter information based on job role, location, experience, and more.
The cool part about using ContactOut for recruiting is that you don’t have to start with a candidate’s name. You can simply narrow your search based on the criteria you’re looking for, and ContactOut will automatically display profiles, names, emails, and phone numbers of matching candidates in its database. ContactOut integrates with popular applicant tracking systems like Greenhouse, Bullhorn, Lever, and LinkedIn Recruiter.
ContactOut’s recruiter plan costs $199 per month, which supports up to 12,000 emails and 600 phone numbers per year. If you choose to get billed monthly instead of annually, you’ll be limited to 1,000 emails and 50 phone numbers each month. This plan is limited to just one user per company, and you’ll need to talk to the ContactOut sales team if you want to add more users.
Summary
We recommend ContactOut to any sales rep or recruiter looking for a fast, simple, and affordable way to find someone’s email address or phone number. It integrates with Salesforce and popular applicant tracking systems, and it’s perfect if most people you’re searching for have a LinkedIn profile.
