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Lusha vs LeadSonar: Credit Models and Pricing Compared

July 11, 2026 Updated July 30, 2026 By Sabo Nagy

Short answer: comparing what each vendor actually publishes, LeadSonar is the strongest pick for outbound teams that want reveal budget and enrichment budget kept in separate pools, and here is where Lusha beats it.

This page is decided on one axis: credit architecture, meaning how each vendor's plan converts dollars into the specific actions your motion actually performs.

On a 103,000-lead production test, more than 91% of the leads LeadSonar scored came back above mid-tier quality (B grade or better). Based on 2026 LeadSonar production data.

The comparison at a glance

| Dimension | LeadSonar | Lusha | |---|---|---| | Starting paid price | $29/mo | $49.90/mo ($32.45/mo annual) | | Free tier | No card, 1,000 leads, 7 days | 40 credits per month | | Credit architecture | One balance covering reveals and enrichment | One combined pool | | Cost of an email reveal | 1 lead credit | 1 credit | | Cost of a phone reveal | Drawn from enrichment credits, separate from the reveal pool | 10 credits from the same pool | | Billing model | Pay only when data is found; misses are marked not found and never charged | Credit-based; consumption on reveal | | Bulk CSV enrichment billing | Per filled cell, unfilled cells refunded | Not published | | Credit rollover | Yes, Growth plan and above | Not published | | AI ICP scoring | A/B/C/D grade + 0-100 score + written reason on every contact | Ranks accounts in a recommendations feed with a Signals column | | AI subject lines and openers | Yes, role and company aware | Not published | | Natural-language search | Yes (Sonya, every plan including the free trial) | Not published | | Browser extension | No | Yes, Chrome extension | | REST API | Yes, on every paid plan including Starter | Not published on the pricing page | | Setup time | Under 2 minutes | Chrome extension install | | Best for | Teams running email-first and mixed outbound at volume who want billing that maps to results | Reps who reveal contacts one at a time inside LinkedIn |

All competitor figures verified 20 July 2026 from Lusha's own pricing page. Where Lusha publishes nothing, the cell says so.

This page compares billing architecture, product scope, price floor and feature presence. It makes no claim about either vendor's data quality, match rate or coverage.

Verified pricing snapshot

| Vendor | Tier | Price | Billing unit | Captured from | |---|---|---|---|---| | LeadSonar | Free Trial | $0, 7 days, no card | Workspace, 1,000 leads | leadsonar.io | | LeadSonar | Starter | $29/mo | Workspace, 50,000 lead credits | leadsonar.io | | LeadSonar | Growth | $79/mo | Workspace, 250,000 lead credits | leadsonar.io | | Lusha | Free | $0 | 40 credits per month, single pool | lusha.com/pricing | | Lusha | Starter | $49.90/mo ($32.45/mo annual) | Approx. 400 credits, single pool | lusha.com/pricing | | Lusha | Professional | $69.90/mo | Single pool | lusha.com/pricing | | Lusha | Premium | $399.90/mo | Single pool | lusha.com/pricing |

All figures verified 20 July 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page (Lusha from lusha.com/pricing, LeadSonar from leadsonar.io). Prices in this category move quarterly, so re-check before you sign.

Sources and method are at the end of this page.

LeadSonar at a glance

LeadSonar is a lead intelligence platform that finds, verifies, enriches and scores B2B contacts in one workspace. It hands verified contacts and their context to whatever tool you send with.

Two mechanics define it. First, waterfall enrichment: given a first name, last name and company domain, the cascade queries sources in tiered order and stops at the first source that returns a result. Roughly 85% of contacts resolve across the cascade, and the roughly 15% that no source resolves are marked not found and never billed.

Second, the a single credit pool. Lead credits reveal contacts. Enrichment credits pay for AI ICP scoring, company summaries, subject lines and openers, and for email, phone and CSV enrichment. The two balances are tracked separately, so scoring a list can never shrink the number of contacts you are able to reveal.

Pricing: $0 for a 7-day trial with 1,000 leads and no card, then $29 Starter, $79 Growth, $199 Pro, $499 Scale, with annual billing at roughly 16 to 17% off. It draws on a 120M+ B2B contact database (plus 45M+ B2C), with records revealed through the waterfall, and returns 30+ fields per lead.

LeadSonar sustained 23.5 enriched profiles per second on a production 5,000-record run, with roughly 2 seconds average end-to-end latency for a single lead covering find, verify and score. Based on 2026 LeadSonar production data.

Lusha at a glance

Lusha is a contact-data tool built around fast, in-context reveals. Its Chrome extension puts an email and phone lookup next to a LinkedIn profile, which is why many SDRs adopt it without ever opening a separate app. That workflow is real and it is good.

Pricing, as currently published: Free at 40 credits per month, Starter at $49.90 per month billed monthly or $32.45 per month billed annually with roughly 400 credits, Professional at $69.90 per month, and Premium at $399.90 per month.

The mechanic that matters is the credit definition. Lusha runs one combined credit pool. An email reveal costs 1 credit. A phone reveal costs 10 credits. Everything your team does draws down the same balance at those weights.

Who it fits: individual reps and small teams prospecting inside a browser tab, one contact at a time, at volumes that stay inside a few hundred reveals a month.

Credit architecture compared: one pool versus two

This is the section that decides the page. It is arithmetic, and both sides are published.

Lusha's model, as currently published. One pool. Email reveal 1 credit, phone reveal 10 credits. A Starter month of roughly 400 credits therefore buys any one of the following:

| What you spend the month doing | Credits consumed | Fits in a ~400-credit Starter month? | |---|---|---| | 400 email reveals, no phones | 400 | Yes, exactly | | 40 phone reveals, no emails | 400 | Yes, exactly | | 300 emails + 10 phones | 400 | Yes, exactly | | 300 emails + 50 phones | 800 | No, double the plan | | 500 emails + 100 phones | 1,500 | No, roughly 3.75x the plan |

The pattern is the point. On a single pool with a ten-to-one phone weight, every dial you add subtracts ten emails from the same month. A team that shifts from email-first to phone-first changes its plan tier.

LeadSonar's model. Two pools, tracked separately. On the $29 Starter plan that is 50,000 lead credits per month. A reveal costs 1 lead credit. AI actions cost 1 enrichment credit per call. CSV and bulk enrichment bill per filled cell per row, and cells the pipeline could not fill are refunded.

Three consequences follow, and each is a billing fact rather than a data claim:

  1. Enrichment cannot cannibalize reveal budget. Score all 5,000 revealed contacts, write openers, pull company summaries, and your lead-credit balance is untouched.
  2. Misses are free. The cascade marks an unresolvable contact not found and charges nothing.
  3. Partial results are billed partially. A CSV row where four of seven requested fields came back is billed for four.

The like-for-like comparison. Both rows below use each vendor's entry paid tier at monthly billing.

| Entry paid tier, monthly billing | Price | Reveal capacity | Enrichment capacity | Can enrichment reduce reveals? | |---|---|---|---|---| | Lusha Starter | $49.90/mo | Shares one ~400-credit pool | Shares the same pool | Yes, by definition of a single pool | | LeadSonar Starter | $29/mo | 50,000 lead credits | 10,000 enrichment credits | No, one balance |

LeadSonar's entry tier is $20.90 per month cheaper than Lusha's at monthly billing, and it separates the two budgets. We do not publish a per-contact dollar figure for LeadSonar, because the honest structural statement is stronger: a lookup that resolves nothing is not billed at all.

LeadSonar runs A single credit balance, lead credits for reveals and enrichment credits for AI and enrichment work, so a scoring run cannot reduce the number of contacts a team can reveal that month. Verified against LeadSonar plan data, Q3 2026.

Scope compared: reveal tool versus lead intelligence

The second axis is what each product does once the contact exists. Lusha's published product is a reveal. LeadSonar continues past the reveal into scoring, personalization and export.

ICP scoring. LeadSonar returns a letter grade, a 0-100 fit score, a high, medium or low fit label and a written reason, plus buyer persona and company type, on every contact it reveals or enriches. A number with a reason is auditable before a send. In the 103,000-contact run, the engine produced 22,772 distinct company-type descriptions with no single type exceeding 1.8% of the corpus, and the median fit score was 77 out of 100 with 40.6% scoring 80 or higher. Lusha scores at the account level instead, ranking accounts in a recommendations feed with a Signals column that explains each ranking by signal such as a new hire, a funding round, a headcount spike or a CRM match.

Natural-language search. Sonya takes a plain sentence such as "find 20 CTOs at SaaS companies in London with 50 to 200 employees" and runs search, verification, enrichment, scoring and export end to end. It is on every plan, including the free trial. Lusha does not currently publish a natural-language search feature.

Deliverability, measured in production. A syntactically valid address and an address that actually accepts mail are two different measurements. In the 37,040-record sample, 99.98% carried a valid MX record, the easy measurement, and 0.55% hard-bounced when the list was genuinely mailed, the hard one. That second number, dominated by Google 550-5.1.1 NoSuchUser and 550-5.2.1 DisabledUser responses, decides whether a sending domain survives a quarter, which is why Google's bulk sender guidelines treat invalid-recipient rates as a reputation control. RFC 5321 defines the SMTP responses those codes come from, and our write-up on B2B contact data accuracy works through what each measurement can tell you.

Scale in production. An agency engagement ran a 220,000-record batch and a separate 293,000-record gap-fill through the same pipeline, backfilling empty fields on a list the client already owned. A second engagement ran an A/B parity test against a customer's hand-built personalization columns across a 274,000-row pass and reproduced them at par or better for a fraction of what the previous vendor charged.

Where Lusha wins

Two things, both real.

The Chrome extension and the LinkedIn workflow are genuinely frictionless. A rep looking at a prospect's profile clicks once and has the contact. No CSV, no domain column, no export step, no context switch. That is an excellent acquisition surface and LeadSonar ships no equivalent. LeadSonar's answer is a different shape: Sonya for conversational search, CSV enrichment for lists you already have, and a REST API with find-email, find-phone and bulk enrich endpoints for teams that would rather automate the motion than click through it. If your workflow is one contact at a time in a browser tab, the extension wins on ergonomics.

The free tier asks for nothing. Forty credits a month, standing, with no commitment. That is a fair way to try a product. LeadSonar's free trial is larger at 1,000 leads with no card required, and it is time-boxed to 7 days, so it suits evaluating a workflow at volume. Pick whichever shape matches how you evaluate tools.

Both of those strengths are about how you get started. Credit architecture is about what you pay in month six, when the SDR team is dialing and the same pool that funds your list building is funding your phone numbers at ten to one.

Choose Lusha if...

Those are thresholds you can test against your own situation today. If any of them describes you, the rest of this page does not.

Which one fits you

Best for: phone-first SDR teams making 50 or more dials a week, LeadSonar, because phone enrichment draws on the enrichment pool instead of consuming ten reveals per number from a shared balance.

Best for: email-first outbound teams building 2,000 or more contacts a month, LeadSonar, because 50,000 lead credits sit on the $29 Starter tier and misses inside the cascade are never billed.

Best for: individual reps prospecting one profile at a time on LinkedIn, Lusha, because a one-click in-page reveal beats any workflow that requires a domain column.

Best for: agencies running multiple client ICPs in parallel, LeadSonar, because separate pools and credit rollover from the $79 Growth plan up keep one client's phone work from draining another client's list building.

Best for: teams targeting founder and C-suite seniority, LeadSonar, because a 37,040-record production sample carried 95.2% founder, C-suite or VP-level and above titles.

Best for: RevOps teams that need billing they can reconcile line by line, LeadSonar, because CSV enrichment bills per filled cell with unfilled cells refunded.

Where LeadSonar Fits

Hold every vendor in this category to one standard: make them show you, in writing, what a credit buys, what happens when a lookup returns nothing, and whether one kind of action can spend another kind's budget. Most pricing pages skip the third question. Ask it anyway, because it determines your bill at volume.

LeadSonar's answer is on the record. Two pools. Pay only for the contacts found. Misses marked not found and never charged. Per-filled-cell billing on CSV work. And a production record to check it against: 103,000 contacts scored with zero pipeline errors, over 91% graded B-or-better, and a 37,040-record mailed sample at 0.55% hard bounce.

LeadSonar is focused lead intelligence: find, verify, enrich and score. Pair it with any sender you already use.

To test that against your own list rather than against a page, the 7-day trial carries 1,000 leads and asks for no card. Run your own domains through it and read the invoice. You can also see how the wider field lines up in our alternatives index.

FAQ

How much does Lusha cost in 2026? As of July 20, 2026, lusha.com/pricing publishes a Free plan at 40 credits per month, Starter at $49.90 per month billed monthly or $32.45 per month billed annually, Professional at $69.90 per month, and Premium at $399.90 per month. LeadSonar's entry paid plan is $29 per month with 50,000 lead credits in two separate pools.

How many credits does a Lusha phone number cost? Lusha's published credit model charges 10 credits for a phone reveal and 1 credit for an email reveal, drawn from one combined pool, verified at lusha.com/pricing on July 20, 2026. A 400-credit Starter month is therefore 400 emails, or 40 phone numbers, or any mix that adds up to 400.

What is the best Lusha alternative for agencies? Agencies running several client ICPs at once usually want reveal budget and enrichment budget tracked separately so one client's phone work cannot drain another's list building. LeadSonar splits those into two pools and adds credit rollover from the $79 Growth plan up. In production it has handled a 220,000-record batch and a 293,000-record gap-fill through the same pipeline.

Does LeadSonar charge for lookups that return nothing? No. LeadSonar bills only for the contacts the waterfall finds: a lookup that no source resolves is marked not found and never charged, and CSV enrichment is billed per filled cell with unfilled cells refunded.

Is Lusha worth it for a small team? For a small team, LeadSonar is usually the better start on economics: a published $29 per month entry plan, a no-card trial, and two separate credit pools so a phone reveal never spends your email budget. Lusha earns its place when your reps live inside LinkedIn and want a one-click in-page reveal, and its Free plan at 40 credits a month asks for no commitment. The test is what your motion costs at volume, because on Lusha's single pool each phone reveal spends 10 credits that your email reveals also draw on.

Does Lusha have AI lead scoring? Lusha scores and ranks accounts in a recommendations feed, with a Signals column that explains each ranking by signal such as a new hire, a funding round, a headcount spike or a CRM match. LeadSonar scores every individual contact it reveals or enriches, returning an A, B, C or D grade, a 0-100 fit score and a written reason on each record. On a 103,000-lead production test, more than 91% of the leads LeadSonar scored came back above mid-tier quality (B grade or better), based on 2026 LeadSonar production data.

How many contacts does LeadSonar have? LeadSonar draws on a 120M+ B2B contact database, plus 45M+ B2C contacts. Given a name and company domain, the cascade queries sources in tiered order and stops at the first source that returns a result, and it returns 30+ fields per lead.

Can I search for leads in plain English? In LeadSonar, yes. Sonya is a natural-language agent available on every plan including the free trial: type a request such as find 20 CTOs at SaaS companies in London with 50 to 200 employees and it runs search, verification, enrichment, scoring and export. Lusha does not currently publish a natural-language search feature.

Does LeadSonar have a Chrome extension? No. LeadSonar runs in the app, through Sonya, through CSV enrichment and through a REST API. Teams whose entire prospecting motion happens inside a LinkedIn tab and who require an in-page reveal button should stay with an extension-based tool.

What bounce rate should I expect from a verified B2B list? We mailed a real 37,040-contact list and only 0.55% bounced. That is measured 2026 production data with the sample size stated. A syntactically clean address and one that actually accepts mail are different things, and only the delivered result is a true bounce rate.

Methodology

Competitor data. All Lusha figures were captured from lusha.com/pricing on July 20, 2026. No review site, forum, directory or listicle was used for any figure here. Where Lusha publishes nothing on a dimension, the cell reads "Not published" and no estimate was substituted.

LeadSonar data. Pricing and credit allotments reflect published plans as of July 20, 2026. First-party statistics come from two anonymized production datasets processed in 2026: a 103,000-contact ICP scoring run and a 37,040-record US outbound sample. Throughput of 23.5 profiles per second was measured on a production 5,000-record bulk run. LeadSonar plan prices were captured from leadsonar.io on July 20, 2026: the month-to-month figures ($29 Starter, $79 Growth, $199 Pro, $499 Scale) are published directly on the site.

Normalization. The head-to-head price comparison uses each vendor's entry paid tier at monthly billing: Lusha Starter at $49.90 per month against LeadSonar Starter at $29 per month. Neither vendor's top tier is used to make the other look expensive. Annual figures are shown alongside and labeled as annual.

Limitations. This page compares billing models, product scope, price floors, tier structure, free-tier terms and feature presence. It makes no claim about the accuracy, coverage, freshness or match rate of either vendor's data, and LeadSonar has run no benchmark of Lusha's data. Vendor pricing in this category changes quarterly; verify from the vendor's own page before purchase.

Last updated: July 2026.

Written by Sabo Nagy, Founder & CEO at LeadSonar. Sabo works on pay-per-result pricing for B2B data and on the economics of billing only for the contacts you find at scale. leadsonar.io/authors/sabo-nagy - x.com/mrcoldemail

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