Prospeo vs Lusha: which one to pay for, and when to stay

Pick Prospeo if you buy contact data by the result and your targets include European mobiles, and stay on Lusha if your reps reveal contacts straight from LinkedIn into a CRM all day and your market is mostly the United States. The test that settles it costs nothing: run 40 contacts from your real list through both free tiers and count verified emails and callable numbers. I have run Prospeo since 2024, on every client account, as one source in the enrichment chain we built ourselves; I have never run a Lusha seat, so every Lusha figure below comes from its own pages and from third parties I name, including two that compete with it.

Compare the plans credit to credit

Prospeo prints its whole ladder on its pricing page: Free at 0 dollars, Starter at 49 dollars per user per month or 37 billed yearly with 2,000 credits a month, Growth at 99 or 74 with 5,000, Pro at 249 or 187 with 15,000. The full yearly allowance arrives upfront, so a Starter seat holds its year on day one, and a credit works out to 441 / 24,000 = about 1.8 cents on that tier.

Lusha's pricing page text publishes no plan price at all, only a credit calculator and the credit rules: one credit reveals a verified email, five reveal a phone number. The plan figures live in the data the page embeds rather than its text, and the two third parties that have read them disagree: Supered, on 1 October 2026, records an entry tier in the same fifties-a-month bracket as Prospeo's 49, while UpLead publishes a figure half that for the tier it calls Pro. Treat any single Lusha price as probable and unconfirmed until your own checkout shows it.

A phone reveal costs five credits on Lusha and ten on Prospeo, but Prospeo's own pricing FAQ states in writing that it charges only for rows it actually finds, and the Lusha pages I read do not say what happens to the credit when a reveal comes back empty. Prospeo also returns the email and the mobile in one call, so the number never lands without an address beside it, while the Lusha pages price the two reveals separately at one plus five.

Test both free tiers on your 40 hardest contacts

Neither side needs a trial window because both free tiers are permanent. Prospeo gives 100 credits every month with no end date. Lusha gives 40 a month, which is 40 emails or 8 phone reveals, so run your 40 hardest contacts rather than your easiest. That is the only accuracy test that counts: verify real contacts from the exact segment you sell to, on both free tiers, before you pay anything.

Count three things: verified emails returned, callable numbers returned, and rows flagged catch-all or risky instead of clean. On mobiles specifically, the only live test I can point to favours Prospeo in Europe: ColdIQ's run of 23 July 2026 found 26 of 28 European mobiles with it, plus 25 of 25 American ones, median 2.1 seconds. Lusha publishes no comparable mobile-finding rate; its own pages give 98 percent email accuracy, 86 percent global phone accuracy, 85 percent US phone accuracy, and a database of 520 million contacts refreshed daily. Those are self-reported figures on both sides, and neither publishes the list or the method behind them, which is exactly why the 40-contact run decides it on your market. Our own number is narrower and labelled for what it is: the full four-source chain we run, Prospeo in front, returned a mobile for 1,798 of 8,948 French decision-makers in August 2026, which is 20 percent, and that is the waterfall, not any single provider.

Re-verify before the send whichever tool you buy. A dedicated verifier costs a tenth of a credit per check on our side of the stack, and one hard bounce costs more than a thousand checks. Lusha does publish one habit worth copying: it flags numbers on a Do Not Call registry and labels each number direct, mobile or switchboard before you spend the five credits, and a switchboard line billed as a direct dial is the quiet way a phone budget dies.

Read the rollover rules before you size a plan

The two vendors answer the unused-credit question in opposite ways, and it changes which plan you should buy. Prospeo's credits never roll over: whatever you have not spent expires at renewal, so size the plan on your average month, not your best one. Lusha's monthly plans roll unused credits into the next month, capped at twice the plan allowance; its annual plans hand you the full year upfront and reset whatever is left at the end of the annual cycle; its free-plan credits never carry over.

Put together, that means a lumpy workload suits Lusha monthly billing and a steady pipeline suits either. It also means a Prospeo seat bought for a big quarter and left idle burns its whole monthly allowance, and no vendor page on either side offers a refund on unspent credits.

Switch the data, not the workflow

Switching from Lusha to Prospeo breaks one thing, and you should name it before paying anything: the reveal-in-the-browser motion does not fully travel. Lusha's extension reveals from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, company sites and Gmail, pushes into Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, monday CRM, Bullhorn and Capsule, and the Free plan already includes the extension and CRM integrations. Prospeo's Chrome extension exists too, but native CRM sync starts at Growth, 99 dollars a month per user, for HubSpot and Salesforce only. A team whose hard requirement is CRM push from the free tier has no cheap equivalent on the Prospeo side.

The reverse break is narrower. Prospeo enriches from a LinkedIn profile URL alone, or a name plus a company, or a domain, so a list with no domain column still goes through. On limits, Lusha publishes no daily reveal cap for the extension; the credit pool is the ceiling it names, and its API page sets 25 requests per second per account by default, with higher quotas on higher tiers. The practical ceiling is LinkedIn's own tolerance for automated browsing, which no data vendor controls, so pace the extension the way you pace any LinkedIn session. Prospeo's published ceiling is per-plan API rate limits, highest on Pro, and its free-plan selections cap at 25 rows a pass, so a hundred contacts goes through in four batches on the free tier.

If you are assembling a chain rather than replacing one tool, the order matters more than the brand: the waterfall page covers the ordering that keeps a found mobile cheap, and putting the source that bills on results first costs around forty percent less than the reverse for the same data.

Stay on Lusha when the extension runs the day

The honest answer to who should not switch is the team that lives in Lusha's extension and CRM pushes. If your reps open profiles in LinkedIn all day, reveal with one click, and need the result in Salesforce or Pipedrive without leaving the tab, that motion costs 0 dollars a month to keep on Lusha's free tier and has no equivalent at that price on Prospeo. A US-centric team buying mostly emails also has little reason to move: Lusha charges one credit an email, the same headline rate as Prospeo, and its own August 2026 test against ZoomInfo on five US ideal customer profiles returned twice as many US contacts with a direct phone.

The reverse case is ours, and I will give it with its measurements. We buy data by the result and send through tools we choose, so a provider that bills only on contacts it actually finds, and hands back the email and the mobile together, fits the way we work. Two years in, it has never left the chain, and the figures behind that are in the review: the ColdIQ live test, the 20 percent mobile rate on 8,948 decision-makers, and what a callable contact actually costs at eleven credits. Lusha sells the reveal workflow; the catalogue entry sells the data that feeds one.

Prospeo is an affiliate of this site: we earn a commission if you buy through our links. Lusha is not, and we earn nothing if you choose it.