What is Clearbit?
Clearbit is a B2B data enrichment platform that specializes in real-time data enhancement. Unlike prospecting databases that help you find new leads, Clearbit focuses on enriching the leads you already have with additional firmographic, demographic, and technographic information.
Think of Clearbit as your data detective. When someone fills out a form on your website with just their email address, Clearbit instantly investigates that email and returns a complete profile including their job title, company size, industry, revenue estimates, and even the technology stack their company uses.
The platform offers four core products. The Enrichment API adds detailed data to your contacts and companies. Reveal identifies which companies are visiting your website based on IP address mapping. Forms shortens your lead capture forms by auto-filling enriched data. And Advertising helps you target B2B ads using Clearbit’s data infrastructure.
Clearbit is particularly popular among marketing teams, product-led growth companies, and organizations with strong developer resources. It shines in scenarios where you need instant, real-time data enhancement rather than a searchable database of prospects.
Clearbit Products Breakdown
Enrichment: Turning Email Addresses into Complete Profiles
The Enrichment API is Clearbit’s flagship product. Here’s how it works in practice: imagine you capture an email address like john@acmecorp.com through a demo request form. Within milliseconds, Clearbit processes that email and returns comprehensive information.
On the person side, you’ll get John’s full name, current job title (like VP of Engineering), LinkedIn profile URL, and location. On the company side, you’ll learn that Acme Corporation has about 250 employees, operates in the software industry, generates approximately $25 million in revenue, uses technologies like AWS and Salesforce, and is headquartered in San Francisco.
The data spans multiple categories. Person data includes name, title, seniority level, and social profiles. Company firmographics cover employee count, estimated revenue, industry classification, and physical locations. Technographics reveal the tech stack, from cloud providers to marketing automation tools. You’ll also get social media handles and company metadata like founding year and funding status.
Accuracy varies by data type. Company names are incredibly reliable at 95% or higher. Industry classification hits 90-95% accuracy. Employee counts are accurate about 85-90% of the time. Revenue estimates drop to 80-85% accuracy since they’re often modeled rather than directly reported. For person data, email verification sits at 85-90% accuracy, while job titles are accurate about 80-85% of the time.
Reveal: Identifying Your Anonymous Website Visitors
Reveal solves a common B2B marketing problem: you know companies are visiting your website, but you don’t know who they are. Reveal uses IP address mapping to identify companies browsing your site, even when they don’t fill out a form.
Here’s a typical workflow: an anonymous visitor arrives at your pricing page. Clearbit’s Reveal technology maps their IP address to a company database. Within seconds, you receive a company profile showing the organization name, size, industry, and suggested contacts. You can then alert your sales team, personalize the website content dynamically, build retargeting audiences, or use the visit as an intent signal for outreach.
The limitations are important to understand. Reveal identifies companies, not individual people. Not all website traffic is identifiable, especially visitors on residential ISPs or VPNs. The technology works significantly better for B2B traffic than B2C, since business IP addresses are easier to map to companies.
Many teams use Reveal to trigger alerts when target accounts visit key pages like pricing or case studies. Others use it to personalize website messaging based on company size or industry. The most sophisticated implementations combine Reveal data with marketing automation to create highly targeted follow-up sequences.
Forms: Boosting Conversion with Smart Auto-Fill
Forms addresses a fundamental tension in lead generation: you want comprehensive data, but long forms kill conversion rates. Clearbit Forms lets you capture minimal information upfront, then automatically enriches the rest in the background.
Consider a traditional lead capture form with eight fields asking for name, email, phone number, company name, job title, company size, industry, and country. With Clearbit Forms, you only ask for name and email. The remaining six fields are automatically populated through enrichment, giving you the same quality data with a fraction of the friction.
The benefits are measurable. Companies typically see 30-50% higher form conversion rates when they reduce form fields. Data quality actually improves because you’re pulling from Clearbit’s verified database rather than relying on prospects to manually enter information. You can also implement progressive profiling, gradually collecting additional information across multiple interactions.
Advertising: B2B Targeting at Scale
The Advertising product helps you use Clearbit’s data for audience targeting across platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google Ads. You can create matched audiences based on company characteristics, retarget website visitors identified through Reveal, or build lookalike audiences based on your best customers.
This is particularly useful for account-based marketing campaigns where you want to target specific company profiles or industries. Instead of broad demographic targeting, you can build audiences of companies with 500+ employees in the financial services industry who use Salesforce, for example.
Understanding Clearbit Pricing
Clearbit uses usage-based pricing, which means costs scale with how much you use the platform. There are no publicly listed prices, but here’s what you can typically expect based on market data and customer reports.
For Enrichment, low-volume users generally pay around $99-199 per month. Mid-volume usage runs approximately $299-499 monthly. High-volume needs require custom enterprise pricing. The per-enrichment cost typically ranges from $0.05 to $0.30 depending on your volume tier, with better rates available through annual contracts.
Reveal pricing is fully customized based on your website traffic volume but typically starts around $500 per month for smaller sites. Full platform access with multiple products runs into enterprise territory, usually $15,000 or more annually.
The usage-based model has pros and cons. On the positive side, you pay for what you actually use, there are no per-user seat limits, and you can scale up or down as needed. The downsides include costs that can grow significantly with increased usage, pricing that becomes expensive at scale, and the frequent requirement for annual commitments to get competitive rates.
Real-World Use Cases
Form Shortening for Higher Conversions
Let’s say you run a SaaS company with a demo request form. Traditionally, you’d ask for eight or ten fields to properly route and qualify the lead. But you’ve noticed that only 3% of landing page visitors actually complete the form.
By implementing Clearbit Forms, you reduce the form to just email and name. A visitor types in their email, and Clearbit instantly enriches the submission with company data, job title, company size, and industry. Your CRM receives a fully populated record, your marketing automation can still route the lead appropriately based on company size, and your sales team gets all the context they need.
The result? Your form conversion rate jumps from 3% to 4.5%, a 50% improvement. You’re getting 50% more leads with the same quality of data, just by reducing friction at the point of capture.
Intelligent Lead Routing
A common challenge is routing leads to the right sales rep when you only have basic information. Imagine a lead submits their email through a content download. Without additional data, you can’t tell if they’re from a 10-person startup or a 10,000-person enterprise.
With Clearbit enrichment integrated into your workflow, the lead enters with just an email address. Clearbit enriches the record in real-time, revealing that the company has 2,500 employees. Your routing rules check the enriched company size field and automatically assign the lead to your enterprise team rather than your SMB team. The entire process happens in seconds without any manual research.
This instant, accurate routing means enterprise prospects get faster, more appropriate follow-up, while your reps aren’t wasting time manually researching company details before reaching out.
CRM Enrichment for Complete Records
Most CRMs are filled with incomplete records. A contact might have an email and name, but missing fields for industry, company size, or social profiles. Sales reps waste hours manually researching this information or, more commonly, just work with incomplete data.
By integrating Clearbit with your CRM, every new record automatically triggers an enrichment. When a contact is created, Clearbit fills in company name, employee count, industry classification, estimated revenue, social media profiles, and technographic data. Your sales team always has complete context without lifting a finger.
The consistency is valuable too. Instead of different reps entering industry data differently, you have standardized, machine-verified information across your entire database.
Website Personalization Based on Firmographics
Generic websites convert poorly because different visitors need different messaging. A 50-person company cares about ease of use and quick implementation. A 5,000-person enterprise cares about security, compliance, and integration capabilities.
Using Clearbit Reveal, you can personalize the website experience in real-time. When a visitor from a large financial services company lands on your homepage, Reveal identifies their industry and company size. Your website dynamically displays case studies from other financial services companies, messaging focused on security and compliance, and CTAs for enterprise demos rather than self-service trials.
Companies implementing this level of personalization typically see 20-40% higher engagement rates and significantly better conversion because every visitor sees the most relevant content for their situation.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Clearbit excels in several areas. The accuracy for company data is among the best in the market, consistently hitting 90-95% for firmographic information. The real-time enrichment speed is excellent, with most lookups completing in under a second. The API is developer-friendly with comprehensive documentation and code samples. Native integrations with platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce work seamlessly. And the data freshness is maintained through regular updates to the underlying database.
However, Clearbit has notable limitations. It’s not a prospecting database, so you can’t search for new leads the way you can in Apollo or ZoomInfo. The contact data, particularly for direct phone numbers, isn’t as comprehensive as dedicated sales intelligence platforms. Pricing can become expensive at scale, especially for high-volume enrichment needs. And if your primary use case is finding new people to contact rather than enriching existing leads, Clearbit won’t meet your needs.
Integration Ecosystem
Clearbit offers native integrations with major platforms. Salesforce integration is native and real-time, automatically enriching records as they’re created. HubSpot integration includes workflow triggers and automatic property population. Marketo, Segment, and Slack all have native connections. The Slack integration is particularly useful for sales teams, sending alerts when target accounts visit the website.
The API is a major strength. It’s RESTful, well-documented, and supports real-time enrichment, batch processing, and webhooks. Developers appreciate the detailed responses, clear error handling, sandbox testing environment, and abundant code samples in multiple languages. If you have engineering resources, you can build sophisticated custom integrations.
Clearbit vs. Alternatives
Clearbit vs. Apollo
Apollo and Clearbit serve different primary purposes. Apollo is a prospecting platform with a database of 275 million contacts that also offers enrichment capabilities. Clearbit is purely an enrichment platform with no searchable database.
For real-time enrichment, Clearbit is superior. For combined prospecting and enrichment, Apollo offers better value since you get both capabilities in one platform. Apollo uses per-user pricing while Clearbit is usage-based. If your team primarily needs to find new leads to contact, Apollo is the better choice. If you’re capturing inbound leads and need best-in-class enrichment, Clearbit wins.
Most teams actually need both prospecting and enrichment, which is why Apollo’s combined platform is popular. But marketing teams focused on inbound lead enrichment often prefer Clearbit’s superior data quality.
Clearbit vs. ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo and Clearbit both excel at company data, but ZoomInfo is significantly stronger for contact information. ZoomInfo offers the most comprehensive contact database in the market, including verified direct dials. ZoomInfo also includes intent data showing which companies are actively researching solutions, while Clearbit doesn’t.
ZoomInfo requires an annual license and is substantially more expensive, typically starting around $15,000-20,000 per year. Clearbit’s usage-based pricing can be more accessible for smaller teams or specific use cases.
If you need comprehensive sales intelligence including prospecting, contact data, and intent signals, ZoomInfo is the enterprise choice. If you need marketing-focused enrichment for forms, lead routing, and CRM data completeness, Clearbit is more appropriate.
Clearbit vs. Clay
Clay takes a fundamentally different approach to enrichment. While Clearbit is a single data source, Clay aggregates data from over 50 sources including Clearbit, Apollo, Hunter, and many others. Clay’s waterfall enrichment tries multiple sources until it finds the data, resulting in better coverage.
Clay is highly flexible, allowing you to build custom enrichment workflows and combine data from different sources. However, it has a steeper learning curve. Clearbit is simpler and faster to implement but limited to one data source.
If you need maximum flexibility and coverage through multi-source enrichment, Clay is worth the learning curve. If you want a simple, single-source solution with great API and integrations, Clearbit is easier to implement.
Who Should Use Clearbit
Clearbit is an excellent fit for several types of organizations. Marketing teams that run a lot of inbound lead generation benefit from form shortening and automatic enrichment. Product-led growth companies with self-serve models use Clearbit to understand their users without requiring lengthy signup forms. Companies that prioritize CRM data quality use Clearbit to automatically maintain complete, accurate records. Developer-focused teams appreciate the clean API and detailed documentation. And high-volume enrichment scenarios benefit from Clearbit’s real-time performance at scale.
Clearbit is not a good fit for other scenarios. Sales teams primarily needing a prospecting database should look at Apollo or ZoomInfo instead. Teams with limited budgets may find the usage-based pricing grows faster than expected. Low-volume enrichment needs might not justify the minimum pricing. If your main need is phone numbers for cold calling, other platforms have better direct dial coverage. And if you require intent data showing active research behavior, you’ll need ZoomInfo or similar platforms.
Key Takeaways
Clearbit is one of the best data enrichment platforms available, but it’s important to understand what it is and isn’t. It excels at real-time enrichment, turning minimal input data like an email address into comprehensive company and person profiles. The accuracy is excellent, particularly for company firmographics where it consistently hits 90-95% accuracy rates.
Pricing is usage-based, starting around $99 per month for basic enrichment volumes but scaling up based on how much you use the platform. Per-enrichment costs typically range from $0.05 to $0.30 depending on your volume tier. This model works well for teams with predictable usage patterns but can become expensive at very high volumes.
The critical distinction is that Clearbit is not a prospecting database. You can’t search for new leads or build targeted lists of companies to contact. Clearbit enriches the leads you already have from forms, CRM records, or other sources. If you need both prospecting and enrichment, platforms like Apollo offer combined functionality.
The developer-friendly API is a major advantage for technical teams. The documentation is comprehensive, the API responses are detailed and consistent, and integrations with major CRMs work seamlessly. Marketing operations teams particularly appreciate the native HubSpot and Salesforce integrations that enable automated enrichment workflows.
Choose Clearbit if your primary use case is enriching inbound leads, shortening forms to improve conversion rates, enabling intelligent lead routing based on company characteristics, or maintaining complete CRM records automatically. Consider alternatives if you need prospecting capabilities, comprehensive contact phone numbers, or intent data signals.
Need Help With Your Enrichment Strategy?
Choosing the right data enrichment approach depends on your specific workflows, lead sources, and team structure. We’ve implemented Clearbit and alternative enrichment solutions for hundreds of B2B companies, and we understand the tradeoffs between different platforms.
If you want expert guidance on whether Clearbit fits your use case or if an alternative would work better, book a call with our team. We’ll review your current process and recommend the most cost-effective enrichment strategy for your situation.