---
title: "Intent Data Providers: Compared by Signal Family"
description: "Compare intent data providers by signal family, granularity, latency and entry price, and see which intent signals you can verify yourself for free."
canonical: "https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/intent-data-providers"
category: "B2B Intent Data"
updated: "2026-09-19"
---

# Intent data providers, compared by the signal family they actually sell

> Intent data providers sell the observation that a company is researching a topic, not the identity of the person doing it. Sixteen vendors sit in six very different families: publisher co-operatives, review and comparison sites, content syndication, bidstream and marketplaces, reverse IP, and public observable signals. Nearly all of them deliver an account rather than a person, with a delay of days, and only the sixth family can be verified by you. Choose on coverage of your own account list first, on granularity second and on price last, because a feed that scores more accounts than your team can work is the most common way this budget is wasted.

*Canonical: https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/intent-data-providers* · *B2B Intent Data*

---

## What intent data providers actually sell, and what they cannot tell you

**Intent data providers sell the observation that a company is researching a topic, not the identity of the person doing the research.** Nearly every vendor in this market resolves its signal to an account, delivers it some days after the behaviour happened, and cannot tell you which of the four hundred employees typed the query. That single constraint decides what the data is good for: choosing which accounts your team works this week, and very little that is more precise than that.

The second thing worth knowing before you compare quotes is that three words cover six very different collection methods. A publisher co-operative, a review site, a content syndication network, a bidstream feed, a reverse IP tool and a public signal you can look up yourself are all sold by intent data providers under the same label. They differ in accuracy, in delay, in legal footing and in what they cost. How each one actually collects its signal is explained family by family in our guide to [third party intent data sources](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/third-party-intent-data-sources). This page does the other half of the job: who sells which family, at what granularity, with what delay, and at what entry price.

Here is the honest list of what no intent data provider can hand you: the person to write to, the reason they care, the budget, or the certainty that the research was not a student writing about your category. You get a ranked list of accounts. Turning that into a conversation still takes a named contact and something worth saying. The wider programme sits on our [B2B intent data hub](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data); everything below stays on the vendor decision.

## The intent data providers matrix: family, granularity, latency and entry price

Comparison lists of [B2B intent data providers](https://derrick-app.com/glossary/b2b-intent-data-providers) are organised by brand, which is convenient for the writer and useless for the buyer, because two names sitting next to each other can be selling completely different things. The matrix below is organised by what you are actually buying. Read it column by column: the family tells you where the signal comes from, the granularity tells you whether you can write to somebody at the end of it, the delay tells you whether the account is still in the market when you call, and the last column tells you whether you could have found the same thing yourself.

| Vendor | Signal family | Granularity | Typical delay | Can you verify it yourself? | Entry price |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Derrick** | Public observable signals, the layer that runs alongside a bought feed | Company, and person for post engagement | You run it, so same day | **Yes, every row points at a public source** | Free plan, 100 credits a month at zero euros; continuous alerting from 20 euros a month |
| Bombora | Publisher co-operative | Account | Weekly batch | No | On request |
| 6sense | Co-operative plus predictive modelling | Account | Days | No | On request |
| Demandbase | Co-operative plus advertising activation | Account | Days | No | On request |
| G2 | Review and comparison site | Account | Days | Partly: the reviews are public, the browsing is not | On request |
| TrustRadius | Review and comparison site | Account | Days | Partly, same split | On request |
| DemandScience | Content syndication | Person | Days to weeks | No | Per lead, on request |
| Foundry | Content syndication and co-operative | Account and person | Days to weeks | No | On request |
| Datarade | Data marketplace | Depends on the listing | Depends on the listing | No | Per dataset |
| IntentData.io | Marketplace and managed sourcing | Account and person | Days | No | On request |
| Lead Forensics | Reverse IP on your own traffic | Account | Near real time | No | On request |
| Leadfeeder | Reverse IP on your own traffic | Account | Near real time | No | Free tier, then published tiers of roughly 0 to 99 US dollars a month |
| Lead Onion | Bidstream and reverse IP blend | Account | Days | No | On request |
| ZoomInfo | Intent bundled with contact data | Account | Days | No | On request |
| Cognism | Intent bundled with contact data | Account | Days | No | On request |
| Lusha | Intent bundled with contact data | Account | Days | No | On request |

Two caveats so you use the table properly. Delay and granularity are contract terms: what a vendor delivers to a six figure account is not always what it delivers to a starter plan, so treat the column as a question for the sales call. And the entry price column is thin on purpose, because most of this market does not publish prices. That is itself a comparison result: in September 2026, a majority of the intent data providers above quote on request, which means the number you get depends on how the call goes.

## Intent data providers by signal family

Intent data providers cluster into six families, listed here in the order you are most likely to meet them. The mechanics of collection, the accuracy trade-offs and the way each family constructs a topic score are covered in the sister guide linked in every subsection, so nothing is repeated here.

### 1. Publisher co-operatives

You are buying a share of a pooled panel: thousands of B2B publishers report what is being read from which company network, and the vendor turns that into weekly topic scores. Read [how co-operative intent sources collect and score topics](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/third-party-intent-data-sources) before the demo, because the vocabulary of topics and surge is where these calls get slippery.

- **Bombora.** The panel most of the others resell or blend. Account level, weekly cadence, topic taxonomy in the thousands. Ask which topics map to your category, and how many companies in your territory actually have coverage.
- **6sense.** Co-operative data plus a predictive layer that scores accounts into buying stages. Account level. Ask what happens to the score when the underlying panel has no data on an account: a model will still output a number.
- **Demandbase.** Co-operative data wired into advertising and account based orchestration. Account level. Ask whether you can export the signal or only activate it inside the platform, because that decides whether your sales team can use it at all.

### 2. Review and comparison sites

You are buying the behaviour of people comparing products on a review marketplace. It is the most legible family, because a review is a public artefact, while the browsing behaviour sold alongside it stays invisible, as our breakdown of [the six families of third party intent data sources](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/third-party-intent-data-sources) sets out. Our own walkthrough of this family is in [how to score and segment with G2 insights](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/g2-insights).

- **G2.** Category and competitor comparison activity, resolved to an account. Ask for the list of categories you are buying and the refresh cadence, and ask what share of your addressable market visits the site at all.
- **TrustRadius.** Same shape, different audience mix. Ask the same two questions.

### 3. Content syndication

You are buying a person who filled in a form on somebody else's property in exchange for a white paper. It is the one family that legitimately hands you a named human, which is also the reason it is the most argued about; our guide to [the consent question behind syndicated third party sources](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/third-party-intent-data-sources) sets out where that leaves you.

- **DemandScience.** Person level, priced per lead, delivered in batches. Ask where the person consented, on which property, and how long ago.
- **Foundry.** Syndication alongside co-operative panels, so the two granularities arrive in the same contract. Ask for them separately in the quote, otherwise you cannot tell which half is working.

### 4. Bidstream and data marketplaces

You are buying signals derived from advertising auctions, or a catalogue of datasets from many suppliers. This is the cheapest and the weakest family, and our guide to [where bidstream intent sources add their noise](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/third-party-intent-data-sources) explains exactly how.

- **Datarade.** A marketplace of suppliers. Granularity, delay and legal basis change with every listing, so diligence happens dataset by dataset.
- **IntentData.io.** Managed sourcing across suppliers, account and person level. Ask which underlying supplier each field comes from before you sign.
- **Lead Onion.** A blend of bidstream and visitor identification sold as one feed. Ask for the split, because the two halves do not deserve the same trust.

### 5. Reverse IP and visitor identification

You are buying the de-anonymisation of traffic you already have. It is first party behaviour with a third party lookup bolted on, and our guide to [the match rate problem behind reverse IP sources](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/third-party-intent-data-sources) covers the number that decides everything here.

- **Lead Forensics.** Account level, near real time, tied to your own site. Ask for the match rate on your actual traffic during a trial, not the headline figure.
- **Leadfeeder.** Same family, with a free tier and published entry pricing, so of the two reverse IP tools listed here it is the one you can evaluate without a sales cycle.

### 6. Public observable signals, where Derrick sits

You are not buying a panel at all: you are looking up things the company published itself. Hiring, technology on the website, news, leadership moves and engagement on a public post are all visible to anyone who goes and checks. The sister guide lists [the seven you can see on a cold account](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/b2b-buying-signals) and what each one is worth.

This is the only family in the matrix where the verification column says yes, and it is the one family most intent data providers do not sell at all. It is what Derrick is built for. [Company Hiring Signal](https://derrick-app.com/features/company-hiring-signal?utm_source=seo&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=in-intent-data-providers&utm_content=feature_company-hiring-signal) returns which companies on your list are hiring and for which roles, at 1 credit per company, on the free plan of 100 credits a month at zero euros. [Website Technologies](https://derrick-app.com/features/website-technologies?utm_source=seo&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=in-intent-data-providers&utm_content=feature_website-technologies) returns the stack behind a domain at 2 credits per website, and [Google News Scraper](https://derrick-app.com/features/google-news-scraper?utm_source=seo&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=in-intent-data-providers&utm_content=feature_google-news-scraper) returns recent announcements at 1 credit per article; those two columns are both available from the 9 euro a month plan. [Import LinkedIn post likes and comments](https://derrick-app.com/features/import-post-engagers) is the one public and verifiable signal in the matrix that carries a name, and it is included in the free plan. For the same signals watched continuously rather than checked on demand, [Signal](https://derrick-app.com/features/signal) is available from the 20 euro a month plan, with one credit charged each time an alert fires.

Derrick is not a co-operative and does not sell topic intent. Its place in the matrix is the layer underneath a topic feed: the signals you can prove, on the accounts a provider just handed you, or on a list you built yourself. Most teams end up running both.

## Account level or person level: read the granularity before the price

Look back at the granularity column, because it is the one that quietly decides whether the data changes anybody's Monday. Almost every intent data provider in the matrix delivers an account. Two families break that pattern: content syndication, which hands you a person because a person filled in a form, and public post engagement, where the like and the comment carry a name.

The practical consequence is that account level intent is a prioritisation input, not a personalisation input. It tells a rep which twenty accounts to open today. It does not tell them who to write to, which is why an intent subscription almost always arrives with a contact data bill attached: somebody still has to find the right five people inside each flagged company and a verified way to reach them.

That is the sum worth doing before the contract, not after. Price the intent feed and the contact layer together, then compare that total to the number of accounts you can realistically work in a quarter. A team can easily end up paying for signal on several thousand accounts while having the capacity to work a few dozen a week.

## Latency: how old the signal is when it reaches you

The delay column is the one nobody negotiates and everybody should. A co-operative signal is a weekly aggregate, so the research you are reacting to happened somewhere between one and eight days ago. Syndication leads arrive in batches. Marketplace data can be months old depending on the listing. Reverse IP is the fastest of the bought families, because the visit is happening on your own site.

Why it matters more than accuracy: a perfectly accurate signal about a decision that closed last month is worth nothing, while a rough signal you can act on the same afternoon at least puts a rep in the conversation. Most intent data providers will tell you their cadence if you ask for it as a contract term rather than as a demo question.

The public signals in family six have no vendor delay at all, because there is no pipeline between the event and you. A job posting is live when it is live. A technology on a website is there when you check. A topic panel still sees things a job board never will, so what you are weighing is a trade: freshness and provability against breadth.

## The 20 account test: what checking public signals costs, step by step

Before committing to a subscription, it is worth knowing how much of your target list shows a signal you can see for free. Here is the run, priced step by step from the current catalogue. Count the steps, not the features: each column is a separate call and therefore a separate cost. One condition before the numbers: two of these steps read LinkedIn through the Derrick Chrome extension, so the prices below assume your LinkedIn session is connected there.

- [Import Companies from a Prompt](https://derrick-app.com/features/import-companies-by-prompt) to build the list of 20 if you do not already have it: **1 credit per company with LinkedIn connected and 10 without, so 20 credits**. Included in the free plan.
- [Enrich Companies](https://derrick-app.com/features/enrich-companies) to get industry, headcount, country and the identifiers the next steps need: **1 credit per company, so 20 credits**. Included in the free plan, and this step needs your LinkedIn session connected to run at all.
- [Company Hiring Signal](https://derrick-app.com/features/company-hiring-signal) to see who is hiring and for which roles: **1 credit per company, so 20 credits**. Included in the free plan, and it reads a public source, so it needs no LinkedIn connection.
- [Website Technologies](https://derrick-app.com/features/website-technologies) to read the stack: **2 credits per website, so 40 credits**. Paid plans only.

Two totals, and the difference between them is the point. The three free plan steps come to **60 credits for 20 accounts** with LinkedIn connected, which fits inside the 100 credits the free plan gives you each month at zero euros. Adding the technology column takes the run to **100 credits**, and because Website Technologies is available on the paid plans only, that version of the test is not a free plan gesture: Website Technologies is available from the 9 euro a month plan. If you also want news, [Google News Scraper](https://derrick-app.com/features/google-news-scraper) is 1 credit per article and is likewise a paid plan feature.

Whatever your list returns, you now have a floor. If a meaningful share of your twenty accounts shows a hiring or stack signal you could see for the price of a coffee, that is the share a paid subscription to one of the intent data providers above has to beat before it earns its line in the budget. If almost none of them do, your market genuinely is one where pooled topic data is the only way in, and now you know that for 60 credits instead of a quarter.

## Do you need an intent data provider at all?

The question the comparison lists never ask, because the answer is sometimes no. Three situations where buying a feed is the wrong move, and what to do instead.

**Your addressable market is small.** If your entire list is four hundred companies, you do not have a prioritisation problem, you have a coverage problem. Intent data providers earn their fee by ranking thousands of accounts you could never work by hand. Below a certain size, researching every account properly is cheaper and better.

**Your sales cycle is short and your deal size is low.** Pooled intent is calibrated for considered purchases with a committee. If your buyer decides in a week, the weekly aggregate arrives after the decision, and you will spend the subscription chasing ghosts.

**You have no capacity to act on the signal.** This is the most common one and the most expensive. A flagged account is only worth something if somebody contacts it within days, with a message that reflects why it was flagged. Two reps and four thousand scored accounts is not a programme, it is a dashboard. The public figures on this gap are gathered on our [page on the state of B2B intent data](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/b2b-intent-data-report-2026), and the honest reading is that most of the money goes missing at the activation step.

In all three cases the same fallback applies: work the public signals yourself on the list you already have, measure what the reply rate does, and revisit the subscription when volume actually exceeds what your team can research by hand.

## How to choose a vendor: six questions to ask before you sign

Most comparisons of B2B intent data providers stop at the list, which leaves the buyer with names and no procedure. Evaluating a source and evaluating a vendor are different jobs. The first is about where the signal comes from and is covered in the sister guide. The second is about what the contract actually obliges the company in front of you to deliver, and it comes down to six questions.

1. **Which family am I buying, and is it one family or a blend?** If the answer is a blend, ask for the split in writing. A feed that mixes a co-operative panel with bidstream should not be trusted uniformly.
2. **What is the coverage on my territory, measured on my list?** Not global coverage. Hand over two hundred of your target accounts during the trial and ask how many come back with any signal at all. This single number ends most evaluations.
3. **What granularity is delivered, on my plan?** Account or person, written into the order form, not described on the demo call.
4. **What is the delivery cadence, and is it in the contract?** Weekly, daily, real time. A cadence that lives only in a slide is not a commitment.
5. **Can I export the data, or only activate it inside the platform?** This decides whether your CRM, your sequencer and your reps ever see the signal. An export restriction turns a data purchase into a platform lock, and it is the clause that separates intent data providers you can plug into your stack from the ones you have to live inside.
6. **What is the total for twelve months, including the contact layer?** The feed is rarely the whole bill. Price the enrichment you will need to actually contact the flagged accounts at the same time.

One habit is worth more than all six: run a trial on your own list rather than on their sample. Every sample is chosen to look good. Your list is the only test that predicts what you will get.

**One email every two weeks.** Fill Down covers go to market and sales data tactics, including which signals actually precede a reply. [Subscribe to the Fill Down newsletter →](https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/fill-down-gtm-sales-news-7480639838598184961/)

## What it costs, and where the money actually goes

Intent data providers price mostly in private, so here is what can be said honestly from public pages in September 2026. Every third party figure below is the vendor's own published number, in US dollars, while Derrick prices in euros. At the entry end, visitor identification tools publish tiers in the region of 0 to 99 dollars a month. Topic intent platforms with a co-operative panel sit in a different order of magnitude, commonly quoted in the hundreds to low thousands of dollars a month, and almost always on request. Syndication is priced per lead. Marketplace data is priced per dataset. If a number matters to you before a sales call, the two families that publish anything are reverse IP and marketplaces.

Where the money goes is the more useful question. A feed that ranks accounts creates work: somebody has to find the people inside each account, verify a way to reach them, and write something that reflects the signal. That second bill is often larger than the first, and it is the one that gets discovered in month two.

The public signal layer is priced per row instead of per seat, which makes it easy to compare against the rest of the table. One credit per company for hiring, two per website for the stack, one per article for news, and a free plan of 100 credits a month at zero euros to see whether the signals exist in your market at all. Continuous alerting on the same events starts at the 20 euro a month plan, with one credit charged for each alert that fires. None of that replaces a topic panel. It covers the part of the picture you can check yourself, at a price where checking stops being a decision.

## Where this leaves you

Intent data providers mostly sell accounts, not people, so budget for the contact layer from day one. The delay between the behaviour and your inbox is a contract term, so negotiate it. And one of the six families costs almost nothing to test, so test it first: the result tells you how much of the problem you actually need to buy.

A sensible order for most teams evaluating intent data providers: run the public signals on the list you already have, see what fraction of it lights up, then take that number into the vendor conversations as your baseline. You will negotiate differently when you know what the free half of the market already gives you.

## Use Derrick in Claude (MCP) or via API

Derrick isn't only a Google Sheets add-on. The same B2B data enrichment runs as an MCP server (use it directly inside Claude and other AI agents) and as a REST API:

- **Claude / AI agents (MCP)**: connect the Derrick MCP server, then enrich from chat. Setup: /mcp
- **REST API**: call the same enrichment endpoints from your own stack (PLUS plan and up). Docs: https://app1.derrick-app.com/api/v1/docs/

## FAQ

### What are B2B intent data providers?
B2B intent data providers are vendors that sell signals suggesting a company is researching a product category. They collect those signals in six very different ways: pooled publisher co-operatives, review and comparison sites, content syndication networks, advertising bidstream and data marketplaces, reverse IP lookups on your own traffic, and public observable events such as hiring or technology changes. What they have in common is that the signal almost always resolves to a company rather than to a named person, and that it reaches you some days after the behaviour happened. Sort any shortlist by family before you sort it by brand, because two names sitting next to each other often sell completely different things.

### What is the difference between first-party and third-party intent data?
First-party intent is behaviour on your own properties: pages visited, emails opened, demos requested. You own it and it is accurate, but it only exists for accounts already in your funnel. Third-party intent is behaviour observed somewhere else and sold to you, which is the only way to see a company that has never touched your website. The trade is precision for reach: third-party signals are broader, older and coarser, and they point at an account instead of a person.

### Do intent data providers identify the person or only the company?
Almost all of them identify the company only. Two exceptions exist. Content syndication hands you a named person because that person filled in a form on a publisher property in exchange for content. Public post engagement also carries a name, because the like and the comment are attributed. Everything else, including co-operative topic data, review-site activity, bidstream and reverse IP, resolves to an account, which is why an intent subscription usually arrives with a contact data bill attached.

### How fresh is intent data when you receive it?
It depends on the family. Co-operative topic data is typically a weekly aggregate, so the research you are reacting to happened one to eight days ago. Content syndication arrives in batches. Marketplace datasets can be months old depending on the listing. Reverse IP is the fastest of the bought families because the visit is happening on your own site. Public observable signals have no vendor delay at all, because you look them up yourself the day you need them.

### How much do intent data providers cost?
Most of the market quotes on request, which is itself a finding. From public pages in September 2026, visitor identification tools publish entry tiers in the region of 0 to 99 dollars a month, topic intent platforms backed by a co-operative panel are commonly quoted from several hundred to a few thousand dollars a month, content syndication is priced per lead and marketplace data per dataset. Budget the contact layer separately: an account-level feed creates the work of finding and verifying the people inside each flagged company.

### How do you evaluate an intent data provider?
Six questions settle most evaluations. Which family am I buying, and is it a blend? What is the coverage on my own list, not global coverage? What granularity is written into my order form? What is the delivery cadence, and is it contractual? Can I export the data or only activate it inside the platform? And what is the twelve-month total including the enrichment needed to contact the flagged accounts? Run the trial on your own two hundred accounts rather than on the vendor sample, because samples are chosen to look good.

### Can you build your own intent layer instead of buying one?
Partly, and it is worth measuring before you subscribe. The sixth family, public observable signals, is available to anyone who goes and checks: hiring, technology on the website, news and public post engagement. Running three of those columns on twenty accounts costs 60 credits with your LinkedIn session connected through the Derrick Chrome extension, which two of the three steps rely on, and that fits inside a free plan of 100 credits a month at zero euros. Without that connection the import step costs 10 credits per company and the enrichment step does not run. Adding a technology column takes the run to 100 credits and requires a paid plan. What you cannot build yourself is the pooled topic panel, which sees reading behaviour across thousands of publishers.

### Are intent data providers useful for B2C?
The vendors in this comparison are built for B2B, where the unit of decision is a company and a buying committee. A handful of tools market themselves for B2C intent, but the mechanics differ enough that the matrix above does not transfer: consumer intent is individual, privacy rules are stricter, and the account-level granularity that makes B2B intent workable has no equivalent. If you sell to consumers, treat this page as background rather than as a shortlist.

## Related

- [The B2B Buying Committee in 2026: How Many People Really Sign Off](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/b2b-buying-committee-report-2026)
- [The State of B2B Intent Data 2026: The Signal-to-Pipeline Gap](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/b2b-intent-data-report-2026)
- [Intent Marketing: How to Harness Data Intelligently?](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/marketing-strategy)
- [Product Rating Checker: How to Identify Your Prospects' Tech Stack via Reviews](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/product-rating)
- [G2 Intent Data: Score, Segment and Personalize Leads in Google Sheets](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/g2-insights)
- [Product Review Intent Data: How to Mine Reviews for B2B Prospecting Signals](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/product-review)
- [Third Party Intent Data Sources: Where the Signal Really Comes From](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/third-party-intent-data-sources)
- [B2B Buying Signals You Can Detect Before First Contact](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-intent-data/b2b-buying-signals)