Clearbit

Clearbit was one of the first modern data enrichment APIs, built for developers and ops teams who wanted to enrich records programmatically. After being acquired by HubSpot in 2023, the product has shifted toward tight HubSpot integration, with many features now available free to HubSpot customers on Professional and Enterprise plans.

The enrichment engine is Clearbit’s foundation. Pass in an email address or domain, and Clearbit returns company firmographics, technographics, employee count, funding data, and contact-level attributes like title and seniority. This works in real time, so a form submission can be enriched before the lead hits your CRM. The form shortening feature uses this: if Clearbit already knows a visitor’s company, you can remove fields from the form and still capture the data.

Reveal (IP-to-company resolution) identifies which companies are visiting your website, even when visitors do not fill out a form. This feeds into account-based workflows where marketing teams want to trigger campaigns based on website activity from target accounts.

The HubSpot acquisition changed the product’s trajectory. For HubSpot users, Clearbit is now the built-in enrichment layer, which is a strong value add at no extra cost. For teams on Salesforce or other CRMs, the calculus is different. Clearbit still offers a standalone API and Salesforce integration, but the development focus has shifted toward HubSpot features.

As a prospecting database, Clearbit is smaller than ZoomInfo or Apollo. It is better suited for enrichment (improving existing records) than for building outbound lists from scratch. Teams needing large-scale prospecting with direct dials and mobile numbers will likely need a dedicated prospecting tool alongside Clearbit.