Hoovers Database: What It Is, Costs & Alternatives (2026)

The Hoovers Database: What You're Actually Getting in 2026

You're paying $49/month - or $27,300/year on an enterprise contract - and half the phone numbers your SDRs dial connect to someone who left the company two years ago. That's the D&B Hoovers database experience for a lot of sales teams right now. The company intelligence is genuinely excellent. The contact data? That's where things fall apart.

What You Need (Quick Version)

D&B Hoovers remains the gold standard for company intelligence - corporate hierarchies, private company financials, D-U-N-S linkage, subsidiary mapping. But if your primary need is verified contact data for outbound prospecting, the credit-burn model and accuracy complaints make it a tough sell in 2026.

For company research and strategic account planning: D&B Hoovers is hard to beat. Nobody else maps corporate family trees with this depth.

For verified emails and direct dials at scale: Prospeo delivers 98% email accuracy at ~$0.01/lead with no contracts and a 7-day data refresh cycle. (If you’re building lists at volume, see our guide to B2B databases.)

For all-in-one sales engagement plus data: Apollo.io starts at $59/user/month with built-in sequencing and a solid contact database. If you’re comparing platforms, it helps to start with how you’ll run sales engagement day-to-day.

What Is D&B Hoovers?

The Hoovers database has been around longer than most sales tools people use today. Gary Hoover founded the company in 1990 as a business reference publisher - essentially the original company intelligence platform. Dun & Bradstreet acquired Hoover's in 2003 for roughly $119M, folding it into their data empire and making it one of the most comprehensive business data products on the market.

The product went through a quiet period, then got rebranded as D&B Hoovers in 2017 after D&B acquired Avention (formerly OneSource). That rebrand brought a modernized interface and tighter integration with D&B's proprietary D-U-N-S numbering system, which tracks corporate relationships across millions of entities worldwide.

Today, D&B positions Hoovers as a sales acceleration platform with a bold claim: "3x the company data and 6x the decision-maker contacts of any other B2B sales intelligence provider." That's vendor marketing, but the company data depth is legitimately hard to match. The contact data side is where the story gets murkier.

How Big Is the Database?

D&B can't seem to agree with itself on how big the Hoovers database actually is. The numbers shift depending on which page you're reading.

The most current official figures from D&B's own pricing page are 330M+ companies and 520M+ contacts, with 70M+ emails, 190M+ decision-makers, and 60M+ direct dials. Note the gap between Wikipedia's "120M business records" and D&B's "520M+ contacts" - the former likely counts unique business entities while the latter includes individual contact records, but D&B doesn't clarify the distinction anywhere.

What matters more than the raw count is coverage quality. In our testing, teams pulling thousands of contacts found that a meaningful percentage of emails bounced and phone numbers connected to former employees. The database is wide. Whether it's deep and fresh enough depends entirely on what you're doing with it. (If you’re cleaning lists, it’s worth understanding soft bounce rate vs hard bounces.)

Key Features

D&B Hoovers packs a lot into the platform, and the feature set has expanded over the past year.

Filtering is deep. D&B's Essentials page advertises 130+ filters, while the G2 listing shows 175+. Either way, you get a serious search engine spanning NAICS/SIC codes, revenue ranges, employee count, geography, and dozens of firmographic dimensions. The practical workflow is straightforward: build a list by selecting NAICS codes, geography, and revenue range, then export up to 1,000 records per pull. For account-based research, the corporate hierarchy and family tree visualization is genuinely best-in-class - you can map parent-subsidiary relationships across global entities using D-U-N-S linkage.

Beyond search, the platform includes Business Signals & Triggers for job changes, funding events, and leadership moves, CRUSH Reports for competitive account intelligence, and FirstResearch industry reports for market context. CRM integrations cover Salesforce, HubSpot (added in late 2025), and Microsoft Dynamics, and the Chrome extension lets reps pull company data while browsing the web. (If you’re trying to reduce manual work here, see CRM automation software.)

D&B also added AI features including Smart Search AI, Smart Mail AI, and Prospect Scoring. Bombora Intent data is available as an add-on, along with Website Visitor Tracking. Bulk upload supports up to 1 million company records for D-U-N-S mapping and enrichment. If you’re evaluating enrichment workflows, compare options in our roundup of data enrichment tools.

The feature breadth is impressive. The question is whether you need all of it, or whether you're paying for company intelligence when what you really need is accurate contact data.

D&B Hoovers Pricing

Essentials Plan

The self-serve entry point: $49/month for 150 company credits and 150 contact credits, or $529/year for 1,800 of each. Your first month is free. At 150 credits per month, a single SDR doing moderate prospecting will burn through their allocation in a week or two. If you’re deciding between credit packs and usage-based models, see pay-as-you-go B2B data.

Enterprise Pricing

Enterprise plans are where D&B makes its real money. Credit packages scale like this:

Typical mid-market contracts land in the $10,000-$50,000+/year range depending on seats, credit volume, and add-ons. (If you’re negotiating in this range, it helps to know the SMB vs Mid-Market vs Enterprise differences in buying motions.)

Hidden Costs and Contract Traps

Here's the thing: enterprise contracts can include a 6% annual price increase baked in by default. Auto-renewal kicks in at the then-current list price - not your negotiated rate. Exporting a contact can also burn the associated company credit in some workflows, effectively doubling your credit consumption.

Add-ons like Bombora Intent and Website Visitor Tracking are priced inconsistently, and the cancellation process has drawn pointed complaints on Trustpilot. Users report unresponsive account managers and difficulty escaping auto-renewed contracts. The Trustpilot score sits at 2.5/5, and while that's from only 5 reviews, the cancellation stories align with D&B's auto-renewal language.

What Users Actually Say

Here's the review picture across platforms:

The praise is consistent: users love the company intelligence and ease of use. Corporate hierarchy mapping, private company financials, revenue and employee estimates, industry segmentation via NAICS/SIC codes - this is where Hoovers earns its reputation. Multiple TrustRadius reviewers call it essential for truth-checking company facts and strategic account planning.

The complaints are equally consistent. Credits burn fast on inactive or outdated phone numbers - a Jan 2026 Capterra reviewer specifically flagged paying for numbers belonging to people who'd retired or left. Filtering can feel cluttered, and the platform sometimes takes forever to load. G2's automated theme analysis surfaces "outdated data" and "inaccurate contact info" as recurring issues across hundreds of reviews. G2's implementation timeline also shows roughly one month to get fully onboarded, which is a real cost in ramp time for teams that need to move fast.

Geographic coverage is another sore spot. TrustRadius reviewers note that EMEA and APAC data is noticeably weaker than North American coverage. Exports cap at 1,000 records per pull, creating friction for teams building large prospect lists. The consensus on r/sales is that Hoovers is great for research but frustrating for high-volume outbound - plenty of threads ask for alternatives. If your team is ramping outbound, these B2B prospecting strategies help reduce wasted touches.

Hoovers Database vs. Modern Alternatives

Let's be honest: D&B Hoovers is still the best company intelligence platform on the market. But most sales teams don't actually need company intelligence. They need accurate contact data. Those are two very different products. If you're evaluating Dun & Bradstreet alongside newer prospecting tools, the comparison often comes down to company research depth versus contact data freshness.

Data refresh cycles vary significantly. Prospeo refreshes every 7 days, ZoomInfo updates monthly, and D&B Hoovers claims daily updates to its company records - though user reviews suggest contact data doesn't keep pace. If you’re trying to operationalize this, a RevOps tech stack view helps.

Prospeo

Use this if you need verified emails and direct dials without burning credits on stale data. Prospeo's 300M+ professional profiles go through a 5-step verification process with catch-all handling, spam-trap removal, and honeypot filtering - which is why the 98% email accuracy rate holds up in practice. The 125M+ verified mobile numbers deliver a 30% pickup rate across all regions, compared to the single-digit connect rates teams report from Hoovers leads. We've seen teams like Snyk cut bounce rates from 35-40% to under 5% after switching, with AE-sourced pipeline jumping 180%.

At ~$0.01/lead with a free tier of 75 emails/month, it's a fraction of the cost. Native integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Smartlead, Instantly, and Clay mean you can plug it into existing workflows without ramp time. Skip this if you need deep corporate hierarchy mapping or private company financials - that's still Hoovers territory, and pairing both tools is a legitimate strategy for enterprise teams. (If you want more options in this category, see verified contact database.)

Apollo.io

Use this if you want data and sales engagement in one platform. Apollo combines a 275M+ contact database with built-in sequencing, a dialer, and workflow automation - all starting at $59/user/month. TrustRadius rates it 8.5/10 versus Hoovers' 8.1/10, and Apollo's contact data tends to be more current for individual contributors and mid-level roles. Skip this if you need deep company financials or corporate hierarchy mapping. Apollo doesn't play in that space.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is the enterprise heavyweight, with the largest contact database in the category and best-in-class intent data and workflow automation. A mid-market contract runs $15,000-$40,000+/year. Where ZoomInfo beats Hoovers: contact database depth and breadth, especially for US-based prospecting. Where Hoovers beats ZoomInfo: private company financials, D-U-N-S linkage, and corporate family tree mapping. Both are expensive and contract-heavy. If your average deal size is under five figures, you probably don't need either.

Cognism

Typically $1,000-$3,000/month. Cognism is the strongest option for European-focused teams needing GDPR-compliant, human-verified mobile numbers. It's weaker in North America. For teams that need both EMEA and North American coverage, pairing Cognism with a broader database makes more sense than relying on it alone.

Who Should Use Hoovers (And Who Shouldn't)

Use Hoovers if you need deep company intelligence that goes beyond what any prospecting tool provides. Private company financials, subsidiary structures, D-U-N-S linkage, corporate hierarchy visualization, FirstResearch industry reports - this is Hoovers' wheelhouse. Research-heavy teams benefit most: market analysts, enterprise AEs doing strategic account mapping, competitive intelligence teams, and anyone who needs to understand how a company's corporate family tree connects across borders and holding structures. The Dun & Bradstreet ecosystem is unmatched for this kind of structured firmographic research.

Skip Hoovers if your primary need is verified emails and phone numbers for high-volume outbound. SDR teams doing 100+ touches per day will burn through credits faster than they can book meetings, wasting spend on stale data. Also skip if you need strong EMEA or APAC contact coverage - multiple reviewers flag this as a persistent gap. If you’re trying to improve connect rates, these phone sales skills matter - but clean data matters more.

Real talk: most teams that buy Hoovers for prospecting end up supplementing it with another tool for contact data anyway. Save yourself the overlap and match the tool to the job.

FAQ

Is D&B Hoovers the same as the old Hoovers.com?

Yes. Hoover's was founded in 1990, acquired by Dun & Bradstreet in 2003 for approximately $119M, and rebranded as D&B Hoovers in 2017 after D&B acquired Avention. The underlying data assets carry the same lineage - just modernized and integrated into D&B's broader data cloud.

How accurate is the Hoovers database for contact data?

D&B runs 5 million daily updates, but user reviews consistently flag outdated emails and phone numbers - especially outside North America. G2 reviewers cite "outdated data" and "inaccurate contact info" as recurring themes across hundreds of reviews. Company intelligence like revenue, employee count, and corporate hierarchy is consistently strong, but contact accuracy drops noticeably for EMEA and APAC regions.