8 Best Lead Carrot Alternatives for 2026 (With Real Pricing & Test Data)

You just ran a Lead Carrot search for "plumbers in Denver" and got back 200 results - half with no email, a quarter with outdated Google Maps data, and zero contact names. Now you're wondering why you're paying $47/mo for this. You're not alone. Lead Carrot's Capterra reviews (3.8/5 overall) tell the whole story: 5-star ratings in 2020, 1-star ratings by 2023. The product was promising. Then the data quality fell off a cliff, support went silent, and users started searching for something better.

Lewis F. put it bluntly in his November 2023 review: "Do not buy this software for Marketing Agencies." The Google Maps function, he said, "doesn't pull the data off Google maps, it's outdated." Daryl A. was even more direct: "Go elsewhere - ESPECIALLY IN AUSTRALIA." He reported being charged despite a free trial promise, and support told him "too bad."

The local lead scraping space has gotten significantly better since Lead Carrot's peak. More options, better data, lower prices. Here are 8 alternatives we've actually tested, with real pricing and head-to-head results.

Quick note: Lead Carrot (leadcarrot.io) is a B2B lead scraping tool. It's not the same as Carrot / Investor Carrot (carrot.com), which is a real estate investor website platform at $99-199/mo. If you're looking for Carrot alternatives, check out LeadPropeller, REsimpli, or Pebble instead.

Our Picks (TL;DR)

If you don't want to read 3,000 words:

1. LeadSwift - Best overall replacement. In a head-to-head test on "Restaurants in Toronto," LeadSwift pulled 5,357 leads (4,025 with emails) vs. Lead Carrot's 286 leads (7 with emails). That's not a marginal improvement - it's a different category. Unlimited exports. Starts at $19.99/mo annually. (See the fine print in our LeadSwift pricing breakdown.)

2. Prospeo - Best for verified B2B emails. 300M+ professional profiles, 98% email accuracy, 7-day data refresh. If your needs have grown beyond local scraping into mid-market and enterprise prospecting, this replaces the entire workflow. Starts free with 75 emails/month. (If you’re comparing tools, start with our B2B email lookup tools roundup.)

3. Lead Scrape - Budget king. $97/year with no search limits. Desktop-only and searches are slow, but if price is everything, nothing touches it.

What Lead Carrot Actually Does (And Where It Falls Short)

Lead Carrot, headquartered in Hoorn, Netherlands, crawls the web for businesses matching your search criteria - niche plus city within a 21-mile radius. It pulls phone numbers, emails, Google My Business info, review data, social profiles, and website details. The Starter plan runs $47/mo; Enterprise goes up to $297/mo.

What still works:

• Fast searches (~1.5 minutes per query)
• Built-in CRM with pipeline management (if you need a lightweight option, compare CRM software for small businesses)
• Native GoHighLevel integration
• Easy-to-use interface with minimal learning curve

Where it falls short:

• Doesn't return business contact names - you get the business, not the person (here’s how to ask for the right contact person)
• Google Maps data is frequently outdated per 2023 reviews
• Starter plan caps at ~300 searches/week
• No bulk city search (claimed "coming soon" for years)
• Up to 5 cities at once, but results are thin
• Support has become unresponsive - multiple reviewers cite broken English responses and billing disputes

For $47/mo with those limitations, the math doesn't work anymore. Not when the replacements deliver 10-20x the results at similar or lower prices.

Pricing Comparison: Lead Carrot vs. Top Alternatives

D7's real-world cost deserves a footnote: once you add external email verification, Zapier for CRM sync, and data supplements, a small agency is looking at ~$343/mo - 186% over the base price. That $44.99 sticker is misleading.

The Best Lead Carrot Alternatives for 2026

LeadSwift - Best Overall Replacement

Use this if: You want the closest thing to "Lead Carrot but actually works." You're an agency or freelancer scraping local business leads by niche and city, and you need emails, contact names, and the ability to send outreach from the same tool.

Skip this if: You're prospecting B2B companies by job title and company size - that's a different tool category entirely.

LeadSwift is the obvious replacement for anyone leaving Lead Carrot. The numbers aren't even close. In a test on "Restaurants in Toronto," LeadSwift found 5,357 leads with 4,025 emails. Lead Carrot returned 286 leads with 7 emails. That's a 19x difference in total leads and a 575x difference in emails.

It pulls from Google, YellowPages, Bing, Facebook, and Yelp - not just Google Maps. LeadSwift extracts employee names, job titles, and direct emails, data Lead Carrot doesn't even attempt. Every plan includes unlimited leads, contacts, and exports. Built-in email outreach with sequences, scheduling, and custom SMTP means you don't need a separate tool for campaigns (see our guide to cold email outreach tools).

Pricing starts at $24.99/mo monthly or $19.99/mo on annual billing (there's a 50% early adopter discount active right now). A 7-day free trial requires no credit card. Trustpilot rating sits at 4.9/5 across 586 reviews - that's not a small sample.

If you're switching from Lead Carrot to another local scraper, LeadSwift is where you start.

Prospeo - Best for Verified B2B Contact Data

If your real problem is finding the right people - not just businesses - with emails that actually work, Prospeo replaces the scraping workflow entirely with a verified B2B database.

The database covers 300M+ professional profiles with 98% email accuracy and a 7-day data refresh cycle. The industry average refresh is 6 weeks - that gap matters when you're running outbound at scale. You're not scraping Google Maps and hoping. You're searching 30+ filters including buyer intent data (15,000 topics via Bombora), technographics, job change signals, headcount growth, and funding data. (If you want the bigger picture, read about B2B contact data decay.)

For agencies prospecting businesses above the small local shop level - SaaS companies, mid-market firms, professional services - those filters find decision-makers no Google Maps scraper can reach. The Chrome extension (40,000+ users) pulls verified contact data from any website or company profile in one click, and native integrations push contacts straight into Salesforce, HubSpot, Instantly, Lemlist, and Smartlead.

Pricing is credit-based at roughly $0.01 per email. The free tier gives you 75 emails/month - enough to test the data quality firsthand. No contracts, no annual commitment. (For a deeper comparison, see Prospeo pricing.)

Lead Scrape - Best Budget Option

Lead Scrape is the cheapest serious option in this category. $97/year for Standard, $247/year for Business. That's not a typo - annual, not monthly.

Pros:

• In a "Dentist Miami FL" test: 2,229 results with 332 emails vs. Lead Carrot's 1,118 with 144
• Returns 362 contact names (owner, CEO, manager) - Lead Carrot returns zero
• No daily or monthly search limits
• Free built-in email verification plus NeverBounce integration (for other options, see email verifier websites)
• Integrates with GoHighLevel, HubSpot, Instantly, Smartlead, Lemlist

Cons:

• Desktop software only (Windows/Mac) - no cloud access
• Searches are slow: ~40 minutes vs. Lead Carrot's 1.5 minutes
• Interface feels dated compared to cloud-based tools
• No built-in outreach - you'll need a separate email tool

The tradeoff is clear: you save a ton of money and get more data, but you sacrifice speed and convenience. For agencies running batch searches overnight, that's fine. For someone who needs results in real time during a client call, it's painful.

D7 Lead Finder - Cheap on Paper, Expensive in Practice

D7 looks affordable at first glance: Starter at $44.99/mo, Agency at $69.99/mo, Professional at $119.99/mo. Then you start using it.

The email verification is syntax-only - it checks if the format looks right, not whether the email actually exists. Only 15% of results include decision-maker contacts. Only 8% have direct dial phone numbers. So you're immediately paying for external verification, Zapier for CRM sync (no native integrations below Professional), and supplemental data to fill the gaps.

A small agency's real-world cost lands around $343/mo. That's 186% over the base price. The G2 profile has 5 reviews, a 3.7 rating, and hasn't been updated by the vendor in over a year. One reviewer gave it 0.5/5 and explicitly recommended LeadSwift instead. I'd skip this one.

Lead Kahuna - Built-in Outreach for Agencies

Use this if: You want lead scraping and email/voicemail outreach in a single tool at $299/year, and you don't need high volume. The built-in email broadcasts, voicemail drops, campaign tracking, and done-for-you marketing templates make it genuinely useful for small agencies that hate juggling multiple subscriptions.

Skip this if: You need volume. In a test on "Attorneys Nashville TN," Lead Kahuna found 61 leads in 20 minutes. Lead Scrape found 434 in 11 minutes. Lead Kahuna searches one city at a time, doesn't include proxies, and the 80+ data points it advertises are thin in practice. It's a convenience play, not a data play.

Apollo.io - For B2B Beyond Local Businesses

Apollo occupies a completely different lane. It's not a local business scraper - it's a B2B prospecting platform built for finding contacts by job title, company size, industry, and tech stack. Free tier available, paid plans from ~$49-99/mo per user.

If your needs have evolved beyond "find me every dentist in Miami" to "find me the VP of Operations at Series B SaaS companies with 50-200 employees," Apollo is where you go. It's strong for enterprise and mid-market prospecting with solid email data and built-in sequencing. But Apollo doesn't have the owner's personal email for a 15-person plumbing company in Austin. If you're still doing local lead gen, it won't replace Lead Carrot.

Apify Google Maps Scraper - Pay-Per-Use for Technical Users

Apify's Google Maps Scraper runs $4 per 1,000 places with $5 in free monthly credits. It bypasses Google Maps' 120-result limit, offers enrichment add-ons for emails, phone numbers, and social profiles, and carries a 4.8/5 Trustpilot rating.

Here's the thing: this isn't a point-and-click tool. You need to be comfortable with APIs, JSON configs, and data pipelines. Best for developers or technically comfortable operators building custom workflows. Everyone else should look at the turnkey options above.

Outscraper - Free Tier for Low-Volume Scraping

Outscraper charges $3/1,000 places base, roughly $5-10/1,000 with email enrichment. The free tier gives you 500 businesses/month. Searches are slow (~20-25 minutes for 400 results) and it's not built for ongoing campaigns. Trustpilot 4.7/5. Use it for occasional one-off scrapes, not as your primary lead source.

The DIY Option - Building Your Own Scraping Pipeline

A practitioner on Reddit's r/coldemail built a full local lead scraping pipeline for roughly $0.008 per lead. Compare that to $0.10-0.50 per lead from most databases.

The stack: Apify Google Maps scrape ($0.004/place) -> Apify contact enrichment ($0.002/place) -> website deep scrape (free) -> DuckDuckGo search enrichment (free) -> Claude Haiku AI extraction ($0.002/lead) -> Google Sheets. Total build time: 15-20 hours.

The results are impressive. It extracts 36 fields per lead. 70-75% of businesses return usable email addresses. 40-50% return an identifiable owner name. 60% have at least one social profile.

As the practitioner put it: "Apollo and ZoomInfo don't have the owner's personal email for a 15-person plumbing company in Austin. But their /about page does."

This approach works for any local service business with a Google Maps presence - contractors, medical practices, law firms, dental offices, restaurants, auto shops. It doesn't work for SaaS, tech startups, or remote businesses without physical locations. And the tradeoff is real: 15-20 hours of build time, ongoing maintenance, and technical skills most agency owners don't have. But if you're technically inclined and running high volume, the economics are hard to beat.

The Verification Problem Nobody Talks About

I've watched this play out dozens of times. You run a search in your scraping tool, export 300 leads, load them into your email tool, hit send - and 120 bounce. Your sender reputation tanks. Your domain needs weeks of warm-up to recover. The campaign is dead. (If you’re troubleshooting, see 550 Recipient Rejected.)

Since 78% of customers buy from the first business that responds, every day your domain is recovering is revenue walking to a competitor.

This isn't hypothetical. One Reddit practitioner scraping solar industry leads found that 75-80% of raw Google Maps results were "totally off" even with solid keywords. That's the dirty secret of local lead scraping: the raw data is garbage without a verification layer. (More broadly: data quality is the hidden variable in outbound.)

D7 Lead Finder is a perfect example of false security. Its "email verification" is syntax-only - it checks that the email looks like an email, not that it actually exists. You feel verified. You're not.

The real cost of bounced emails isn't the wasted credits. It's the domain reputation damage, the warm-up time, and the lost campaigns while you recover. For agencies running client campaigns, one bad batch can burn a domain you've spent months building.

Real talk: if your average deal size is under a few hundred dollars, you can probably tolerate some bounce rate pain and use a cheaper scraper with bolt-on verification. But the moment you're running outbound for clients - where a burned domain means a burned relationship - verification isn't optional. It's the whole game. Every scraper on this list needs a verification layer. The question is whether you bolt one on after the fact or start with verified data from the beginning.

Which Lead Carrot Alternative Is Right for You?

Your situation determines your tool:

• Closest Lead Carrot replacement -> LeadSwift. Same use case, dramatically better data, unlimited exports, built-in outreach. Start with the 7-day free trial.

• Verified B2B emails for mid-market+ companies -> Prospeo. 300M+ profiles, 30+ search filters, 98% accuracy. The free tier lets you test without commitment.

• Budget is everything -> Lead Scrape at $97/year. Slow searches, desktop-only, but unbeatable on price with no search limits.

• Scraping + outreach in one tool -> Lead Kahuna at $299/year. Low volume, but the built-in email and voicemail campaigns save you a separate subscription.

• Technical and want maximum control -> Build a DIY pipeline with Apify + enrichment + AI extraction. ~$0.008/lead, 15-20 hours to build.

• Outgrown local lead gen entirely -> Apollo.io for B2B prospecting by job title, company size, and industry. Free tier available.

• Lead Carrot is actually fine for you -> Stick with it if you need fast local searches with a built-in CRM, you're running low volume, and you haven't hit data quality issues. Just test carefully before committing to a paid plan.

Lead Carrot Alternatives FAQ

Is Lead Carrot still worth using in 2026?

It can work for fast, low-volume local searches with a built-in CRM at $47/mo - if you haven't personally hit data quality issues. But multiple 2023 Capterra reviewers report outdated data, unresponsive support, and billing disputes. The product hasn't shown signs of improvement since. Test the free trial carefully and run your results against a second tool to verify accuracy.

What's the cheapest alternative to Lead Carrot?

Do these tools include email verification?

Most local scrapers don't - or offer syntax-only checks that don't confirm whether an email actually exists. LeadSwift includes built-in verification plus six third-party API integrations. Lead Scrape integrates with NeverBounce. D7 Lead Finder's verification is syntax-only, which won't protect your sender reputation. For multi-step email verification that checks deliverability, catch-all domains, and spam traps, you'll need a dedicated verification tool or a platform that bakes it in.

Can I use these tools for B2B prospecting beyond local businesses?

Local scrapers like LeadSwift, Lead Scrape, and D7 are designed for businesses with Google Maps listings - contractors, restaurants, dental offices. For B2B prospecting by job title, company size, or industry, you need a dedicated B2B leads database with filters built for that use case. Apollo.io also works well for B2B prospecting beyond local businesses.

Is Lead Carrot the same as Investor Carrot?

No - they're completely different companies. Lead Carrot (leadcarrot.io) is a B2B lead scraping tool for finding local business contact data at $47-297/mo. Carrot, also called Investor Carrot (carrot.com), is a real estate investor website and SEO platform at $99-199/mo. Different products, different pricing, different use cases.