What is ContactOut? Complete Guide to This B2B Contact Finder

What is ContactOut?

ContactOut is a B2B contact discovery platform that helps sales professionals, recruiters, and marketers find verified email addresses and phone numbers for prospects. The platform is built around a Chrome extension that integrates directly with LinkedIn, allowing you to pull contact information from profiles without leaving the page.

At its core, ContactOut functions as a search engine for contact information. It scans public pages across the internet and matches emails and phone numbers to the right professionals. The platform claims access to contact data for over 300 million professionals across 30 million companies, making it one of the larger databases in the B2B contact space.

The tool has gained significant traction in enterprise environments, with the company claiming that 76% of Fortune 500 companies—including Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—have users on the platform. This adoption speaks to its reliability for high-volume prospecting needs.

How ContactOut Works

The primary interface for ContactOut is its Chrome extension, which activates when you browse LinkedIn profiles. Here's how the workflow typically operates:

• Install the extension: Download ContactOut from the Chrome Web Store and pin it to your browser toolbar
• Browse LinkedIn: Navigate to any LinkedIn profile (works with standard LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, and Recruiter)
• Reveal contact info: Click the ContactOut extension to display personal emails, work emails, and phone numbers associated with that profile
• Export or add to campaigns: Save contacts to your CRM, add them to folders, or push them directly into email campaigns

One important detail: ContactOut doesn't automate LinkedIn activity. The extension simply reads the page content you're already viewing and matches it against their database. This passive approach helps avoid triggering LinkedIn's anti-automation detection.

Beyond the Chrome extension, ContactOut offers a Search Portal where you can query their database directly using over 20 filters including job title, location, company, skills, and years of experience. This is useful when you need to build prospect lists without browsing individual LinkedIn profiles.

ContactOut Key Features

Triple-Verified Contact Data

ContactOut uses a three-layer verification process combining AI and social media cross-referencing to validate contact information. This approach aims to reduce bounce rates and improve deliverability for email outreach campaigns. The platform claims around a 70% match rate on LinkedIn profiles, meaning you'll find contact information for roughly seven out of ten profiles you search.

Email Campaigns

Beyond just finding contacts, ContactOut includes built-in email campaign functionality. You can create multi-stage automated sequences, personalize messages at scale using their AI Email Writer, and track performance metrics—all within the platform. This eliminates the need to export contacts to a separate email tool for basic outreach.

CRM and ATS Integrations

ContactOut connects with popular systems including Salesforce, HubSpot, Lever, Bullhorn, Greenhouse, and over 5,000 other apps through Zapier. For sales teams and recruiters, this means prospect data can flow directly into your existing workflow without manual data entry.

Bulk Reveal

When viewing LinkedIn search results, you can reveal contact information for multiple profiles simultaneously rather than clicking through each one individually. This dramatically speeds up the list-building process for high-volume prospecting.

ContactOut Pricing Breakdown

ContactOut offers several pricing tiers, though it's worth noting that their "unlimited" plans come with fair use caps that aren't immediately obvious. Here's the real breakdown:

Free Plan

The free tier provides 5 email lookups, 5 phone numbers, and 5 exports per day. This is extremely limited—think of it as a test drive rather than a functional plan. You get basic search portal access but miss out on the features that make ContactOut valuable for serious prospecting.

Email Plan ($49/month billed annually)

Marketed as "unlimited" emails, this plan actually caps you at 2,000 emails monthly with 300 exports. It includes email campaigns, the list builder, and AI Email Writer. Best suited for light email outreach and small businesses that don't need phone numbers.

Email + Phone Plan ($99/month billed annually)

This plan provides 2,000 emails plus 1,000 phone numbers monthly (again marketed as "unlimited"), with 600 exports. This is the realistic starting point for sales professionals who need both email and direct dial access.

Sales Plan ($79/month)

Some sources list a Sales plan at $79/month with 6,000 emails per year. This tier includes advanced features and integrations, positioned for sales professionals with moderate volume needs.

Recruiter Plan ($199/month billed annually)

The Recruiter tier offers up to 12,000 emails per year with enhanced search capabilities designed for talent acquisition teams.

Team/Enterprise Plans

Custom pricing based on team size, usage requirements, and integration needs. These plans include API access, team management features, and dedicated support. Enterprise pricing reportedly starts around $14,995 annually.

Hidden Limitations to Watch For

Several ContactOut users have reported frustration with limits that aren't clearly disclosed upfront. The "unlimited" language in marketing materials is misleading—there are hard monthly caps enforced through fair use policies. Export restrictions further limit how many contacts you can actually use. And if you hit your cap? You're done until the next billing cycle with no overage options.

ContactOut Pros and Cons

What Works Well

• Accuracy: The triple-verification system delivers relatively reliable data, particularly for email addresses
• LinkedIn integration: The Chrome extension creates a seamless workflow for LinkedIn-centric prospecting
• Ease of use: The interface is intuitive—no steep learning curve to start finding contacts
• Personal emails: Unlike some competitors, ContactOut can surface personal email addresses, not just corporate ones

Where It Falls Short

• Phone number accuracy: Users report more inconsistencies with phone data compared to email data
• Deceptive "unlimited" claims: Fair use caps significantly limit actual usage
• Per-user pricing: Each team member needs their own subscription, which adds up quickly
• Export restrictions: Even if you find contacts, export limits constrain how many you can actually use

Who Should Use ContactOut?

ContactOut works best for specific use cases:

Recruiters who need to bypass LinkedIn InMail and reach candidates directly will find the most value here. The platform was originally built with recruiting in mind, and features like ATS integration reflect that heritage.

Sales professionals doing account-based outreach on LinkedIn can streamline their workflow significantly. If you're already spending time on LinkedIn identifying prospects, ContactOut lets you capture contact data without breaking your research flow.

Small teams with moderate volume needs (under 2,000 contacts monthly) will find the pricing reasonable compared to enterprise alternatives like ZoomInfo.

However, if you need high-volume contact data, more transparent credit-based pricing, or data beyond LinkedIn profiles, you may want to explore alternatives.

ContactOut Alternatives Worth Considering

The B2B contact data space is competitive, and several alternatives offer different strengths:

Lusha provides similar LinkedIn integration with real-time verification and strong GDPR/CCPA compliance. Premium plans start around $37-50/month with clearer credit-based pricing.

RocketReach offers verified email addresses, phone numbers, and social profiles with transparent credit-based plans starting at $49/month.

Apollo.io combines contact finding with broader sales intelligence, including AI-driven lead scoring. Their free plan includes 10,000 credits—substantially more than ContactOut's free tier.

For teams focused on email finding specifically, Findymail offers a focused solution without the complexity of a full prospecting platform.

Building Your B2B Targeting Strategy

Contact finding tools like ContactOut solve one part of the prospecting puzzle: getting the email or phone number. But effective B2B outreach starts earlier—with identifying who to target in the first place.

Before you start pulling contact data, you need clarity on your ideal customer profile. What industries? What company sizes? What job titles? What technologies do they use? What pain points do they experience?

This is where our B2B Targeting Generator comes in. It uses AI to analyze your product or service and generate detailed target market profiles, including specific companies that match your criteria. Instead of manually researching who might need what you sell, you get a prioritized list of targets with the reasoning behind each recommendation.

Once you have that target list, tools like ContactOut become dramatically more valuable. You're not just collecting random contacts—you're building a focused prospect list based on strategic targeting.

Verifying Contact Data Before Outreach

Regardless of which contact finding tool you use, verification matters. Email deliverability has become increasingly strict, with providers like Google and Yahoo penalizing senders with high bounce rates. A bad sender reputation can land your entire domain in spam folders.

While ContactOut includes verification in their process, it's worth running additional verification before launching campaigns—especially for high-value outreach. Our Email Verifier provides instant validation, categorizing emails as valid, risky, or invalid so you can clean your lists before hitting send.

For prospects where email isn't the right channel, our Mobile Number Finder can surface cell phone data from email addresses or LinkedIn profiles, giving you another avenue for connection.

Making the Right Choice for Your Team

ContactOut is a solid tool for LinkedIn-based prospecting, particularly for recruiting teams and sales professionals who work primarily within that ecosystem. The Chrome extension integration is genuinely convenient, and the data quality—while not perfect—is competitive with alternatives.

However, go in with realistic expectations. The "unlimited" marketing doesn't match reality, and the per-user pricing model means costs scale linearly with team size. For high-volume needs or teams requiring more flexibility, credit-based alternatives may offer better economics.

Whatever tool you choose, remember that contact data is just one piece of an effective outreach strategy. Combine quality data with smart targeting, verified emails, and personalized messaging to maximize your results. The right foundation makes all the difference between outreach that gets ignored and conversations that convert.