Data.com vs. D&B Hoovers

If you're researching Data.com vs. D&B Hoovers, here is what you need to know before you go any further: Data.com no longer exists. Salesforce retired it on July 31, 2020, and by February 2021 all contact data had been removed. If your team depended on Data.com for CRM enrichment and prospecting inside Salesforce, that door has been closed for years.

So this is not a traditional comparison. It is a migration guide -- and an opportunity to ask a better question. Before you move your data workflow to the obvious successor, work through these:

• Do you need a standalone prospecting database, or a platform that also handles outreach, intent signals, and pipeline execution?

• What accuracy rate do you actually need from your database -- and is legacy commercial data good enough for your team's connect rate targets?

• How important is global company coverage and corporate hierarchy mapping for your specific sales motion?

• Do you want your data tool to sit alongside your CRM, or to power AI-driven workflows across your entire go-to-market operation?

• Is your priority replacing what Data.com did, or upgrading to what Data.com could never do?

How you answer those questions determines which platform fits. Both D&B Hoovers and ZoomInfo are credible successors to Data.com. They serve different buyers, solve different problems, and price very differently.

Data.com vs. D&B Hoovers vs. ZoomInfo at a glance

Data.com's retirement left a gap that needed filling

Data.com was built on a genuinely good insight: contact data should live inside your CRM workflow, not in a separate tool that reps have to context-switch into. Salesforce acquired Jigsaw in 2010 for $142 million precisely because of that insight. The vision -- search for contacts, clean stale records, and enrich Salesforce directly without leaving the platform -- was the right one.

The problem was the execution. Data.com ran on a crowd-sourced model where community members contributed data in exchange for export credits. Rapid growth in coverage came at the cost of data quality. Community members could upload low-quality records to earn credits for additional exports, creating a self-reinforcing cycle: the database grew in size while reliability declined. By the time Salesforce announced the retirement, data accuracy estimates had dropped to 25-50%.

GDPR accelerated the end. Crowd-sourced data arrives without clear liability, and once it enters a system, ensuring compliance with GDPR's consent and accuracy requirements becomes difficult to guarantee. Salesforce retired Data.com in July 2020 -- the same month GDPR enforcement had been underway for two full years -- and shifted to a marketplace model through Lightning Data on the AppExchange. That transition scattered Data.com users across multiple replacement providers.

What Data.com got right -- embedded data access, CRM-native prospecting, fast record enrichment -- is now table stakes for any serious replacement. Both D&B Hoovers and ZoomInfo deliver on that baseline. The question is what they add on top.

D&B Hoovers carries the D&B data legacy forward

If Data.com's most useful feature for your team was the Dun & Bradstreet company data, D&B Hoovers is the direct continuation. Data.com combined crowd-sourced contacts with D&B company data as its foundation. D&B Hoovers removes the crowd-sourced layer and gives you direct access to the full D&B commercial Data Cloud.

D&B Hoovers strengths

The scale difference from Data.com is significant. Where Data.com peaked at 21 million contacts across 3 million companies, D&B Hoovers provides 330M+ companies and 520M+ contacts, with 190M+ decision-makers, 70M+ emails, and 60M+ direct dials. The underlying D&B Data Cloud spans 600M+ businesses across 200+ countries.

What makes D&B Hoovers distinctively valuable is its heritage data. The D-U-N-S Number, introduced in 1963, provides a universal business identifier that enables corporate family tree mapping with individual subsidiary identification. Features like Decision HQ (identifying purchasing authority within corporate hierarchies), Spend Capacity (ranking spending levels relative to peers), and Growth Trajectory (predicting 12-18 month business trajectory) draw on proprietary commercial credit and financial data accumulated over 184 years. For teams selling into complex enterprise accounts where corporate hierarchies and financial health matter, this depth is hard to find elsewhere.

The platform also holds a TrustRadius 2025 Buyer's Choice award and multiple G2 Leader badges including Small Business, Mid-Market, Asia, and India regional categories. The SMB Essentials tier at $49/month provides a lower-friction entry point than most enterprise B2B data platforms. Two vertical add-ons -- D&B Healthcare Insights and D&B Technology Insights -- layer sector-specific data attributes directly into the Hoovers interface, useful for teams with concentrated vertical focus.

D&B Hoovers integrates natively with Salesforce (via the D&B Hoovers Salesforce Lightning integration) and Microsoft Dynamics, and works alongside D&B Connect for CRM data quality and D&B Rev.Up ABX for ABM workflows.

For teams primarily evaluating D&B Hoovers as a data and company intelligence layer, see the D&B Hoovers review and pricing breakdown for additional context.

D&B Hoovers limitations

Gartner Peer Insights gives D&B Hoovers a 3.9/5 rating across 192 reviews. While the platform earns recognition for its company-level data depth and D-U-N-S Number mapping, reviewer feedback surfaces a consistent concern: data freshness and individual contact accuracy. Reviewers describe issues with "outdated, retired, or even deceased contacts," and data accuracy estimates in Gartner reviews cluster around 70% for individual contact records.

The platform's AI capabilities -- SmartSearch AI for enhanced filtering and SmartMail AI for outreach drafting -- are useful additions, but SmartMail AI generates draft text without native sending or sequencing functionality. There is no D&B Hoovers equivalent of a built-in dialer, outbound sequence tool, or conversation intelligence platform. Intent data requires purchasing add-ons separately. Enterprise pricing is fully gated -- no public rates beyond the $49/month Essentials tier.

For teams actively weighing whether to stay with D&B Hoovers or move to a broader platform, the D&B Hoovers alternatives guide covers the competitive landscape in detail.

ZoomInfo goes beyond data replacement

ZoomInfo approaches the Data.com migration question from a different angle. Rather than replacing Data.com's data access alone, it replaces the entire workflow that Data.com was part of -- and then extends it.

Where Data.com gave you contacts to export into Salesforce, and D&B Hoovers gives you contacts plus company intelligence to export into a CRM, ZoomInfo provides the contacts, the intent signals telling you which ones are in-market, the AI that drafts personalized outreach, and the execution tools to send it.

ZoomInfo is an all-in-one AI GTM Platform built on three connected layers.

The first layer is data: 500M contacts, 100M companies, 135M+ verified phone numbers, and 200M+ verified business emails, verified through a pipeline combining automated machine learning, natural language processing, and 300+ human researchers. ZoomInfo achieves up to 95% accuracy on first-party data -- meaningfully above the ~70% contact accuracy reported for D&B Hoovers in Gartner reviews.

The second layer is the GTM Context Graph: an intelligence layer that processes 1.5B+ data points daily, fusing ZoomInfo's B2B data with your CRM records, conversation transcripts, and behavioral signals. The Context Graph surfaces not just what happened in an account, but why -- which concerns came up on the last call, which accounts match your actual closed-won patterns, which contacts are showing active buying signals right now.

The third layer is Universal Access: three ways to use the same data and intelligence in any workflow. GTM Workspace gives sellers AI agents that research accounts, draft personalized outreach grounded in deal history, and surface the next best action. GTM Studio lets marketers and RevOps teams describe audiences in natural language and launch multi-channel plays without building the segmentation manually. The ZoomInfo MCP server and Enterprise API connect ZoomInfo's data and intelligence directly to AI agents, custom applications, and any front-end your team uses.

ZoomInfo customers using these tools see measurable rep-level outcomes. Seismic reported a 54% productivity improvement and 11.5 hours saved per week after deploying ZoomInfo's AI-powered tools -- proof that the platform's impact registers in the work reps do every day, not just in abstract data quality scores.

Try ZoomInfo free or start with ZoomInfo Lite -- a permanent free tier with 10 monthly export credits and basic search and enrichment access.

Data accuracy: the battleground that determines your connect rate

Data accuracy is the single most important dimension for any Data.com replacement -- and it is where the three options diverge most sharply.

Data.com ran on a crowd-sourced model with no systematic accuracy controls. Community members contributed records in exchange for export credits, creating strong incentives to upload data regardless of quality. By the time of its retirement, accuracy estimates ranged from 25% to 50%.

D&B Hoovers is built on a fundamentally different model: Dun & Bradstreet's commercial Data Cloud, anchored on the D-U-N-S Number and built over 184 years. Company-level data is a genuine strength. The D-U-N-S Number provides a unique business identifier that enables reliable hierarchy mapping and corporate family tree resolution across 200+ countries.

Contact-level data is where the Gartner reviewers surface concerns. With approximately 70% contact accuracy per reviewer estimates, a rep making 50 outbound dials per day can expect roughly 35 accurate records out of 50. That means 15 calls a day to disconnected numbers, dead email addresses, or contacts who left the company months ago.

ZoomInfo operates a multi-source verification pipeline combining automated machine learning, natural language processing, and 300+ human researchers who continuously verify and update records. The result: up to 95% accuracy on first-party data. At the same 50-dial benchmark, 95% accuracy means roughly 47 or 48 accurate records -- the equivalent of adding almost half a call block back to a rep's productive day, every day.

For sales teams where connect rate directly drives pipeline, this gap compounds quickly. A 25-percentage-point accuracy difference between D&B Hoovers and ZoomInfo translates to 12-13 additional productive contacts per 50 attempts. Across a team of 10 SDRs, that recovers hundreds of productive contact attempts per week.

GTM workflow completeness: from data access to deal execution

The second major battleground is what happens after the data.

Data.com stopped at step zero: it gave reps access to contact data that they then exported into Salesforce for manual outreach. The value proposition was access, not execution.

D&B Hoovers moves one step further: it combines contact and company data with SmartMail AI, which generates draft outreach emails based on a prospect's profile and news triggers. That is a useful addition. The limitation is that SmartMail AI produces drafts without native sending, sequencing, or dialer functionality. To actually send those drafts at scale, teams need a separate outbound tool -- adding another seat license, another workflow integration, and another context-switch for reps.

ZoomInfo treats data and execution as a single system, not sequential purchases.

GTM Workspace gives sellers AI agents that research accounts, build contact lists, draft outreach grounded in deal history and call transcripts, and surface prioritized next actions -- all in one interface. Native sequences and a built-in dialer mean reps can move from a data search to an active outreach sequence without leaving the platform. For teams replacing Data.com who also used a separate outbound tool, ZoomInfo can consolidate both into a single contract.

GTM Studio lets marketers and RevOps teams define audiences in natural language ("companies in the healthcare segment showing intent signals for CRM migration with more than 500 employees") and launch multi-channel plays directly. The same intelligence that powers seller outreach in GTM Workspace drives marketing orchestration in GTM Studio.

For teams building custom AI applications -- whether automating prospecting workflows, connecting ZoomInfo data to internal AI agents, or embedding B2B data into customer-facing tools -- the ZoomInfo MCP server provides programmatic access without custom data pipeline engineering.

The question to ask: does your team need a data source, or a GTM execution platform? If you already have outbound tooling and only need to replace the contact and company data layer, D&B Hoovers may be sufficient. If your team is looking to consolidate the data, intent, outreach, and AI layers into one platform, that is where ZoomInfo operates differently.

AI-powered selling: from smart search to intelligent GTM execution

The third battleground is AI -- specifically, what AI actually does in each platform.

Data.com had no AI features. In the 2010s, when it was active, AI-assisted sales was not a meaningful category.

D&B Hoovers has added AI capabilities that improve its core workflows: SmartSearch AI refines filters and surfaces better-fit companies based on your search history; SmartMail AI generates personalized outreach drafts grounded in company data and news triggers; AI Prospect Scoring identifies accounts that match your ideal customer profile. These are practical additions that make a data-and-prospecting tool faster and easier to use.

The limitation is that D&B Hoovers AI sits on top of a data product. It makes the search-and-draft workflow faster, but it does not fundamentally change what the platform does: find contacts, research companies, and draft messages.

ZoomInfo's GTM Context Graph represents a different approach. Rather than AI features added to a data tool, it is an intelligence layer that processes 1.5B+ data points daily -- ZoomInfo's B2B data, your CRM records, conversation transcripts, behavioral signals, and third-party intent data -- to produce a unified, reasoning model of your go-to-market activity.

The Context Graph captures why deals move or stall, not just what happened. When GTM Workspace drafts a follow-up email for an AE after a discovery call, it draws on the actual call transcript, the account's history in your CRM, and ZoomInfo's current intelligence on that account's buying signals -- producing output that is grounded in deal reality, not just prospect profile data.

GTM Studio applies the same intelligence to audience orchestration: a RevOps team can describe their target segment in natural language and the platform builds the audience, segments it by signal strength and ICP fit, and launches the multi-channel play. Marketers get the same intelligence layer driving their ABM motion that sellers use for account research.

The practical difference: D&B Hoovers AI makes a data tool smarter. ZoomInfo AI makes the GTM motion itself smarter -- from prospecting through pipeline execution.

Pricing models serve different buyers

Data.com used a hybrid model: crowd-sourced points for contacts (earn by contributing, spend by downloading) combined with subscription pricing for Clean and Prospector tiers.

D&B Hoovers publishes pricing only for its SMB Essentials tier: $49/month or $529/year, including 150 Company Credits and 150 Contact Credits per cycle. The dual-credit system -- separating company exports and contact unlocks into different pools -- adds complexity to usage planning. Intent data, Audience Builder, and Advanced Insights all require separate add-on purchases. Enterprise tiers require contacting sales; no public pricing is listed beyond the Essentials tier.

ZoomInfo is free to start with consumption credits based on usage. ZoomInfo Lite is a permanent free tier -- not a time-limited trial -- providing access to ZoomInfo's database with 10 monthly export credits, basic search, and enrichment tools. A 7-day free trial of paid features is available at zoominfo.com/free-trial with no credit card required.

For teams replacing Data.com on a lean data budget, D&B Hoovers Essentials provides an accessible starting point at $49/month. For teams prepared to invest in a platform that consolidates data, intent, outreach, and AI execution, ZoomInfo's broader capability set can reduce the total number of tool subscriptions required.

Global coverage and compliance

Data.com operated primarily in the US market. Its crowd-sourced model produced inconsistent international coverage, and the GDPR compliance issues that contributed to its retirement underscore the risks of crowd-sourced data at scale.

D&B Hoovers has the deepest global company coverage of any major vendor, drawing on D&B's Data Cloud of 600M+ businesses across 200+ countries and 256 countries and territories. The D-U-N-S Number identifier enables corporate family tree resolution globally -- a genuine advantage for teams selling into complex enterprise accounts with subsidiaries across multiple markets. D&B holds ISO 27001:2022, ISO 27701, SOC 2 Type 2, and SOC 3 certifications, and maintains GDPR and CCPA compliance. For teams selling internationally in non-English-speaking markets, D&B Hoovers' geographic company coverage is a clear differentiator.

ZoomInfo provides 34M+ company profiles outside North America, 200M+ professional profiles outside North America, and 45M+ mobile numbers outside North America. In 2025, ZoomInfo expanded international mobile coverage by 1.8 million numbers across six European markets. ZoomInfo holds ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 2 Type II, and TRUSTe GDPR and CCPA certifications, all renewed annually.

The honest comparison: D&B Hoovers leads on global company-level intelligence and corporate hierarchy mapping. ZoomInfo leads on the breadth of contact-level data paired with that coverage, and on the execution platform layered on top of the data.

Data.com vs. D&B Hoovers vs. ZoomInfo: which should you choose?

The choice depends on what you are trying to accomplish, not just what you are trying to replace.

Data.com is no longer an option. Salesforce retired it in 2020 and directs former users to Lightning Data on the AppExchange. Both D&B Hoovers and ZoomInfo far exceed what Data.com offered at its peak.

Choose D&B Hoovers if:

• Corporate hierarchy intelligence and D-U-N-S Number mapping are essential to your sales motion -- particularly for selling into complex enterprise accounts with multiple subsidiaries or regulated industries where institutional identifier credibility matters

• You need the deepest global company coverage available, especially in non-English-speaking markets and developing economies

• Your team primarily needs a prospecting data layer and already has separate, established tools for outbound sequencing and execution

• Vertical-specific depth -- healthcare or technology sector-specific data attributes -- adds meaningful value for your target accounts

• A $49/month self-serve Essentials tier fits your current budget and you want to start with data before expanding

Choose ZoomInfo if:

• You want to consolidate prospecting data, intent signals, outbound execution, and AI-assisted selling into a single platform rather than managing multiple vendor contracts

• AI-powered GTM workflows matter more than data depth in any single dimension -- specifically the GTM Context Graph's ability to surface why accounts are moving, not just who they are

• Execution tools including sequences, dialer, and conversation intelligence are part of the same budget conversation as your data platform

• Your team is moving from manual list-building to signal-driven go-to-market, where intent data, job change signals, and behavioral triggers should drive prospecting prioritization

• Programmatic access to B2B data via APIs and MCP supports your broader AI agent or custom application build-out

Ready to move beyond data replacement to a complete go-to-market platform? See how ZoomInfo works with a free trial or start with ZoomInfo Lite at no cost.

Data.com vs. D&B Hoovers vs. ZoomInfo: full comparison

Frequently asked questions

Is ZoomInfo an alternative to Data.com?

Yes. ZoomInfo is one of the most comprehensive replacements for Data.com, particularly for teams that used Data.com for CRM enrichment, contact prospecting, and Salesforce integration. Where Data.com delivered contacts to export into Salesforce, ZoomInfo provides the data plus intent signals, AI-powered outreach tools (GTM Workspace), and 120+ native integrations. ZoomInfo Lite offers a permanent free entry point. Paid plans scale with usage via a consumption credit model. See how ZoomInfo works with a free trial.

What replaced Data.com when Salesforce shut it down?

Salesforce retired Data.com on July 31, 2020, and directed users to Lightning Data on the AppExchange -- a marketplace of third-party data providers. The two most common Data.com replacements are D&B Hoovers (which supplies the D&B company data that Data.com used as its foundation) and ZoomInfo (which offers a larger database, higher contact accuracy, and a full GTM execution platform alongside the data). Both far exceed the scale and accuracy of Data.com at its peak.

How accurate is D&B Hoovers data?

D&B Hoovers is built on Dun & Bradstreet's commercial Data Cloud, covering 330M+ companies and 520M+ contacts. The platform earns a 3.9/5 rating from 192 Gartner Peer Insights reviewers and a TrustRadius 2025 Buyer's Choice award. However, Gartner reviewers surface consistent data freshness concerns, with some estimating approximately 70% contact accuracy and noting issues with "outdated, retired, or even deceased contacts." D&B Hoovers' strongest data is company-level hierarchy and financial intelligence, anchored by the D-U-N-S Number. ZoomInfo achieves up to 95% accuracy on first-party contact data through continuous multi-source verification and 300+ human researchers.

Does ZoomInfo have a free version?

Yes. ZoomInfo Lite is a permanent free tier -- not a time-limited trial -- providing access to ZoomInfo's database with 10 monthly export credits, basic contact and company search, and enrichment tools. A 7-day free trial of paid features is available at zoominfo.com/free-trial with no credit card required. Paid plans are structured as consumption credits based on usage rather than fixed seat tiers.

Why did Salesforce shut down Data.com?

Salesforce retired Data.com because its crowd-sourced data model created two compounding problems: data quality degradation and GDPR compliance risk. The crowd-sourced contribution model incentivized volume over quality, pushing accuracy estimates down to 25-50%. GDPR introduced compliance requirements that crowd-sourced data -- arriving without clear consent attribution -- could not reliably satisfy. Salesforce retired Data.com in July 2020 and transitioned former users to a marketplace of vetted third-party data providers through Lightning Data on the AppExchange.

Data.com proved that sales teams want data embedded in their workflow, not siloed in a separate tool. That insight was correct. The execution, built on crowd-sourced data with declining accuracy and a model incompatible with global compliance requirements, was not.

Both D&B Hoovers and ZoomInfo deliver on Data.com's original vision with data quality and scale the crowd-sourced model could never sustain. The difference between them is scope: D&B Hoovers provides a data foundation with deep heritage-based company intelligence. ZoomInfo provides the data foundation and the AI-powered go-to-market engine built on top of it.

More Data.com and D&B Hoovers comparisons and guides

If you're interested in reading more, you might like:

• Data.com vs. Lead411 (vs. ZoomInfo): Where Should Former Data.com Users Turn in 2026?

• 7 D&B Hoovers Alternatives: Specialized Sales Intelligence for Modern GTM Teams (2026)

• D&B Hoovers vs. ZoomInfo: Which Sales Intelligence Platform Fits Your GTM Strategy in 2026?