Cognism Review (2026)

Cognism screens its telephone database against Do Not Call registers in twelve named countries: the UK's TPS and CTPS, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden and Belgium. That list, taken from its own compliance page on 2026-08-05, is the product.

Everything else it sells can be bought elsewhere, usually for less. Coverage, mobile numbers, intent data from Bombora: none of that is unique. The screening is the thing you are actually paying for, and reviews that lead with contact counts have the product backwards.

What legitimate interest commits you to

Cognism processes personal data under the lawful basis of legitimate interest, Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR, and says it has run the relevant assessments. It also acknowledges the obligation that follows: data subjects have to be informed that a company holds their data so they can exercise their rights, including the right to opt out.

Read that carefully, because the obligation does not stop at the vendor. Your outbound inherits the lawful basis your data vendor established. If that basis is weak, the regulator's letter arrives at your company, not theirs, and the contract will not move it.

This is the whole reason the vendor exists as a separate business from the American incumbents. It is also why a team selling exclusively into North America can reasonably ignore it.

There is no monthly plan, and the discounts are against prices you cannot buy

Lusha sells no monthly billing at all. Every paid card reads billed yearly, and confirmed in a rendered browser on 2026-08-12, the page carries no billing toggle. Only the free plan is billed monthly.

Which makes the discount badges worth reading twice. Starter is marked 25% off, Pro 30%, Premium 35% — struck through from $49.90, $249.90 and $463.65. Those three figures are not prices a buyer can select. They are the arithmetic the discount is measured from, and nothing else.

So this site now records Lusha at $449.40 a year, which is Starter at $37.45 a seat a month on the only basis it sells, rather than the $49.90 a seat we published before. Dividing an annual commitment by twelve to print a monthly price would invent a rate nobody is offered.

The credit meter behind the price

Nothing is published. The pricing page names four things you can buy: Standard, Pro, CRM Enrichment and Data-as-a-Service, the last two available as add-ons or on their own. Every route ends at Talk to sales.

Underneath sits a credits model, and the definition is unusually clear for this category: one credit is used each time a contact record is revealed. Credits come bundled with the subscription and more can be bought on top. Data-as-a-Service is priced on data volume and delivery method instead.

Notice what this makes it. A credit meter, quoted per seat, with the consumption rate decided by how hard your team prospects rather than by how many of them there are. Apollo has worked this way for years and Outreach's Amplify tiers moved the same direction. The category now bills on a meter while continuing to talk about seats.

Coverage, and where it stops holding

European coverage is genuinely strong, and it is the mirror image of Apollo's weakness. Apollo's contributory model produces excellent North American mid-market technology data and degrades on European contacts; Cognism is built the other way round, and its North American coverage trails both ZoomInfo and Apollo.

Mobile numbers are the field worth testing. Cognism sells verified mobiles and offers on-demand verification as a premium option, which is precisely the field Apollo is weakest on and the one a phone motion lives or dies by.

Run the same fifty-account test you would run on any data vendor. Coverage varies by segment far more than it varies by vendor, and no review, including this one, can tell you what your own territory looks like.

Against ZoomInfo and Apollo

Three vendors, three different reasons to exist. ZoomInfo has the deepest North American enterprise coverage and the contract terms to match. Apollo bundles adequate data with sequencing and a dialer at a published, self-serve price. Cognism sells a compliance posture with good European data attached.

If you sell into Europe and someone in your organisation has asked what your lawful basis is, that question has one comfortable answer here and does not have one at the other two.

No self-serve path and no free tier, so the first step is a sales conversation and the second is usually a security or privacy review. That review is the point of buying this vendor, so treat it as the evaluation rather than an obstacle to it.

• Get the credit definition in writing, including what counts as revealing a record and whether re-revealing the same contact later consumes another credit. This decides the real annual cost.
• Ask what happens at zero credits mid-contract, and what a top-up costs. That price is not on the pricing page and is worth negotiating before signing rather than after running out.
• Confirm the seat floor against your actual headcount. Five seats are included whether you field five people or two.
• Test mobile coverage on your real territory, fifty accounts you already know, before the contract rather than after. This is the field the premium verification exists for, and the field most worth paying for if it holds up.

Nothing in Cognism's AI sends an email, places a call or enrols a prospect. Three of its four AI features surface information for a human; the fourth writes data into Salesforce under admin-controlled field permissions. For a category where the word agent now means software that contacts your buyers unsupervised, that is a deliberate position rather than a gap, and the vendor states it: its engine is governed by design, set explicitly against tools that rely on open-ended chat.

And the compliance page does not agree with itself on the number that matters here. Its headline claims screening against 15 major Do Not Call and TPS lists; the FAQ below it names twelve countries and thirteen registries. A separate product post announces coverage for Norway and Finland and then describes only Norway, with Finland named twice and never explained. The registry list is the reason to buy this vendor, so it is the one list that should reconcile.

Gated, credit-metered, and annual. What the pricing page does and does not tell you, checked 2026-08-05:

Model it as cost per usable exported contact, not cost per seat. That is the same instruction this site gives for Apollo, and it applies harder here because the seat count is floored at five and the credit allowance is not published at all.

The comparison that decides it is rarely against another data vendor. It is against the cost of a compliance problem in a market where regulators have shown willingness to act, and against the salary of the person who would otherwise be answering the lawful-basis question by hand.