Choosing the Best BeenVerified Free Alternative: 4 Options Reviewed

Author
Authors
Clay Team
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Date
Jul 1, 2024

As a platform that collects personal data from a wide range of public records, BeenVerified can be useful when you need to learn more about a specific person. You can search for someone’s contact information, addresses, criminal records, past and current employment, and social media profiles. 

In theory, this makes BeenVerified a valuable tool for prospect enrichment, but some of the platform’s drawbacks make it a less-than-ideal choice—such as its lack of a free account, data accuracy issues, cancellation problems, and overbilling

BeenVerified also fails to provide any outreach automation features, so the service is ill-suited for outbound campaigns at scale. 

If you’re searching for a BeenVerified free alternative, our team of experts can help by presenting our top four choices. We’ve helped over 30,000 teams upscale their outreach without significantly raising their costs, so we know a thing or two about cost-effective outbound campaigns. 

Let’s begin!

How We Chose Our Top BeenVerified Alternatives

To choose a few among hundreds of data collection and processing platforms, we’ve developed a specific set of criteria that we applied to root out unviable options. These include: 

  • Adjustable pricing—The ideal BeenVerified alternative should offer a free account or at least a free trial. It should also have a flexible pricing system suitable for businesses of all sizes and allow you to scale up without increasing costs exponentially 🏷️
  • Positive user feedback—We’ve examined Trustpilot, G2, and other popular review aggregators to find out how well the platforms cater to users in practice and learn about any glaring issues 👍 
  • Integrations—The ideal replacement for BeenVerified will do a better job of integrating with the rest of your sales stack 🛠️
  • Data accuracy—While 100% data accuracy is impossible, it’s important to disregard platforms that use too many outdated data sources or one proprietary database that isn’t updated often 📖
  • Automation features—Besides data collection, the best outbound tools also help you process data easily and automate your email outreach. Platforms that only provide raw data, like BeenVerified, are less cost-effective 🤖

We examined pricing and the factors outlined above, but some of them may be less important to your team than others—depending on your budget, company size, and current tech stack

To choose your ideal BeenVerified alternative, consider your priorities and our reviews.  

Top 4 Alternatives to BeenVerified—Detailed Reviews

Using the criteria discussed above, we’ve shortlisted four BeenVerified alternatives that may be a better choice for your outbound efforts. These include:

  1. Clay
  2. TruthFinder
  3. Apollo
  4. Spokeo

Clay

Source: Clay

Like BeenVerified, Clay provides access to information you can use to enrich your prospect data and reach qualified leads more efficiently. But the similarities between the two platforms end there—Clay provides far more outbound marketing features. 

While BeenVerified only collects information from public sources, Clay gathers data from over 50 sources, providing more up-to-date and relevant information on prospects. These providers include, but are not limited to:

After building a prospect list on the platform, you only need to specify which type of information you want to acquire—its waterfall enrichment will do the rest automatically. Clay will search its many data sources sequentially until it finds the requested piece of information. 

Source: Clay screenshot

Besides data collection, the platform streamlines your outbound efforts with additional features, such as:

While Clay doesn’t send emails, it lets you export data and sequences to your sales execution platform (like Salesloft) in a single click, thanks to the extensive list of 100+ integrations

Unlike most other outbound sales tools, Clay provides a robust free plan that you can use indefinitely, as well as four paid plans that have a 14-day free trial. 

Pros Cons

✔️ Over 50 data sources

✔️ 100+ integrations with other tools

✔️ AI assistant that automates research and email writing

✔️ Flexible pricing

❌ No built-in option for sending emails

TruthFinder

Source: Truthfinder

TruthFinder isn’t exactly an outbound marketing tool. As a search platform for public records, it’s more of a direct BeenVerified competitor

All information that TruthFinder can collect on someone is compiled into a report containing everything from contact information to criminal records and finances.

BeenVerified provides access to much of the same data, but TruthFinder’s reports are better organized and more readable. The platform also provides some unique features, like its Dark Web scanner that you can use to find out if your email address or other personal information has been sold or shared on criminal websites.

Unfortunately, user reviews suggest the platform has issues with data accuracy, which has resulted in middling online ratings, such as:

  1. Trustpilot— 2.2 / 5 (1,278 reviews)
  2. SiteJabber—2.38 / 5 (661 reviews)

While TruthFinder is a viable alternative to BeenVerified if you need to run a personal background check, the platform is equally ill-suited for processing prospect data and executing an outbound campaign due to a lack of relevant features. 

Though not exactly free, you can access the platform’s basic features within the $1 trial, but you’ll get charged a full month's fee if you don’t cancel it within five days. 

Still, TruthFinder is more cost-effective than BeenVerified as it provides unlimited reports with any monthly subscription—BeenVerified only lets you access 100, regardless of your payment tier. In terms of prices, the two platforms are almost identical at around $28 per month. 

Pros Cons

✔️ Readable, well-organized reports

✔️ More cost-effective than BeenVerified

❌ No built-in outbound marketing features

❌ Data accuracy problems

❌ Lack of integrations with sales tools

💡 Bonus read: Want to know what users said about other similar platforms? Check out these review breakdowns of ZoomInfo and Cognism.

Apollo.io

Source: Apollo.io screenshot

Apollo.io is a sales intelligence platform with a large contact database containing information on over 270 million companies and individuals. The platform also offers various data enrichment and automation features, including:

  • Advanced search filters
  • Built-in calls
  • AI-generated call summaries
  • Task manager
  • AI-written emails

Apollo also integrates with various platforms, including big-name tools like HubSpot, Zapier, and SalesLoft. 🔗

While its integrations and outbound-oriented features make Apollo a viable alternative to BeenVerified, the platform isn’t without its downsides. Since it only uses information from its own database, you can’t easily cross-reference it with other sources to confirm it’s up-to-date. 

According to some Apollo user reviews, the UI is too convoluted, creating a steep learning curve for many of Apollo’s features. The platform’s lax approach to data privacy has also proven troublesome—some users have even sought legal action against Apollo for misuse of personal information.

Source: ClassAction.org

While Apollo offers a free tier, its limited nature will probably lead most teams to opt for one of its three paid subscriptions, ranging from $59 to $149 per user monthly. Each of the plans provides a certain number of email, mobile, and export credits, which you will need to perform almost every action on the platform.

Coupled with the fact that Apollo charges a separate subscription for each user, this approach to pricing makes the service prohibitively expensive for smaller teams on a tight budget. 

Pros Cons

✔️ AI-generated call summaries and emails

✔️ Database with 270+ million contacts

✔️ Integration with 10 sales platforms 

❌ Unintuitive user interface

❌ Data privacy and accuracy issues

❌ Questionable business practices

💡 Bonus read: Want to find more similar solutions? Check out these top Apollo alternatives and see how Apollo compares to ZoomInfo and other data enrichment platforms.

Spokeo

Source: Spokeo screenshot

Spokeo is a background check platform similar to BeenVerified, except it has a narrower focus—it lets you perform four types of searches:

  1. Name search
  2. Phone lookup
  3. Reverse email search
  4. Address search

Depending on your chosen option, you’ll get different reports. For example, a name search will reveal lots of data on a person, from basics like contact information and birthdays to family information and court records. Searching for an address can show you who currently lives there, as well as property records like mortgages. 🔎

Spokeo boasts some impressive figures, such as:

  • 6 billion consumer records
  • 600 million court records
  • 89 million business records

Using the platform is easy—all you need to do is choose your search type and then answer Spokeo’s questions along the way until you get to report generation.

The platform offers a seven-day free trial, but there’s a catch—you can only unlock it after performing a search and paying $0.95 for the first report. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that users have complained about misleading advertising.

After the free trial expires, you’ll automatically be charged $29.95 for a monthly membership. You may not know this unless you closely read the fine print, which is another thing users have found frustrating.

Sadly, the membership may not be worth it, as many users have reported incomplete and basic data. Some have still completed their searches successfully, but it’s clear that the results aren’t consistent.

Pros Cons

✔️ Easy to use

✔️ Several search types

✔️ Various data points

❌ Misleading advertising

❌ Data accuracy issues

Final Verdict—Which BeenVerified Alternative Is the Best for You?

Besides considering your specific needs when deciding on the best BeenVerified alternative, you should also take into account the following:

  • The generosity of the free plan 💰
  • Feature variety and functionality ⚙️
  • Data accuracy 🎯

.If you only need a background check platform for personal use, TruthFinder and Spokeo might be worth trying.

Those in need of a more sales-focused solution won’t find these options useful, so if you’re among them, Apollo might be a better fit. Still, a single database and per-user pricing make it a subpar solution, especially compared to more versatile and cost-effective solutions. 

For a superior choice with an unlimited free plan that lets you test out all features—choose Clay. 🏆

Source: Notion Wall of Love

How Clay Helps Maximize Your ROI

Clay’s free plan isn’t the only way the platform saves money. Even if you opt for one of the paid tiers, you’ll get flexible options that accommodate both smaller and larger teams. Specifically, the plans are priced as follows:

  1. Starter—$149 per month
  2. Explorer—$349 per month
  3. Pro—$800 per month
  4. Enterprise—Custom pricing 

Each plan lets you choose the most fitting amount of credits, and thanks to waterfall enrichment, you only pay for the data you get

Plus, AI features like Claygent and Email Builder remove countless hours from your workflow, so one person can effortlessly complete the work of several team members. Ask Claygent for the info you need, and after it’s added to the Clay table, you can use the AI Email Builder to get entire email sequences in no time.

Source: Clay

To sum up—with Clay’s prospect data, automation features, and integrations, you can streamline your entire email outreach process and successfully reach more qualified prospects at a lower cost. 📢

Get Started With Clay

Creating a Clay account is simple and only takes three steps:

  1. Visit the signup page
  2. Choose your account information
  3. Explore Clay’s features

To learn more about Clay’s inner workings, check out its Learn hub and Slack community. You can also sign up for the platform’s newsletter and always receive the latest info on updates.  

Check out the video below to see how Clay can help you grow your business: 

💡 Keep reading: For more prospecting, data enrichment, and cold outreach solutions, check out our alternative pages for:

Or find some of our direct comparison pages:

As a platform that collects personal data from a wide range of public records, BeenVerified can be useful when you need to learn more about a specific person. You can search for someone’s contact information, addresses, criminal records, past and current employment, and social media profiles. 

In theory, this makes BeenVerified a valuable tool for prospect enrichment, but some of the platform’s drawbacks make it a less-than-ideal choice—such as its lack of a free account, data accuracy issues, cancellation problems, and overbilling

BeenVerified also fails to provide any outreach automation features, so the service is ill-suited for outbound campaigns at scale. 

If you’re searching for a BeenVerified free alternative, our team of experts can help by presenting our top four choices. We’ve helped over 30,000 teams upscale their outreach without significantly raising their costs, so we know a thing or two about cost-effective outbound campaigns. 

Let’s begin!

How We Chose Our Top BeenVerified Alternatives

To choose a few among hundreds of data collection and processing platforms, we’ve developed a specific set of criteria that we applied to root out unviable options. These include: 

  • Adjustable pricing—The ideal BeenVerified alternative should offer a free account or at least a free trial. It should also have a flexible pricing system suitable for businesses of all sizes and allow you to scale up without increasing costs exponentially 🏷️
  • Positive user feedback—We’ve examined Trustpilot, G2, and other popular review aggregators to find out how well the platforms cater to users in practice and learn about any glaring issues 👍 
  • Integrations—The ideal replacement for BeenVerified will do a better job of integrating with the rest of your sales stack 🛠️
  • Data accuracy—While 100% data accuracy is impossible, it’s important to disregard platforms that use too many outdated data sources or one proprietary database that isn’t updated often 📖
  • Automation features—Besides data collection, the best outbound tools also help you process data easily and automate your email outreach. Platforms that only provide raw data, like BeenVerified, are less cost-effective 🤖

We examined pricing and the factors outlined above, but some of them may be less important to your team than others—depending on your budget, company size, and current tech stack

To choose your ideal BeenVerified alternative, consider your priorities and our reviews.  

Top 4 Alternatives to BeenVerified—Detailed Reviews

Using the criteria discussed above, we’ve shortlisted four BeenVerified alternatives that may be a better choice for your outbound efforts. These include:

  1. Clay
  2. TruthFinder
  3. Apollo
  4. Spokeo

Clay

Source: Clay

Like BeenVerified, Clay provides access to information you can use to enrich your prospect data and reach qualified leads more efficiently. But the similarities between the two platforms end there—Clay provides far more outbound marketing features. 

While BeenVerified only collects information from public sources, Clay gathers data from over 50 sources, providing more up-to-date and relevant information on prospects. These providers include, but are not limited to:

After building a prospect list on the platform, you only need to specify which type of information you want to acquire—its waterfall enrichment will do the rest automatically. Clay will search its many data sources sequentially until it finds the requested piece of information. 

Source: Clay screenshot

Besides data collection, the platform streamlines your outbound efforts with additional features, such as:

While Clay doesn’t send emails, it lets you export data and sequences to your sales execution platform (like Salesloft) in a single click, thanks to the extensive list of 100+ integrations

Unlike most other outbound sales tools, Clay provides a robust free plan that you can use indefinitely, as well as four paid plans that have a 14-day free trial. 

Pros Cons

✔️ Over 50 data sources

✔️ 100+ integrations with other tools

✔️ AI assistant that automates research and email writing

✔️ Flexible pricing

❌ No built-in option for sending emails

TruthFinder

Source: Truthfinder

TruthFinder isn’t exactly an outbound marketing tool. As a search platform for public records, it’s more of a direct BeenVerified competitor

All information that TruthFinder can collect on someone is compiled into a report containing everything from contact information to criminal records and finances.

BeenVerified provides access to much of the same data, but TruthFinder’s reports are better organized and more readable. The platform also provides some unique features, like its Dark Web scanner that you can use to find out if your email address or other personal information has been sold or shared on criminal websites.

Unfortunately, user reviews suggest the platform has issues with data accuracy, which has resulted in middling online ratings, such as:

  1. Trustpilot— 2.2 / 5 (1,278 reviews)
  2. SiteJabber—2.38 / 5 (661 reviews)

While TruthFinder is a viable alternative to BeenVerified if you need to run a personal background check, the platform is equally ill-suited for processing prospect data and executing an outbound campaign due to a lack of relevant features. 

Though not exactly free, you can access the platform’s basic features within the $1 trial, but you’ll get charged a full month's fee if you don’t cancel it within five days. 

Still, TruthFinder is more cost-effective than BeenVerified as it provides unlimited reports with any monthly subscription—BeenVerified only lets you access 100, regardless of your payment tier. In terms of prices, the two platforms are almost identical at around $28 per month. 

Pros Cons

✔️ Readable, well-organized reports

✔️ More cost-effective than BeenVerified

❌ No built-in outbound marketing features

❌ Data accuracy problems

❌ Lack of integrations with sales tools

💡 Bonus read: Want to know what users said about other similar platforms? Check out these review breakdowns of ZoomInfo and Cognism.

Apollo.io

Source: Apollo.io screenshot

Apollo.io is a sales intelligence platform with a large contact database containing information on over 270 million companies and individuals. The platform also offers various data enrichment and automation features, including:

  • Advanced search filters
  • Built-in calls
  • AI-generated call summaries
  • Task manager
  • AI-written emails

Apollo also integrates with various platforms, including big-name tools like HubSpot, Zapier, and SalesLoft. 🔗

While its integrations and outbound-oriented features make Apollo a viable alternative to BeenVerified, the platform isn’t without its downsides. Since it only uses information from its own database, you can’t easily cross-reference it with other sources to confirm it’s up-to-date. 

According to some Apollo user reviews, the UI is too convoluted, creating a steep learning curve for many of Apollo’s features. The platform’s lax approach to data privacy has also proven troublesome—some users have even sought legal action against Apollo for misuse of personal information.

Source: ClassAction.org

While Apollo offers a free tier, its limited nature will probably lead most teams to opt for one of its three paid subscriptions, ranging from $59 to $149 per user monthly. Each of the plans provides a certain number of email, mobile, and export credits, which you will need to perform almost every action on the platform.

Coupled with the fact that Apollo charges a separate subscription for each user, this approach to pricing makes the service prohibitively expensive for smaller teams on a tight budget. 

Pros Cons

✔️ AI-generated call summaries and emails

✔️ Database with 270+ million contacts

✔️ Integration with 10 sales platforms 

❌ Unintuitive user interface

❌ Data privacy and accuracy issues

❌ Questionable business practices

💡 Bonus read: Want to find more similar solutions? Check out these top Apollo alternatives and see how Apollo compares to ZoomInfo and other data enrichment platforms.

Spokeo

Source: Spokeo screenshot

Spokeo is a background check platform similar to BeenVerified, except it has a narrower focus—it lets you perform four types of searches:

  1. Name search
  2. Phone lookup
  3. Reverse email search
  4. Address search

Depending on your chosen option, you’ll get different reports. For example, a name search will reveal lots of data on a person, from basics like contact information and birthdays to family information and court records. Searching for an address can show you who currently lives there, as well as property records like mortgages. 🔎

Spokeo boasts some impressive figures, such as:

  • 6 billion consumer records
  • 600 million court records
  • 89 million business records

Using the platform is easy—all you need to do is choose your search type and then answer Spokeo’s questions along the way until you get to report generation.

The platform offers a seven-day free trial, but there’s a catch—you can only unlock it after performing a search and paying $0.95 for the first report. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that users have complained about misleading advertising.

After the free trial expires, you’ll automatically be charged $29.95 for a monthly membership. You may not know this unless you closely read the fine print, which is another thing users have found frustrating.

Sadly, the membership may not be worth it, as many users have reported incomplete and basic data. Some have still completed their searches successfully, but it’s clear that the results aren’t consistent.

Pros Cons

✔️ Easy to use

✔️ Several search types

✔️ Various data points

❌ Misleading advertising

❌ Data accuracy issues

Final Verdict—Which BeenVerified Alternative Is the Best for You?

Besides considering your specific needs when deciding on the best BeenVerified alternative, you should also take into account the following:

  • The generosity of the free plan 💰
  • Feature variety and functionality ⚙️
  • Data accuracy 🎯

.If you only need a background check platform for personal use, TruthFinder and Spokeo might be worth trying.

Those in need of a more sales-focused solution won’t find these options useful, so if you’re among them, Apollo might be a better fit. Still, a single database and per-user pricing make it a subpar solution, especially compared to more versatile and cost-effective solutions. 

For a superior choice with an unlimited free plan that lets you test out all features—choose Clay. 🏆

Source: Notion Wall of Love

How Clay Helps Maximize Your ROI

Clay’s free plan isn’t the only way the platform saves money. Even if you opt for one of the paid tiers, you’ll get flexible options that accommodate both smaller and larger teams. Specifically, the plans are priced as follows:

  1. Starter—$149 per month
  2. Explorer—$349 per month
  3. Pro—$800 per month
  4. Enterprise—Custom pricing 

Each plan lets you choose the most fitting amount of credits, and thanks to waterfall enrichment, you only pay for the data you get

Plus, AI features like Claygent and Email Builder remove countless hours from your workflow, so one person can effortlessly complete the work of several team members. Ask Claygent for the info you need, and after it’s added to the Clay table, you can use the AI Email Builder to get entire email sequences in no time.

Source: Clay

To sum up—with Clay’s prospect data, automation features, and integrations, you can streamline your entire email outreach process and successfully reach more qualified prospects at a lower cost. 📢

Get Started With Clay

Creating a Clay account is simple and only takes three steps:

  1. Visit the signup page
  2. Choose your account information
  3. Explore Clay’s features

To learn more about Clay’s inner workings, check out its Learn hub and Slack community. You can also sign up for the platform’s newsletter and always receive the latest info on updates.  

Check out the video below to see how Clay can help you grow your business: 

💡 Keep reading: For more prospecting, data enrichment, and cold outreach solutions, check out our alternative pages for:

Or find some of our direct comparison pages:

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