Hunter vs Tomba
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentTomba compared with Hunter
The same product concept a decade apart. Hunter has the index depth, per-result public source citations, published per-second rate limits, unlimited seats, and a bundled sender, at 149 euros for 10,000 credits. Tomba does 10,000 for 89 dollars, ships ten SDKs against Hunter's handful, exposes endpoints Hunter does not, and sells credits as a one-time block. Choose Hunter when provenance or documented rate limits matter; choose Tomba when unit price and API breadth do.
Choose Hunter if
Small teams and solo founders who need reliable work email addresses for named people at named companies, want to see where each address came from, and would rather pay a flat monthly fee with unlimited seats than a per-seat contact database subscription.
Choose Tomba if
Developers and technical small teams building email finding, verification, or enrichment into their own product or internal tooling, and high-volume buyers who want a flat per-thousand price with twelve-month credit validity rather than a tier ladder.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Hunter | Tomba |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Data | Data |
| Starting price | 0 euros (Free, 50 credits per month), then 49 euros per month (Starter) (free plan available) | $0 (25 free searches per month, plus 75 free API credits on signup), then $8.90 per 1,000 credits (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Freemium monthly or annual subscription priced in euros by credit allowance, with unlimited team members on every plan and a separately quoted Data Platform for API-heavy buyers. | Usage-priced credits at a flat rate per thousand, bought as a monthly subscription or as a one-time block, with twelve-month credit validity and no conventional tier ladder. |
| Free plan | 50 credits per month, one connected email account, 100,000 saved leads, 10 AI searches and 15 AI suggestions, and full access to Domain Search, Email Finder, and Email Verifier. | 25 searches per month with no credit card required, plus 75 API credits granted on signup. |
| Free trial | No time-limited trial; the permanent free tier is the evaluation path | 75 free API credits on signup with no card required, alongside a permanent free tier of 25 searches a month |
| Best for | Small teams and solo founders who need reliable work email addresses for named people at named companies, want to see where each address came from, and would rather pay a flat monthly fee with unlimited seats than a per-seat contact database subscription. | Developers and technical small teams building email finding, verification, or enrichment into their own product or internal tooling, and high-volume buyers who want a flat per-thousand price with twelve-month credit validity rather than a tier ladder. |
| Setup time | Under ten minutes for the lookup product: create an account, run a domain search, install the extension. Campaigns takes another twenty to thirty minutes because you have to connect and authenticate a sending mailbox and set up tracking and unsubscribe handling. | Fifteen minutes to a first API call: sign up, take the 75 free credits, pull an SDK, authenticate with the key and secret pair. The browser extension takes five. A production integration is a day or two depending on how many endpoints you use. |
| Learning curve | Very low. Domain Search and Email Finder are self-explanatory, and the only concept that needs learning is the difference between a valid result, an accept-all result, and a pattern-inferred guess. Teams that ignore the confidence score and treat every result as verified are the ones who complain about bounces. | Low for a developer and moderate for anyone else. The endpoint set is well enumerated and the SDKs are conventional. The concept that needs learning is the credit multiplier: emails cost one and phones cost five, so a phone-heavy workload burns a budget four times faster than the headline rate suggests. |
| Platforms | Web application, Chrome extension, Firefox extension, Google Sheets add-on, REST API v2 | REST API, Browser extension, Web application, Ten official SDKs |
| Compliance | GDPR with a data processing agreement, CCPA, Published individual claim and removal process | GDPR stated by the vendor |
| Founded | 2015 | 2021 |
| Headquarters | Wilmington, Delaware, United States (fully remote team across Europe, America, and Asia) | Claymont, Delaware, United States |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped and independent | Privately held and independent |
Strengths and limitations
Hunter
Strengths
- Credits are only consumed on results, so the advertised price is close to the real cost per found email rather than a ceiling you never reach.
- Per-result public source citations are close to unique in this category and are the strongest available answer to a provenance or GDPR question.
- Unlimited team members on every plan, including Free, removes the per-seat tax that makes comparable tools expensive for small teams.
- The API is properly documented with published per-second and per-minute limits, free management endpoints, and stable behaviour, which is why Hunter appears as a provider inside so many waterfall tools.
Limitations
- No phone numbers at all, in any tier, which rules Hunter out entirely for teams that cold call.
- Coverage is a function of what companies publish on the open web, so it is strong for tech, agencies, media, and education and noticeably weaker for manufacturing, trades, healthcare, and privately held mid-market firms.
- It is not a prospecting database: Discover finds companies, but you cannot filter a hundred million people by title and seniority the way you can in Apollo or UpLead.
- Confidence scores and pattern inference mean some returned addresses are educated guesses; the pattern is usually right but the individual result can be wrong, and a wrong result still consumed a credit.
Tomba
Strengths
- A flat 8.90 dollars per thousand credits at every volume, which removes tier guessing entirely and is the cheapest published per-email rate in this batch.
- Explicit and correct billing rules: no charge for a failed search, no charge for a duplicate search inside the same month, and one credit per valid email.
- Twelve-month credit validity plus a one-time purchase option, so a finite project does not need a subscription it will forget to cancel.
- Ten official open-source SDKs across Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Go, Java, Dart, Lua, R, and Elixir, which is broader language coverage than any competitor here.
Limitations
- The interface is a secondary concern; non-technical sales users will find Skrapp, SalesQL, or GetProspect better places to work.
- Phone lookups at five credits are poor value against SalesQL's single-credit pool if calling is your main channel.
- No searchable people database to filter by title and seniority, so Tomba answers questions about people you can already name rather than helping you decide who to contact.
- No per-second or per-minute API rate limits are published, only an uptime figure and a response-time claim, which is a real gap for a product sold primarily on its API.
Pricing compared
Hunter
Freemium monthly or annual subscription priced in euros by credit allowance, with unlimited team members on every plan and a separately quoted Data Platform for API-heavy buyers.
- Free0 euros
- Starter49 euros
- Growth149 euros
- Scale299 euros
- EnterpriseCustom
At Growth, 10,000 credits for 149 euros works out at roughly 0.015 euros per found email, and because failed searches are free that number holds in practice rather than in theory. At Starter, 2,000 credits for 49 euros is about 0.025 euros each. Both are competitive with Anymail Finder and cheaper than credit-metered platforms once you account for unlimited seats and the bundled sending tool, which alone would cost 30 to 50 dollars a month elsewhere. The catch is scope: there are no phone numbers, so a team that needs to call as well as email is buying a second tool regardless, and at that point the bundled Campaigns feature is less of a saving than it looks.
Tomba
Usage-priced credits at a flat rate per thousand, bought as a monthly subscription or as a one-time block, with twelve-month credit validity and no conventional tier ladder.
- Free$0
- Growth$89
- Custom volume$8.90 per 1,000 credits
Tomba is the cheapest published per-unit price in this batch and one of the cheapest anywhere self-serve. At 1,000 verified emails a month you spend 8.90 dollars in finder credits, roughly 0.0089 per address, against Skrapp at 0.0145, GetProspect at 0.034, and Hunter's Starter at about 0.025 euros. At 10,000 emails a month you spend 89 dollars, well under Hunter's Growth tier at 149 euros for the same volume and better than any tier-laddered competitor here. Phone numbers are the weak point: at five credits, 1,000 mobiles costs 44.50 dollars and 10,000 costs 445, which is respectable in absolute terms but four to five times SalesQL's single-credit pool. The honest summary is that Tomba is the best price per email in this batch and a middling price per phone, and it is worth the switch mainly if you are calling the API rather than clicking a button, because the interface does not justify the move on its own.
Editorial verdict on each
Hunter
Hunter is the safest choice in this category for a small business that needs work email addresses and nothing else. Credits are charged only on results, seats are unlimited, credits last a year, the API is properly documented, and every address comes with the public URLs it was found at, which is the best answer anyone in this market gives to the provenance question. A decade of bootstrapped independence means the terms are unlikely to change underneath you. Buy it if your workflow starts with a list of companies and ends with a sent email. Do not buy it if you need phone numbers, because there are none at any price, or if you need to discover who to contact rather than how to reach them, because that is Apollo's job and not Hunter's.
Read the full Hunter profileTomba
Tomba is the best-value email lookup in this batch and the only one in it genuinely built for developers. Eight dollars ninety per thousand credits at every volume, with failed and duplicate searches free and credits valid for twelve months, gives an honest cost of under a cent per verified address, and ten open-source SDKs across fourteen endpoints is more API surface than anyone else here offers. The Author Finder endpoint and the Clearbit-compatible person and company endpoints are real differentiators rather than list padding. What is missing is everything around the API. There are no published rate limits, no seat terms, no searchable people database, no sequencer, a thin interface, and almost nothing disclosed about who runs the company. Phone lookups at five credits are middling value. Buy Tomba if code is calling it and price per verified email is the number that matters. Do not buy it as the tool a salesperson opens in the morning, and do not buy it as your phone data provider.
Read the full Tomba profileHunter profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Tomba last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.