Clearbit vs. Bombora: Which should you choose?

About Clearbit

Clearbit transforms minimal inputs — an email, a domain — into detailed company and contact intelligence. It pulls from public web data and proprietary sources, now integrated as HubSpot's Breeze Intelligence.

Plug it into your CRMs, forms, and marketing tools via APIs. Enrich lead data in real-time. Identify website visitors by IP. Reduce form fields to boost conversions.

About Bombora

Bombora tracks which companies are researching specific topics — monitoring content consumption across B2B websites to deliver intent scores that reveal spikes in research activity.

It feeds company-level intent data into your existing CRM and marketing workflows. But here's the catch: it doesn't provide contact information for actually reaching the people at those companies.

What do users say?

Users describe Clearbit as effective for lead generation and data enrichment — excelling at finding contact information, email addresses, and company data. Many praise its ease of use and seamless integrations with Gmail and Salesforce.

The downsides? Data accuracy and completeness concerns. Information can be outdated, missing, or incorrect — particularly for European contacts and specific employee searches. Users also criticize customer support response times, lack of pricing transparency, and occasional technical issues.

Users consistently praise Bombora for B2B intent data and account targeting. They highlight robust filtering capabilities, comprehensive industry coverage, and seamless integrations with platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce.

Bombora helps sales and marketing teams identify companies actively researching products — enabling targeted outreach and better prospect prioritization before they make purchasing decisions. Common criticisms include dashboard design issues, lack of historical data storage, limited European coverage, and unintuitive interface elements.

Comparison

Clearbit

Clearbit excels at data enrichment — transforming minimal inputs into comprehensive firmographic and contact information with strong accuracy and real-time updates. Integration capabilities are extensive, particularly with HubSpot (now native as Breeze). Unique features like form shortening can boost conversion rates.

The limitations? Scope is restricted to data enrichment without built-in outreach or nurturing capabilities — requiring additional tools for complete sales workflows. Pricing escalates quickly with volume and lacks transparency. Integration gaps (like LinkedIn) and recent UI changes have created usability concerns.

Bombora

Bombora delivers industry-leading intent data through its unique data co-op model — offering granular insights into which companies are actively researching specific topics. Seamless integration into existing CRM and marketing automation systems makes it valuable for account-based marketing strategies.

Primary limitation: no contact information. You'll need additional tools to act on intent signals. Pricing model is opaque with custom quotes only. Effectively leveraging intent data requires a learning curve and mature marketing processes.

Choose Clearbit if you're a growth team or inbound marketer who needs to enrich existing leads with comprehensive firmographic and contact data — particularly if you're using HubSpot or requiring form optimization.

Choose Bombora if you're running account-based marketing campaigns and want to prioritize outreach based on buying intent signals. It functions as a complementary tool rather than a primary data source.

Neither tool provides a complete contact-based marketing solution. Clearbit offers contact information but lacks intent signals. Bombora provides intent data without contact details.

This gap is significant — effective B2B marketing requires knowing who to contact AND when they're most likely to be interested. You're forced to either combine multiple tools or accept incomplete data for your outreach campaigns.

Do you need account-based marketing, or something else?

Here's what's flipping ABM on its head: your funnel isn't about anonymous accounts. It's about the decision-makers and influencers within those accounts.

Enter contact-based marketing (CBM) — a breakthrough approach. Instead of focusing on broad account intent signals, CBM pinpoints the EXACT people engaging with your content in real-time, even when they don't convert.

How does this solve the traditional tension of intent-based marketing? It eliminates the ambiguity.

With contact-level data, you can:

• Reveal high-priority leads by identifying the individuals behind key touchpoints
• Deliver hyper-targeted ads based on specific contact behaviors
• Bridge the gap between marketing and sales alignment with actionable, lead-level insights