Home › Compare Us › vs ZoomInfo
vs ZoomInfo
LinkedIn data access is changing for the whole industry

ZoomInfo is a strong platform.
But its data foundation
is under pressure.

ZoomInfo built one of the most successful B2B data businesses in the world — on LinkedIn-derived data. That data source is now under serious legal and technical pressure from Microsoft, making fresh data expensive, incomplete, and increasingly hard to maintain.

Request Early Access Schedule a Demo
ZoomInfo data layer
  • LinkedIn-derived — access increasingly restricted
  • Fresh data now expensive to acquire
  • Old data held longer to manage cost
  • Duplicate org profiles across subsidiaries
  • Contacts accumulate — no removal process
  • Mobile numbers harvested without consent
Fullinfo
  • Open-web — no LinkedIn dependency
  • 300M+ domains analyzed monthly
  • Monthly refresh cycle — data stays current
  • One unified profile per organization
  • Source-backed with timestamps
  • Corporate contact — published channels only
Industry context

An industry-wide shift — not just a ZoomInfo problem.

ZoomInfo, Clay, Apollo, Cognism, Lusha and every other tool built on LinkedIn-derived data is facing the same structural challenge. Understanding why helps explain what's happening to data quality across the board.

⚖️

Microsoft is restricting LinkedIn data access

Since acquiring LinkedIn, Microsoft has applied increasing legal and technical pressure to stop third-party data harvesting. Court cases, API restrictions, and technical countermeasures have made it progressively harder and more expensive for data providers to access LinkedIn at scale. This affects every tool in the market simultaneously.

💰

Fresh LinkedIn data is now very expensive

As scraping becomes harder and legal risk increases, the cost of acquiring fresh LinkedIn data has risen sharply. For tools built on this foundation, refreshing the database at the same frequency as before is simply no longer economically viable. The industry response is to hold data longer — which means older, less accurate records.

📦

Old data is held longer to manage cost

When refreshing is expensive, the rational response is to keep existing records longer — even if they are outdated. Duplicate profiles, defunct businesses, and former employees remain in the database not through negligence, but because the economics of removing and replacing them no longer work. This is a structural problem, not a product decision.

Why Fullinfo is different

No LinkedIn dependency.
No exposure to these pressures.

Fullinfo is built entirely from the open web — company websites, domain data, public career pages, and publicly cached professional profiles. We have no reliance on LinkedIn data, which means Microsoft's restrictions don't affect our coverage, our freshness, or our economics.

✓ 300M+ domains analyzed monthly — regardless of LinkedIn's data policies
✓ Monthly refresh cycle not constrained by data acquisition cost
✓ Covers businesses that barely exist on LinkedIn — SMB, B2C, non-English markets
✓ Every data point source-linked and timestamped — full traceability
Duplicate records

One company. Many records.
A known data challenge.

LinkedIn's structure — where subsidiaries, regional offices, and acquired brands each get their own company page — means LinkedIn-derived databases inherit that fragmentation. A large multinational can appear hundreds of times across different records, each with partial data.

This isn't unique to ZoomInfo — it's a consequence of building on LinkedIn's data model. As fresh data becomes harder to acquire, deduplication and consolidation become less economically viable to maintain.

Fullinfo starts from the domain, not from LinkedIn pages. We trace every domain to its organization, link subsidiaries to parents, and build one unified profile per organization — regardless of how many LinkedIn pages that organization has.

  • Parent companies and subsidiaries unified into one profile
  • Regional offices and country domains linked, not duplicated
  • Placeholder and defunct profiles excluded entirely
ZoomInfo search: "Shell" 147 records found
Shell plc
London, UK · Energy
Real
Shell Netherlands B.V.
The Hague, NL · Energy
Duplicate
Shell USA, Inc.
Houston, TX · Energy
Duplicate
Shell Trading & Supply
No location · Unclaimed
Placeholder
Shell Chemicals Europe
Rotterdam, NL · Chemicals
Duplicate
Shell Exploration Co.
No data · Defunct
Defunct
+ 141 more records · Which one is correct?
Fullinfo — same search
Shell plc
1 unified profile · 12 subsidiaries mapped · 6 regions · verified from 34 sources
Data freshness

When refresh cycles slow down,
data ages faster.

As the cost of acquiring fresh LinkedIn data has increased, the economics of frequent refresh cycles have become harder to justify. The result across the industry is that data is held for longer — including contact records that are no longer accurate.

People change roles, leave companies, retire, or pass away. In a database that is refreshed frequently, this is caught and corrected. In a database where refresh cycles have slowed due to data acquisition costs, these records accumulate.

Fullinfo collects contacts from company websites and publicly cached professional profiles — sources that already reflect current roles. Our monthly refresh cycle is not constrained by LinkedIn data costs, so we can maintain it regardless of what happens to third-party data pricing.

ZoomInfo contacts — Acme Corp Last verified: unknown
JM
James Mitchell
Chief Executive Officer · Acme Corp
Current · Added 2024
SR
Sandra Reynolds
VP Marketing · Acme Corp
Left role 2016 · Still listed as current
RK
Robert Kaplan
Chief Financial Officer · Acme Corp
Deceased 2019 · Still active in database
PL
Patricia Lam
Head of Sales · Acme Corp
Now at competitor since 2020 · Not updated
No removal process · Records accumulate indefinitely
Contact philosophy

Respectful outreach.
Not harvested numbers.

ZoomInfo's core product is mobile phone numbers and direct dials collected without individual consent. Cold-calling someone's personal mobile before any prior contact is one of the most effective ways to damage a sales relationship before it begins.

Fullinfo takes a different position — not because we can't collect phone numbers, but because we don't believe that approach works or is appropriate.

ZoomInfo approach
📱 Mobile numbers harvested from data brokers and scraped sources — without individual consent
📞 Direct dials to personal phones before any prior relationship
🔄 Contact data sold regardless of whether the person is still in the role
❓ No source attribution — you cannot verify where the number came from
Fullinfo approach
✉️ Corporate email collected from company websites and published sources — the right channel for a first introduction
🔗 Professional network profile link — LinkedIn and equivalent — for context before you reach out
📞 Phone numbers only when published on the corporate website — meaning the person has chosen to be reachable by phone
📋 Every contact sourced and timestamped — you always know where it came from
Search limitations

Broad categories work.
Niche markets don't.

Because ZoomInfo's data is LinkedIn-derived, it inherits LinkedIn's core limitation: industry classification is broad, self-declared, and shallow. You can find healthcare companies in the USA. You cannot find private clinics offering cosmetic surgery in Miami.

LinkedIn gives every company one self-selected industry tag. ZoomInfo works within that constraint. The result is that any search requiring operational specificity — the kind that actually matters for niche market discovery, supplier identification, or targeted prospecting — returns either nothing useful or thousands of loosely relevant results you then have to filter manually.

Fullinfo builds industry classification from what companies actually do — reading product pages, service descriptions, certifications, and keywords — giving each organization up to 7 structured industry layers. Combined with location, keyword, size, and relationship filters, searches that were impossible become routine.

What ZoomInfo can find
Industry: Healthcare Location: USA
Returns thousands of records — hospitals, insurers, pharma companies, medical device manufacturers, software vendors, and anything else that selected "Healthcare" on LinkedIn. Useful for broad outreach. Not useful for finding anything specific.
What ZoomInfo cannot find
Industry: Cosmetic surgery clinic Location: Miami, FL Ownership: Private
No results — or thousands of irrelevant ones. "Cosmetic surgery" is not a LinkedIn industry category. Private clinics rarely maintain active LinkedIn company pages. The data simply isn't there.
What Fullinfo can find
Industry: Cosmetic surgery · Medical aesthetics Location: Miami, FL Ownership: Private Keywords: rhinoplasty · liposuction · breast augmentation
Precise, relevant results — drawn from what these clinics actually say about themselves on their own websites. No LinkedIn presence required.
Feature comparison

Fullinfo vs ZoomInfo

A focused comparison on data quality, coverage, and contact philosophy — not on workflow features. ZoomInfo's sequences, intent signals, and CRM integrations are powerful tools. This is about the data underneath.

Capability
Fullinfo
ZoomInfo
Company data quality
Duplicate profiles
✓ Unified — one profile per org
✗ Hundreds per large org
Defunct businesses
✓ Excluded — active domains only
✗ Kept indefinitely
Placeholder profiles
✓ Not ingested
✗ Ingested from LinkedIn
Data freshness
Monthly refresh cycle
Accumulates — no removal
Coverage
Organizations indexed
100M+ unified profiles
~35M claimed · heavily duplicated
SMB coverage
Any business with a domain
LinkedIn-derived — limited
Non-English markets
100+ languages normalized
Strong US/EN bias
B2C businesses
Included — any domain
Largely absent
Contact data
Contact verification
Source-linked · monthly refresh
No systematic verification
Stale contacts
Caught in refresh cycle
Accumulated indefinitely
Mobile / personal numbers
Only if published on corp. website
Harvested without consent
Source transparency
Every contact source-linked
Black box — no attribution
Search & intelligence
Industry classification
Up to 7 structured layers per org
Broad LinkedIn categories
Niche market search
Operational keywords + industry layers
✗ Not possible — single broad tag
Natural-language search
✓ Core feature
✗ Filter-based only
Relationship mapping
Parent · subsidiary · supplier
Limited
SMB & non-LinkedIn businesses
Any business with a domain
✗ LinkedIn presence required
Also compare Fullinfo vs LinkedIn Sales Nav. →Fullinfo vs Clay → ← All comparisons
Ready to explore?

Open-web data.
No LinkedIn dependency.

See how Fullinfo's approach to company intelligence holds up as LinkedIn data access becomes more restricted across the industry.

Request Early Access Schedule a Demo Send Us Your Market