Crustdata vs Coresignal vs LeadMagic: The Best Hiring-Signal & Job-Data Providers for Recruitment Agencies in 2026

TL;DR

Almost every "signal-led BD" tool on the market, including boilr, sits on top of a small number of raw data infrastructure providers - most commonly Crustdata, Coresignal and LeadMagic. These are genuinely different products: Coresignal is the deepest job-postings archive (468M+ postings, 70M+ companies, credit-based API) [1]; Crustdata is the real-time, webhook-driven event layer for funding, headcount and job-posting changes [2]; LeadMagic is a cheap, high-volume contact-enrichment API with a job-change-detector endpoint bolted on, built to plug into Clay [3]. All three are explicitly "API-first" products built for developers and data teams to wire into their own pipeline, not finished tools a recruiter opens in the morning [3][4]. This guide compares what each actually covers, what it costs, where the wider field (Bright Data, TheirStack, PredictLeads, People Data Labs) fits, and why the honest answer for a recruitment agency is almost never "buy the raw feed and build it yourself" - including where boilr fits as the applied layer on top.

What "Hiring-Signal Data Provider" Actually Means

The phrase gets used loosely. In practice, it covers three distinct categories of company, and mixing them up is the fastest way to buy the wrong thing:

• Raw data infrastructure providers: Crustdata, Coresignal, PredictLeads, Bright Data, People Data Labs. They aggregate public web data - job boards, LinkedIn, Companies House/SEC filings, company websites - into structured APIs or bulk datasets. You pay per credit or per record and build on top.
• Enrichment/contact APIs with a signal endpoint attached: LeadMagic, and similar tools that primarily sell email/phone finding but added a job-change or job-posting endpoint because their customers (mostly GTM engineers running Clay workflows) asked for it [3].
• Applied BD products: Tools like boilr that consume one or more of the above (or run their own monitoring), score the result against a specific agency's ICP, and hand a consultant a scored, actionable task rather than a data table.

A recruitment agency evaluating "hiring signal tools" is almost always shopping in category three, even when the vendor pages it lands on (via SEO comparison sites and "best data provider" listicles) are selling category one. Understanding the difference before you sign anything saves months of building.

Crustdata, Coresignal and LeadMagic, Compared

All three are real, current businesses (not abandoned tools) that a data-savvy GTM or engineering team would genuinely evaluate. Here is what each one actually is:

Provider	Core coverage	Delivery model	Built for
Crustdata	1B+ people, 60M+ companies; funding, headcount-by-department change, exec hires/departures, job openings, product launches, web-traffic changes, aggregated from 11+ sources [2]	Real-time webhook API + monthly-refreshed flat files (CSV/JSON); credit-based tiers from $49/month plus custom enterprise [2]	Engineers building AI agents, recruiting platforms and GTM tools that need event-driven triggers, not a lookup table [2]
Coresignal	468M+ job postings, 70M+ company records, 895M+ professional profiles, refreshed in real time from 15+ public web sources [1]	Credit-based Database APIs ($49-$5,000/month), bulk Datasets (from $1,000, contract-based), plus a newer Agentic Search API [1]	Data teams and platform builders needing the deepest historical job-postings archive to run their own trend or scoring logic [1]
LeadMagic	Email/mobile finder, company/profile search, a Job Change Detector (tenure and status from a LinkedIn URL) and a Jobs Finder endpoint [3]	Single shared credit pool from $0.007/credit; four self-serve tiers $49.99-$399.99/month, quarterly enterprise from $2,490 [3]	GTM engineers and agencies running outbound automation, usually via Clay, who want cheap contact-level enrichment with a signal bolted on [3]

Crustdata: the real-time event layer

• Strongest at: Live webhooks firing on funding rounds, department-level headcount swings, exec moves and new job openings the moment they're detected.
• Weakest at: No finished UI for a non-technical buyer; pricing beyond the entry tier is largely custom, so true cost at scale is opaque until you talk to sales [2].
• Notable: Crustdata explicitly markets a "Best Candidate Enrichment APIs for Recruiting Platform Builders" guide - i.e. it sells to the people building the next boilr, not to the recruiter using one [5].

Coresignal: the deepest job-postings archive

• Strongest at: Breadth and history. 468M+ job postings and 70M+ company records give a data team enough volume to build real hiring-velocity models rather than just a live feed [1].
• Weakest at: Credit costs bite fast - employee and company records run 10-20 credits each, so enriching a large target list on the entry $49 tier (2,500 credits) empties quickly [1].
• Notable: Runs three separate commercial tracks (self-serve API, bulk contract datasets, and a new Agentic Search API), which itself signals the buyer is expected to know which track they need [1].

LeadMagic: the cheap, Clay-native contact layer

• Strongest at: Cost per result. Credits from $0.007 and pay-on-success billing make it the cheapest way to enrich contacts at volume, and it plugs directly into Clay tables many GTM teams already run [3].
• Weakest at: Job-posting depth. Its Jobs Finder and Job Change Detector are single endpoints inside a broader contact-enrichment product, not a dedicated hiring-signal database like Coresignal's [3].
• Notable: LeadMagic's own positioning is explicitly "API-first," built for automated systems rather than an application a non-technical user opens directly [3].

The Wider Field: Other Providers Worth Knowing

Crustdata, Coresignal and LeadMagic are the three names that come up most in recruitment-adjacent GTM circles, but they're not the only serious players. An honest comparison should name the rest of the field, including one cautionary example:

Provider	What it's known for	Worth knowing because
Bright Data	General-purpose web-scraping infrastructure with a dedicated job-postings product covering LinkedIn, Indeed and Glassdoor [6]	If you need sources beyond what any single vendor's dataset covers, Bright Data's proxy/scraping layer is the fallback data teams reach for
TheirStack	226M+ job postings from 195 countries across 353,000+ job boards, with both a UI and an API [6]	One of the few in this category offering a usable interface, not just an API - a meaningfully different buyer experience from Crustdata or Coresignal
PredictLeads	Firmographic and technographic signal API (funding, hiring, tech-stack changes) aimed at B2B GTM teams	Regularly appears alongside Coresignal and Bright Data in independent "top job data providers" roundups [7]
People Data Labs	Person and company profile enrichment plus annual data-licensing deals; not a dedicated job-postings provider [8]	Common alternative when the need is broad person/company enrichment rather than hiring-specific signals
Proxycurl (shut down July 2025)	Was a popular LinkedIn-only profile-scraping API doing an estimated $10M ARR before Microsoft/LinkedIn sued it for operating hundreds of thousands of fake accounts [9]	The clearest cautionary tale in this market: a permanent injunction forced it to delete LinkedIn-sourced data and wind down entirely, which is the real legal risk of building your own pipeline on scraped data [10]

The Proxycurl shutdown matters beyond one company's story. It's a live example of the compliance exposure that sits underneath any "just build it yourself with a scraping API" plan: a vendor you depend on for a live feed can disappear inside a settlement, and any agency data warehouse built directly on their raw exports inherits that exposure too.

Data Feeds vs Finished Products: Coverage and Pricing Side by Side

Stripped of marketing language, here is what an agency is actually choosing between if it goes shopping for "hiring signal data":

Dimension	Raw data providers (Crustdata, Coresignal, LeadMagic)	Applied BD product (e.g. boilr)
What you receive	Records, credits, and API endpoints you query yourself	A scored, prioritised task with the decision-maker and a drafted opening line attached
Who operates it day to day	A data engineer or GTM engineer maintaining pipeline code, credit budgets and rate limits	The consultant, in 5-20 minutes a day, reviewing and sending [4]
ICP scoring	None included - you write the scoring logic against your own criteria	Built in, tuned to the agency's ICP and past wins via the Company Brain
Time to first usable output	Weeks to months: integrate the API, dedupe records, build scoring, wire into outreach	Same day to a few days once ICP is configured
Typical monthly spend	$49-$5,000+ per provider, often needing 2+ providers combined for full coverage [1][3]	One subscription covering signal detection, enrichment, scoring and drafted outreach
Maintenance burden	Ongoing: schema changes, credit-cost creep, vendor outages or shutdowns (see Proxycurl)	Vendor's problem, not the agency's

Who Actually Needs the Raw Feed vs Who Needs a Finished Product

This is the honest crux of the comparison. Neither option is "better" in the abstract - they're built for different buyers:

• Need the raw API: You have (or are) a data engineer, you're building a product to sell to others, and hiring-signal data is one input among several going into a model you control end to end.
• Need the raw API: Your GTM stack already runs on Clay or a similar workflow tool, and you're comfortable maintaining credit budgets and endpoint logic across two or three providers at once.
• Need the raw API: Your differentiation is the model, not the outreach - e.g. you're building an investment-intelligence product where Crustdata's headcount-by-department data is the actual insight you sell.
• Need a finished product: You're a recruitment consultant or agency owner whose job is placements, not maintaining API integrations between three vendors that each bill differently.
• Need a finished product: You want the signal already matched to your ICP, the decision-maker already identified, and an outreach draft ready to review - not a spreadsheet of job postings to triage manually.
• Need a finished product: Your agency has 1-20 desks, not a data team, and the honest ROI question is billings per consultant-hour, not cost-per-API-credit.

Almost every recruitment agency, including specialist boutiques and larger multi-desk firms, falls into the second group. That's not a knock on Crustdata, Coresignal or LeadMagic - it's simply not who they're selling to. Their own marketing (Crustdata's "for Recruiting Platform Builders" content, LeadMagic's "API-first" language) says as much directly [3][5].

What Building Your Own Pipeline on These APIs Actually Costs

Agencies sometimes ask "why not just wire up Coresignal ourselves and save the middleman fee?" The honest answer is that the API subscription is rarely the real cost:

1. Integration time: Connecting one API, deduping records against your existing CRM/ATS, and building a first-pass ICP filter is realistically weeks of engineering time, not a weekend project.
2. Multi-vendor stitching: No single provider covers funding, headcount, exec moves and job-posting velocity equally well - most serious buyers combine two or three (e.g. Crustdata for events plus Coresignal for archive depth), each with its own schema and credit model [1][2].
3. Ongoing credit management: Credit costs vary 1-20x by record type across providers, so a naive integration can burn a monthly budget on low-value lookups within days [1].
4. Scoring logic: None of these APIs ship with recruitment-specific ICP scoring - you're writing and maintaining that logic yourself, and re-tuning it as your agency's winning patterns change.
5. Vendor risk: A provider can change pricing, get acquired, or - as Proxycurl shows - disappear entirely inside a legal settlement, taking your pipeline down with it [9][10].
6. Opportunity cost: The engineering time spent maintaining the pipeline is time not spent on placements, which is the actual revenue-generating activity of a recruitment business.

None of this means "never build." A large PE-backed staffing group with its own data team, or a company building a product to resell, can have a very good reason to own the pipeline outright. It means the default assumption for a typical agency should be "buy the applied layer," not "buy the raw feed and build."

Where boilr Fits (Honestly)

boilr is an AI sales employee, one per consultant, built specifically for recruitment agency BD. It is not a replacement for Crustdata or Coresignal in the categories where those providers genuinely excel - it does not sell bulk historical job-postings datasets to a data team, and it will never be the right choice for a company building its own investment-intelligence product on top of headcount-by-department data. What it does honestly replace, for a recruitment agency specifically, is the need to buy and wire up a raw data feed at all:

• Signals: Monitors 10,000+ sources continuously for funding rounds, executive moves, expansions and job-posting velocity, surfacing many roles 48-72 hours before they're posted publicly, with every signal tied to a traceable source link.
• Companies: Scores every detected company against the agency's specific ICP automatically - the step none of Crustdata, Coresignal or LeadMagic include out of the box.
• Candidates: Sources and shortlists candidates against live mandates, so a signal doesn't just surface a lead, it surfaces a lead the desk can already act on.
• Company Brain: A shared knowledge layer that pools winning ICP patterns and outreach angles across the whole desk, surviving consultant turnover instead of living in one person's head or spreadsheet.
• Tasks: Drafts the outreach and identifies the decision-maker; the consultant reviews and sends in minutes, not hours spent triaging a raw data export.
• Integrations: Syncs with Bullhorn, RecruiterFlow, Spott, CRMs and calendars the agency already runs, so signal data lands where the desk already works rather than in a separate dashboard nobody checks.

What stays human: reading the tone of a hiring manager's message, deciding which mandate to prioritise this week, negotiating terms, and the relationship trust that turns a well-timed signal into a signed brief. boilr's job is to make sure the desk never misses the signal or spends an engineer's week wiring up an API that a data-team buyer, not a recruiter, was the intended customer for.

Curious whether your agency needs a raw data API or a finished BD product? See how boilr turns hiring signals into scored, ready-to-send tasks without you touching a single API credit.

5 Mistakes Agencies Make When Evaluating "Signal Data" Tools

Mistake #1: Buying an API when you needed a product

Why it fails: Signing up for Coresignal or Crustdata directly gets an agency a credit balance and a schema document, not a scored lead - the gap between "data" and "actionable task" is exactly the work a data engineer would otherwise do.

Fix: Ask any vendor directly: "what do I receive - a record, or a task I can act on today?" before signing anything.

Mistake #2: Assuming one provider covers every signal type

Why it fails: No single API is strong across funding, headcount change, exec moves and job-posting velocity at once - most serious builders combine two or three providers, each with a different schema and credit model [1][2].

Fix: Map exactly which signal types matter to your ICP before evaluating any vendor, rather than buying the biggest-sounding dataset first.

Mistake #3: Underestimating credit costs at scale

Why it fails: Company and employee records commonly cost 10-20x more credits than a single job posting, so an entry-tier plan can look cheap on the pricing page and still run out inside a week of real use [1].

Fix: Model your expected monthly record volume against the real per-record credit cost, not the headline subscription price, before committing.

Mistake #4: Ignoring vendor concentration risk

Why it fails: Proxycurl's shutdown proved a data vendor can disappear entirely inside a legal settlement, with no notice period long enough to rebuild a dependent pipeline calmly [9].

Fix: If you do build on a raw API, treat vendor continuity as a real risk factor, not a theoretical one, and avoid single-sourcing your entire pipeline on one provider's terms of service.

Mistake #5: Treating "AI sales employee" and "data API" as competitors

Why it fails: They're not competing for the same buyer. Comparing boilr's price to Coresignal's entry tier is comparing a finished BD outcome to a raw ingredient - the comparison only makes sense if you're also willing to build the ICP scoring, enrichment and outreach layer yourself.

Fix: Compare total cost and time to a usable, ICP-scored lead in your consultant's hands - not subscription price per provider.

KPIs to Track Whichever Route You Choose

Metric	What it tells you	Target
Time from signal detected to actionable lead in a consultant's hands	Whether your setup is delivering usable output or just raw records	Under 30 minutes with an applied product; days-to-weeks is normal for a self-built pipeline in its first quarter
Cost per ICP-fit lead delivered	The real comparison point between a raw-data build and an applied product	Track and compare against consultant-hours saved, not subscription price alone
% of API credits spent on records that never converted to outreach	Whether a self-built pipeline is scoring effectively or just consuming budget	Falling trend month over month
Engineering hours per month maintaining the pipeline	The hidden cost of a "build it yourself" decision	Track explicitly; don't let it hide inside general engineering overhead
Vendor concentration	How dependent your BD motion is on a single provider's continuity	No single vendor should represent a point of total failure

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between Crustdata, Coresignal and LeadMagic?

Crustdata is a real-time, webhook-driven event API covering funding, headcount change, exec moves and job openings across 1B+ people and 60M+ companies [2]. Coresignal is the deepest job-postings archive of the three, with 468M+ postings and 70M+ company records on a credit-based API [1]. LeadMagic is primarily a cheap contact-enrichment API (email/phone finding) with a Job Change Detector and Jobs Finder endpoint added on, built to plug into Clay workflows [3]. All three are self-serve, API-first products meant to be integrated by a developer, not opened directly by an end user.

Are these providers built for recruitment agencies?

Not directly. Their own marketing targets data teams, GTM engineers and platform builders - Crustdata explicitly publishes guidance for "recruiting platform builders," and LeadMagic describes itself as "API-first" [3][5]. A recruitment agency can technically sign up for any of them, but doing so means becoming the data-engineering team that turns raw records into a usable BD workflow.

How much does hiring-signal data cost per month?

Entry tiers start around $49/month for both Crustdata and Coresignal, and $49.99/month for LeadMagic [1][2][3]. Real usage at agency scale typically runs into the hundreds to low thousands per month per provider, and serious buyers frequently combine two or three providers to cover different signal types, multiplying the total spend.

What happened to Proxycurl, and does it affect these providers?

Proxycurl, a popular LinkedIn-profile scraping API doing an estimated $10M ARR, shut down in July 2025 after Microsoft/LinkedIn sued it for operating hundreds of thousands of fake accounts to scrape profile data, and a permanent injunction forced it to delete the data it had collected [9][10]. It doesn't directly implicate Crustdata, Coresignal or LeadMagic, but it's a real example of the legal exposure that exists for any company - including an agency building its own pipeline - that depends heavily on scraped LinkedIn data.

Should a recruitment agency build its own signal pipeline on these APIs?

Usually not. The API subscription is rarely the real cost - integrating one or more APIs, deduping records, building ICP scoring logic and maintaining the pipeline typically takes weeks of engineering time an agency doesn't have on staff, and every hour spent on it is an hour not spent on placements. It can make sense for a large group with a dedicated data team or a company reselling the resulting data product, but that's a small minority of recruitment businesses.

Does boilr use Crustdata, Coresignal or LeadMagic under the hood?

boilr monitors 10,000+ sources directly for hiring and buying signals and does not depend on any single named third-party data vendor for its core signal detection. The point of this comparison isn't which specific feed powers which product - it's that the category of raw data infrastructure providers exists, is built for data teams, and is a different purchase entirely from an applied BD product built for a recruitment consultant.

What's the difference between a job-posting API and a hiring-signal platform?

A job-posting API (like Coresignal's Jobs API) returns structured records of live and historical job listings you query and filter yourself [1]. A hiring-signal platform interprets multiple signal types together (funding, exec moves, expansions, posting velocity) against a specific ICP and turns the result into a scored, prioritised action - a meaningfully different output even when both draw on similar underlying web data.

Is TheirStack or Bright Data a better fit than Coresignal for a non-technical team?

TheirStack is unusual in this category for offering a genuine user interface alongside its API, which can suit a technical-but-not-engineering-heavy team better than a pure API product [6]. Bright Data is closer to general-purpose scraping infrastructure than a finished job-data product. Neither removes the core issue for a recruitment agency: both still deliver records to work with, not a scored, ready-to-send BD task.

Sources

Information sourced from public vendor pricing pages, product documentation and industry reports as of August 2026.

1. Coresignal - Datasets and Data APIs Pricing
2. Crustdata - B2B Data API Pricing Plans
3. LeadMagic - Pricing
4. boilr.ai - AI Sales Employee for Recruitment
5. Crustdata - Best Candidate Enrichment APIs for Recruiting Platform Builders
6. TheirStack - Best Job Posting Data APIs in 2026 (Compared)
7. PredictLeads - Top 5 Job Data Providers (2026) Comparison
8. Nubela - People Data Labs Reviews: Features, Pricing and Comparison
9. StartupHub.ai - The #1 LinkedIn Scraping Startup Proxycurl Shuts Down
10. Nubela - Proxycurl Shuts Down. Thank You.