Buying guide

Best ICP and Lead Discovery Tools

Choose DiscoLike to describe your ICP in plain language and search what company websites say, Ocean.io to extend patterns from your best customers, Apollo to keep discovery next to sequencing, Clay to build your own discovery workflow across providers, and Lusha for firmographic matches bundled with contacts. Start from how you can describe your market.

Reviewed October 2, 2026. Published by DiscoLike, which sells one of the products on this list, so read it as a vendor's shortlist rather than a neutral ranking. We list our own tradeoffs alongside everyone else's, and competitor details link to the vendor's own pages so you can check them.

The shortlist at a glance

ProviderBest fitData or evidencePricing
DiscoLikeDescribing the ICP in plain languageCompany website content and observed vendor footprints, including external infrastructure signals.$99-$1,599/month; subscription converts to usage credits. API and MCP included. Pricing source
Ocean.ioExtending patterns from your best customersCompany context and similarity to your successful customer segments.Ocean.io no longer publicly publishes prices: the pricing page leads to signup. The API docs list 0.2 credits per result. Pricing source
ApolloDiscovery next to contacts and sequencingPublic web data, contributing users, and third-party providers.Free signup and paid plans; confirm current seat, credit, and phone allowances on the pricing page. Pricing source
ClayBuilding your own discovery workflowConnected data providers and research agents; evidence depends on the workflow you build.Free plan; Launch from $185/month and Growth from $495/month per the pricing FAQ. Data Credits and Actions are separate allowances. Pricing source
LushaFirmographic matches bundled with contactsSimilar firmographics: industry, employee count, and geography.Free plan with 40 credits a month; Starter $37.45, Pro $52.45, and Premium $299.95 a month, billed yearly. API access starts on Pro. Pricing source

How to choose

Can you describe the ICP the way you think about it?

Most ICPs are a sentence, not a set of dropdowns: contract manufacturers of sterile medical packaging in Germany. Check whether the tool takes that description directly, or only industry codes, size bands, and locations.

Can your best customers be an input?

Customer domains show the tool what good looks like. Check how many it accepts, whether it matches what those customers sell or only their industry and size, and whether you can combine them with a description and filters.

Does discovery end in a lead?

An account list still needs the right person and a way to reach them. Check whether contacts, qualification, and email finding happen in the same tool or in another one, and price the whole path.

Describing the ICP in plain language

DiscoLike

DiscoLike is a B2B company discovery and vendor intelligence platform covering 82M+ business websites, with contact search and account research. DiscoLike is building a managed prospecting agent that turns a company and persona brief into a run covering company discovery, ICP validation, contact qualification, and email finding. Product source

Describe the market in a sentence, add up to 10 customer domains or exact homepage phrases, and filter by country, size, and technology in the same search. Matching runs on what each company says on its own website, and contact search and the Prospecting Agent take the list through qualification and email finding.

DiscoLike at a glance

What it is
DiscoLike is a B2B company discovery and vendor intelligence platform built on an index of 82M+ business websites.
Best fit
GTM teams and data builders targeting specific industries, services, geographies, and vendor customer segments.
Search advantage
Combine company-fit and vendor criteria before retrieving paid company records. Add natural language, customer lookalikes, and exact homepage phrases.
Starting price
$99/month, converted to usage credits. On Starter, one query returning 1,000 new company records uses $3.68: $0.18 query fee plus $3.50 for records.
What that price covers
The $3.68 example covers company retrieval within a paid subscription. Contacts, research, email work, and external AI/search providers have their own applicable charges.
Agent access
REST API, MCP, Python SDK, and CLI on every plan. Company discovery can feed your CRM or outreach tools.

Pricing and allowances · Company Index · Prospecting Agent

What to account for

Outreach runs in your CRM or sequencer. A famous customer used as a seed can pull in sites that write about it, so review a sample before retrieving at volume.

Extending patterns from your best customers

Ocean.io

Account discovery and fit scoring informed by customer segments and closed-won deals. Product source

Ocean.io's API takes seed domains, with a precise mode that matches similar products and services and a broad mode that matches the same industries, plus filters for technology, headcount growth, and job postings. Source

What to account for

Ocean.io no longer publicly publishes prices; the docs list 0.2 credits per result, and you sign up to see what a credit costs.

Compare DiscoLike and Ocean.io →

Discovery next to contacts and sequencing

Apollo

Company and contact search with enrichment and outreach in the same platform. Product source

Filter Apollo's company and contact database, or paste your top customers into its Lookalikes feature, and send from the same platform. Source

What to account for

Lookalikes is labelled beta on Apollo's pricing page and matches on firmographic traits, so a niche ICP that industry codes do not describe may need extra qualification.

Compare DiscoLike and Apollo →

Building your own discovery workflow

Clay

Configurable workflows combining data providers, account research, and sales operations. Product source

Combine several data providers and research steps under rules your operations team controls, when no single source covers the ICP.

What to account for

Someone must design and maintain the workflow. Track data credits and workflow actions separately when comparing cost.

Compare DiscoGen and Claygent →

Firmographic matches bundled with contacts

Lusha

Contact and company data with a Company Lookalikes API that takes 5 to 100 seed domains or LinkedIn URLs. Product source

The Company Lookalikes API accepts 5 to 100 customer domains in one request, and contact data sits in the same product, with paid plans starting at $37.45 a month billed yearly.

What to account for

Matching covers industry, employee count, and geography only, so an ICP defined by what a company sells may not separate from the rest of its industry.

Write the ICP as a sentence first

Start with what your best customers have in common that a salesperson would recognize: what they sell, who they sell to, and where. Industry and headcount usually come second. A sentence like regional HVAC distributors selling to commercial contractors in Texas is something you can test in any tool.

If you are unsure what the pattern is, list ten customers that bought for the same reason and read their websites side by side. The shared language on those sites is often the best search input you have.

Test the same ICP in every tool

Give each candidate the same description, the same customer domains, and the same exclusions. Review the first 50 results by hand and count the companies a salesperson would accept, separately for each segment and region.

Then take ten accepted accounts through to a contact. A tool that finds good accounts but leaves you to find the buyer elsewhere still needs the second tool in the cost.

Count cost per accepted lead

On DiscoLike Starter, one query returning 1,000 new company records uses $3.68 in credits: a $0.18 query fee plus $3.50 for the records, within a $99 minimum monthly subscription. Contacts and email finding have their own charges. Divide each pilot's total cost by the leads you accepted, and record review time separately.

Try a specific ICP →

Common questions

What is ICP discovery?

Turning a description of your ideal customer into a list of real companies, and then the right people at them. The input can be a written description, your best customers' domains, filters, or a mix.

Is lookalike search still useful?

As one input. Customer domains show the tool what good looks like. A written ICP and filters let you describe parts of the market your current customers do not cover yet, so test both on the same segment.

Can an AI agent run ICP discovery?

Yes. DiscoLike exposes the same search through its API and MCP server, so an agent can pass the ICP description and customer domains, review results, and move on to contacts.

DiscoLike

Put a real search engine under your GTM

  • 82M+ companies in our own index
  • 1B+ pages crawled monthly
  • Self-serve from $99/mo, no demo required
  • Company data from public web sources
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