Email Finder Benchmark

There are dozens of Email Lookup API's with little distinguish features. To help you chose we wrote a small benchmark script that tests top providers against known good and known bad emails. Our input list was sampled from Banking and IT in Europe.

If you have another input list you would like to have tested or you would like us to add another provider just post it under our issues.

Accuracy is calculated from total searched emails

Service	Email Searched	Emails Found	Correct Email Found
Email Gardener	385	330	123
Hunter	385	96	66
Anymailfinder	385	58	51
Snov	385	85	49
Findemails	385	303	67

Numbers are hard to believe if you have not calculated them yourself, we agree and hence included the simple script in the repo. For privacy reasons we did not include our input dataset of names but we expect similar results if you simply validate with your existing known true list.

How to run this benchmark?

1. Clone the repository with

   git clone https://github.com/Gardener-gg/email-lookup-benchmark.git
   

2. Move to project directory

   cd analytics/
   

3. Install dependencies with

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

4. Run find_emails.py

   python3 find_emails.py
   

You will need to provide access tokens for Email Gardener, Hunter, Snov and Anymailfinder.

You will also need to provide the input csv file containing domain, first_name, last_name and email(for accuracy) for individuals in that particular order.

Qualitative Email Lookup API comparison

Hunter

Pros

• Amount of data retured is more.
• Result accuracy is decent.

Cons

• No metered billing
• Unused credits are not rolled over to next month

Sample JSON output for email finder

{
  "data": {
    "first_name": "Dustin",
    "last_name": "Moskovitz",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "score": 72,
    "domain": "asana.com",
    "position": "CEO",
    "twitter": "moskov",
    "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmoskov",
    "phone_number": null,
    "company": "Asana",
    "sources": [
      {
        "domain": "blog.asana.com",
        "uri": "http://blog.asana.com",
        "extracted_on": "2015-09-27",
        "last_seen_on": "2017-09-01",
        "still_on_page": true
      },
      ...
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "params": {
      "first_name": "Dustin",
      "last_name": "Moskovitz",
      "full_name": null,
      "domain": "asana.com",
      "company": null
    }
  }
}

Anymailfinder

Pros

• Lets monthly allowance to roll over if you do not use it.
• Claims to not charge for pattern matched emails

Cons

• No metered billing

Sample JSON output for email finder

{
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "email_class": "verified",
  "alternatives": [
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]"
  ],
  "input": {
    "full_name": "John Smith",
    "company_name": "Acme Inc"
  },
  "domain": "acme.com",
  "status": "success"
}

Snov

Pros

• Has a nice modern feel and is planning on growing into your single source for all email marketing needs
• Credit based payment scheme and don't push too hard into setting up recurring payments

Cons

• Generated token expires in 1 hr so you have to refresh it everytime
• No metered billing
• Unused credits are not rolled over to next month

Sample Json output for email finder

{
    "params":{
        "firstName":"gavin",
        "lastName":"vanrooyen",
        "domain":"octagon.com"
    },
    "data":{
        "firstName":"gavin",
        "lastName":"vanrooyen",
        "emails":[
            {
            "email":"[email protected]",
            "emailStatus":"valid"
            }
        ]
    },
    "status":{
        "identifier":"complete",
        "description":"Emails search is completed"
    }
}

FindEmails (formerly Toofr)

Pros

• Metered billing

Cons

• Have monthly subscription on top of metered billing.
• Output is very different from other providers
• Mostly pattern matched emails
• Extra effort by developer is required to go through all emails returned and decide which email is good enough.
• Having breaking changes in their API output without any versioning. Definitely not desirable if you are using automated scripts in production with FindEmails API.

Sample Json output for email finder

Following is a sample of Json output returned by FindEmails which is different from the output in their docs

{
    "[email protected]": {
        "confidence": 100,
        "state": "high",
        "email": "[email protected]",
        "detail": [
            {"description": "Mailserver score", "response": "+40"}, 
            {"description": "Pattern score", "response": "+27"}, 
            {"description": "MX records score", "response": "+10"}, 
            {"description": "Catchall score", "response": "+10"}, 
            {"description": "Uniqueness score", "response": "+2"}, 
            {"description": "List score", "response": "+2"}, 
            {"description": "Name score", "response": "+2"}, 
            {"description": "Disposable score", "response": "+2"}, 
            {"description": "Gibberish score", "response": "+2"}
        ],
    },
    ...
    "employee": {
        "first_name": "ryan",
        "last_name": "buckley",
        "title": "founder",
        "profile": {
            "fn":"Ryan Buckley",
            "photo":"https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4D03AQFIi292VtKikw/profile-displayphoto-shrink_200_200/0?e=1536192000&v=beta&t=aXWOwRlu17VF_r96euIeWvX00I8OYfOrwhaK-Xbmksg",
            "title":"Builder of ToOfr, Inlistio, and Voxloca. Author of The Parallel Entrepreneur. Resident of Contra Costa County.",
            "linkedin_profile":"https://www.linkedin.com/in/rbuckley"
        },
            "email": {
              "email": "[email protected]",
              "confidence": 70,
              "state": "high"
        }
    }
} 

Gardener

Pros

• Developer oriented API only service
• True metered billing with no monthly cap or minimum monthly charge.
• 0 API call = $0 bill

Cons

• New in competition
• No free plan

Sample Json output for email finder

{
  "emails": [
    {
      "first_name": "John",
      "last_name": "Wick",
      "email": "[email protected]",
      "source_uri": ""
    }
  ],
  "email_count": 1,
  "company": "Example"
}