Easy Email Finder vs Hunter.io: Which Is Better for Small Business?

Hunter.io vs Easy Email Finder: An Honest Comparison

Hunter.io has been a staple in the email finder market since 2015. It built its reputation on domain search and email verification, and it remains a solid choice for many sales teams. But if you run a small business or work as a solo founder, the subscription model may not be the best fit. Here is how Hunter.io stacks up against Easy Email Finder across the metrics that matter most.

Pricing Models

Hunter.io operates on a monthly subscription model. Their free tier gives you 25 searches per month, which can run out quickly during active prospecting. Paid plans start at $49 per month for 500 searches, scaling up to $399 per month for 10,000 searches.

Easy Email Finder takes a different approach with pay-per-email pricing at $0.25 per email. There is no monthly fee, no annual commitment, and you get 5 free lookups to start without entering a credit card. You only pay when you actually need emails, which means your costs scale linearly with your actual usage.

Data Sources and Freshness

Hunter.io primarily relies on a pre-built database of emails crawled from the web over time. This means some results may be outdated, especially for small local businesses that update their websites frequently. Their domain search works best for larger companies with many employees.

Easy Email Finder scrapes business websites in real time using Google Places data as a starting point. When you search for a business type in a specific location, it finds businesses on Google Maps and then crawls their actual websites to extract current email addresses. This real-time approach means the data is always fresh.

Local Business Focus

Hunter.io excels at finding emails for known companies and domains. If you already have a company name or website, it works well. However, it is not designed for local business discovery. You cannot search for "plumbers in Austin" and get a list of businesses with their emails.

Easy Email Finder is built specifically for this use case. Enter a business type and location, and it returns a list of local businesses complete with emails, phone numbers, addresses, ratings, and business categories pulled from Google Places.

Additional Data Points

Hunter.io returns email addresses, confidence scores, and the source URL where the email was found. This is useful for verification purposes.

Easy Email Finder returns richer business data including Google ratings, price levels, business categories, website URLs, phone numbers, and physical addresses. For local prospecting, this additional context helps you qualify leads before reaching out.

API Access

Both tools offer REST APIs for developers. Hunter.io includes API access in their paid plans, while Easy Email Finder offers API access with the same pay-per-email pricing model and no separate API subscription fee.

Which Should You Choose?

Hunter.io is a strong choice if you already know which companies you want to target and need to find specific people at those organizations. It is well-suited for enterprise sales teams with predictable monthly volumes.

Easy Email Finder is the better fit if you need to discover local businesses in specific markets, want to avoid monthly subscriptions, or have unpredictable prospecting volumes. The pay-per-email model and Google Places integration make it particularly well-suited for small business owners, freelancers, and agencies targeting local markets.