Intent data providers.

B2B intent data providers sell behavioral signals that suggest a company is researching a topic or product. The largest is Bombora, whose third-party Company Surge data is licensed and resold by many other tools. The catch: almost every provider reports intent at the account level — it tells you a company is interested, not which person.

I run a contact-level advertising platform. So you know where I sit before I rank anyone.

But the account-level limit I keep pointing at isn't a sales angle. It's written into the documentation of nearly every provider on this list. I'll quote them.

Here's the trap this list exists to help you avoid.

You buy intent data. A dashboard lights up: "Acme Corp is surging on account-based marketing." Your rep opens Acme. There are 240 employees. The tool can't say which one did the research. So the rep guesses, picks a VP from a title filter, and sends an email about a topic the actual researcher may have never touched.

That's not a signal. That's a coin flip with a subscription fee.

If you've read my breakdown of B2B intent data, you know the full argument. This page is the buyer's version: who the providers actually are, what each one measures, and the one column most lists leave out — account-level vs contact-level.

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How to read this list.

Intent data providers fall into three groups, and mixing them up is how people overpay.

→ Data providers. They sell the raw signal. Bombora is the one everyone else licenses from. You're buying a feed.

→ Platforms with intent built in. 6sense, Demandbase, ZoomInfo. Intent is one feature inside a bigger system — predictive scoring, account identification, ad orchestration, contact data. You're buying the machine, not the feed.

→ First-party and review-site signals. G2 Buyer Intent and your own site activity. Narrower in reach, higher in buying intent, because it's people doing the actual research, not a model guessing.

One more thing before the list. "Account-level" vs "contact-level" is the column that decides whether your sales team can act without guessing. I flag it for every provider.

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The B2B intent data providers, ranked by what they actually do.

1. Bombora — the source most others resell.

What it does: Bombora runs a Data Co-op of thousands of B2B publishers and brand sites, with a tag on the page that tracks what topics get researched. Its Company Surge product compares an account's recent research against that company's own historical baseline to flag a "surge" in interest across 21,600+ topic categories.

Data type: Third-party, account-level. Bombora is explicit that it measures aggregated account-level intent. It can't tell you which person at the account did the research, by design.

Best for: Teams that want the raw signal to feed into their own ABM platform, ad targeting, or CRM. It's the most-integrated intent feed in the market — over 100 integrations.

Pricing notes: Bombora doesn't publish pricing. Third-party reviews put Company Surge in the low five figures to six figures per year depending on topics and volume. I won't pretend to a number I can't verify.

If you're evaluating Bombora specifically, I wrote a full breakdown in my Bombora intent data review.

2. 6sense — intent plus prediction plus orchestration.

What it does: 6sense takes intent signals, adds anonymous account identification (matching IP addresses to company records), then runs predictive models that score each account and assign a buying stage — awareness, consideration, decision. It surfaces "these accounts are in-market now" and lets you orchestrate ads and sales touches against them.

Data type: Mostly account-level. 6sense scores anonymous accounts by buying stage. It does have a contact-level scoring model for known contacts already in your data, but the predictive in-market signal is an account verdict, not a named-person one.

Best for: Enterprise ABM teams that want one platform to identify accounts, predict timing, and run the campaigns — not a raw feed they have to wire together.

Pricing notes: Custom, annual, enterprise. Public reviews consistently land 6sense in the $50K-$100K+/year range. They don't publish it.

3. Demandbase — keyword intent inside an ABM platform.

What it does: Demandbase identifies which accounts are researching your category using account lists, keyword sets, and bidstream data — 810K+ intent keywords expanded by AI. Like 6sense, intent is one layer inside a full account-based platform with advertising and sales intelligence on top.

Data type: Account-level. Demandbase describes its intent as account-level signals mapped to buying committees. It has introduced a "Person-Based Intent" capability that recommends which contacts in an account may be signaling — worth watching, but the core product is still an account verdict.

Best for: Teams already committed to a full ABM platform that want keyword-driven intent feeding the same system they advertise from.

Pricing notes: Custom, enterprise, annual. Same $50K-$100K+/year tier as 6sense, unpublished.

4. ZoomInfo — intent bundled with the contact database.

What it does: ZoomInfo collects intent from content-consumption events, bidstream, IP-based tracking, and review-site partnerships, then overlays its account graph on the signals. Its Streaming Intent feature pushes real-time alerts instead of weekly batches. The pitch: you get the signal and the verified contacts to act on it, in one tool.

Data type: Account-level intent, paired with contact data. ZoomInfo is clear that it surfaces intent "at the company level," then lets you export recommended contacts at the account. The intent is account-level; the contacts are a separate database lookup, not proof those people researched anything.

Best for: Teams that want intent and a contact database in one subscription, so the "who do I email" step has an answer — even if it's a recommendation, not a verified researcher.

Pricing notes: Custom and seat-based; intent is typically an add-on. Not published.

5. G2 Buyer Intent — the first-party exception.

What it does: G2 tracks what companies do on G2 itself — viewing your product profile, comparing you to a competitor, reading alternatives in your category. Because it's real activity on a review site at the bottom of the funnel, the buying signal is strong.

Data type: First-party to G2, but reported account-level. G2 is direct about the limit: the data is based on individual activity on their site, but what they hand you is account-level. You'll see a company researched alternatives — not who.

Best for: Teams that want high-intent, late-stage signals about who's actively comparing them to competitors. The signal quality is higher than broad topic surges because it's purchase-stage behavior.

Pricing notes: Tiered by category and signal volume; G2 doesn't publish standard pricing.

6. Cognism — Bombora intent plus compliant contact data.

What it does: Cognism is a sales-intelligence database first. It embeds Bombora intent as an add-on so you can layer surge signals onto its phone-verified, GDPR-conscious European contact data.

Data type: Intent is account-level (it's Bombora). The contact data is contact-level, but the intent signal is still the account verdict — same limit, different wrapper.

Best for: Teams selling into EMEA that need compliant mobile numbers and emails, with Bombora intent as a prioritization layer on top.

Pricing notes: Reviews cite Bombora intent topics as add-ons in the low hundreds of dollars per topic per year on the higher tiers. The base contact-data subscription is quoted separately and not published.

7. TechTarget Priority Engine — publisher-owned, content-led intent.

What it does: TechTarget owns a network of enterprise tech publications. Priority Engine surfaces intent from real research activity on those properties — what content accounts (and in some cases logged-in members) consume across its sites.

Data type: Mostly account-level, with some logged-in member signals at the publisher level. Strong in enterprise IT and tech categories specifically, because that's the audience TechTarget owns.

Best for: Companies selling enterprise tech and IT products, where TechTarget's audience overlaps heavily with the actual buyers.

Pricing notes: Enterprise, custom, not published. I'm keeping this one short because it's narrower than the others and I'd rather under-claim than guess at numbers.

8. Your own first-party data — the contact-level signal nobody sells you.

This isn't a vendor. It's the category every provider above can't reach.

When someone clicks your ad, watches your video, visits your pricing page, or replies to an email, that's intent — and it's tied to a named person, not a modeled company. It's slower to accumulate than buying a feed. But it's the only intent that tells a rep exactly who to call and what they looked at.

The problem is most teams can't see it. Anonymous traffic stays anonymous. Ad engagement gets reported as "9 clicks from Stripe," not "Sarah Chen clicked." Identity is the missing piece — and resolving it is the entire job of contact-level tools.

I wrote the full argument in contact-level intent data: why account-level intent underdelivers, and how first-party identity turns "someone at Acme" into a person you can email today.

9. ContactLevel — where the account signal becomes a person.

I'll be honest about what we are and aren't.

ContactLevel is not a Bombora replacement. We don't sell a third-party topic-surge feed. If your job is "tell me which accounts in my TAM are researching cybersecurity this month," buy Bombora or 6sense — that's their job, and they're good at it.

What we do is the layer those feeds can't: turn an account into reachable, named people. You take your contact list — or the accounts an intent feed flagged — enrich each contact through an identity graph (50-70 data points per contact vs 1-3 in a raw CSV), and sync them to LinkedIn, Meta, Google, Reddit, and X at 70-99% match rates instead of the ~30% a native upload gives you.

Then you track which named contact saw your ad, clicked, and came back. That engagement is contact-level intent — first-party, person-level, the signal a rep can act on.

Data type: First-party, contact-level.

Best for: Mid-market and enterprise B2B teams already running paid who want to act on intent at the person level — either their own first-party engagement, or an account-level feed made reachable.

Pricing notes: Published, because hiding it annoys me. Grow is $1,000/month for 10,000 contacts, Scale is $2,500/month for 30,000, Enterprise is custom. 14-day free trial with 1,000 contacts. See pricing.

The pairing that actually works: buy account-level intent to prioritize, add contact-level identity to act.

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Intent data providers compared.

The column that matters most is the last one.

A few honest reads on this table.

Most of the "intent" in B2B traces back to a small number of sources — Bombora especially. When ZoomInfo, Cognism, and others surface a surge, a lot of it is the same co-op data wearing a different logo. That's not a knock. It just means you're often comparing platforms, not signals.

And every account-level row shares the same ceiling. The signal stops at the company door. What you do after that — pick a name and guess, or resolve the actual person — is on you and your tooling.

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How to actually choose.

I'll make this simple, because most buying guides won't commit.

If you need to know which accounts are in-market → buy account-level intent. Bombora for the raw feed, 6sense or Demandbase if you want prediction and orchestration in the same platform, ZoomInfo if you want contacts bundled. This part of intent data is real and worth paying for.

If you need late-stage, competitor-comparison signals → G2 Buyer Intent. It's narrower but the buying intent is higher, because it's purchase-stage behavior, not a topic surge three weeks ago.

If you sell into Europe and need compliant contact data → Cognism, with Bombora intent as a layer.

If you need to act on a person, not a company → that's where account-level intent runs out of road. You add contact-level identity. Resolve the named people, reach them across platforms, and track who actually engaged.

The mistake I see most is buying an expensive account-level feed and expecting it to tell sales who to call. It can't. It was never built to. Pair it with the layer that can.

That layer is the whole reason contact-level marketing exists: start with a list of named contacts, and build everything — including how you use intent — around reaching them.

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Go deeper.

→ B2B intent data — the parent guide: first-party vs third-party, what the signal can and can't tell you, and the providers in context.

→ Contact-level intent data — why account-level intent underdelivers, and how first-party identity makes it actionable for sales.

→ Bombora intent data review — a full breakdown of Company Surge, pricing, what it gets right, and where it falls short.

→ Contact-level marketing — the pillar strategy: build your entire acquisition system around named contacts.