Coresignal Review
Coresignal’s huge and well maintained datasets outweigh the sometimes unpolished user experience.
Businesses need web data, but they don’t always have the capabilities or willingness to collect it themselves. This is where companies like Coresignal come in. It’s a major provider of professional data for sales platforms, HR tech, investment intelligence, and other purposes.
In this review, we’ll take a closer look at Coresignal: its services, pricing, and user experience. By the end, I hope to leave you with an answer to the question of whether Coresignal is the right data source for you.
Let’s get started.
General Information
Coresignal has been running for a better part of the decade. In that time, the provider has served over 400 clients from various industries. I believe at this point it’s safe to call it a major player in the field.
Web scraping and personal information are sensitive topics, so Coresignal takes compliance seriously. It collects business-related information, only from publicly available sources, and provides a mechanism to opt out. In addition, Coresignal is a founding member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative, which is concerned with promoting responsible data collection off the web (we interview the CEO here). All the legal bases seem to be covered.
In short, Coresignal creates the impression of a serious company with a proven track record on platforms like Datarade.
Data Types & Sources
Coresignal offers eight types of datasets from over 20 different sources. The subject matter is business data – companies, employees, and the like – focusing on HR, lead generation, and similar industries. You shouldn’t expect to find much information related to products or people outside of professional contexts.
The source that Coresignal calls the largest professional network takes the center stage. It’s also likely to be the biggest draw for many, so we’ll cover it as a separate category.
The data below reflect Coresignal’s service as it was in November 2023. Things may have changed since then.
The Largest Professional Network Data
The largest professional network is the website where we fend off recruiters on good days and post trite ChatGPT-generated content on others. We were asked not to explicitly mention its name, but I think we all know what we’re talking about.
Coresignal controls a huge database of data from this professional network divided into three types: companies, jobs, and members. The member dataset includes by far the most records.
Firmographic Data
Firmographic data contains information about companies: their size, industry, locations, and such. It’s dominated by the website that’s not to be named.
Employee Data
Job Posting Data
Job postings provide a collection of job ads. The dataset offers a detailed view with such information as seniority, interview experience, and remote possibilities, in addition to more basic data points. The vast majority of records are scraped from two sources, with a good balance between them.
Employee Reviews
Employee review data covers company evaluations, such as the pros and cons of working there, review summaries, and multiple types of ratings. It’s predominantly scraped from Glassdoor.
Funding Data
Funding data draws from a balanced selection of sources to provide information about funding rounds, investors, and company acquisitions.
Technographic Data
Technographic data covers the tech that companies use to run their businesses. It also includes social signals on communities like Hacker News and Stack Overflow. The primary source here is Crunchbase.
Product Reviews
Product reviews mostly come from Trustpilot with such data points as product description, ratings, and category.
Community & Repository Data
Community and repository data offers several huge databases from sources like GitHub and Docker. Four fifths of the records consist of GitHub branches.
Data Structure & Delivery
Data Structure
Coresignal offers data in two forms: raw and clean. At the time of writing this review, the latter was available only for the largest professional network – namely, its company and employee data.
Corsesignal defines raw as data that has been scraped and parsed based on a certain structure but without modifying individual fields. In other words, they can include duplicate records, HTML tags, different terminology, and so on. Clean data contains fewer records, but they’re standartized, trimmed from HTML tags or special characters, and enriched with additional information.
Clean data may be the better option if you need value ASAP, while raw data may be preferred by companies that already have strong data cleaning capabilities and possibly different preferences than the data vendor.
All changes to the data structure are listed in the documentation, and Coresignal’s account manager informs about them in advance.
Delivery Options
Coresignal offers two data delivery methods: datasets and APIs.
The main method is the dataset. It supports all sources and primarily returns data in JSON – or CSV if you need data from the largest professional network. The delivery frequency also differs by target: it’s mostly monthly, with a few exceptions. The CSV files are compressed in gzip and contain instructions for integrating the data into a database.
Alternatively, you can fetch results via an API. This works by using a pair of endpoints – one for POSTing relevant search parameters to the API and the second for fetching matches via a GET request. There’s also an option to use an Elasticsearch endpoint for querying data, which some may find more convenient.
For example, you can “find a job record with the product management keyword in the description; the employment place is in Dallas, the United States, and the job ad is active.” (Taken from Coresignal’s documentation.)
Data Freshness
With most sources, Coresignal aims to renew the datasets every month. Two exceptions are the largest professional network’s members and job boards.
- The former is checked continuously using a queue of profiles. Coresignal’s logic prioritizes profiles that were recently changed, are located in English-speaking and other major markets. It checks all priority profiles every month and immediately re-scrapes the ones with changes. Around 100 million profiles are refreshed every month and all priority profiles within six months.
- As for the job ads, Coresignal only renews active job postings. It also adds new ones using internal discovery criteria
Coresignal Pricing
The model for datasets is mostly opaque and sales-based. The final price depends on multiple factors like data source, coverage and delivery frequency. In any case, you’ll have to commit to a contract.
The data API model is both more flexible and transparent: for small quantities of data, you can pay as you go and even get access through self-service. Subscribing to a plan unlocks more features like the full documentation or a dedicated account manager, but the product remains materially the same.
The API grants search credits for filtering the dataset and collection credits for fetching the data records. A pay-as-you-go credit costs $0.2, and you get twice as many search than collect credits with any plan. It’s possible to buy up to 10,000 credits without a subscription, which remain available for six months.
Coresignal offers a way to try out its services, either through free credits or a sample of its datasets.
User Experience
Let’s see what it’s like to use Coresignal. We’ll go through its registration process, dashboard, documentation, and customer service.
I’ll say it in advance: Coresignal’s self-service capabilities mostly apply to its APIs, and the dataset experience is built around interactions with the sales and then account management teams. This isn’t ideal – but, given the nature and price of the product, understandable.
Registration
To register with Coresignal, you’ll have to enter your company email address and password. This leads to another form that asks for a full name, industry, and department within the company. Finally, you’ll be required to confirm your email address.
It’s interesting that we created two different accounts under the Proxyway email domain, and the system somehow linked our credits between them. This may be a measure to prevent abuse.
Dashboard
As I’ve mentioned, Coresignal’s dashboard currently revolves around the data API. There, you can buy credits, view your credit expenditure, understand and build (but not run) API queries. You’ll also find a data dictionary showing how the results are structured. Finally, there’s an option to contact support via a form.
I’ve noticed very few options for managing the user profile – there’s no way to update your contact information, share company roles, or even change the password. From what I’ve learned, the option for self-service is new to Coresignal in general, and the provider is looking to expand its functionality.
Subscription Management
There’s little to speak of. The dashboard lets you buy pay-as-you-go credits. For subscription plans, the only way for now is to contact sales. I also wasn’t able to find invoices – they don’t seem to be available on the platform.
Using the Dashboard's API Tool
Without an enterprise plan, the dashboard currently lets you interact with three largest professional network databases: members, companies, and jobs. You do this using Coresignal’s query generator tool.
The query generator is a widget that allows selecting one or multiple filters. For example, you can opt to filter all co-founders from Australia in the financial services industry. Each filter primarily works as an AND operator (though in some cases, like position titles, OR is also available).
Then, the widget generates a code snippet in multiple programming languages and provides a sample of the data. You can see how many matches were found in the database.
Running the code snippet returns relevant database IDs, which you can then use to fetch actual data from another API endpoint. However, the dashboard no longer covers this part, and you’ll have to follow the provided documentation.
Documentation
Coresignal’s documentation is two-tiered. The first tier is for self-service customers. It’s a dashboard one-pager that competently explains how to work with the API.
The second tier grants access to the full documentation and is available only to subscribed clients. It’s much more comprehensive, with information about the main data sources, their sizes and refresh frequency, data dictionaries and sample datasets, changelog, and troubleshooting. The docs have a search bar with an AI assistant that’s as useful as you’d expect it to be.
The full documentation also includes much more detailed API instructions for the largest professional network and other sources that aren’t yet available on the dashboard.
Overall, permissioned users should find no shortage of information – for newcomers, there sometimes may even seem too much of it.
Hands-On Support
Coresignal’s pay-as-you-go customers can receive support only through a contact form, while subscribers and dataset users get a dedicated account manager. My account manager was responsive and helpful during local working hours.
The only thing that left me wanting was technical support for addressing possible API issues round the clock. After all, this is not a cheap service, and it’s impossible to ensure 100% uptime for an online tool.
Conclusion
That was Coresignal. I found it to be a reliable data vendor with some of the largest professional datasets in the market. They’re well kept and frequently refreshed which may be a big selling point for trend intelligence.
In terms of user experience, I’d prefer more pricing transparency and improvements to the self-service. The latter won’t affect you if you’re looking to get a dataset directly – which is Coresignal’s forte for now.
Overall, despite its drawbacks, I consider Coresignal to be among the best sources for company, people, and other professional data. If you were looking for a recommendation, this is one.
Recommended for:
Anyone looking to buy professional data.
