The 6 best people search APIs in 2026

People data used to be something you bought as a database. Increasingly, developers can search for people programmatically: describe the person you’re looking for, look someone up from a few known details, or find professionals who match criteria such as role, company, and location.

Here at Exa, we maintain a search index of more than 1 billion professional profiles, so this is a problem we work on directly.

Exa lets developers search that index with natural-language queries rather than relying only on a fixed set of database filters. Other APIs take different approaches, from traditional B2B contact databases to identity and enrichment services.

This guide compares six people search APIs by what they index, how you can search them, freshness, available data, and price, and shows how to search for people with Exa.

Three kinds of people search APIs

Each group covers a different type of data and supports a distinct set of use cases.

1. B2B and professional search APIs index work details, including job titles, employers, seniority, skills, and work history. You can use filters or plain-language queries to find people who match a role. Most providers charge separately for contact details.

2. Public records and identity APIs draw from court records, property records, phone directories, and other public sources. You can search by name, address, or phone number. The API then returns the best match, along with details such as addresses, relatives, and phone numbers. These tools support fraud checks and skip tracing.

3. Internal directory APIs search for people within an organization. Google's Admin SDK Directory API lists users in a Workspace domain, while Microsoft Graph's people API ranks the colleagues most relevant to a signed-in user. Because these APIs cover only people within a specific tenant, the rest of this guide focuses on B2B and public-records tools.

B2B and professional search APIs

Many sales teams start with an older contact database such as Apollo or ZoomInfo. The APIs below are what buyers move to when they need custom criteria, fresher records, or results inside their own product.

• Exa combines indexed people search with open-ended list building. Its Search API includes a people category that searches an index of more than 1 billion people. Its Agent API accepts criteria such as "engineering leaders at AI infrastructure companies that raised a Series A in the last six months," then finds and enriches matching people in the same run. You define output fields such as name, job title, and profile URL in a JSON schema. The resulting schema-validated JSON can match the format required by a CRM or ATS, and citations let reviewers check the source of each value.

• People Data Labs is one of the largest B2B providers, listing 2.4 billion person profiles in its All Dataset. Each profile includes a name and at least one other piece of personal data. Its Person Search API accepts Elasticsearch or SQL queries based on person fields, such as SELECT * FROM person WHERE .... The free plan includes 100 credits per month but excludes contact data. Paid plans start at $98 per month.

• Crustdata combines search and enrichment. It charges 0.03 credits for each person search result and 1 to 7 credits for each enriched record. It also sells company and people datasets as monthly refreshed flat files.

• Linkup takes a different approach as a web search API. Its documentation explains how to find a person's LinkedIn profile URL from a text prompt. A standard search with a structured or sourced answer costs $0.006. New accounts registered with a professional email address receive $20 in credit, restored each month.

Identity verification and public records

• For identity verification and public-records searches, Searchbug offers three prepaid people data APIs, each designed for a different level of detail. Customers pay only when a query returns data.

  • The People Search API (api_ppl) provides detailed matching and background indicators. It costs $0.33 to $0.79 per successful result.

  • The Contact Info API (api_contact) supports identity verification and CRM cleanup. It costs $0.22 to $0.45 per successful result.

  • The Name, Address, Phone and Email API (api_nape) supports high-volume contact discovery. It costs $0.04 to $0.20 per successful result.

SSN and driver's license data require a separate Restricted Access add-on. Searchbug limits access to verified businesses that submit an application and supporting documents.

• EnformionGO is another public-records option. It returns the best match for each person search and assigns it a score. Its database contains 120 billion records from more than 6,000 data sources. The free tier includes 100 matches per month. Starter plans cost $0.25 per match for up to 5,000 searches, while Pro pricing can fall to $0.01 per match.

Data freshness: cached versus live

Beyond data type and pricing, providers differ in how current their results are. A people search API may query a stored database or retrieve data when it receives a request. The effect becomes clear when someone changes jobs.

Most B2B databases rebuild their indexes on a schedule. People Data Labs releases data monthly, and Crustdata refreshes its flat-file datasets each month. Someone who changed roles last week may therefore show an old title until the next update. In exchange, preindexed data makes searches fast and inexpensive.

Live retrieval, by contrast, checks current sources when a request arrives. Crustdata offers live person endpoints on enterprise plans. Exa built its people ingestion pipeline to process more than 50 million updates a week, and its Agent API reads current web pages during a run. Because live data takes longer to retrieve and costs more per record, most teams search a cached index first, then refresh only the records they plan to use. The table below compares these approaches across providers.

Comparison table

FAQ

Is there a free people search API?

Several have free tiers. People Data Labs gives 100 credits a month, but it doesn’t include contact data. EnformionGO includes 100 matches a month. Exa gives $10 in free credits every month, plus a $10 bonus when you sign up.

Which people search API is best for recruiting?

Choose an API that can search by skills, title, and location while returning work history. People Data Labs and Crustdata provide structured filters for these searches. Exa's Agent API takes criteria that are hard to express as filters at all, such as finding people who spoke at a specific conference, and returns them in the fields you define, with citations on each value.