RocketReach markets itself as the world's largest and most accurate contact database, with over 700 million professional profiles spanning virtually every industry and geography. For recruiters, sales teams, and researchers who need to find a specific person at a specific company, that breadth is genuinely useful.

But breadth creates its own problem: discovery. When your database contains 700 million profiles, finding the right 50 contacts for your outreach campaign requires significant filtering, trial and error, and domain knowledge. RocketReach gives you the haystack. You still need to find the needles.

For PR professionals, link builders, and media outreach specialists, the question is not "can I find this person?" but "who should I be contacting in the first place?" That requires a fundamentally different approach.

What RocketReach Does Well

RocketReach excels at individual lookups. Enter a name and company, and the platform returns email addresses, phone numbers, social profiles, and sometimes organizational context. The data is sourced from public records, web scraping, social media, and data partnerships.

The platform offers Chrome and Edge browser extensions that overlay contact data while browsing LinkedIn, company websites, and other professional sites. This makes it easy to capture contact information during research sessions without switching tabs.

Advanced filters let you search by job title, industry, company size, location, and technology stack. For teams building targeted account lists, these filters narrow the 700M database to manageable segments.

Pricing starts at $39/month for the Essentials plan (80 lookups), with Professional at $99/month (200 lookups) and Ultimate at $249/month (500 lookups). Phone number lookups consume additional credits.

The Haystack Problem

RocketReach's 700M+ database sounds impressive, but it creates a paradox: the more profiles you have, the harder it is to find the right ones without already knowing who you are looking for.

Consider a common PR outreach scenario: you want to find marketing and communications contacts at companies in the renewable energy sector that are currently active in media outreach. With RocketReach, you would:

  1. Search for "PR Manager" or "Communications Director" by title
  2. Filter by the energy industry
  3. Get hundreds or thousands of results
  4. Manually review each profile to determine relevance
  5. Hope the companies are actually interested in media coverage

This process is time-consuming and imprecise. You end up paying for lookups on contacts who may have changed roles, work at companies with no PR activity, or have no interest in being contacted by media professionals.

How YEB Outreach Pre-Filters by Intent

YEB Outreach eliminates the haystack by starting with a signal of intent. Instead of searching a massive database by title and hoping for relevance, it surfaces contacts from companies that have recently published press releases.

This is a fundamentally different filtering mechanism. A press release is evidence that:

  • The company has an active PR function
  • They are currently investing in media outreach
  • They have news they want covered
  • The contact listed is the person designated to handle media inquiries

Instead of searching 700 million profiles and filtering down, you browse 15 industry categories and filter by recency (7, 30, or 90 days). Every result is a company that recently demonstrated PR activity, with the specific contact designated for media outreach.

Pricing: Per-Lookup vs Per-Contact

RocketReach's per-contact cost varies significantly by plan:

  • Essentials: $0.49/lookup (80 lookups at $39/month)
  • Professional: $0.50/lookup (200 lookups at $99/month)
  • Ultimate: $0.50/lookup (500 lookups at $249/month)

Phone number lookups and some advanced data points consume additional credits, increasing the effective cost per contact. Unused lookups do not roll over.

YEB Outreach charges $0.10 per contact unlocked. roughly 5x cheaper than RocketReach's per-contact cost. There is no monthly subscription, no tiered pricing, and no expiring credits. Previously unlocked contacts are free to re-download at any time.

For a team that needs 100 PR contacts per month: RocketReach would require the Professional plan at $99/month. YEB Outreach costs $10 total.

Data Depth vs Data Relevance

RocketReach provides rich data per contact: email, phone, social profiles, company information, and sometimes org chart context. This depth is valuable for sales teams that need to map accounts and understand reporting structures.

YEB Outreach provides the essential contact information from press releases: name, email, role, and the context of the press release itself. The data is narrower but more relevant for PR outreach. you know exactly why this person is in the database and what their company recently announced.

The trade-off: RocketReach gives you more data about each contact. YEB gives you more relevant contacts for PR workflows.

Use Cases Where Each Tool Excels

Choose RocketReach if:

  • You need to find specific individuals at known companies
  • You require phone numbers and direct dials
  • You are building detailed account maps with org chart data
  • Your outreach spans diverse roles (sales, engineering, executive)
  • You want browser extensions for real-time lookups on LinkedIn

Choose YEB Outreach if:

  • You need to discover PR and marketing contacts by industry
  • You want pre-filtered results from companies actively seeking coverage
  • You do link building, media pitching, or content partnerships
  • You prefer $0.10/contact over $0.49+/contact
  • You want date-based filtering to ensure contact freshness
  • You do not need phone numbers or org chart data

API Comparison

Both platforms offer REST APIs for programmatic access. RocketReach's API provides person lookup, company lookup, and search endpoints with the same credit-based pricing. YEB Outreach's API offers industry browsing, contact search, and unlock endpoints at $0.10/contact.

For automated workflows that need to periodically discover new PR contacts in specific industries, YEB's API is purpose-built: query by industry and date range, get fresh results, unlock what you need. RocketReach's API is more general-purpose but requires you to define your own filtering logic.

The Bottom Line

RocketReach is a comprehensive contact database for teams that need to find specific people across a massive professional landscape. YEB Outreach is a focused discovery tool for PR and media outreach that pre-filters by intent. surfacing contacts from companies that are actively seeking coverage. If you know who you are looking for, RocketReach finds them. If you need to discover who to contact, YEB Outreach does the discovery at $0.10 per contact.