Sluice vs Lusha

Lookup versus discovery

Lusha answers a narrow question very well: what is this person's email and phone number? You bring the person, usually by viewing their LinkedIn profile or a record in your CRM, and Lusha fills in the contact details.

Sluice answers the question before that one: who should I be contacting at all? It looks at where buyers leave traces (people engaging with a post, reviewers of a competitor, companies advertising on your keyword or hiring the role you sell to, local listings with visible gaps), resolves them to named people, and ranks them by fit with what you sell. Contact details come at the end, as part of revealing someone worth the money.

So the two overlap only at the last step. If your list problem is "I know who, I need the number", Lusha is the more direct tool.

A month of calling and emailing, priced

Say you run a two-person team selling payroll software to small accountancy firms. Each month you want 150 new people to email and, of those, 40 phone numbers for the ones who look strongest.

On Lusha. 150 emails at 1 credit is 150 credits. 40 phone numbers at 5 credits is 200. Total 350 credits, which fits inside Starter's 400 credits at $49.90 a month on monthly billing, or $37.45 on annual (as of October 2026). You still need to find the 150 people yourself, for example by browsing LinkedIn with the extension.

On Sluice. You describe the customer and run a directory search for partners and practice managers at small accountancy firms, plus a signal such as "payroll software for accountants" across LinkedIn and Reddit. Previews are free; 150 people who score 70 or more cost 5 cents each to reveal, $7.50 in total, usually with a verified work email included. That fits in the $9 Starter plan. Phone numbers are the weak part: our phone waterfall bills only when it finds a number, but mobile numbers are expensive and we have no dialer. For 40 numbers a month, Lusha is likely the better buy.

A reasonable set-up for this team is both: Sluice to find and rank the 150, Lusha to pull numbers for the 40 worth a call.

What happens when nothing is found

Lusha's platform and CSV uploads do not charge for misses. Its API does: according to its developer documentation, each API request costs at least one credit even with no match. That matters if you plan to enrich a CRM automatically, where miss rates on older records can be high.

Sluice does not charge for a lookup that returns nothing usable, whichever way you run it, and a profile lookup that comes back with no title, no company and no location is not billed either. A verified email that bounces is refunded exactly what it cost. More on why this matters across vendors in what a lead actually costs.

A quick test before you choose

Take ten people you would genuinely like to reach this month. Look each one up in Lusha's free plan (40 credits covers ten emails and a few phones) and note how many came back with a working email and a number. Then run the same customer description through Sluice and see how many new people it finds that you had not thought of, and how they score. The first test tells you how good Lusha's data is for your market. The second tells you whether your real problem is contact details or knowing who to contact.

Where Lusha is ahead

• Speed in the browser. One click on a profile, no workflow to set up.
• Phone numbers. Clear five-credit pricing for direct dials.
• CRM integrations on every plan, including Salesforce. Sluice connects only to HubSpot.
• Rollover. Unused credits carry over up to twice the monthly amount.
• Track record. Lusha has years of users; Sluice is new.

Where Sluice is ahead

• Finding people you did not know about, from what they said, reviewed or posted.
• Scoring. Each person ranked against your profile, with a reason, before you pay to reveal them.
• Drafting and sending. First messages written from the person's own words, sent only through your accounts and only once you approve.
• Lower entry price for the finding part.

Which to choose

If you already have names and need phones, choose Lusha. If you need names, start with Sluice on the pricing page. Teams comparing Lusha with other databases should also read the Apollo comparison, and teams that mostly need mobile numbers in Europe should look at Cognism.