ABM Platform Alternatives: What Google Recommends, Measured September 7, 2026

On September 7, 2026 we ran seven ABM buying queries through Google's live SERP API. The selection rule was mechanical: every competitor-shaped and alternative-shaped query in our 354-keyword buyer set for the two platforms Google names in every answer, Demandbase and 6sense, plus the category head term "b2b intent data providers". CPCs run from $44.76 to $229.15. All seven return an AI Overview, and three vendors are named in every one: 6sense, Demandbase and ZoomInfo. Bombora is named in six. Cleanlist is named in zero, and holds a single organic position across the seven, rank 34 for "6sense alternatives". Not one of the six ABM and intent platforms whose pricing pages we fetched publishes a purchasable price. Here is what each answer actually says, and which of the three layers you are really buying.

Last measured: September 7, 2026. Every AI Overview quoted below was collected that day from Google US desktop, and every vendor price was read off that vendor's own page on September 7 or, where noted, on September 1. Prices and AI answers in this category both move weekly. Treat each figure as a dated observation.

Cleanlist: Best for teams that discover they were paying platform prices for the contact data underneath. It runs waterfall enrichment across 25+ providers and charges 1 credit per verified email and 10 per direct dial, with search costing nothing, starting at $79 a month. Cleanlist is not an ABM platform and does not sell intent data, which is why it does not appear in the shortlists further down this page.

What does Google's AI Overview actually recommend as a Demandbase or 6sense alternative?

Three names, on every query, without exception: 6sense, Demandbase and ZoomInfo. Across the seven keywords in this study, all seven returned an AI Overview and all seven returned a readable answer body, and those three vendors appear in the body of every single one. Bombora appears in six of the seven, missing only from "demandbase alternative". RollWorks also appears in six, absent only from "b2b intent data providers". Apollo appears in four, Terminus in three and Warmly in three. Cleanlist appears in zero of the seven and is cited as a source in zero of the seven.

The wording is close to identical across queries, which tells you the answer is assembled from the same small pool of pages. For "demandbase competitors" it opens: "6sense is the closest direct enterprise competitor to Demandbase for account-based marketing (ABM) and revenue intelligence." For both "6sense alternatives" and "6sense alternative" it opens: "The best 6sense alternative depends on your primary need: Demandbase for enterprise ABM, Bombora for standalone intent data, or Apollo.io for budget-friendly prospecting."

Which ABM platforms publish a price?

None of the six we checked. On September 7, 2026 we fetched by hand the pricing page of each of the six ABM and intent platforms in the table below. Six pages, zero dollar figures. Demandbase returns HTTP 200 on a page headed "Pricing & Packaging" whose only mechanism is a form. 6sense returns three bundles labelled by capability rather than by plan, and a "Book Your Demo" button. RollWorks redirects to AdRoll, which lists four ABM packages: three end in "Request a Demo" and the fourth, Account-Based Retargeting, ends in "Get Started" with no fee to begin and media billed separately, which is a media rate rather than a platform price. Bombora's pricing URL redirects to its data co-op page. ZoomInfo returns HTTP 403 to an automated fetch, exactly as it did on September 1.

The Terminus row is the one worth stopping on. On September 7, 2026 at 09:03:58 GMT, terminus.com returns HTTP 301 to demandscience.com with the query string utm_campaign=terminus-redirect, and terminus.com/pricing returns 404. Terminus is not a site you can buy from any more. Google's AI Overview for "demandbase competitors" still recommends it that same day, described as "Best for multi-channel B2B marketing campaigns and display-focused ABM orchestration", with no note that the domain now forwards to its acquirer. One of the seven answers does label it "Terminus (by DemandScience)". The other two do not.

How much does Demandbase cost?

Demandbase does not publish a price. Its own pricing page, read on September 7, 2026, describes the structure without a number: "Our pricing model features a clear platform fee that covers all the essential software and services. In addition, there's a flat fee per user, allowing you to easily scale according to your needs." The call to action is "Fill out the form, and we'll customize a pricing plan that works perfectly for you." So the shape is a platform fee plus a per-user fee, and both values are quoted rather than listed.

Google fills the gap with a third-party estimate. The AI Overview for "demandbase alternative", collected September 7, 2026, quotes Sales Motion verbatim: "Demandbase's median annual contract runs around $68,591, whereas lighter alternatives or point solutions offer lower monthly or transactional pricing." That is the only Demandbase dollar figure in any of the seven answers, and it cannot be checked against Demandbase's own page, because Demandbase does not publish one. The comparable 6sense figure sits in a different answer: the AI Overview for "6sense alternatives" describes 6sense as carrying "a high price tag" of $50,000 to $120,000+ per year, citing UserGems, Factors.ai and Tomba rather than 6sense. So the consistent claim across the sources Google reads is a five-figure to six-figure annual commitment, sourced entirely from third-party posts, with no first-party confirmation from either vendor. Budget for a negotiation, not for a rate card.

What type of company is Demandbase?

Demandbase is a private B2B software company that sells an account-based go-to-market platform to enterprise marketing and sales teams. Read on its own about page on September 7, 2026, it describes itself as "the trusted pipeline AI platform" and "the pipeline engine for AI GTM that aligns teams to turn goals into revenue". The same page publishes four numbers: founded 2006, "750+ employees", "1,000+ customers" and "367% average customer ROI".

The category label has moved. Demandbase led the ABM category for most of the last decade, and its own site now foregrounds "Pipeline AI" and "GTM" ahead of the ABM acronym while keeping ABM capabilities and an ABM certification programme in the navigation. When a vendor renames its category, feature comparisons written against the old label go stale faster than the pricing does, and the pages ranking for these queries are mostly written against the old label. Demandbase's site also hosts head-to-head pages against 6sense, Terminus and ZoomInfo, which is why demandbase.com holds a page-one organic slot on six of the seven queries here, including its competitors' own branded searches.

Is Demandbase a product-based company?

Yes. Demandbase sells a licensed software product, Demandbase One, rather than services or media, and its published model is a platform fee plus a flat per-user fee. The question shows up in People Also Ask because ABM vendors sit next to two adjacent business models that look similar from outside: demand-generation agencies that sell leads by the record, and advertising resellers that mark up media. Demandbase does run an advertising product, which is where the confusion starts, and it also sells professional services and an academy alongside the licence.

The distinction changes what you are negotiating. With a product company the levers are seats, platform fee, contract length and which modules are switched on. With a lead vendor the lever is cost per record, and with a media reseller it is the spend and the margin. Demandbase's answer to whether you can buy pieces separately, on the pricing page we read on September 7, 2026, is that you cannot: "we don't split Demandbase One into separate solutions", though it offers the Advertising product as a starting place and sells its Data solutions on their own.

Is Demandbase similar to 6sense?

They are the two closest products in the category, and Google says so on every query where both appear. The AI Overview for "demandbase competitors" opens by calling 6sense "the closest direct enterprise competitor to Demandbase". The AI Overview for "6sense competitors" returns the mirror image, calling Demandbase "the closest direct peer for enterprise-level ABM". Both platforms combine account identification, third-party intent, predictive scoring, advertising activation and CRM write-back. Both are quoted rather than listed. Both are bought by enterprise marketing operations teams with a dedicated admin.

The differences Google reports are matters of emphasis. It positions 6sense around predictive machine learning and buying-stage models, and Demandbase around out-of-the-box account lists and advertising execution. Independent of the marketing, one structural difference shows up in our own measurement: the two companies use each other's brand names as acquisition channels. demandbase.com ranks page one for "6sense competitors" and "6sense alternatives", and 6sense.com ranks page one for "demandbase competitors" and "demandbase alternative". On both branded competitor queries, one of the top two organic results is written by the rival being compared: demandbase.com at number one for "6sense competitors", 6sense.com at number two for "demandbase competitors".

Is Demandbase good?

Depends entirely on which of the three layers you are trying to buy, and we do not publish an opinion on it, because we have not run a first-party evaluation of Demandbase and will not invent one. What we can report is what the September 7, 2026 SERP contains. Gartner's peer-review alternatives page holds the number one organic slot on three of the seven queries and number two on two more, G2's equivalent appears on three, and a single Reddit thread, r/marketingagency's "6sense Alternatives & Reviews", is cited as an AI Overview source on all three 6sense queries and ranks organically on two of them. Those are the three places where buyers who have used the product are actually talking.

The reason "is it good" resolves badly for ABM platforms is that they bundle capabilities graded on different scales. Intent signal quality, advertising reach, scoring accuracy and contact data accuracy are four separate procurement questions, and a platform can be strong on two and weak on two while every review aggregates to one star rating. Split the trial into those four tests and score them separately. The layer breakdown below applies the same split to the buying decision.

Is 6sense a CRM?

No. 6sense is an account-based marketing and revenue intelligence platform that sits on top of a CRM and writes into it. Its own homepage title, read on September 7, 2026, is "The ABM Platform Powered by Revenue Intelligence", and the hero copy reads "Intelligence for Agentic GTM. Turn every signal, yours and ours, into intelligence every team, tool, and AI agent can act on and trust." Salesforce and HubSpot remain the systems of record. 6sense supplies account identification, intent, predictive scores and campaign activation, and pushes those attributes back onto CRM records.

This matters more than the definition suggests. Because 6sense is not the system of record, everything it produces has to survive a sync into one, which is where most ABM implementations lose time. The AI Overview for "6sense alternatives" makes the same point, describing 6sense as carrying "long implementation times" alongside its price. If CRM data hygiene is the real problem, an ABM platform layered on top inherits it rather than fixing it, and that holds for every vendor in the table above. Fix the record layer before buying a scoring layer that reads from it.

How many employees does 6sense have?

6sense does not publish a headcount on its own website. We checked three pages on September 7, 2026, the homepage, the about page and the careers page, and none of them states a number of employees, a team size or a founding year. That is a real difference from its closest peer: Demandbase publishes "750+ employees" and "founded 2006" on its about page on the same day. Any 6sense headcount you see quoted is coming from a third-party database rather than from the company, and we are not going to repeat a number we cannot source first-party.

The buyer's underlying question is usually implementation weight rather than trivia. A vendor fielding hundreds of solution consultants expects to be implemented over months with help, and that expectation shows up in the contract as professional services line items. Better signals are checkable yourself: whether the vendor publishes a price (neither of these two does), whether it sells modules separately (Demandbase says explicitly that it does not), and how long its own marketing says onboarding takes.

What are the three separate things buyers conflate when they shop for ABM?

Intent signals, account scoring and the contact data underneath. They are sold as one platform, they are priced as one platform, and they fail independently. Intent signals tell you which accounts are researching your category right now. Account scoring tells you which accounts fit your ICP and how ready they are. Contact data is the verified email address and direct dial for the human you actually reach out to once the first two have picked the account.

The failure mode this page exists to name is buying all three at platform prices when only one was the problem. A team with an account list it trusts and a scoring model that works, whose real complaint is that half the direct dials bounce, is buying an intent platform to solve a contact data problem. The reverse happens too: a team with clean contact data and no idea which accounts are in market buys more contact data. Split the three before you shortlist, price each layer separately, then decide whether one vendor covering all three beats three vendors covering one each.

Which vendors sell intent signals, and is Cleanlist one of them?

Bombora, 6sense, Demandbase, ZoomInfo and G2 Buyer Intent are the names Google returns for this layer, and Cleanlist is not one of them. Cleanlist does not sell intent data of any kind, first-party or third-party, and does not sell technographic data. If intent is the thing you are actually shopping for, this is the point at which you should stop reading and go to one of those five.

Google's breakdown for "b2b intent data providers", collected September 7, 2026, splits the layer three ways: first-party data from visitor de-anonymization on your own site, third-party data from publisher co-ops, and review-based data from software marketplaces. Bombora is named as the co-op that "many other platforms license underneath their own tools", worth knowing before you compare two platforms whose intent feeds may share a source. Bombora publishes no price and its pricing URL forwards to a co-op page claiming "21,600+ Intent topics tracked". The AI Overview asserts Bombora pricing "typically starts around $12,000 to $40,000+ per year" and hangs four citations on it. The first is bombora.com/intent/, Bombora's own page, and the other three are dreamdata.io, autobound.ai and bullseye.so. We fetched bombora.com/intent/ on September 7, 2026: HTTP 200, and no dollar figure anywhere in the rendered text. Google is sourcing a price range partly to a page that does not carry one.

What are the options for account scoring?

6sense and Demandbase for predictive scoring bought as a platform, RollWorks for a lighter mid-market version, and your CRM's native scoring for teams that already have the attributes. Scoring is the layer where the platforms genuinely add something a data vendor cannot, because a predictive model needs engagement history and third-party signal together, and neither exists in a contact database.

Google's AI Mode answer to "best firmographic data provider for account scoring", collected the same day, separates the model from its inputs. It names ZoomInfo for enterprise CRM enrichment, Demandbase for engagement-based scoring through its "Engagement Minutes" framework, Clearbit inside HubSpot Breeze for real-time inbound enrichment, Coresignal or Bright Data for custom models, and Crunchbase for funding and headcount triggers. Most of that list is firmographic input rather than scoring logic. If you already run a scoring model in Salesforce or HubSpot, what you need is the attributes to feed it, and those are priced per record rather than per platform.

What does the contact data layer actually cost?

Between $19.60 and $435.29 per 1,000 verified emails at the entry paid plan on annual billing, across the vendors publishing enough to compute a rate. Every figure below was read off the vendor's own pricing page on September 1, 2026 and normalized by one formula: twelve months of cash at the entry plan, divided by annual credits, divided by credits per verified email, times 1,000.

Apollo is cheaper per verified email than Cleanlist, by a factor of two, and it is the vendor Google names in four of the seven AI Overviews on this page. We are not going to pretend otherwise. Where Cleanlist differs is the metering: search is free and unlimited on every plan, a miss costs nothing, all seats draw on one shared credit wallet, and the waterfall runs across 25+ providers so a record another vendor misses can still resolve. Verified work email is 1 credit, direct dial 10, both 11, validation 0.5. Plans are Starter $79, Pro $229 and Scale $599 a month, 25% off annually, and new workspaces start on a 14-day full Scale trial with 250 credits, 3 seats and no card.

When should you not buy contact data from Cleanlist?

When the problem you are solving is intent, scoring or advertising. Cleanlist does not sell intent data, does not sell technographic, revenue or funding filters, does not score accounts, does not run ad campaigns and does not send email. If the reason you typed "6sense alternatives" into Google is that you need to know which accounts are in market this quarter, nothing on this page from us will help, and Bombora, 6sense, Demandbase, ZoomInfo or G2 Buyer Intent is where you should be looking.

Two more cases. If your team is one to three people and unit price is the only thing that matters, Apollo is cheaper per verified email at $19.60 against our $39.33, and its published rate stays below ours at all three of our tiers. And if procurement needs one vendor of record covering ads, intent, scoring and data on one contract, a platform is the right shape of purchase even at platform prices, trading transparency for consolidation.

The case for the third layer is narrow. A team paying a platform fee plus per-user fees, whose actual monthly consumption is a few thousand enrichments, is paying an ABM price for a data job. Six integrations move the records where they need to go, two-way with HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive, one-way into Outreach, Salesloft and Lemlist, and Cleanlist does not send the email itself. That team can price the data layer at the rates above, keep the scoring where it already works, and buy intent separately if that turns out to be the missing piece.

How we measured this

Collection date: September 7, 2026, one sitting, Google US desktop.

Endpoint: DataForSEO SERP API, Google Organic Live Advanced, location_code 2840 (United States), language_code en, device desktop, depth 50, load_async_ai_overview true, one task per POST. Volume and CPC from keywords_data/google_ads/search_volume/live, same location and language.

Keyword selection. Every competitor-shaped and alternative-shaped query in our 354-keyword buyer set for Demandbase and 6sense, the two platforms named in all seven answers, plus the category head term "b2b intent data providers". This is not the seven highest-CPC ABM terms in that set: "bombora competitors" at $156.62 and "bombora pricing" at $127.80 both carry higher CPCs and are excluded, because they are queries about an intent vendor rather than about an ABM platform.

Sample size: 7 keywords carrying 550 combined monthly US searches, at CPCs from $44.76 to $229.15 (6sense competitors 170 searches, demandbase competitors 90 at the top CPC of $229.15, b2b intent data providers 90, the two 6sense alternative variants 70 each, the two demandbase alternative variants 30 each). That produced 70 organic result rows, 7 readable AI Overview bodies, 65 AI Overview source entries resolving to 44 unique URLs across 36 unique domains, 8 People Also Ask questions and 1 Google AI Mode answer.

Counting rules. A vendor counts as named only if its name appears in the AI Overview answer body, with URLs stripped first, so a citation link alone does not count. The denominator for every rate here is 7, the number of keywords returning a readable body, which on this sample equals the number attempted. Cleanlist organic position was checked to depth 50 and read from rank_group, the organic position, rather than rank_absolute. It returned one result across the seven, cleanlist.ai/alternatives/6sense at rank 34 for "6sense alternatives", and was absent from the top 50 on the other six.

Prices. The six platform pricing pages were fetched by hand on September 7, 2026 and their HTTP status, redirect target and rendered text recorded. The contact data rates come from our 37-vendor pricing index fetched September 1, 2026, each row carrying its own source_url and date_fetched.

Reproduce it. The census is at buyer-shortlist-census-2026-09.csv, section 2, and the pricing index at b2b-data-pricing-index-2026-09.csv. Both CC BY 4.0.

Related reading

• The B2B data and GTM pricing index, 37 vendors, September 1, 2026, the full working behind the contact data table
• Best intent data providers
• Best sales intelligence platforms
• Cleanlist pricing