HubSpot Data Enrichment: What It Fills, What It Misses, and What to Add

What is HubSpot data enrichment?

HubSpot data enrichment is a native CRM feature that looks up business information about your contacts and companies and writes it into their properties, without an integration or an export. HubSpot's documentation describes the data as coming from three places at once: HubSpot's own commercial dataset, third-party data providers, and publicly available information from across the internet. HubSpot's product page puts the index at over 100 million company domains and 380 million email addresses.

The mechanism is a match, not a search. For contact enrichment HubSpot takes the first name, last name and work email address already on the record and looks for a matching profile. For company enrichment it takes the company domain. If it finds a match it fills the properties it has values for. That input requirement is the single most important thing to understand about the feature, and it is covered in its own section below, because it decides which half of your database the feature can help with.

The lineage matters for anyone searching for the old brand names. HubSpot acquired Clearbit in November 2023 and sold the dataset as Breeze Intelligence, which is why a search for Clearbit pricing now lands on HubSpot. As of HubSpot's current knowledge base, the feature is documented plainly as data enrichment, available across the Hubs, and the standalone Clearbit product is effectively gone. If you are reading a 2024 or 2025 comparison that treats Clearbit as a CRM-agnostic API you can buy on its own, it is out of date.

What enrichment is not, inside HubSpot, is deduplication or hygiene. Merging duplicate contacts, standardising job title formats and removing junk records are separate HubSpot data quality tools. Enrichment writes new values into blank properties. It does not clean up the mess that is already there, and running it first on a database full of duplicates just gives you enriched duplicates.

Which properties can HubSpot's native enrichment actually fill?

HubSpot publishes the exact list, and it is short enough to read in full. As documented on 2026-09-04, native enrichment fills 12 contact data properties and 27 company properties, plus two administrative opt-out fields on the contact.

Contact properties: City, Country, Country Code, Employment Role, Employment Seniority, Employment Sub Role, First Name, Job Title, Last Name, LinkedIn URL, State/Region, State/Region Code. Two more properties exist on the contact for administration rather than data: Enrichment opt-out and Enrichment opt-out timestamp.

Company properties: Annual revenue, City, Company domain name, Company keywords, Company name, Country/Region, Country/Region Code, Description, Employee range, Facebook company page, Industry, Industry group, Is public, LinkedIn company page, LinkedIn handle, Number of employees, Phone number, Postal code, Revenue range, State/Region, State/Region Code, Street Address, Total Money Raised, Web Technologies, Website URL, X account handle, Year founded.

Read those two lists next to each other and the shape of the product is obvious. The company side is broad and genuinely good: revenue banding, headcount banding, industry group, technographics, funding raised, founding year and a full postal address is more firmographic coverage than most paid company enrichment tools include at the entry tier, and it is sitting inside a subscription you already pay for. The contact side is thin by comparison: where somebody works, what they do there, how senior they are, roughly where they are, and their LinkedIn URL.

A practical consequence for segmentation. Because HubSpot returns Employment Role, Employment Seniority and Employment Sub Role as categorised values rather than free text, they are more reliable list-building filters than the raw Job Title string a rep typed in. If your HubSpot lists currently filter on Job Title contains VP, switching them to Employment Seniority after an enrichment pass usually recovers a meaningful number of records that were being missed on formatting alone.

Does HubSpot data enrichment find email addresses and direct dials?

No. HubSpot's published enrichment property list contains no contact email address and no contact phone number. The only phone number on the list is the company's main line, which is the switchboard rather than the person you want.

The input requirement compounds this. HubSpot's documentation states that contact enrichment uses first name, last name and work email address to find a match, and that contacts must have a business email address to be eligible at all, with personal addresses such as Gmail or Yahoo excluded. So the feature needs an email to run and does not return one. A contact with a name and a company but no email is not partially enriched, it is ineligible: HubSpot has nothing to match on and the record is skipped.

That is not a criticism of the product, it is a description of what kind of product it is. Native enrichment is a completeness tool for records you can already reach. It takes a contact you can email and adds their title, seniority, location and LinkedIn URL so you can score, segment and personalise. It is not an acquisition tool and does not claim to be.

The practical split for a HubSpot database looks like this. Records that arrived through a form fill, a demo request or a signup usually carry a work email already, and native enrichment does real work on them for free. Records that arrived from a conference list, a LinkedIn export, a partner referral, a scraped account list or a rep typing a name into the CRM usually do not, and native enrichment cannot touch them. The second group is where third-party enrichment spend belongs, and knowing which of your records fall into it is a filter you can run in ten seconds, covered further down.

For callers the gap is total rather than partial. If your motion involves picking up a phone, HubSpot's native enrichment will never contribute a number you can dial, regardless of subscription tier or how many times you re-enrich.

What does HubSpot data enrichment cost?

As documented by HubSpot on 2026-09-04, data enrichment does not consume HubSpot Credits. It is included with a Starter, Professional or Enterprise subscription to Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Data Hub or Content Hub, and with Smart CRM or Revenue Hub at Professional and Enterprise. Smart properties, a separate AI feature, do consume HubSpot Credits. Enrichment itself, per HubSpot's own get-started article, does not.

That is a meaningful change from the model most published comparisons still describe, and it is worth confirming in your own portal rather than in a blog post, ours included. Under the earlier Breeze Intelligence packaging the enrichment dataset was sold as metered credits layered on top of a HubSpot subscription: our own Clearbit pricing guide, which was written against HubSpot's published pricing page, put that at roughly $45 a month for 100 credits with a paid HubSpot plan from about $20 a month underneath it, for a realistic all-in minimum near $65 a month, with credits expiring monthly and no rollover. If your account is still on a credit-metered enrichment arrangement, that pricing is the one that applies to you. HubSpot has moved its packaging more than once since the acquisition.

So the honest answer to what HubSpot data enrichment costs is: on current documentation, the marginal cost of enriching a record is zero and the real cost is the Hub subscription you were paying anyway. The free HubSpot CRM does not include it, because every listed tier starts at Starter.

That zero marginal cost has one important strategic implication, and it is the reason this page recommends what it does. When the native pass is free, there is no scenario in which the right order is to buy a third-party tool first. Run the free thing, measure what it left blank, then price the gap. Any vendor telling a HubSpot team to skip that step is asking them to pay for records HubSpot would have filled for nothing.

How do you turn on HubSpot data enrichment, and which records qualify?

Automatic enrichment is off by default and has to be switched on separately for contacts and for companies, which is the most common reason a team believes the feature is not working. A Super Admin configures it in enrichment settings, and a user needs either Super Admin or the Data enrichment access permission (Settings, Users and Teams, Edit permissions, Data Management, Data enrichment access) before they can enrich anything by hand.

Eligibility is decided per record and is strict. Contacts must have a business email address, and HubSpot explicitly excludes personal addresses such as Gmail and Yahoo. Companies must have a company domain name. On top of that, only records with data available are enriched at all: if HubSpot has nothing new for a record, nothing happens and it is not marked as enriched. HubSpot recommends testing record eligibility before you run a large pass, which is good advice for the same reason it is good advice with any vendor: it tells you the size of your gap before you plan around it.

There are five ways to run it. An individual record, from the Intelligence tab on the contact or company, where you tick the specific properties you want. In bulk from the contacts or companies index page, capped at 100 records per action. From a saved segment, using Actions then Enrich segment, which is the route for anything larger than a hundred records. During an import, by ticking Enrich records in the import flow. And from a workflow, using the Enrich Record action, which is how you enrich continuously on a trigger rather than on a schedule.

The 100-record index-page cap is the operational detail that catches people out. Anyone trying to clean a 20,000-contact database by selecting rows on the index page will be there for a week. Build a segment, enrich the segment. For new records arriving continuously, the workflow action is the correct tool and means you never run a manual pass on inbound again.

What are the three HubSpot enrichment modes, and which should you use?

HubSpot enrichment has three fill behaviours and they differ on exactly one question: whether they are allowed to overwrite something. Automatic fills properties that are blank or empty and never overwrites a value set by a user or another system. Manual can fill blanks or overwrite existing values, and you control which through the overwrite settings. Continuous keeps previously enriched values up to date over time, and stops enriching any individual property the moment a user or another system edits it.

That last rule is the elegant part of the design and is worth stating on its own: continuous enrichment treats a human edit as a veto on that specific property, not on the record. A rep who corrects a job title after a call keeps their correction forever, while the same contact's city and seniority carry on updating. Very few enrichment products behave this well, and it removes the usual argument between RevOps and sales about whether automation is allowed to touch the CRM.

The configuration most teams should land on is automatic plus continuous on both objects, with manual overwrite reserved for a deliberate audited pass. Automatic guarantees new records arrive complete. Continuous fights data decay, which for B2B contact data runs at roughly 2.1% a month and 22.5% a year on Cognism's published figures, with email the fastest field to rot. Manual overwrite is the one to be careful with, because it is the only mode that can replace something a person put there on purpose.

One governance point specific to HubSpot. Enrichment is bidirectional with HubSpot's dataset in a way that is easy to miss: HubSpot's FAQ states that when it can verify a record against multiple data points, limited business contact data from that enrichment may be contributed back to its commercial dataset, and that if you are only using continuous enrichment, no data is added. If contributing back is a problem for your legal team, running continuous only is the documented way to avoid it, and that is a decision worth making explicitly rather than by default.

How do you measure what HubSpot enrichment left blank?

Filter on the Has been enriched property, which HubSpot sets to True on every record enrichment touched, then look at what is still empty inside that group. This is the whole audit, it takes a few minutes, and it is the number that should drive any third-party enrichment budget.

The sequence that works. First run native enrichment across the database, by segment, and let it finish. Then build four lists. List one: Has been enriched is False. These are the records native enrichment could not touch at all, which for contacts almost always means no business email on file, and this list is your true acquisition gap. List two: Has been enriched is True and Job Title is empty. HubSpot matched the person but had no title, a smaller group than most teams expect. List three: Has been enriched is True and Phone Number is empty on the associated company, which after native enrichment tells you how much of your account list has no dialable number of any kind. List four: contacts where the email address is present but has never been verified, which native enrichment does not check and which is a separate exercise.

The count on list one is the number that matters, and it is usually the surprise. Teams predict 5% and find 30%, because every account list a rep ever pasted in, every event scan, every LinkedIn export and every referral typed in from memory lands there. Those records cost nothing to store and quietly do not participate in a single campaign.

Also use the record timeline before you draw conclusions. After each pass, HubSpot writes a Record Enriched activity showing how many properties changed and which ones, filterable from the Activities tab. On a sample of twenty records that tells you which fields your dataset actually gains from enrichment and which were already complete, and stops you buying a solution to a field that was never empty.

Do this before you shop, not after. A quote from any enrichment vendor is meaningless until you know whether your gap is 400 records or 40,000, and the free native pass is what converts that guess into a number.

When is HubSpot's native enrichment enough on its own?

For a large number of HubSpot teams it is genuinely enough, and no third-party tool should be bought. The clearest case is an inbound-led business: contacts arrive through forms carrying a work email, native enrichment adds title, seniority, industry, headcount and revenue band automatically, lead scoring and routing improve immediately, and the marginal cost is zero.

Four signals that you are in that group. Your acquisition is inbound or product-led, so records arrive with an email attached. Your sales motion is email and meetings rather than cold calling, so a missing direct dial costs you nothing. Your segmentation runs on firmographics, industry, employee count, revenue band, technologies, which is precisely the half of the property list HubSpot covers well. And your Has been enriched is False list, from the audit above, is a small fraction of your database.

There is a second case worth naming because it is often overlooked: company-level enrichment on its own. Even if your contact data has gaps, HubSpot's 27 company properties are broad, free at the point of use, and refresh continuously. Enriching only companies and leaving contacts alone is a legitimate configuration, and it powers territory assignment, account scoring and ABM segmentation without anybody buying anything.

A related HubSpot feature that pays for itself and gets almost no coverage: form shortening. When a returning visitor loads a form, HubSpot checks the enrichment dataset and only shows the fields it cannot fill itself. Shorter forms convert better, and the enriched fields land anyway. If you are running HubSpot forms and have never turned it on, that is a higher-return five minutes than any enrichment purchase.

We sell enrichment, and this section still says do not buy it yet. That is deliberate. The teams for whom a waterfall is worth the money are the ones in the next section, and selling it to anyone else produces a churned customer and a bad review.

When do you need a third-party enrichment tool on top of HubSpot?

You need one when the field you are missing is a contact email address or a direct dial, because those are the two things HubSpot's native enrichment does not return at any tier. Everything else is a judgement call. Those two are structural.

Five situations where the gap is real. Outbound prospecting, where you build target account lists and need the people at them, and the records arrive with a name and a company and nothing else. Any calling motion, because a company switchboard is not a direct dial and no amount of native enrichment produces one. Conference, webinar and partner lists, which arrive as names and companies and go straight into the ineligible pile. Post-job-change re-acquisition, where a contact's old work email is dead and a new one has to be found rather than refreshed, which is a lookup and not an update. Deliverability work, because native enrichment never checks whether the address already on a record still accepts mail, and a HubSpot database that has been accumulating for three years typically has a meaningful share of addresses that will bounce.

There is a sixth that is less about missing fields than about where the work happens: net-new prospecting. HubSpot enriches records that are already in HubSpot. Finding people who are not in your CRM yet is a different job, done by a search tool, and native enrichment has no view on it.

The honest framing for all six is supplement, not replace. Nothing here argues for turning HubSpot's enrichment off. It is free, it runs continuously, it respects human edits, and its company-side coverage is strong. The right architecture is native enrichment handling the base layer at zero marginal cost, and a paid tool spending money only on the records the free layer provably could not fill.

How does waterfall enrichment fill the gaps HubSpot leaves?

A waterfall runs each lookup across several providers in sequence and stops at the first one that returns an answer it can verify, which is how it finds contact fields a single dataset does not hold. Cleanlist walks a pool of 25+ providers on every lookup, verifies each candidate work email at the mailbox before accepting it, and charges once for the answer no matter how many providers had to run. On the Cleanlist 500-Lead Enrichment Benchmark, 2026, run on 500 stratified B2B leads, that returned a verified work email for 98% and a direct dial for 85%.

The reason this is the right shape for the HubSpot gap specifically is that the gap is a coverage problem, not a quality problem. HubSpot's dataset is not wrong about the records it holds, it simply does not hold a contact email for people who are not in it, and adding one more single dataset on top reproduces the same failure at a different edge. A cascade fails only when every provider in it fails.

The pricing is per field returned, which keeps the arithmetic on a HubSpot cleanup legible. A verified work email is 1 credit. A direct dial is 10. Both on the same contact is 11. A company record is 1. A row that comes back empty costs nothing, so escalating deep into the pool on a hard record is free when it fails. People Search and Company Search cost 0 credits. Pushing a finished lead into a CRM costs 0.2 credits. Plans are Starter $79 for 1,500 credits, Pro $229 for 5,000 and Scale $599 for 15,000, with 25% off annual billing.

Two worked examples on a real HubSpot cleanup. Say the audit found 3,000 contacts with Has been enriched False and no email. Filling those is 3,000 credits, plus 600 to sync the results back at 0.2 each, so 3,600 credits, which at the Pro rate of $229 for 5,000 is about $165 and fits inside a single month. Then say 500 of those are accounts you actually intend to call. Adding a direct dial to contacts that now have an email is the phone-only price of 10 credits each, so 5,000 credits plus 100 to sync, about $234 at the same Pro rate. Phone is where enrichment budgets go, which is the argument for choosing the 500 rather than dialling the 3,000.

A new workspace opens on Scale for 14 days with 250 credits, 3 seats and no card, which is enough for roughly 22 contacts with both an email and a direct dial, or 250 with an email alone. That is the right size for testing a sample of your own ineligible list rather than reading a benchmark somebody else ran.

Where does third-party enriched data land in HubSpot properties?

Into standard HubSpot properties wherever one exists, and into a custom property where it does not, which decides how much setup you do once. Cleanlist's HubSpot field map is published rather than discovered during onboarding, and it looks like this.

A verified work email lands on the Contact's Email. A direct dial and mobile land on the Contact's Phone number and Mobile phone number. Job title and seniority land on the Contact's Job title. Company and domain land on the Company's Name and Company domain name. Industry lands on the Company's Industry. Employee count lands on the Company's Number of employees. Those six use HubSpot stock properties and need no configuration at all.

Three need a property created once. LinkedIn URL lands on a custom Contact property, since HubSpot's own enrichment writes its LinkedIn URL to a property your portal may or may not already expose. ICP score lands on a custom Cleanlist ICP score property on the Contact. Custom AI research columns land on any property you map them to, on the Contact or the Company.

Because the destinations are ordinary properties, everything downstream picks the data up with no further work: list segmentation, lead scoring, workflow enrollment triggers, personalisation tokens in emails, reports. There is no parallel data model to reconcile and no separate object to teach reps about.

The connection is OAuth, and the sync is two-way for contacts, companies, deals and lists, so records can be pulled from HubSpot to be enriched and written back. Two-way CRM sync is a Cleanlist Pro and Scale feature. On the HubSpot side it works across every tier including the free CRM, which is a useful asymmetry: a team on free HubSpot cannot use HubSpot's own enrichment at all, since that starts at Starter, but can still connect and enrich. CSV export works on every Cleanlist plan and CSV upload from Starter upward, so a round trip through a file is always available as a fallback. Cleanlist does not send email; enriched contacts go one way out to Outreach, Salesloft and Lemlist when a sequencer is the destination.

One cost-control feature worth setting up on day one, because it is the difference between a sane bill and a silly one. Cleanlist's People Search reads a connected HubSpot and can exclude anybody already in it, filtering on Not in your CRM, by record owner, or by last activity. Current customers, open opportunities and contacts a teammate already owns drop out of a prospecting list before a single credit is spent, which is the same idea as the Has been enriched audit applied at the front of the funnel instead of the back.

What does HubSpot's enrichment opt-out system mean for your CRM data?

Individuals can ask HubSpot to remove their professional data from its commercial dataset, and when they do, HubSpot notifies every account that previously received enrichment data about them. If you use native enrichment you will receive these notices, and they are not spam or an error.

What actually happens on your side is narrower than the email subject suggests. The contact is not deleted from your CRM. Data you received from enrichment stays. Data you or your team entered manually stays. What stops is future enrichment updates for that person, and HubSpot marks them with an enrichment opt out property. HubSpot's documentation is explicit that once someone is removed from the commercial dataset they cannot be re-enriched later, ever.

The administrative side has a switch worth deciding on deliberately. Super Admins get an email titled "Action needed: Enriched data delete requests pending" and can either assign each request to a person to action manually, or turn on automatic action so enriched data is deleted from the account without anybody touching it. Either way a contact timeline event records the deletion. Manual gives you a review step, automatic guarantees nothing sits in a queue for three weeks. Most teams should pick automatic and tell their legal team they did.

Two distinctions that HubSpot spells out and that people routinely get wrong. An enrichment opt-out is not a marketing email unsubscribe, and the two are unrelated: someone can be out of the dataset and still a willing subscriber. And an opt-out for one contact does not affect enrichment for anyone else in your account.

The part that needs a decision rather than a note is the data you have on that person only because enrichment gave it to you. HubSpot's guidance is to evaluate with your legal team whether you have a separate basis to keep it. If you collected the same field independently, through a form submission or a direct conversation, you generally do. If the only reason the field exists on the record is the dataset the person just left, that is a real question and it is better answered once as a policy than record by record under time pressure. The same reasoning applies to any third-party enrichment you run: whoever your provider is, ask which subprocessors supplied the data and what their opt-out route looks like, because that is the document a data protection review asks for first.

How do you choose between HubSpot data enrichment tools?

Choose on the specific field you are missing, not on database size, because for a HubSpot team the decision has already been narrowed to one of three jobs: contact acquisition, phone data, or intent.

If the gap is contact emails and direct dials on records you already hold, you want multi-provider coverage with verification included, and the evaluation is a bake-off rather than a demo. Take 200 to 500 real records from the Has been enriched False list, run them through each candidate unchanged, and compare four numbers: how many came back with a work email, how many with a direct dial, what each run cost, and how many of the returned emails survive an independent verification pass run somewhere other than the tool that produced them. That last check is the one people skip and the one that separates vendors, because a tool that pattern-guesses gaps posts a high fill rate and a low survival rate, and the difference arrives later as bounces charged to your sending domain.

If the gap is intent, meaning you want to know which accounts are in a buying cycle rather than how to reach them, a platform built around signals is what you are shopping for, and ZoomInfo and Cognism are the serious options. No waterfall answers that question, ours included.

If you want to compose your own multi-step research pipelines and have somebody whose job is to own them, Clay is built for exactly that and is the right answer for that profile.

If you want a large stored database to browse and slice as a research surface rather than fill gaps in a list you already have, license a database. Apollo and ZoomInfo are that shape.

Five questions to ask any enrichment vendor before the bake-off, because the answers change how you read the result. Are misses billed, or does a lookup that returns nothing cost money? Is billing per provider call or per accepted field, since per call makes a budget impossible to forecast? Is verification inside the run or sold as a separate step? Are catch-all and role-based addresses reported honestly, or returned as green? And who tunes the provider order, and how often, since a cascade tuned once at signup decays quietly as provider coverage shifts.

One last filter specific to HubSpot buyers: check the sync direction before you sign. A tool that only pushes into HubSpot cannot read your database to work out what needs enriching, so somebody exports a CSV every month forever. Two-way is what turns this from a project into a background process.

When is Cleanlist the wrong choice for a HubSpot team?

When the field you need is not a contact field, when your security review has certification requirements we do not meet, or when native enrichment already covers your gap. All three are common enough to state plainly.

Certification. Cleanlist does not hold SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001. ZoomInfo and Cognism do. If either is a hard requirement in your procurement process, that is a genuine reason to buy elsewhere and worth establishing on day one rather than in week six. The providers in the waterfall are disclosed as subprocessors in the privacy policy, which is the document a data protection review will ask for first.

Scope. Cleanlist finds and verifies who somebody is and how to reach them. It does not tell you that they are in a buying cycle, and it has no intent product. If your pipeline problem is timing rather than contactability, this is not the purchase.

The stored field boundary. The stored contact and company record is work email, direct dial, LinkedIn URL, title, seniority, department, company name, domain, headcount, industry, headquarters location and founded year, with up to 180 firmographic properties on an enriched company record. Anything past that set, funding events, hiring signals, tech stack or recent news, is produced by an AI research column at the moment you ask for it rather than read out of a stored field, and it is priced separately at 0.5 to 3 credits a lead. Worth noting for HubSpot teams specifically: several fields on HubSpot's native company list, Web Technologies, Total Money Raised, Company keywords and Is public among them, are stored properties for HubSpot and research columns for us. If those are what you are short of, HubSpot's own enrichment is both better suited and free.

Hygiene. Deduplication, merging and standardising records already in HubSpot is HubSpot's job, through its own data quality tools. Enriching a database before you deduplicate it means paying to enrich the same person twice.

Volume shape. A list holds 2,500 leads on any paid plan and 100 on the Free plan, and bulk runs are asynchronous, returning a workflow id you poll rather than holding a request open. A team wanting to enrich a 200,000-record database in one action should plan it as a sequence of segments, and should be talking about the API, which is a Pro and Scale feature and is held back during the 14-day trial.

The shortest description of the boundary: Cleanlist is an orchestration layer over other people's data rather than a data vendor holding a database of its own, which is exactly why it fills gaps a single dataset like HubSpot's leaves, and exactly why it is not the tool for the jobs above.