Lusha.co Review & Alternatives — A B2B Lead Gen Software With a Dubious Past

Lusha is a b2b lead generation and data enrichment tool that aims to help companies generate qualified leads and maximize conversions. Although a relatively new software company, Lusha has already made quite a name for itself, earning G2’s top 100 software 2020 award. 

In reality, the software’s pretty basic, and it’s quite pricey for what it does. At the same time, there are quite a few alarming reviews from the software’s users on various forums, portals, and review sites. 

Before we get into the meat of things, we want to quickly address the question of why you should listen to what we have to say about Lusha. 

Why You Should Trust Us About Lusha

Regardless of what piece of software you look up on Google, you’ll likely find hundreds of reviews, most of which are positive. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that most software companies have an affiliate program in place that lets bloggers monetize their websites by promoting the product and selling subscriptions. 

Although not a bad thing by default, the sheer number of affiliate reviews makes it next-to-impossible to ascertain how good the software really is. Most of them will tell you that the software they’re “reviewing” is the best thing since the peanut butter and jam sandwich.

These heavily subjective reviews won’t make your decision any easier. If you’re trying to make up your mind between two or more lead gen and/or data enrichment tools, reading how each of them is “the best tool on the market” is little more than a waste of time. 

We take a fundamentally different approach. We’ll go through each of Lusha’s features in detail and give you an objective review of the software so you can make an informed decision and see how well it integrates into your workflow. We’ll also introduce you to a couple of alternatives, so you’ll have more options if you determine Lusha doesn’t align with your business’ needs. 

The reason why we’re in a position to provide you with a comprehensive review of Lusha is that we have extensive experience with b2b software. 

Our CEO, Mathieu Picard, is also the founder of AnyLeads — a company that has helped giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon generate over 10,000,000 qualified leads. 

When it comes to b2b lead generation and conversions, we don’t just run our mouths — we have extraordinary results to back our claims! 

With the right software at your fingertips, you can generate thousands of leads for your business and convert them into paying customers. Let’s jump right in and see whether Lusha has the potential to be that revenue-boosting software for your company.

About Lusha 

The idea behind Lusha is to help b2b companies gather a wealth of valuable data on their leads, contacts, and customers that they can act on. The tool not only allows you to identify and get in touch with qualified leads, but it also pulls detailed information on each contact from the web and b2b social media, allowing you to streamline your outreach efforts and helping you turn cold leads into loyal customers. 

Lusha Homepage

Lusha boasts an impressive client list that includes some of the most successful companies in the online business world, such as:

• Microsoft

• Samsung

• IBM

• Facebook

• Intel

While this certainly instills confidence, it’s important to keep in mind that some of Lusha’s users have had serious issues with the way the company handles their private data. 

We’ll go into more detail regarding Lusha’s Privacy Policy later in the review. For now, let’s get back to the tool itself. 

Lusha Free Plan

From Lusha’s homepage, you can get started with a free plan by entering your business email address. You’ll then be redirected to a new page and asked to fill out the form and verify your email before you can start using the tool. 

That’s all well and good, and Lusha doesn’t ask for credit card information, so there’s no risk from being charged automatically after the free trial expires. The company does ask you for your phone number, which we strongly dislike. If you hate spammy promotional text messages and cold-calls from random companies as much as we do, the good news is that you can always input a randomly generated phone number. 

Lusha’s Free Trial Form

After you complete the form and verify the email, the tool will prompt you to install the Google Chrome extension. While you can click the “View My Account” button to go straight to the tool’s dashboard, you will have to add the extension before you can start using Lusha. 

After adding the extension to your browser, Lusha will automatically redirect you to a LinkedIn profile of one of its employees. Here, you can see how the extension works first-hand. 

Lusha Chrome Extension

The plug-in pulls the person’s contact information, as well as other valuable data, such as:

1. Company name and domain

2. Number of employees

3. Industry information and tags

4. Social media profiles

One thing to understand here is that Lusha applies strict limitations to the free plan. Rather than seeing someone’s email address and phone number right off the bat, you’ll first have to click “Show.” Every time you do so, you’re spending one credit, and the free plan only gives you five of those. 

So, you can only add five contacts per month with the free plan, but that should be sufficient to get a sense of how the extension works, right? Wrong. You only get to see the person’s name, email, and phone number and can add them to your contact list, which you can access from the tool’s dashboard. 

Other than that, you’ll have absolutely no clue what the other features of Lusha are and how you can utilize them. To make matters worse, the “Professional” pricing plan, which is anything but cheap, only increases the credit limit to 50, but still locks you out of all the other features. Paying $39/month per user for 50 leads isn’t exactly a bargain. 

Lusha Pricing

The notion that you cannot even export contacts with a “Professional” plan is beyond ridiculous. You can only save 50 contacts per month within the app, and you have to add them to your mailing lists manually if you actually want to leverage the lead information. 

Surely we don’t need to tell you that there are far better alternatives out there that can do a lot more for less money.

The funny thing is, it doesn’t end there. If you want to utilize Lusha’s opt-in forms, you have to subscribe to yet another paid plan. The “Forms” free plan is a bit more generous, giving you 200 credits, but the $69/month paid version only states that you’ll have “more than 200 credits.” 

Lusha’s Forms Pricing

What does “more than 200” even mean? The way the company worded it, it can mean anything between 201 and a million leads, but there’s no way to know for sure. 

This is what people behind Lusha mean when they say it’s a “b2b lead gen and data enrichment” tool:

• You can create opt-in forms, but there are unclear limitations as to how many leads you can generate through them

• You can install a Chrome extension and will have to pay one credit every time you want to see someone’s email on LinkedIn

Lusha’s Chrome extension is, in all honesty, hilarious. It doesn’t give you any information on the lead that you wouldn’t be able to gather with two simple clicks. You already have to visit someone’s LinkedIn profile to utilize the Lusha Chrome extension. At that point, you’ll already see their job title, and might as well click the link to their company’s LinkedIn profile and go to the “About” section to see all the info the extension would otherwise provide.

Compared to b2b email & social media extractors, Lusha’s Chrome extension does little for the price you’d be paying to use it. 

Before we move on to the application itself and take a look at its features, we want to give you a quick overview of Lusha.

Lusha Features

Lusha’s features are as basic as they could possibly be. The tool has a singular functionality — importing business email addresses from LinkedIn. Lusha doesn’t even help you find leads. 

You have to visit every prospect’s profile manually. Most people will publicly display their email address if they’re open to receiving business proposals from other companies. What we’re alluding to is the fact that, for $39/month per user, Lusha saves you the time it would take you to click twice. 

When you click on “explore more” to search for new leads, all the extension does is open up the LinkedIn search bar in your stead. So, you basically click a fancy-looking button instead of clicking inside the search field — what a revolutionary way to streamline your b2b lead gen efforts, right? 

Other “features” of Lusha come down to:

1. Lists

2. Team

3. API

4. Integrations

Lists

Lusha’s Lists are simple tables with the names and other relevant info — at least in theory — of all the contacts you added via the extension. The trouble is, even in this basic form, the feature doesn’t actually work as intended, most of the time. 

Lusha Lists

The screenshot above should give you a good idea of how “reliable” of an enrichment tool Lusha truly is. The contact is the one the company uses to demonstrate how the Chrome extension works. Although the extension does pull data such as the contact’s job title, it’s evident that it doesn’t always properly import that info into the app. 

Once you save a bunch of contacts to Lusha, you can sort the view by date added, user, and source. The possible sources of leads include:

1. LinkedIn

2. Salesforce

3. Gmail

4. Lusha’s API 

From there, you can move contacts between different lists or export them as a CSV file.

Team

Lusha lets you add team members and create different groups within the app, with the idea of facilitating collaboration. Even with the most expensive plan, you can only add up to 120 contacts to the tool, and the only functionality Lusha offers is exporting the contact lists. 

How many team members does it take to sort 120 contacts into several lists and export them? Even with just two people, you’ll be paying $138/month to do something a single person can realistically do in less than 15 minutes. 

Granted, you can send emails straight from Lusha if you integrate your Gmail and Outlook accounts, so the Team feature can come in handy for sales representatives. But even then, Lusha doesn’t offer email automation, alerts, notification, or analytics, which begs the question — why would any sales rep use this tool in the first place?

API

Lusha offers an API that lets you “add premium data to your product.” We’re not even kidding — those are the exact words the company uses to describe what their API does. 

Lusha API 

In reality, all the API does is ensure that the email addresses you gather with Lusha are valid. It also authenticates the contacts’ phone numbers so your sales reps don’t waste time dialing non-existing ones. 

Don’t get us wrong — we’re not saying that’s a bad thing. The API does exactly what it’s intended to do. All we’re saying is that Lusha oversells it as something that will help provide you with “premium” data, which couldn’t be further from the truth. 

Integrations

One saving grace of this otherwise underwhelming tool is its integration capabilities. With a single click, you can integrate Lusha with your email account and a handful of CRMs.

Lusha currently integrates with:

• Salesforce

• Hubspot

• Pipedrive

• Outreach

• Salesloft

• Salesforce Auto-Enrich

• Gmail

• Outlook

The company does give you an opportunity to request additional integrations, but even if they do end up expanding the list, you’d likely have to wait for at least several months. 

Lusha’s Data Privacy Issues

It’s one thing for a tool to be basic and offer little in terms of functionality, but it’s a whole different story when a company is engaged in fraudulent activities. 

We’re not saying that’s necessarily the case, but there are quite a few complaints from outraged customers that accuse Lusha of selling their personal information to third parties. 

Accusations From Lusha’s Customers

These are just two examples of Lusha’s possible illegal practices, and there are many more you can find through a simple Google search. Customers claim that Lusha has been selling their phone numbers to businesses in the UK who have contacted them on multiple occasions with shady business proposals. 

Even if Lusha was the best b2b lead gen and data enrichment tool — and it’s probably one of the worst out there — these complaints alone would be reason enough to steer clear from this company. 

While Lusha seems to have sorted out the issues with the Privacy Policy page on their website, we wouldn’t risk giving them our personal information. If the company did sell users’ phone numbers, who’s to say they won’t abuse your credit card information as well? It’s always better to be safe than sorry.

White-Label Lusha Alternative to Find Thousands of Leads and Maximize Your Revenue

Given all the issues that plague Lusha, any piece of b2b software we’d recommend would be a much better alternative. 

At Sell SaaS, we specialize in fully white-label b2b email automation and lead generation software. What this means is that you can both use our powerful software to generate qualified leads and drive sales, as well as to resell it under your own brand. 

There are no “reseller license fees” or other hidden expenses. All you need to do is add your company name, logo, and colors to the software, and you can start reselling it immediately. You also get to dictate the price, and you’ll keep between 60% and 80% of every sale you make, depending on your partner status. 

You don’t even have to worry about the website setup and customer support — we’ll handle everything for you, so you can focus on selling. If you’re looking to launch a profitable SaaS business or want to upsell your existing customers and create an additional revenue stream — check out the most popular white-label software solutions we offer.

Get started today for free and skyrocket your profits with Sell SaaS!