People Data Labs alternatives for company data

This guide is for a data or product engineer who takes company data from People Data Labs (PDL), through its APIs or under a data licence, and is weighing other sources for the company part. It sets out what PDL documents for that dataset, what each product is built for, which Fokals dataset delivers each field of a company panel, and what else is on offer.

One point comes first: PDL documents a person dataset beside its company dataset. Its person schema lists names, emails, phone numbers, work experience and education, and its person endpoints enrich, search and identify a person. It also documents an IP Enrichment API that returns the company associated with an IP address. Fokals is built around the company itself: firmographic, technographic, hiring and intent data on public and private companies worldwide, refreshed daily, with every observation dated and every dataset on one company ID.

What People Data Labs documents for company data

PDL's company schema sets out the fields of a company record in groups. Base fields are available to every customer by default, among them name, website, size, employee count, founding year, industry, NAICS and SIC codes, location, ticker, MIC exchange and total funding raised. Premium groups add headcount insights, which the schema says are built by aggregating its person dataset, and job posting insights built from its job posting dataset. Technology data fields are marked as beta, and a further premium group covers related companies, subsidiaries and acquisitions.

Three routes reach the data. The Company Enrichment API makes a one-to-one match and gives access to the fields of the schema, which is data enrichment in its plainest form; its input parameters include a name, a website, a ticker or a social profile. The Company Search API takes an Elasticsearch or SQL query and retrieves the company records that match it. PDL also licenses data in bulk: its data licence overview describes bulk person datasets under an annual licence, and its company data page lists data licence feeds beside its APIs. Its page on receiving data lists delivery by direct download or to S3, Snowflake, Azure, GCP or Databricks. A flattened table format comes in Parquet or CSV.

PDL's page on data updates says API data is updated monthly and licence flat files monthly or quarterly. The page on data sources and compliance names two categories, proprietary sources and public data sources, and says the job posting dataset is sourced only from company career pages. The company stats page counts more than 76 million company records as of data version 35.2. PDL also publishes a free company dataset, a subset of the full one, under the Creative Commons Attribution licence.

Why teams look for an alternative

The reasons are about scope and fit.

• Company-level data throughout. A policy or a client contract that admits company-level data, drawn from what companies publish, announce and file.
• Dated events as well as a profile. A dated event for every technology adoption and removal, evidence-backed intent scores by topic and announcements by event type are datasets in their own right, beside the fields of a profile.
• Stated figures. A research process that wants headcount as the company states it, each figure with the date it refers to.
• Point-in-time use. A model or a back-test that needs daily and weekly datasets written once after the period closes and never revised.
• Listed-company keys. A join on ISIN, LEI or FIGI, with a brand carrying the identifiers of its listed parent.
• Licence fit. Terms for embedding in a product or for redistribution, agreed directly with the vendor.

People Data Labs and Fokals side by side

The PDL column repeats what the documentation linked above states. The Fokals column follows the data dictionary.

What each is built for

The first four lines restate the PDL documentation linked above. The last four follow the Fokals methodology.

• People as part of the question. PDL's person dataset and person endpoints are built for who works at a company, how to reach them and how its workforce is changing.
• The company behind an IP address. Its IP Enrichment API returns the company associated with an IP address.
• One-to-one enrichment and search. Its Company Enrichment API makes a one-to-one match, and its Company Search API retrieves the company records that match a query.
• Licence files in your cloud. It lists delivery of licence files by direct download or to S3, Snowflake, Azure, GCP or Databricks, with flattened tables in Parquet or CSV.
• Company-level data throughout. Fokals is sourced from first-party company sources and public records and processed in-house: what companies publish on their own websites and careers pages, what they announce, and what they file. The sourcing statement holds the detail a due-diligence review asks for.
• Dated change. Every Fokals observation is dated, every technology adoption and removal is a dated event, and daily and weekly datasets are written once after the period closes and never revised.
• Scores with evidence. Weekly Intent Scores carry the dated signals behind them, so a rep or a model reviewer can open the source.
• Listed-company keys. A listed company carries its ticker, MIC, ISIN, LEI and share-class FIGI, and a brand carries the identifiers of its listed parent.

Fokals is delivered direct, by REST API and as bulk files in JSON, JSON Lines or CSV, which you load into your warehouse or cloud storage with the platform's own loader. Licensing is by written agreement for internal use, embedding in a product or redistribution.

Moving the company part, dataset by dataset

Suppose your product shows a company panel fed by PDL: size, headcount, hiring, technologies and funding. The table sets each PDL field beside the Fokals dataset that delivers it.

The same company ID carries more than the panel shows today: weekly Intent Scores with the evidence behind each score, Company News classified into 13 event types, Web Traffic as the monthly tier of each website, and Website Profile with the markets, languages, currencies and apps of each site. Adding one of them to the panel is a single join on the company ID.

Run the two side by side on a sample before you move anything. This query returns the Fokals headcount points for records you already hold from PDL, once you have normalised the website field to a bare domain.

with domain_map as (
  select distinct domain, company_id
  from company_technologies
)
select
  p.id        as pdl_id,
  p.website,
  m.company_id,
  h.as_of,
  h.employees,
  h.source,
  h.ref
from pdl_companies p
left join domain_map m
  on m.domain = p.website
left join company_headcounts h
  on h.company_id = m.company_id
order by p.id, h.as_of;

The two headcounts measure different things. PDL's schema defines employee count as the number of people now working at the company, counted from its profiles. Employee Headcount delivers stated headcount over time: each point is a published figure with the date it refers to, so it can be cited as stated. An illustrative case: Acme Robotics, an invented company, shows 1,240 in a profile and 1,100 in Employee Headcount, dated nine months earlier. Both are right for what each measures: a current count of profiles, and a stated figure on a stated date.

Job postings need a closer look. PDL's job posting schema marks that dataset as beta and includes the description text, and its page on daily deliveries dates the start of the full file to 2024.

Fokals works from the same kind of source, the roles each company publishes on its own careers pages. It delivers every role labelled by job function, seniority and ten role flags, with location, work mode, advertised pay on one annual US-dollar scale and the tools named. Hiring Activity adds daily open, new and closed postings per company, written once after the day closes. The article on why we read postings from the company's own board explains the choice of source.

Other alternatives to People Data Labs

• Company, employee and jobs data. Coresignal offers company, employee and jobs records collected from the public web, through APIs and as datasets. The guide to Coresignal alternatives covers it.
• Web-sourced company profiles. Veridion builds company records from web crawling, registry ingestion and public data assets, and its delivery page lists APIs, batch files and third-party delivery. See the guide to Veridion alternatives.
• Private-market funding data. Crunchbase offers round-by-round funding data and firmographics through its API, for enriching internal systems or, under data licensing, for customer-facing products. See the guide to Crunchbase alternatives.
• Registry and credit data. Dun & Bradstreet issues the D-U-N-S Number and says its data is sourced from public registries, websites and trusted partners, with business scores and corporate family trees. See the guide to Dun & Bradstreet alternatives.

Frequently asked questions

The queries and code on this page are examples to adapt. Test them in your own environment before you rely on them.

What this page says about the products it names was checked against their public documentation on 4 October 2026. Product and company names are trademarks of their owners. Fokals is not affiliated with them or endorsed by them.