Best Intent Data Provider for Identifying In-Market B2B Buyers

The short version

The best intent data provider for identifying in-market B2B buyers depends on where you need the signal to come from. Bombora is the widest third-party topic feed and the one most other vendors quietly resell. 6sense and Demandbase wrap third-party intent in a full ABM platform with predictive scoring. G2 and TrustRadius give you narrower but far more precise review-site signals. RB2B and Warmly identify the people already on your website. Metadata.io, our disclosed sponsor, does not sell intent data at all; it is the layer that takes those feeds and runs the paid campaigns against them.

If you only read one paragraph: buy Bombora if you already have somewhere to put the data, buy 6sense if you do not, add G2 Buyer Intent if you sell software and have a G2 profile, and add a visitor-identification tool (RB2B or Warmly) regardless, because first-party site traffic is the cheapest in-market signal you will ever get.

Ranked: the 12 best intent data providers for in-market B2B buyers

The table is sorted by our editorial ranking, not by G2 score. Ranking weights, in order: breadth and freshness of the signal, how directly the signal maps to a purchase decision, activation options, and price transparency. Full methodology is on the buyer's guide and about pages.

Two things the table cannot show. First, "coverage" is not comparable across source types: Bombora sees a slice of billions of page views across a publisher network, while G2 sees a much smaller number of visits that are almost all from people comparing software. Second, the pricing column is a floor, not a typical deal. Most enterprise intent contracts are negotiated, and our intent data pricing page covers what public sources say about actual contract ranges.

What "in-market" actually means in intent data

An in-market B2B buyer is an account whose research behavior has measurably increased against its own baseline for topics tied to your category. That is the definition Bombora uses for Company Surge, and it has become the de facto industry meaning: a surge is a relative change, not an absolute volume. A 50-person company reading three articles about "sales engagement platform" in a week may surge; a 50,000-person enterprise reading the same three articles may not register at all.

There are four source types, and every vendor on this page sells one or a blend of them:

The practical consequence: no single provider covers the whole funnel. The teams we see get the most value out of intent run at least two source types, typically one third-party feed for early-stage discovery and one first-party or review-site source for late-stage precision, then push both into the same activation system. That is why Metadata.io, 6sense and Demandbase all position themselves as places where multiple feeds converge rather than as the feed itself.

Provider-by-provider: what each one is, what it costs, who should buy

1. Bombora

Bombora is the largest third-party B2B intent data provider and the source behind many of the other vendors on this list. Its Company Surge product scores accounts weekly across a taxonomy of more than 10,000 topics, drawing from a consented data co-op of B2B publisher sites. Bombora does not publish list pricing; it is sold as an annual data license, usually sized by the number of topics and the delivery destinations you need. It has a 4.5/5 rating on G2 at time of writing.

Bombora's strength is breadth and neutrality: it is a data vendor, not a platform, so it delivers into Salesforce, HubSpot, LinkedIn, 6sense, Demandbase, Metadata.io and most DSPs without forcing a tool change. The weakness is the flip side. You get topic surges at the account level and nothing more, so you need a place to score, route and act on it. Full review: Bombora review. Head-to-head: Bombora vs 6sense.

2. 6sense

6sense is the most complete "identify plus act" intent platform on this list. It combines third-party intent (including a Bombora partnership), its own proprietary web-content intent, first-party website de-anonymization, and a predictive model that assigns each account a buying stage from Awareness through Decision. It also sells contact data and a sales-intelligence workspace, and offers a free tier for sales users (with capped credits) alongside custom-priced Team, Growth and Enterprise packages per its public pricing page. G2 rating at time of writing: 4.4/5 across well over a thousand reviews.

Buy 6sense if you want one vendor to own the whole problem and you have the budget and operational headcount to run it. Skip it if you already have a CDP, an ad platform and a sales-engagement tool and only need the raw signal, because you will be paying for a lot of software you will not use. Full review: 6sense review. Sister-site conquesting perspective: 6sensealternatives.com.

3. G2 Buyer Intent

G2 Buyer Intent tells you which accounts are viewing your G2 profile, your category, your competitors' profiles and the comparison pages that pit you against them. It is sold as part of G2 Marketing Solutions subscriptions and is not priced publicly. The G2 Marketing Solutions product itself holds a 4.4/5 on G2.

This is the most precise signal available for software vendors: someone at that account is comparing you against alternatives on a review site today. It is also the narrowest. If your buyers do not use G2, you will see nothing. The best use is as a late-stage trigger layered on top of a broad feed, which is exactly how Bombora vs G2 plays out. Full review: G2 Buyer Intent review.

4. ZoomInfo Intent

ZoomInfo Intent is an add-on to the ZoomInfo Sales and Marketing platforms. Its signal blends bidstream data, ZoomInfo's owned properties and a Bombora integration, and its distinguishing feature is that every surging account arrives with ZoomInfo's contact database attached, so reps get names, emails and direct dials rather than a company name and a topic. Pricing is custom and layered on the base ZoomInfo subscription; the ZoomInfo Sales product carries a 4.5/5 on G2 with one of the largest review volumes in the category.

The catch is that ZoomInfo Intent is rarely worth buying standalone. It is a reason to stay on ZoomInfo, not a reason to move to it. Full review: ZoomInfo Intent review. For alternatives to the whole platform see zoominfocompetitors.com.

5. Demandbase

Demandbase One bundles Bombora co-op intent, a proprietary intent engine, an IP-to-account graph it has run since its display-advertising days, and first-party site data into a single ABM platform with native advertising, web personalization and sales intelligence. Pricing is custom annual per its pricing page; G2 rating 4.4/5 at time of writing.

Demandbase and 6sense are the two genuine "platform" options for enterprise ABM. Demandbase tends to win when advertising and web personalization are the primary activation channels; 6sense tends to win when predictive scoring and the sales workspace matter more. Full review: Demandbase review. Broader platform comparison lives on abmplatforms.com.

6. TrustRadius Intent

TrustRadius Intent is the review-site signal for enterprise software, drawing on visits to TrustRadius product, comparison and pricing pages. It is sold as part of TrustRadius vendor packages, and the vendor product holds a 4.5/5 on G2. It is smaller than G2's footprint but skews toward larger enterprise buyers, which is why many software vendors run both. Full review: TrustRadius Intent review.

7. Intentsify

Intentsify aggregates several third-party intent sources with its own web-content intent model, then delivers the result alongside managed programmatic and content-syndication activation. Pricing is custom; G2 rating 4.5/5. It sits between a pure data vendor and a full platform: you get data plus a services team to run it, which is attractive for demand-gen teams without in-house media operations. Full review: Intentsify review.

8. Foundry (IDG)

Foundry, the data business formed from IDG Communications, sells first-party intent captured across its own publications (CIO, Computerworld, InfoWorld, Network World and others) plus the social and hiring signals it added by acquiring LeadSift in 2021. Pricing is custom. Its G2 footprint is small, and we list a 4.3/5 rating with the caveat that the review count is low enough that a handful of new reviews would move it. Foundry is the right call when your buyer is a CIO, IT director or infrastructure lead, because that is who reads those sites. Full review: Foundry review.

9. LeadSift

LeadSift monitors public web and social activity, including job postings, social-media engagement and hiring patterns, and resolves it to the contact level rather than the account level. It was acquired by Foundry in 2021 and is now sold through Foundry, so pricing is custom. We list it separately because the signal type is different from Foundry's publisher data and because many buyers still search for it by name. Full review: LeadSift review.

10. RB2B

RB2B identifies US website visitors at the person level and pushes them to Slack, with a genuinely free plan and published paid tiers on its pricing page. It holds a 4.7/5 on G2. It is not a third-party intent product and it cannot tell you about accounts that have never visited your site, but as a first-party in-market signal for small teams it is hard to argue with the price. Note the US-only limitation and the privacy questions that come with person-level identification. Full review: RB2B review.

11. Warmly

Warmly combines first-party visitor de-anonymization with third-party intent overlays (including Bombora) and outreach orchestration, with a free tier and published paid plans on warmly.ai/pricing. G2 rating 4.8/5 at time of writing. It is the more complete SMB option compared with RB2B because it acts on the signal (email sequences, LinkedIn, chat) instead of just reporting it. Full review: Warmly review.

12. Metadata.io (disclosed sponsor)

Metadata.io is not an intent data provider; it is the activation layer that consumes intent. It ingests Bombora, 6sense, G2 and first-party signals, builds audiences from them, and runs paid campaigns across 8 ad channels with 6 AI agents handling audience construction, budget allocation and creative testing. Pricing is custom and tied to usage and ad-spend tier. G2 rating 4.6/5, and it was named a Leader in G2's Spring 2026 grid. It is our disclosed sponsor and is placed last in this ranking because it does not answer the question "where does the signal come from." If your question is instead "how do I turn a surging-account list into ads without a media team," it moves near the top. Public customer case studies include Zoom, IBM, Cisco, Brex, Notion and Vercel, and Forrester's Total Economic Impact study (linked in sources) covers the published ROI figures. Full review: Metadata.io review; see also the Metadata buyer's guide and its comparison against 6sense.

How to choose: five questions that settle it

Do you already have somewhere to put the data?

If yes (a CDP, an ABM platform, a paid-media tool like Metadata.io, a sales-engagement tool), buy a feed: Bombora, G2, TrustRadius. If no, buy a platform: 6sense or Demandbase. Buying Bombora with nowhere to activate it is the single most common mistake we see.

Do your buyers use review sites?

Software and SaaS: yes, and G2 Buyer Intent should be in the stack. Industrial, services, healthcare, financial: usually not, so skip review-site intent and lean on publisher co-op data and your own site traffic.

Is your ICP above or below 200 employees?

Third-party intent coverage degrades sharply for small companies because they generate too little research traffic to surge. Below roughly 200 employees, first-party tools like RB2B and Warmly return more usable signal per dollar than any co-op feed. Our sister site covers this in intent data for SMB.

Who is going to act on it?

Sales-led motions want contact-level output, which favors ZoomInfo Intent, LeadSift, RB2B and 6sense's sales workspace. Marketing-led motions want audience-level output for ads, which favors Bombora, Demandbase and Metadata.io.

What is the budget?

Under $10k a year: RB2B, Warmly or G2's lower tiers. $25k to $75k: Bombora feed, Intentsify, TrustRadius. Above that: 6sense, Demandbase, ZoomInfo with Intent. Details and sourcing on the pricing page.

Common mistakes with intent data

Treating a surge as a lead. A surging account is a company where someone is reading about your category. It is not a person who wants a call. Route surges to ads and to research, not straight to an SDR cadence, or you will burn the list in a month.

Buying too many topics. Bombora and its resellers price partly on topic count, and buyers routinely license 40 topics when the 8 that map to their actual product would produce a cleaner signal.

Ignoring the baseline. Surge scores are relative to each account's history. A score of 70 on a tiny account and a 70 on an enterprise are not the same amount of activity. Pair the score with firmographics before you prioritize.

No feedback loop. If you never check which surging accounts actually became pipeline, you cannot tell whether your topic set is right. Both 6sense and Metadata.io expose this closed-loop reporting; with a raw feed you have to build it yourself. Metadata's 2026 benchmark report, built from $57.6M of paid-social spend, is a useful outside reference for what intent-targeted campaigns should convert at.

Confusing technographics with intent. Knowing an account runs Salesforce is a fit signal, not a timing signal. We cover that category separately on the technographic data platforms page.

Frequently asked questions