Intent Data Providers Compared: Bombora, Demandbase, G2 and the Owned-Audience Alternative

Disclosure first, because it changes how you should read this. NorthRadar is one of the options below. We sell demand programs on comparison sites we own, which means we compete with several vendors on this list. We have included ourselves and applied the same five questions to our own product, including the places where the answer is worse than a competitor's. If that is not enough for you, the right response is to check the claims rather than trust the framing — every figure here is either published by the vendor, reported by a third party we name, or already stated elsewhere on this site.

Most roundups of this category are written by tool vendors and agencies who sell something adjacent. We are not a neutral party either. What we do have is the comparison research behind eight of these vendors, done vendor page by vendor page, and one consistent set of criteria to apply.

The Five Questions That Actually Separate These Vendors

Feature lists do not distinguish intent data products, because everyone lists the same features. These five questions do, and they are ordered by how much they determine everything downstream.

1. Who owned the page where the signal was recorded? Owned surface, a co-op of sites carrying a shared tag, an advertising bidstream, a review platform, or a marketplace. This decides what evidence can travel with the record.

2. Is the deliverable a person or a company? An account-level signal tells you someone at a company looked. A person-level record tells you who. The gap between them is where most disappointment in intent data lives, because finding the buying committee is the expensive part of the job.

3. Does the record include what else they considered? Knowing a buyer is evaluating your category is useful. Knowing they put you beside a named competitor last Tuesday is a different conversation.

4. What consent evidence travels with it? Not a compliance checkbox — the specific artefacts. Which property, what timestamp, what wording was shown.

5. Can you find out what it costs? Price opacity is not automatically a red flag, but it is a fact about the buying process you should plan for.

Bombora: The Co-op

Bombora runs a data co-op of thousands of B2B sites carrying its tag. It aggregates content consumption, resolves it to companies, and scores topic surges by comparing the last three weeks against a twelve-week baseline — a score of 60 or above counts as spiking.

Signal source: co-op. Deliverable: company, with a topic and a surge score. Consideration set: no. Consent: handled at the co-op level rather than travelling per record.

Price: no published list. Vendr reports a median of $25,000 a year across its purchases, a range from $13,000 to $80,450, annual contracts, and onboarding fees of $5,000 to $20,000.

Where Bombora is the better answer: breadth. A co-op spanning thousands of sites sees categories and accounts that no single publisher can, including accounts that have never touched your properties or ours. If your problem is "which accounts should we even be talking to", that is a coverage problem and Bombora is built for it. We are not, and cannot be — an owned-surface model only sees the people who came to our pages.

Demandbase: The Platform

Demandbase One bundles account identification, intent, advertising, sales intelligence and orchestration. Its intent reads the advertising bidstream through its own DSP — described as visibility across a million publishers — and folds in Bombora, G2 and TrustRadius intent alongside it.

Signal source: bidstream plus licensed third-party feeds. Deliverable: account. Consideration set: no, though competitor-topic activity is inferable. Consent: inherited from upstream sources.

Price: no published list. Vendr reports a median of $68,591 a year across 185 purchases, ranging from $24,000 to $164,265, with annual and multi-year terms common, and third-party research citing onboarding around $29,000.

Where Demandbase is the better answer: if you want one system to identify accounts, run the advertising against them and orchestrate the follow-up, it does all of that and we do none of it. We sell data and programs; we are not an ABM platform, and a team looking to consolidate tooling should not buy us expecting one.

G2: The Review Platform

G2 hosts around three million reviews across 200,000 products and 2,000 categories. Vendors buy profile tiers, review campaigns, ads on category and competitor pages, and Buyer Intent, which reports the organisations viewing a vendor's profile, comparison, alternatives and pricing pages, matched to accounts.

Signal source: owned review platform — second-party from your point of view. Deliverable: account. Consideration set: partially, and this is G2's real strength — a buyer on your comparison page has demonstrated something specific. Consent: platform-level.

Where G2 is the better answer: reviews. If a buyer's next question is "what do people who bought this actually say", G2 answers it and we do not host reviews at all. G2's intent is also recorded on a surface G2 owns, which puts it in the same structural category as ours, and honestly so.

Gartner Digital Markets: The Marketplace

Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice, sold as one programme. Vendors bid on software categories rather than keywords in a second-price auction, with a $2 minimum bid and a $500 monthly minimum. One campaign syndicates across all three, which Gartner's media kit put at more than nine million visitors a month across 60 localised sites before the sale of the business.

Signal source: owned marketplace. Deliverable: a lead, pay-per-lead. Consideration set: implied by category, not itemised per person. Consent: platform-level.

Where it is the better answer: transparent, genuinely self-serve entry. A $500 monthly minimum is the lowest barrier on this list, and you can start without a contract negotiation. Nothing we sell starts that small.

pharosIQ, DemandScience, Digitalzone, ViB: The Syndication Side

These four sell demand programmes rather than data subscriptions, and they are the closest comparison to what we do.

pharosIQ, formed in 2024 from MRP and CONTENTgine, sells atlasIQ buyer intelligence alongside IQsyndicate content syndication, full-funnel programmes, display, direct mail, sales development with BANT and call notes, events, and a Data-as-a-Service feed launched in June 2026.

DemandScience sells content syndication with guaranteed CPL and volume, tele-verified BANT and HQL leads, in-market buyer activation, media placement, digital audiences, a prospecting tool, data validation, and an account-based product.

Digitalzone, founded in 2013 with offices in New York and Pune, sells Programmatic Nurture — contact-level targeting, a Journey Pixel tracking activity across channels, and journey reporting with engagement scoring — on top of a data cloud curated over roughly ten years.

ViB, founded in 2008, runs the ViB Community, which it describes as millions of technology professionals, and is unusually transparent about price: dedicated emails from $2,200 a send, appointments from $1,400 a meeting held, content syndication from $45 a lead, and managed webinars.

Where they are the better answer: scale and telequalification. DemandScience's guaranteed CPL and volume commitments, and the tele-verified BANT that several of them offer, are things we do not sell — we do not run a calling floor. If your programme needs a human to confirm budget and timeline before a lead reaches sales, buy that from someone who does it. ViB's per-meeting appointment pricing has no equivalent in what we offer either.

Published roundups of this category put the going rate at roughly $80 to $100 per lead at director level and above, which is the benchmark to hold all of them against, us included.

NorthRadar: The Owned Comparison Surface

We own six software comparison sites and more than twenty newsletters. Buyers read them while they choose, and what they do there is recorded by our own tag.

Signal source: pages we own. Deliverable: a named person — role, work email, LinkedIn, phone, company, size band, industry, region. Consideration set: yes, itemised — the vendors the person put side by side, by name, with the timestamp. Consent: per record — the property, the ISO timestamp, the IP, and the exact opt-in wording shown at collection. Price: $45 per syndicated lead against a written spec with out-of-spec replacement; $4,500 per dedicated send; data and activation quoted by category.

Where we are the worse answer, and these are not hypothetical:

We cannot see accounts that have not visited our properties. That is a structural limit of owning the surface, and it is the exact problem a co-op or bidstream product solves. If your target list is mostly accounts with no presence in our categories, a third-party product will cover more of it than we will.

We do not tele-qualify. No calling floor, no BANT confirmation by a human.

We are not an ABM platform. No DSP, no orchestration, no ad serving against your account list beyond exporting a matched audience.

We publish audience sizes as bands rather than precise counts — a 25 million total addressable audience across the network, with per-category figures given as ranges. That is deliberate, because the deliverable number moves with suppression, consent state and how tightly a programme is specified. It also means we look less precise than competitors quoting exact figures, and a buyer who wants a single confident number will find that annoying.

And we are smaller than most names on this list. Bombora's co-op and Gartner's marketplace operate at volumes we do not.

How to Choose, Honestly

The useful split is not "which vendor is best" but "which problem do you have".

You do not know which accounts to target. That is a coverage problem. Bombora or Demandbase. Person-level data from any owned surface, ours included, will not solve it.

You know the accounts and need the people. That is a resolution problem, and it is where owned-surface products earn their price. Ours, or G2 Buyer Intent if reviews are where your buyers congregate.

You need leads at volume with a human qualification step. DemandScience, pharosIQ or ViB.

You want to start small without a contract. Gartner Digital Markets, at a $500 monthly minimum.

You need one platform to do identification, advertising and orchestration. Demandbase.

Most mature programmes end up running two: something broad for discovery, something owned and person-level for the accounts already in motion. Those answer different questions, and treating them as substitutes is how teams conclude that intent data does not work.

What We Have Not Covered

Two names appear in most roundups of this category and are absent here: 6sense and TechTarget Priority Engine. We have not done the same page-by-page sourcing on either, and we are not going to characterise a competitor's product from its marketing copy in a piece whose whole argument is about checkable claims. Treat their absence as a gap in this comparison, not as a judgement.

The per-vendor research behind the eight we did cover is published as individual comparison pages, one per vendor, with the reasoning laid out at more length than a roundup allows.