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Hunter.io Review: Is Hunter.io safe to use?

Searching for business leads is a time-consuming task that does not guarantee success. Hunter.io will add speed to your lead generation process.

It also comes with many handy features that help save time.

Hunter.io has a massive database of emails that provides extra information and is easy to use. Having access to any professional email address with ease will help your business.

Finding the email of a business owner or even an employee is possible with Hunter.io.

This article will discuss Hunter.io, all the features provided, and if it is safe to use. Read on to learn all about this tool. 

More about Hunter.io

Hunter.io is a lead generation tool at its core. It is an outreach plugin to make external outreach fast and easy.

The app will also verify professional email addresses. This helps ensure that your email will not bounce.

Hunter.io has a massive database for a domain search platform.  There are over 100+ million indexed email addresses. 

Searches display a record of those working in a business and their names next to their email address.

Hunter.io also has excellent support for contacting individuals in bulk. They provide several cold email templates to help you save time.

All features are accessible through their dashboard. Their dashboard is easy to navigate and learn.

Who uses Hunter.io?

Any business that depends on cold email outreach campaigns will enjoy Hunter.io.

Marketing and sales teams will create leads faster and with more certainty.

All businesses that rely on cold emails will find Hunter.io handy due to its affordable prices.

Hunter.io features

Hunter.io offers many handy features to help the effectiveness of your lead creation process.

Domain Search

The Hunter.io domain search is a great way to gather contact information on a business.

The search result includes a department filter, sources, email addresses, and a confidence score.

The search system is simple to use and fast to show results. To start a search, type in a domain and click the search button.

After initiating a search, you will receive many emails. Emails will have a position or title, name, and phone number.

Some search results might include social media links, though this is rare.

Every search includes all its sources. This can range from only one source to an average of five.

Having the sources at hand will help you verify the result and see how old or new the source is.

While Hunter.io looks for more confirmed sources, it will remove old or false ones.

Having a department filter is great if you want to reach out to a specific branch of a business.

An email to the CEO will go unnoticed, but an email to a branch such as marketing will get noticed.

Having the ability to reach out to a specific department will help your sales efforts. Hunter.io finds all emails linked to a domain and will include their position.

Email verifier and finder

Hunter.io have an excellent email finder and verification system.

You can find the email of a specific employee if you have their name and email domain. Using a name will increase the odds Hunter.io will be able to find what you are looking for.

Next to every result is a confidence score displayed as a number. Having a higher number means the email is more likely to be correct.

The email verifier is excellent if you already have an email and want to double-check it. 

This feature only works if the email is a domain email, not a personal email that ends with @gmail.com or @hotmail.com.

There is also another new feature called author finder.

This feature allows you to find the email address of an author who wrote a specific article. All you need is the link to the website, and Hunter.io does the rest for you.

Bulk tasks

Hunter.io has great automation support for bulk tasks, allowing you to do more in less time.

The bulk feature works to perform three types of tasks.

The first task is a domain search. It produces a list of email addresses from the companies you have requested.

The second is an email finder. It works by inputting a name and domain address to find specific emails of individuals.

The last is an email verifying tool. The verification tool is excellent if you have a preexisting log of leads. Hunter.io will run a bulk verification on all your emails to see which ones are correct.

For every bulk search, you create a name for your new list and provide a domain name or insert a CSV file containing your leads.

You can filter your searches to find specific departments or limit how many emails you get from each domain.

Additionally, you can include the confidence score next to each result.

Using bulk tasks brings efficiency to your lead-generation process by allowing you to manage a much larger number of leads.

You also have a customer relationship management (CRM) leads section. This section allows you to organize and sort your leads within Hunter.io.

You can import your leads and filter them by their website, position, industry, and more.

The lead page allows you to store all your emails into one organized folder online and is accessible by email marketing applications.

Exporting all your database is easy and fast.

While the lead tool is decent, it may feel lackluster compared to an application that focuses on CRM. 

Hunter.io is compatible with CRM tools such as Hubspot, allowing you to have a better CRM tool that works with Hunter.io.

Campaign outreach support

An outreach tool will help save time and make you appear professional in your emails. The feature is straightforward and will improve your short email messages.

You need a Gmail account for this feature. It will not work otherwise.

The campaign tool allows you to create follow-up emails and provides many templates for cold emails. You can adjust follow-up emails on a schedule.

You can add custom attributes to each email, giving it a personal feel by adding your information to it.

Emails have advanced personalization. This allows you to customize emails to different prospects to add a personal touch.

There is a performance review on all your campaigns, helping you check the effectiveness of each one.

Hunter.io reviews a few examples of templates on its website.

Templates help you establish a solid cold email while saving time.

Hunter.io has a list of the 8 best cold email tools in the market.

User interface and extension

The user interface for Hunter.io follows a simple design theme. The result is an easy-to-use service.

The app is more accessible through their chrome extension. It allows users to achieve faster results when getting emails. You can link more than one Gmail account on a Hunter.io account.

The extension provides a way to gather the email addresses of any website and provides you with the sources they used to get the emails. 

This feature is easy to use. You just need to click on the extension while on a website, and it does the rest.

After opening the extension, you will view a list of all emails relating to the website. If you want to add an email to your leads, there is a plus sign next to each email.

A supported feature that lets you know what happened to your emails after you sent them is email tracking.

You can also configure the extension to output its results into a Google Sheets file instead of the default leads page.

Hunter.io has a separate extension for Google Sheets that allows results to be output to Google Sheets. 

The result will include their first name, last name, domain, email address, and credibility score.

You can also verify emails on Google Sheets using this extension, removing the need to upload them to Hunter.io for verification. 

Hunter.io has an excellent user interface that anyone can navigate with ease.

Free webinars

There are free webinars offered by Hunter.io that will help you learn how to use all their tools, such as finding and verifying emails. You can also ask any question you have.

There is also a bunch of tutorial videos in the webinar section explaining the majority of their tools in a clear and easy-to-follow manner.

Customer support

Running into technical difficulties is always possible when using an online application. 

You might not need any support but knowing there is a good customer support team ready to help is always great to have.

Other than their frequent webinars and tutorial videos, Hunter.io has included many ways to help their customers if they face any issues.

There is a FAQ section that aims to tackle issues faced by customers.

All FAQ entries are well-written and should solve the problem you are facing. They are also updated to keep them up to date.

There is also an entire help section dedicated to aiding you in learning Hunter.io.

Help sections vary from verifying an email address to sending emails using Hunter.io. There are also sections on how to use extensions and add-ons and how to integrate Hunter.io with other tools.

Hunter.io has an account management guide that helps managers share accounts.

Using bulk features might be a little tricky. The help section contains many useful guides explaining all bulk features.

Sometimes premade guides are not enough to help with an issue. Contacting customer support could be the only way to resolve a problem. 

You can access their customer support by clicking on the chat icon on the bottom right in the help section.

With the chat box, you can search for help or contact an agent. Agents will respond within a few hours.

Users have reported that customer support has always been professional and helpful.

If you are too busy to wait for an agent to hop on and help you with your issue, there is another option to get help. 

You can go to the contact us section and send them a ticket with all your information.

You can view reviews of Hunter.io on Trustpilot. There are many reviews discussing great experiences with their customer support team.

Hunter.io pricing

Hunter.io has five plans all with different features and limits. One of the plans is free to use and is a great starting point to try out Hunter.io and get a feel for the service. 

There is also an enterprise plan.

All plans are listed below in detail.

Free plan

The free plan is an excellent way to try out Hunter.io. There are far fewer features, but it still offers a great trial experience for new users.

With the free plan, you have access to 25 monthly email searches. A search only counts when you use a domain search, email finder, or author finder and find a result. 

Repeated searches of the same type are not counted as new searches.

As for email verifications, you can use up to 50 monthly verifications.

The free plan limits you to only ten email addresses for each domain search.

The premium plans remove this restriction. Additionally, you are not allowed to download the results of any search with the free plan.

When it comes to campaigns, the free plan has a limit of 500 recipients for each campaign.

Many features are not included in the free plan. It still is a great way to test out Hunter.io if you are on the edge about using it.

Starter plan

The starter plan costs $49 a month. If you pay yearly it will be $34 a month, saving you 30%.

The starter plan provides users with 500 monthly searches and 1,000 monthly verifications. You also have access to all the results in a domain search and are no longer limited to only 10.

As for campaigns, you can add 5 Gmail accounts to be part of your team. Starting with the starter plan, adding images and attachments to your email is possible. 

You can also enable link tracking.

You can have a total of 2,500 recipients per campaign with the starter plan.

This plan is excellent for smaller businesses that depend on cold emailing.

Growth plan

The growth plan costs $99 a month or $69 if you pay annually. This totals $828 a year.

The growth plan has access to all features offered by Hunter.io.

Monthly email searches increase to 2,500 and 5,000 for monthly email verifications.

Starting the growth plan, you can now download domain search results into a CSV file. This is a handy feature for larger businesses.

You have ten supported email accounts for campaigns, ideal for larger teams.

With this plan, you have access to using your tracking domain name. This helps enhance your deliverability to clients.

Additionally, you now have a limit of 5,000 recipients for a campaign.

Pro plan

The pro plan comes in at $199 a month or $139 a month if you pay annually.

The limit differences see a large increase.

Monthly email searches are 10,000, and monthly email verifications are 20,000.

Supported campaign email accounts increase to 20, allowing for more users.

Recipients per campaign increase to 7,500.

Business plan

The business plan is the most expensive plan that most businesses will consider.

It costs $399 a month or $279 if you pay annually.

With the business plan, you have a whopping 30,000 monthly email searches and 60,000 email verifications.

You get 40 supported campaign emails and 10,000 recipients per email campaign.

Enterprise plan

The enterprise plan is custom-made for your specific needs. This is for enterprises seeking better rates for a higher bulk order.

On this plan, you get a dedicated account manager, increased rate limits, and flexible or on-demand quotas.

The only way to sign up for the enterprise plan is to contact their sales team with your information.

Is Hunter.io safe to use?

All Hunter.io features are in full compliance with GDPR alongside other data protection protocols. 

Hunter.io only uses emails that are available by digging through online data. Hunter.io only serves as a specialized search engine that aims to connect companies.

If a source used by Hunter.io is no longer accessible through public means, it is no longer included as a source.

What might could be illegal is using a domain search and guessing emails based on the naming scheme of a company. 

While this rule only applies to EU citizens, it is still best to avoid this practice entirely.

As for your information, Hunter.io uses Cloudfare to keep your data safe and uses a Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Hunter.io also has an ongoing security bounty program. The program rewards individuals that notice weak points in its security measures.

All stored logs are in the EU.  Logs older than three months get deleted.

Hunter.io has a detailed privacy policy that might discuss any questions you have.

If you are still worried, you can get in contact with Hunter.io through their contact email at [email protected] to ask them questions.

Hunter.io competitors

It is always a good idea to look at the competition in case they offer better prices or features.

FindThatLead

FindThatLead operates in the same way as Hunter.io. They do offer a major difference in their search limits.

They offer monthly credits, that can work on either searches or verifications. Having the option to have credits over preset limits can help if you perform more verifications over searches.

There is a special feature named prospector that helps you find leads easier. Using a filter, you can insert a location, job title, industry sector, and company size.

This helps in finding all emails or job titles in a certain industry.

Searches, automated campaigns, and email verification are all included. Searches also have an extra feature that allows you to find the email of an individual from their social media link.

The pricing for FindThatLead starts at $49 for their growth plan.

You get 5,000 monthly credits and two campaign accounts that can send 400 daily emails.

Find that lead also has a chrome extension that aims to simplify the process of finding emails.

AnyMail Finder

If you are looking for a simple email finder, AnyMail Finder is a good contender. They claim to have a 97% accuracy, meaning your emails only have a 3% bounce rate.

Their bread and butter are email searches and verifications.

As for pricing, their cheapest option costs $49 for 1,000 email verifications.

They offer 20 free email verifications as a free trial.

If you attempt to verify an email and have no result, you are not charged.

Your credits also roll over for each new month. If you only used 400 searches out of 1,000 next month, you will have access to 1,600 searches. Having a rollover feature is essential, as you never lose out on your searches.

Additionally, you can have unlimited team members on an account.

Subscribing to a plan is not a must. You may choose to pay for a one-time payment.

Hunter.io review wrap-up

Hunter.io is an excellent email finder tool with many handy features that help your lead-finding efforts.

With domain searches and email verification, you are sure to find the correct emails with ease.

You have an automated campaign feature that simplifies any email campaign process. You can add follow-up emails and view link interactions.

As a service, Hunter.io is straightforward to use and has a great UI design. They provide webinars and tutorial videos in case you find yourself struggling with certain tasks. 

Customer service is also fast to reach and helpful.

The lead storage feature is also great for small businesses that have not yet created a leads database.

Hunter.io is safe to use as they follow data protection protocols. Your data is also kept safe as a result of their high-security standards.

You can also look at the competition, as many other solid email-finding services might have better plans based on your needs.