Lusha and Nymeria are two favorite sourcing tools that aid us in finding and locating candidates and their contact information on the web. They both excel in establishing contact information for hard to find candidates, with Lusha focusing on candidates from LinkedIn and Nymeria branching out to both LinkedIn and GitHub. Both are widely used in our sourcing community, but which one is best?
I decided to compare them and did so with 100 profiles, from varying industries, jobs, and levels, all within the US of course. Below are my findings.
Lusha found emails on 60% or 60 out of 100. Out of the 60, 70% or roughly 42 were work emails only and 18 personnel. It did great within the computer/internet industries. It did poorly in the biotech and defense. Unfortunately, Lusha does not work on Github.
Nymeria found 70% or 70 out of 100. Out of the 70, 60% were work emails, or 42 were work emails only while 28 were personnel. Like with Lusha, Nymeria did well within the computer/internet industries and poorly in the Biotech and defense. Within Github, Nymeria found 80% or 80 out of 100. With 70% being personnel emails.
What’s interesting about this experiment, is that I used the same 100 people from LinkedIn for comparison. However, the overlap, meaning the number of emails that Lusha found and Nymeria found, for the same people was 85%. So that means out of the 60 Lusha found, 51 were also detected by Nymeria, but nine were not. Which says, of course, that out of the 70 Nymeria found 51 were also observed by Lusha, but 19 were not.
All that a side, now comes the big questions. How many of the found emails were valid? I decided not to email every prospect to ask them. To streamline my efforts, I used a tool called Toofr, to test them all.
Toofr is a tool/site that allows you to do a lot. You can use it to learn name conventions for work emails individually or in bulk, and also verify both work and personal emails. You can also do a prospect search based on title, company, and country and of course get emails. And you can buy lists of emails or sell information to them. Of course it does have a Chrome extension.
I decided to focus on the nine contacts that Lusha found that Nymeria did not, and the 19 Nymeria found that Lush did not, for the reason that they both saw the same emails on the remaining subset.
Drum roll, please!
Out of the nine emails that Lusha found and that Nymeria did not, 44.4% tested valid, which means that only four were indeed logical email addresses. Out of the 19, Nymeria found that Lusha did not, 69% were accurate or 13 email addresses in all.
So what did we learn? For starters, there isn’t a sourcing tool that is perfect. The other thing we learned is Nymeria did a better job on Linkedin and since it can also work within Github it was the clear winner, for now.
Tools are always changing and improving so while Nymeria is the winner with this showdown, in the future, there might be a new champion.