Crustdata now works inside Claude
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The Best Clado Alternative for People Search & Enrichment
Built for Production Data Pipelines, Not Just Exploration
Comparison Overview
Clado was a people search engine powered by AI agents. Crustdata is a B2B data infrastructure platform where people search is one of many capabilities - alongside company intelligence, web search, and real-time monitoring.
| Capability | Clado | Crustdata |
|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | People search via natural language | People + Company + Web data via API |
| Data Source | 800M+ unified profiles (LinkedIn, GitHub, Scholar, Twitter) | 1B+ unified profiles linked to full company intelligence |
| Search method | AI agents interpret plain English queries | 60+ structured filters for people search with 12+ operators and nesting capability |
| Best for | Exploratory sourcing based on natural language | Reproducible pipelines, automated workflows where control over search logic is required |
| Company data | Inline basics per employment record (revenue, headcount, funding) | Full Company API - firmographics, headcount timeseries, funding, web traffic, job openings, competitors, news, product reviews and more |
| Contact enrichment | Email enrichment and phone number enrichment | Email enrichment |
| Monitoring | Monitors for people that match criteria | Monitors for people that match criteria and tracks individual data points across people and companies such as job changes, posts, headcount growth, and job postings |
People Data
Field-by-Field Comparison
Here's the side-by-side comparison of fields returned by Clado and Crustdata.
| Data Category | Clado | Crustdata |
|---|---|---|
| Profile Images | ✅ | ✅ |
| Location | ✅ | ✅ |
| ✅ | ✅ | |
| Phone | ✅ | ❌ |
| Social Profiles | Unified across 4 sources | Unified across 3 sources |
| Connections & Followers | ✅ | ✅ |
| Language | ✅ | ✅ |
| Skills | ✅ | ✅ |
| Employer data | 48 Datapoints | 250 Datapoints |
| Seniority Classification | ✅ | ✅ |
| Total Experience | ✅ | ✅ |
| Decision Maker Flag | ✅ | ✅ |
| Education | ✅ | ✅ |
| Certifications | ✅ | ✅ |
| Awards / Honors | ✅ | ✅ |
| Salary Projections | ✅ | ❌ |
| GitHub Profile | ✅ | ✅ |
| Patents | Structured: title, description, status, date + count/topics | ✅ Available via websearch |
| Publications | Structured: title, description, publisher, date + count/topics | ✅ Available via websearch |
| Projects | Structured: name, description, dates + count/topics | ❌ |
| Courses | Structured: organizer, title | ❌ |
| Interests | ✅ | ❌ |
| Social Posts | ✅ | ✅ |
People Search
Exploration vs. Precision
This is where the architectural philosophies diverge most, and where neither approach is universally better - it depends on your use case.
| Capability | Clado | Crustdata |
|---|---|---|
| Query style | Natural language ("senior ML engineers at Series B startups in Europe who have published papers") | Structured JSON filters with boolean logic |
| Reproducibility | Non-deterministic as same query may return different results | Fully deterministic as same filters always return same results |
| Relevance scoring | ✅ similarity_score + matched_criteria | ❌ No scoring. All results match your filter criteria |
| Geo-radius search | ❌ NLP-based location interpretation | ✅ geo_distance - find people within X km/miles of a location |
| Autocomplete API | ❌ | ✅ Dedicated autocomplete for region, title, company, school |
| Async/bulk search | Up to 200 profiles per async job | ✅ Up to 10,000 results per async job |
| Profile exclusions | ❌ | ✅ Up to 50,000 profiles per query |
| Filter operators | NLP only | 16 operators |
| Nested filtering | ❌ | ✅ |
Company Intelligence
The Layer Clado Never Had
Clado embedded some company basics inline with each employment record such as revenue, headcount, funding round date, stock ticker. But it had no company search, no company enrichment, and no company-level analytics. Crustdata provides a full company data platform:
| Data Category | What You Get |
|---|---|
| Firmographics | HQ location, year founded, employee count range, company type, acquisition status, IPO date, all office addresses |
| Headcount timeseries | Historical headcount with growth rates (MoM, QoQ, 6M, YoY, 2Y), headcount by function, by region, by skill |
| Funding & investment | Full funding history with investors, total investment, last funding date, valuations |
| Revenue estimates | Lower/upper bound estimates in USD |
| Web traffic | Monthly visitors, MoM/QoQ growth, traffic source breakdown (social, search, direct, paid, referral) with timeseries |
| Employer Review | Overall rating, CEO approval %, review count, culture ratings, timeseries |
| Product Review | Product ratings, review counts, category rankings |
| Job openings | Active job postings data with detailed job descriptions |
| News | Recent articles with URL, publisher, title, publish date |
| Competitors | Identified competitive companies |
| Taxonomy | Industries, Categories, NAICS codes |
| Founders / CXOs / Decision makers | Full people profiles (similar depth as People API) linked to each company |
| Web Search API | Multi-source search (web, news, scholar, social, AI) with optional content fetching |
Datapoint Monitoring Infrastructure
| Dimension | Clado | Crustdata |
|---|---|---|
| Monitoring: job changes | Monitors for people matching a criteria | Watcher API monitors and notifies job changes |
| Monitoring: social posts | ❌ | Track when a person posts, with category filtering |
| Monitoring: company events | ❌ | Job postings, headcount growth, company posts |
| Monitoring: delivery | In-app notifications | Webhook to any endpoint |
| Team UI | Atlas platform | API-first (no UI layer) |
The Bottom Line
Clado built a product with rich people data, that users could find with natural language. But for teams that need to build on people data, Crustdata offers a more complete foundation - deterministic search that scales and a production-grade API that's documented down to every rate limit, error code, and credit charge.