Intent Data Providers Compared: Bombora vs ZoomInfo vs 6sense vs G2

Quick answer: The four best-known intent data providers do different jobs. Bombora sells topic surge data from a publisher co-op. ZoomInfo bundles weaker intent signals with strong contact data. 6sense predicts buying stage and delivers ads against it. G2 sells narrow but high-quality category research activity. Pick by what signal you can act on, not by feature count.

Most comparisons of intent data providers line up feature grids. That is the wrong axis. All four of these vendors will tell you an account is "in market". The useful questions are where that signal comes from, how many of your competitors are buying the same feed, and whether your team has a way to reach the people behind it once the alert fires.

This guide compares Bombora, ZoomInfo, 6sense and G2 Buyer Intent on signal origin, UK and EEA coverage, CRM fit, pricing structure and what you can do with the output. It is written for CMOs, VPs of Sales and RevOps leads at UK B2B companies with long, consultative sales cycles, where a single deal matters and a wasted year of data spend hurts.

Quick comparison of these intent data providers

Treat every number above as reported rather than published. All four vendors gate pricing to some degree, and the same platform has appeared at wildly different entry prices across comparison sites within weeks of each other. Verify on a call with your own account structure in front of you.

Why intent data matters for UK B2B teams

Intent data exists to shorten the part of the cycle you cannot see. In a 12 to 36 month consultative sale, a buying committee does most of its research before anyone fills in a form. Intent signals are an attempt to put a timestamp on that invisible research.

That is genuinely useful. It is also frequently oversold. Three things worth being clear about before you spend:

• Most intent data is account level, not person level. It tells you a company is reading about fraud prevention. It does not tell you the Head of Risk is the one reading.

• The signal is rarely exclusive. Co-op and review-site data is sold to everyone in your category, including the competitors you are trying to outrun.

• A signal with no action attached is a report. The value appears at the point where someone reaches the named individuals inside that account, repeatedly, over weeks.

For UK readers the regulatory picture is more comfortable than it looks. Third-party intent feeds from publisher co-ops and review sites work because the publisher, not you, holds the consent relationship with the reader. Under UK GDPR and PECR your obligations sit mostly on your own side of the line: consent before your own tracking fires, a lawful basis for processing, and a clear retention position. ICO direct marketing guidance is the reference to work from, and your own compliance owner should sign off the final setup.

One asymmetry matters here. Person-level visitor identification, the kind that names an individual who browsed your site, remains effectively a US-only capability under both UK GDPR and EU GDPR. UK and EEA accounts resolve to the company, not the person. Vendors do not always say this clearly in a demo, so ask directly how a London-based visitor resolves compared with a Chicago-based one. Our LinkedIn Insight Tag install guide covers the setup step by step. Make sure the tag sits behind your consent banner.

How we evaluated each of these intent data providers

Six criteria, applied the same way to all four:

1. Signal origin and exclusivity. Where does the data come from, and who else is buying the same feed?

2. Coverage of UK and EEA accounts. Does the provider see European mid-market companies, or mostly US enterprise?

3. Granularity. Account, contact, or predicted buying stage.

4. CRM and HubSpot support. Whether signals land on the records sales already works from, or sit in a separate interface nobody opens.

5. Pricing structure and transparency. Published pricing, contract length, and what sits outside the licence.

6. Action layer. What the platform lets you do once the signal fires, versus what you still have to build or buy.

Bombora: the co-op topic surge standard

Bombora runs a co-operative of B2B publishers and tracks content consumption across it, scoring each account against thousands of topics. When an account reads unusually heavily about a topic relative to its own baseline, Bombora reports a surge.

Strengths:

• The widest topic taxonomy of any intent provider, which makes it usable for niche industrial and technical categories where review sites have no coverage.

• Consent sits with the publishers, which makes UK and EEA use comparatively clean.

• It feeds other systems well. Bombora data appears inside many ABM platforms, ad platforms and CRMs rather than demanding you live in its interface.

Limitations:

• Account level only. No contacts, no committee view, no next step.

• Non-exclusive by design. Every competitor in your category can buy the same surge.

• Baseline sensitivity. Small accounts with low content consumption produce noisy surges.

Best for: teams that already have an account list and an advertising or ABM motion to point topic surge at. Not for: teams hoping the data alone will tell sales who to ring.

ZoomInfo: contact data first, intent second

ZoomInfo is a contact and company database that added intent, website visitor reporting and workflow tooling around it. For many teams the intent is a reason to upgrade rather than the reason to buy.

Strengths:

• Breadth of contact and company data, including technographics, hiring and funding events that work as trigger signals in their own right.

• Native CRM sync with strong HubSpot support, so enrichment and signals land where sales works.

• One vendor instead of three, which reduces procurement and integration overhead.

Limitations:

• Intent depth is thinner than a specialist feed. If topic surge is the core requirement, a dedicated provider sees more.

• UK and EEA data quality is less consistent than US coverage, particularly for privately held mid-market companies.

• Contract structure is the common complaint. Credit pools, seat minimums and multi-year terms mean the renewal rarely looks like the first quote.

Best for: sales-led teams where the primary gap is contactable data and intent is a bonus. Not for: marketing teams buying intent alone. If that is your situation, our comparison of ZoomInfo alternatives for sales intelligence covers narrower, cheaper options.

6sense: prediction plus delivery

6sense blends third-party intent, anonymous web activity and its own model to predict which buying stage an account sits in, then lets you advertise against that prediction inside the same platform.

Strengths:

• Buying-stage prediction is genuinely useful when you have enough closed-won history to train against.

• Data and activation in one place, which removes the handoff between the team reading signals and the team running campaigns.

• Deep integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot and the major marketing automation platforms.

Limitations:

• Time to value is long. Implementation, data hygiene and model training are measured in quarters, not weeks.

• It assumes internal resource. A RevOps owner and someone to run campaigns are prerequisites, not nice-to-haves.

• Person-level resolution is not available for UK and EEA visitors. You get the account.

• Cost puts it out of reach for most companies under about 100 employees.

Best for: enterprise and upper mid-market teams with a data owner and real ad budget. Not for: a two-person marketing team. We compared the category in detail in 6sense vs Demandbase vs Influ2.

G2 Buyer Intent: narrow, clean, cheap to start

G2 reports which companies viewed your profile, your category page and your comparison pages against named competitors. The volume is small. The intent is about as close to purchase as third-party data gets.

Strengths:

• High signal quality. Someone comparing you against a named rival is in an evaluation, not reading a blog.

• Competitive context included. You learn who you are being compared with.

• The lowest entry cost of the four, and the fastest to switch on.

Limitations:

• Coverage is bounded by your category. Industrial OEMs, energy systems and data centre infrastructure vendors often have no meaningful G2 presence.

• Volume is too low to drive a programme on its own.

• You are visible too. Competitors in the same category buy the same product.

Best for: software vendors in an active G2 category who want sharp alerts for a small, well-defined list. Not for: non-software categories or anyone who needs volume.

The Signal Ownership Grid

Feature grids will not tell you which of these intent data providers to buy. Two questions will: how exclusive is the signal, and how much of the action is included once it fires. That is the Signal Ownership Grid.

The grid makes one thing obvious. Three of the four providers sell you a signal your competitors can also buy. The differentiator is never the data. It is the speed and consistency with which you act on it, which is why the last row matters more than the first four.

Pricing and contract comparison

All four vendors gate pricing, so treat the figures below as reported rather than published, stated in USD, and verify them against your own seat count and account volume.

Three hidden costs come up repeatedly:

• Activation. Bombora and G2 sell signal, not reach. Add an advertising or outreach budget before the data earns anything.

• Internal time. 6sense and ZoomInfo both reward a dedicated owner. Without one, licences go unused and renewals get awkward.

• Credit and seat creep. Mid-term expansions are rarely priced as favourably as the original negotiation.

A rough value test, using illustrative numbers you should replace with your own: if a provider costs $40,000 a year and your average deal is $60,000, you need slightly more than one incremental win to break even, and you need to be able to show which accounts moved. In B2B, nobody defends a budget with impressions. Value becomes real the moment you can show which target accounts moved closer to a decision.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Buying signal before fixing the account list. Intent data applied to a vague ICP produces a longer list of the wrong companies.

• Treating account-level surge as a person. Someone at the company read something. Reaching the committee is a separate job.

• Judging the programme on weekly lead counts. Account-based motions compound over 60 to 90 days, so short-term lead metrics make working programmes look broken.

• Letting one person own the whole thing. A programme that lives or dies with a single internal champion is fragile. The ones that last are owned across marketing, sales and leadership, so one personnel change does not end them.

• Assuming US-style person-level visitor ID works in the UK. It does not. Build the plan around account-level resolution.

• Stacking three feeds before using one. Overlapping providers multiply cost and alert noise without improving decisions.

• Skipping the consent sequence on your own tags. Your site tracking is your obligation under UK GDPR and PECR regardless of how clean the vendor's data is.

Where Hey Sid fits, and where it does not

Disclosure: this article is published by Hey Sid. Most reviews in this category are written by vendors with something to sell, including this one. Hey Sid is not an intent data provider and does not belong in the comparison above, so we have left it out of the ranking.

What Hey Sid does is the layer after the signal. It is a person-targeted advertising engine and done-for-you ABM platform for mid-sized B2B companies: Always On runs individual-level advertising across paid social, display and the open web, Authority Builder produces LinkedIn thought leadership, and Precision Connect handles network expansion and personalised outreach. All three aim at the same named individuals, which is why recognition builds over 60 to 90 days rather than arriving cold at the first call. The two-way HubSpot integration writes ad impressions, clicks and engagement totals onto existing company records as properties, and pushes companies and deals from the CRM back into ad audiences, with the CRM left as the source of truth.

It genuinely competes with ABM platforms such as 6sense, Demandbase, Influ2 and N.Rich, and with done-for-you ABM agencies. Those agencies are enterprise-weighted, serving large organisations with sizeable in-house teams, which is the honest difference against a 20 to 100 employee buyer rather than a claim of being better.

Hey Sid is the wrong choice if your budget is under $25,000 a year, you are pre-ICP with fewer than 20 employees, you have no sales team, you want direct click-to-close attribution, you want a DIY tool you control manually, or you need pipeline inside six weeks. The model is slow by design. Published results include Mercuri International reducing ad spend by 85% and attributing one of its biggest deals in a decade to the programme, and Risk Ident seeing 2.5x shorter sales cycles with 40% higher engagement in a regulated European market. More in the case library.

Ready to act on the signals you already have?

If you have intent data and no reliable way to reach the committee behind it, the data is not the constraint. Hey Sid runs the advertising, content and outreach against the same named individuals, and reports which target accounts moved.

→ Book a demo

Or see how it works first.

Conclusion and next steps

The honest summary is that none of these four intent data providers competes with the others on the same axis. Bombora is the broadest topic feed and the best fit for technical categories with no review-site presence. ZoomInfo is the right purchase when contactable data is the real gap and intent is secondary. 6sense earns its licence when you have a data owner, closed-won history to train a model on and budget to advertise against the output. G2 is the cheapest and sharpest of the four, and the narrowest, so it supplements rather than carries a programme.

What separates teams that get value from teams that renew reluctantly is not the vendor. It is whether a signal reaches a named person, repeatedly, through a channel you control, and whether three functions rather than one person own the outcome. Decide the activation plan before you sign the data contract.

From here, read our guide to finding and acting on in-market accounts with intent data, the comparison of CRM audience targeting versus intent data, and our LinkedIn ads strategy guide for B2B, which covers the activation side in depth.

FAQ

Which intent data provider is best for UK B2B companies?

For UK teams in non-software categories, Bombora usually sees the most relevant topic activity because its taxonomy covers industrial and technical subjects review sites ignore. Software vendors with an active G2 category get sharper signals from G2 at a lower entry cost. Both work cleanly under UK GDPR because the publisher or review site holds the consent relationship, not you.

Is Bombora or 6sense better for intent data?

They are not substitutes. Bombora sells raw topic surge that you feed into your own channels. 6sense wraps blended intent in a predictive model and adds ad delivery, which is more useful if you have a RevOps owner and ad budget, and more expensive and slower to implement if you do not. Small teams generally get more from Bombora plus a reliable activation channel.

How much do intent data providers cost?

All four gate pricing to some degree, so published figures are scarce. Reported entry points run from four to five figures USD annually for G2 Buyer Intent up to high five figures for 6sense, with Bombora and ZoomInfo in between. Contracts of 12 to 36 months are normal. Budget for activation and internal time on top of the licence fee.

Does intent data identify individual people in the UK?

Usually not. Third-party intent resolves to the account, and person-level visitor identification remains effectively a US-only capability under both UK GDPR and EU GDPR. UK and EEA visitors resolve to the company. Plan on reaching the buying committee through account-level targeting rather than expecting a named individual from the feed.

Can you combine two intent data providers?

Yes, and larger teams often pair a broad feed with a narrow one, for example topic surge for category awareness plus review-site activity for late-stage evaluation. The risk is alert noise and duplicated spend. Run one provider for two quarters, confirm you can act on every alert it produces, then add the second.

Sources

This article's original contribution is the Signal Ownership Grid, which scores intent providers on signal exclusivity against included action, and the first-party insight that programmes owned by a single internal champion are fragile while those owned across marketing, sales and leadership survive personnel change. Sibling articles use different frameworks and insights.

• https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/direct-marketing-and-privacy-and-electronic-communications/

• https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/lawful-basis/

• https://bombora.com/intent/

• https://www.zoominfo.com/pricing

• https://6sense.com/platform/

• https://sell.g2.com/buyer-intent

• https://www.g2.com/categories/account-based-advertising

• https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/topics/sales-intelligence

• https://help.heysid.com/article/understanding-the-hubspot-integration-v2

Related articles

• Intent Data for B2B: Find In-Market Accounts: https://www.heysid.com/resources/intent-data-for-b2b-find-in-market-accounts

• Best GDPR-Compliant B2B Marketing Tools: https://www.heysid.com/resources/best-gdpr-compliant-b2b-marketing-tools