Bombora Intent Data: How It Works, Pricing & Alternatives (2026)

Bombora is a third-party B2B intent data provider. It tracks anonymized content consumption across a co-op of 5,000+ B2B publisher sites, then scores companies 0–100 for topic-research activity through Company Surge. Bombora doesn’t publish prices; buyer-reported deals run $25,000–$300,000+ a year. It fits teams that already have a stack ready to receive intent signals.

What is Bombora?

Bombora is a New York-based B2B data company that sells intent data: signals showing which companies are actively researching a topic, product category, or vendor before they’ve filled out a form or talked to a salesperson. The company was founded in 2014 as a spinoff of ad-tech firm Madison Logic and rebranded as Bombora in 2015. It remains privately held, with offices in New York, Reno, London, Sydney, and Singapore (PitchBook).

Bombora is credited with creating the modern B2B intent data category, and it’s still the reference point competitors get measured against. In Forrester’s Q1 2025 Wave evaluation of 15 intent data providers, Bombora was one of six vendors named a Leader, alongside 6sense, Demandbase, ZoomInfo, Intentsify, and Informa TechTarget (Bombora).

What Bombora is used for, specifically: marketing teams use Company Surge scores to prioritize account-based target lists and trigger ad campaigns; sales teams use it to time outreach around a research spike instead of cold-calling blind; and RevOps teams pipe the raw score into a CRM or CDP as a lead-scoring input. Bombora itself doesn’t run ads, build landing pages, or send emails — it sells the signal, and customers activate it inside whatever platform they already use, from Salesforce and HubSpot to Demandbase and 6sense.

How does Bombora get its data?

Bombora’s data source is a cooperative, not a single tracking pixel or a purchased list. More than 5,000 B2B publisher sites — trade publications, analyst platforms, and technology media outlets — have agreed to share anonymized reader-behavior data with Bombora in exchange for access to the co-op’s aggregated intelligence. Bombora reports that about 86% of those publisher relationships are exclusive to Bombora, meaning no other intent vendor sees that portion of the signal (Bombora).

The mechanics: every time someone on a business domain reads an article, downloads a whitepaper, or otherwise consumes content on a co-op site, that interaction is logged and matched to a topic. Bombora says the co-op captures behavior from roughly 4.8 million unique business domains and processes 17.6 billion interactions a month (Bombora). Consent is collected under the IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework — readers opt in on the publisher site, and Bombora receives the anonymized, aggregated signal, not personal browsing history tied to a named individual.

Topics are organized through a taxonomy Bombora has expanded steadily: it crossed 17,000 topics in a March 2025 release and has since grown past 21,600 (Bombora; Bombora). Content is mapped to topics with natural language processing, so a single article about, say, cloud migration risk can register interactions against several adjacent topics at once.

The scoring layer is Company Surge. It compares a company’s topic consumption over the trailing 3 weeks against that same company’s 12-week rolling baseline. A score of 50 is average activity for that account; a score of 60 or above is what Bombora treats as a statistically meaningful surge; 80+ signals strong, sustained research. Four inputs feed the weekly score: the number of topic interactions, the number of unique users at the company engaging with the topic, how relevant the content is to the topic, and engagement depth — how long someone spends and how far they scroll (Bombora).

The result: Bombora tells you which named accounts, not individuals, are researching a topic cluster more than usual this week, relative to their own baseline — not whether any specific person at that account is close to buying.

How much does Bombora cost?

Bombora doesn’t publish a rate card, and there’s no self-serve checkout — every quote comes from a sales conversation, and the final number depends on how many topics you track, how many integrations you connect, and your contract length. As of July 2026, the figures below come from buyer-reported spend and reseller pricing pages instead of Bombora’s own price list, so treat them as directional, not a quote.

Reported tier	Annual price (reported)	Source
Entry / small-to-midmarket	~$13,000–$30,000 (median around $25,000)	Vendr
Mid-market	$60,000–$100,000	MarketBetter
Large enterprise (custom intent, Historical Buy, global geography)	$120,000–$300,000+	MarketBetter

Vendr, which aggregates actual buyer contract data, puts the median Bombora deal at roughly $25,000 a year, with a reported range of $13,000 to just over $80,000 (Vendr). Reseller pricing breakdowns tracking larger accounts report enterprise contracts with custom topic sets, historical data, and multi-region coverage running well past $200,000, occasionally into the $300,000+ range (MarketBetter). The gap between those figures mostly comes down to company size and topic count — Bombora’s pricing scales with the number of topics under contract more than with seats or users, so a five-person RevOps team monitoring 50 topics pays a fraction of what a global enterprise monitoring 500+ topics across multiple business units pays.

Budget for onboarding on top of the license: implementation and integration setup is commonly reported in the $5,000–$20,000 range, and multi-year contracts tend to carry a 3–7% annual price escalation unless it’s negotiated out upfront.

Bombora vs 6sense

The short answer: Bombora is a data feed, 6sense is a platform. Bombora sells Company Surge scores that you pipe into whatever CRM, ad platform, or ABM tool you already run. 6sense is an end-to-end account-based platform — it ingests third-party intent, technographic data, and anonymous web-visitor resolution, scores accounts on its own 6QA framework, and includes a built-in advertising DSP and orchestration workflows.

	Bombora	6sense
What it is	Intent data feed	Full ABM platform
Data sources	Co-op of 5,000+ publisher sites	Blended: third-party intent, web-visitor ID, technographics, predictive AI
Activation	None — exports into your stack	Built-in ad DSP, workflows, sales alerts
Reported median price	~$25,000/yr	~$58,000/yr

Pick Bombora if you already run a mature martech stack — a CDP, an ABM ad platform, a sales engagement tool — and just need a well-sourced intent signal to feed into it. Pick 6sense if you don’t have that infrastructure yet and want scoring, orchestration, and ad activation bundled into one contract. Reported pricing tracks the difference: 6sense’s median reported deal runs more than double Bombora’s, which matches the fact that you’re buying a platform, not just a data feed.

One nuance worth knowing before you sign either contract: 6sense’s own intent layer draws on multiple third-party sources, so switching from Bombora to 6sense doesn’t necessarily mean losing every bit of topic-level visibility — it means trading a raw feed for a scored, blended one.

Bombora vs ZoomInfo Intent

The short answer: for years, ZoomInfo’s intent product ran on licensed Bombora data — but that arrangement ended in 2020, and the two companies have built separate intent stacks since. Assuming a ZoomInfo Advanced or Elite plan still includes the Bombora signal is a real risk when you’re pricing out a stack.

The history: ZoomInfo licensed Company Surge data from Bombora under a revenue-sharing agreement for years. That deal terminated in early 2020, and the fallout turned into litigation over how the revenue-share ended along with related data-privacy claims. The companies settled in June 2022 under a confidential agreement that explicitly did not include resuming the business partnership (ZoomInfo).

Since the split, ZoomInfo has built its own intent stack — described in ZoomInfo’s own comparison materials as proprietary machine-learning models, bidstream data, and website partnerships, marketed as Streaming Intent, with daily refresh instead of Bombora’s weekly cadence (Cognism). The two companies now compete directly for the same buyers instead of splitting the same data pipeline.

Why “paying twice” is a real risk: if your team already carries a ZoomInfo Advanced or Elite plan for its intent feature and you’re evaluating Bombora as an add-on, don’t assume you’re adding a second, independent signal — verify with both vendors exactly whose data powers the intent field already inside ZoomInfo before you sign a second contract for what could be a differently-branded version of the same idea. The reverse applies too: if you specifically value Bombora’s co-op-consent data model — the exclusive publisher relationships, the depth of the taxonomy — don’t assume ZoomInfo’s own Streaming Intent gives you that same signal under a different label. It’s built on ZoomInfo’s own sources now.

What Bombora does well

Three things come up consistently across independent reviews and the Forrester evaluation:

• Consent story: Because the co-op collects behavior directly from publishers under an opt-in framework instead of scraping or buying bidstream data, Bombora can point to a cleaner data-provenance story than intent vendors that rely on cookie or IP-based inference.
• Breadth and exclusivity: A 5,000+ site co-op with roughly 86% exclusive publisher relationships gives Bombora signal that competitors genuinely cannot buy or replicate, which is a large part of why Forrester scored it a Leader on uniqueness of signal (Bombora).
• Reseller ecosystem: Bombora data flows into more than 100 martech and adtech integrations, so most teams can adopt the signal inside a tool they already use — Salesforce, HubSpot, Demandbase, LinkedIn — instead of standing up a new workflow from scratch.

The Forrester Q1 2025 Wave gave Bombora top marks in 10 of 21 evaluation criteria, including uniqueness of signal, buying-cycle analysis, and geographic coverage (Bombora), which lines up with what most head-to-head reviews single out: Bombora is a specialist, and the specialization shows up in the data quality more than in any software wrapped around it.

Limitations to know before buying

The same specialization that makes Bombora’s data credible also creates real gaps buyers should plan around before signing.

• Topic-level, not product-level: Company Surge tells you an account is researching “cloud migration risk” or “endpoint security” — it doesn’t tell you they’re comparing your specific product against a named competitor, or where they sit in a buying committee’s decision process.
• Thin coverage in niche categories: The taxonomy covers 21,000+ topics, but coverage depth tracks publisher volume — well-covered B2B categories like cybersecurity or cloud infrastructure get dense signal, while narrow verticals with fewer trade publications produce sparser, noisier surges.
• Annual contracts, no self-serve: There’s no monthly plan and no published price. Every deal is a negotiated annual contract, which makes even a small pilot a slow, sales-led process.
• Needs an activation layer: Bombora is a feed, not a workflow. A Company Surge score sitting in a spreadsheet doesn’t do anything on its own — you need a CRM field, an ad platform audience, or a sales alert built around it before the signal turns into pipeline, which means budgeting for integration work on top of the license.

None of this makes Bombora a bad product — the Forrester Leader placement backs up the data-quality claim. It does mean the buying decision is really two decisions: is the co-op data itself good enough for your categories, and do you have, or are you willing to build, the activation layer to act on it.

Bombora alternatives

Bombora isn’t the only way to get intent signal, and depending on what you already own, one of these six options might fit the budget or the workflow better.

6sense

6sense is the closest thing to a direct platform alternative: instead of selling a raw intent feed, it bundles blended intent (third-party topics plus its own web-visitor resolution and predictive scoring) with an ABM advertising DSP and sales orchestration workflows. Reported median pricing runs close to $58,000 a year, more than double Bombora’s reported median, which tracks with the platform layered on top of the data. It fits teams that don’t already have an ABM ad and orchestration stack and would rather buy one contract that handles data, scoring, and activation together instead of stitching Bombora into separate tools.

Demandbase

Demandbase is another full-stack ABM platform: account intelligence, intent data, programmatic advertising, and sales orchestration in one product. Reported pricing spans a wide range — mid-market deployments commonly land between $50,000 and $80,000 a year, and enterprise contracts with advertising modules attached can run $100,000–$300,000+. Demandbase suits organizations already committed to account-based marketing as a program, with a dedicated ABM team that will use the advertising and orchestration pieces, not just the intent score.

ZoomInfo Intent

ZoomInfo bundles its own Streaming Intent signal — built on proprietary machine learning, bidstream data, and site partnerships since the Bombora split — into its Advanced and Elite plans. The advantage is consolidation: if you already buy ZoomInfo for contact and company data, intent arrives as an add-on inside the same platform instead of a separate vendor relationship. The tradeoff is that it’s ZoomInfo’s own data model, refreshed daily, not the Bombora co-op signal, so don’t expect the same topic taxonomy or publisher-consent story.

G2 Buyer Intent

G2’s intent product tracks first-party behavior on G2’s own comparison and review pages — who’s researching your category, viewing competitor profiles, or reading reviews on G2 itself — instead of pulling from a third-party publisher co-op. It fits teams selling software specifically, since G2’s traffic is buyers already deep in vendor evaluation. See our full breakdown of G2 Buyer Intent pricing and alternatives for how it’s packaged and what it costs.

TechTarget Priority Engine

Priority Engine is built on Informa TechTarget’s own network of technology media properties and a base of tens of millions of permissioned members who register for content across those sites. Because members opt in with named, permissioned profiles, Priority Engine can surface identified contacts researching a topic, not just an account-level score — a meaningfully different data model than Bombora’s anonymized, aggregated co-op signal. Reported pricing starts around $30,000 a year at entry level and climbs past $100,000 for enterprise access. It fits IT and technology vendors specifically, since TechTarget’s publisher network concentrates in enterprise tech media.

Spotsaas Buyer Intel (disclosure)

Spotsaas runs Buyer Intel, our own first-party intent product — built on visits to Spotsaas’s own category and product pages, not on Bombora’s co-op or any third-party publisher network. It’s the same first-party model G2 Buyer Intent uses, just built on Spotsaas’s own traffic (2M+ buyers a year across 419 software categories) instead of G2’s. Buyer Intel surfaces three signal types: resolved company visits (de-anonymized traffic on your category page), content-download leads (companies that pulled a buying guide or comparison), and self-qualified buyer requests (companies that told us directly what they’re evaluating). We disclose this plainly because the comparison matters: Spotsaas’s own traffic is smaller than Bombora’s cross-web, 5,000-site co-op, so the honest use case is category-level buying signal for the software categories Spotsaas covers, not broad market coverage across every B2B vertical. See Spotsaas Buyer Intel for how the three modes work.

Frequently asked questions

How does Bombora get their data?

Bombora runs a Data Co-op of more than 5,000 B2B publisher sites that agree to share anonymized reader-behavior data in exchange for access to the co-op’s aggregated intelligence. Every time someone on a business domain reads content on a co-op site, that interaction is logged, matched to a topic, and rolled into a weekly Company Surge score for that account.

What is Bombora used for?

Marketing teams use it to prioritize account-based target lists and trigger campaigns around research spikes. Sales teams use it to time outreach instead of cold-calling blind. RevOps teams pipe the Company Surge score into a CRM as a lead-scoring input. Bombora sells the signal only — activation happens inside whatever CRM, ad platform, or ABM tool the buyer already runs.

How much does Bombora cost?

Bombora doesn’t publish list prices. Buyer-reported contracts run from around $13,000–$30,000 a year at entry level (median near $25,000) up to $120,000–$300,000+ for large enterprise deals with custom topics and multi-region coverage. Pricing scales with the number of topics tracked and integrations connected, not with user seats.

How does intent data work?

Intent data infers what a company is researching by tracking anonymized digital behavior — content consumption, search activity, or site visits — tied to a business domain instead of an individual. Vendors compare current activity against a historical baseline for that account; a spike above baseline signals active, in-market research on a specific topic.

What’s the difference between first-party and third-party intent data?

Third-party intent, like Bombora’s, comes from a network of sites you don’t own — a publisher co-op that shares aggregated behavior across the web. First-party intent comes from your own properties: who visits your category or product pages, downloads your content, or requests a demo. First-party signal is narrower but usually more directly tied to your specific offering.

Keep reading

• 10 best buyer intent data providers — a ranked comparison of the category beyond just Bombora.
• Buyer intent data: the complete guide — how intent data works, first-party vs. third-party, and how to build a program around it.
• G2 Buyer Intent: pricing and alternatives — the closest first-party comparison to Bombora’s third-party model.

Sources

• Bombora — Our Data (Data Co-op scale and taxonomy size)
• Bombora — Company Surge intent product overview
• Bombora — March 2025 taxonomy release
• Bombora — Forrester Wave Leader recognition, Q1 2025
• Vendr — Bombora buyer-reported pricing
• MarketBetter — Bombora pricing breakdown, 2026
• Cognism — ZoomInfo Intent Data review
• ZoomInfo — ZoomInfo and Bombora Settle Lawsuit (2022)
• PitchBook — Bombora company profile

Last updated: July 17, 2026