KnowFirst Review 2026: Australia's Largest B2B Business Database — Pricing and Data Quality

KnowFirst Review: What You Get (and What You Don't)

KnowFirstis a business and contact intelligence platform for Australia and New Zealand, built around company and contact data anchored to official business registers, including the ABN (Australian Business Number) register and New Zealand's NZBN.

It serves sales, marketing, recruitment, and market research teams that need accurate, locally-sourced Australian and New Zealand business data. The value proposition over global providers: depth and accuracy for the Australian market that a company focused primarily on the US, European, or global market can't match.

How KnowFirst Works: From Free Search to Export

KnowFirst is self-serve and built around a simple rule: searching is free, and you pay only for the records you actually use. As of September 2026, the workflow runs in six steps.

1. Search. Filter more than 3 million businesses and 12 million people across Australia and New Zealand by industry, location, business size, keywords, and role. Searching and browsing cost nothing, and you can save searches to re-run later.
2. Research. Open a business profile to see registry details, locations, website and tech stack, search and social presence, reviews, news, contracts, key people, and the business feed of recent changes.
3. Unlock. Spend a credit to reveal phone numbers and email addresses for a business or person. The unlock is remembered across your searches, lists, and profiles, so you never pay twice for the same record.
4. Organise. Save businesses and people to lists and keep your searches for later.
5. Export. Export records as CSV or JSONL. KnowFirst shows the credit cost before you confirm, and completed exports can be downloaded again without paying twice.
6. Integrate. Pull the same data through the REST API, which draws on the same credit balance at 1 credit per request.

The practical upshot: size your market before you buy anything. Because search is free and the free plan includes 20 credits, you can check how many of your target businesses KnowFirst covers — and unlock a handful to test contact quality — before committing to a paid plan.

KnowFirst Data Quality: Australian Coverage in Practice

KnowFirst's data quality for Australian companies is strong. ABN, ACN, and GST registry data provides a reliable ground truth for company existence and registration status, and KnowFirst says it continuously refreshes profiles from public records and published sources, with the business feed surfacing changes as they happen.

Contact data accuracy is the variable. Business phone numbers and registered office addresses are generally accurate. Personal email addresses and direct mobile numbers — the data that drives outbound — vary in coverage and freshness. Small and medium businesses in particular have inconsistent contact coverage.

For enterprise accounts and ASX-listed companies, KnowFirst's depth is excellent. For the long tail of SMEs that make up much of the Australian market, coverage gaps appear more frequently.

KnowFirst vs. Global Providers for Australian Data

Global providers like ZoomInfo, Apollo, and Cognism have notoriously thin Australian coverage. Australian businesses represent a small fraction of their total database and get fewer refresh cycles than US or European records. KnowFirst's local-first approach produces better Australian data quality than any global provider — for Australian-market use cases, it wins on coverage.

KnowFirst Pricing Breakdown

As of September 2026, KnowFirst publishes its pricing, and every plan — including Free — gets the full platform: search with every filter, business and people profiles, lists, and saved searches. Credits are spent only on paid actions: unlocking contact details or exporting a record costs 1 credit per record, and each API request costs 1 credit.

• Free (A$0): 20 credits to start, with the same features as the paid plans.
• Starter (A$120/month, or A$720/year billed annually): 200 credits a month; extra credits at A$0.30 each.
• Growth (A$216/month, or A$1,296/year): 600 credits a month; extra credits at A$0.18 each.
• Professional (A$600/month, or A$3,600/year): 2,000 credits a month; extra credits at A$0.15 each.
• Enterprise (custom): Higher volumes and custom commercial terms through sales.

All prices are in Australian dollars and include GST. Annual billing is 50% off the monthly rate, top-ups start at 1,000 credits at your plan's rate (with optional auto top-up and a monthly spending cap), and credits last for the length of your subscription. There are no per-seat fees and no minimum spend.

Because an unlocked record stays unlocked for your account, repeat lookups are free. A solo rep unlocking around 150 contacts a month fits inside Starter's 200 credits, while a team exporting 500 records a month and running API lookups on top will need Growth's 600 credits or regular top-ups.

KnowFirst Datasets: What's in the Database

KnowFirst builds its profiles from public records and published sources, drawing on more than 240 million records in total. Key datasets include:

• Registry data: ABN, ACN, and GST status for Australian businesses and the NZBN for New Zealand businesses — the foundation of business identity verification.
• Trading names and locations: The names and sites a business actually operates under, not just its registered entity.
• Industry data: An ANZSIC code on every business, from broad divisions down to precise subdivisions, aligned with official Australian and New Zealand statistics.
• Workforce data: Employees, jobs, and salaries, plus people profiles for the key people behind each business.
• Digital footprint: Websites and tech stack, organic and paid search, social media, and directories.
• Reputation and activity: Customer and employee reviews, news and awards, and contracts and trademarks.
• Contact information: Phone numbers and email addresses, revealed when you unlock a business or person.

The combination of registry verification plus published-source enrichment is what makes KnowFirst useful. A company confirmed against the ABN or NZBN register, paired with its key people and web footprint, gives you a reliable foundation for ANZ prospecting that scraped web data alone can't match for accuracy.

KnowFirst Integrations: CRM and API Access

KnowFirst offers a REST API, authenticated with an API key, that draws on the same credit balance as the dashboard at 1 credit per request. Technical teams can use it to pipe KnowFirst data into an existing CRM, enrichment pipeline, or product. For everyone else, exports come as CSV or JSONL, and an MCP server is listed as coming soon.

KnowFirst's site says you can put its data to work in your CRM, but it doesn't list native HubSpot or Salesforce connectors — verify with their team before assuming a one-click sync. Like most ANZ-focused data providers, the integration ecosystem is less developed than global providers with larger R&D budgets.

What Are the Downsides of Using KnowFirst?

1. Australia and New Zealand Only

KnowFirst's strength is also its primary limitation. If your GTM motion extends beyond Australia and New Zealand — to wider APAC, EMEA, or North America — KnowFirst has nothing to offer for those markets. You'll need a separate global data provider for accounts outside ANZ.

• No APAC coverage beyond Australia and New Zealand
• Multi-market teams need to manage two separate data sources

2. Limited Buying Signals

KnowFirst's business feed surfaces recent changes on a business — website updates, news mentions, new roles, and registered changes — which is more than a static database offers. But it doesn't list funding-round or third-party intent signals, and the feed sits on each business profile, so you see changes when you look a business up. For signal-based outbound across a whole account list, you still need a separate layer.

3. Credits Add Up at Scale

Searching is free, but every unlock, export, and API request costs a credit, and monthly allowances are modest — 200 to 2,000 credits depending on the plan. Teams that export large lists or run high-volume API lookups will lean on top-ups (from 1,000 credits at the plan rate), so model your monthly record volume before choosing a plan.

4. SME Contact Coverage Gaps

While KnowFirst's company coverage is broad, contact-level data for small and medium businesses has gaps. Decision-maker mobile numbers and personal emails are harder to source reliably at the SME tier — which is a significant portion of the Australian B2B market.

Is KnowFirst Worth It?

KnowFirst is worth it for businesses that sell primarily into Australia and New Zealand. The registry-backed data quality and coverage depth for ANZ companies is genuinely better than what global providers offer for this market, and free search plus public credit pricing make it easy to test.

For teams targeting international markets — or for Australian companies expanding globally — KnowFirst's ANZ-only focus creates gaps that require a second data platform to fill.

For signal-driven outbound, the business feed is a useful start — it flags website, news, and registry changes on the businesses you research — but funding and intent signals still need a separate tool. To see how KnowFirst stacks up against other local options, read our roundup of the best B2B databases for Australia.