Every Evaboot export starts with a Sales Navigator search. The sentence sounds harmless, and it is in fact the tool's most structuring constraint. Its publisher states it plainly: "Evaboot exports the results of your own Sales Navigator searches, so you need an active Sales Navigator seat" Source, Evaboot, 2026. Looking for an Evaboot alternative therefore rarely means looking for a better exporter. It means asking whether LinkedIn data is the data you actually need. This article separates the two questions and gives you enough to decide, including the decision to stay on Evaboot.
Two registers that do not describe the same object
Sales Navigator describes people, and companies as they present themselves on LinkedIn: a job title, a stated tenure, a headcount bracket filled in by the company itself. That is declarative data, maintained by individuals, and that is exactly where its value sits. No public register knows that a new IT director took the job three weeks ago.
The French Sirene register describes legal entities as they are registered: a SIREN number, a SIRET number per establishment, legal form, activity code, registered office address, active or ceased status. Insee reports close to 25 million businesses and 36 million establishments recorded since 1973, updated daily, and states that Sirene data is free of charge Source, Insee, 2026. If those identifiers are new to you, our explainer on what SIRET and SIREN numbers actually mean covers the structure.
The two registers answer different questions. "Who runs IT in manufacturing companies above 250 employees in this region" is a LinkedIn question. "Which establishments in my sector are still active in this department, under which legal form, at which registered address" is a Sirene question. A sales rep working the French market often needs the second one, and the first does not contain it: a LinkedIn profile will not tell you that the establishment has been struck off.
One caveat before betting everything on open data: Insee does not publish legal representatives in its open files, in application of article R 123-232 of the French commercial code Source, data.gouv.fr, 2026. Director names come from somewhere else, and that is one more step.
The work Evaboot saves you
Label cleaning. The tool normalises first names, last names, job titles and company names at export. Anyone who has ever sent a "Hi JEAN-PIERRE 🚀 | Growth Hacker" knows what that step prevents. It is tedious to code, and Evaboot does it by default.
Built-in email verification. Finding and testing an address happens in the same pass, which removes a round trip to a third-party tool. The billing model follows the same logic: 1 credit for the exported lead, 1 credit for the email found, and nothing charged when no email is found Source, Evaboot, 2026. Charging for results rather than attempts is an honest design choice and deserves to be named.
Respect for your own search perimeter. Evaboot exports what your Sales Navigator query returns, without substituting a third-party database assembled elsewhere. You therefore know exactly where every row came from, which is not true of every contact vendor.
On function-based targeting, LinkedIn is unbeatable and that should be said without hedging: no legal register will tell you who the HR director is. If your segment is defined by a role, a seniority level or a recent job change, stay on that chain. Worth knowing all the same: one search exports up to 2,500 leads or 1,000 companies, a ceiling imposed by LinkedIn's pagination rather than by Evaboot, which forces you to slice large segments Source, Evaboot, 2026.
The access condition that shapes everything else
The Sales Navigator seat is not included. The unit of decision is therefore not the tool, it is the chain. On the LinkedIn side, pricing for a Sales Navigator Core licence starts at EUR 120.99 per month or EUR 1,088.88 per year, a figure LinkedIn presents as an estimate that may exclude VAT Source, LinkedIn Sales Solutions, 2026. On the Evaboot side, the entry plan is $9 per month for 100 credits, or $0.09 per credit billed annually Source, Evaboot, 2026. Since a lead exported with its email consumes 2 credits, those 100 credits amount to 50 complete contacts a month.
That arithmetic is not an argument against Evaboot. At that volume the spend is modest and the service real. It only frames the question. The expensive part of this chain is the access subscription, and it is justified by LinkedIn's declarative data. If you are paying for that access in order to extract company names and website URLs, you are funding a register of people to retrieve information that is available elsewhere without a subscription.
What "free" really covers here
The query "evaboot alternative free" comes up often enough to deserve a straight answer. Evaboot's pricing page shows no permanent free plan: every volume listed there is billed in credits. It does state that you can subscribe to a plan and cancel immediately, with one month to spend the credits you bought Source, Evaboot, 2026.
On the access side, the Sales Navigator free trial is not open to everyone: LinkedIn reserves it for members who are not on any paid LinkedIn subscription and who have not used a LinkedIn free trial in the past 365 days Source, LinkedIn Sales Solutions, 2026. In other words, a member already on Premium cannot stack the two free offers, and testing the full chain almost always means paying for at least one of the two layers.
What is genuinely free, with no eligibility condition, is Sirene data. But a raw Sirene extract is not a prospecting file: it gives legal identity, not a phone number, not an email, not a website. Free raw material says nothing about the work that remains. That is also why outsend, currently in free alpha by application, puts its effort on what comes after the public record. You can request free alpha access and test the full chain on your own segment.
Where outsend plugs in, and what it does not replace
Two scenarios, two different positions.
If your segment is defined by a trade and a territory, the LinkedIn chain is the wrong starting point. A local tradesperson, a garage, a small accounting practice in a provincial town often have no usable Sales Navigator presence at all. You start from business listings instead, with a Google Maps extraction exported to CSV, then attach SIRET, SIREN, VAT and trade register numbers automatically. Here outsend is an alternative, not a complement.
If you already have an Evaboot export, the role changes: outsend becomes the qualification layer. A list pulled from LinkedIn can be pushed back through to check the legal form and status of each company, to collect additional phone numbers from the company website, or to test deliverability before the first send. The two tools chain rather than compete, and this is by far the most common case.
What outsend does not do, and does not claim to: named targeting by function. No "every HR director in mid-market manufacturing" search, no job change signal, no career history. Outside France the advantage also leans towards LinkedIn as soon as people are involved, since the Sirene register stops at the French border. For company-level identifiers in other jurisdictions, our guide to the Companies House equivalent in each country lists the national registers worth querying.
What each source holds, and what it leaves out
| Criterion | Evaboot with Sales Navigator | Raw Sirene register | outsend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Object described | Person and company page | Legal unit and establishment | Establishment, then linked legal entity |
| Origin of the data | Declared by the individual or the company | Administrative registration | Public online listing, cross-checked with the register |
| Third-party subscription required | Active Sales Navigator seat, mandatory | None, free access | None |
| Geographic coverage | International | France only | International extraction, French register for legal enrichment |
| Active or ceased status | Not available | Available | Available through enrichment |
| Targeting by function and seniority | Yes, its strong point | No | No |
| Ceiling per search | 2,500 leads or 1,000 companies | Not applicable, full files | Configurable territorial slicing |
| Work remaining after export | Legal qualification and non-email contact details | All contact data: phone, email, website | Quality control and segmentation |
FAQ: what to check before you pay for the first month
Do you really need a Sales Navigator subscription to use Evaboot?
Yes. The question appears in the publisher's own FAQ, which answers that an active Sales Navigator seat is required since the tool exports the results of your own searches Source, Evaboot, 2026. Several seats can be connected at no extra cost on the Evaboot side.
How many credits does one lead with its email consume?
Two: one for the exported lead, one for the email found and verified. An email that cannot be found is not charged Source, Evaboot, 2026. The right reflex before picking a volume is to think in complete contacts, not in credits.
Can you export more than 2,500 leads from a single search?
No, and the limit does not come from the tool: Sales Navigator stops paginating beyond 2,500 leads or 1,000 companies. The method the publisher recommends is to split the search into narrower ones, by headcount, geography or industry, and export each of them Source, Evaboot, 2026.
Is the Sirene register enough to prospect with?
It is enough to qualify, not to reach out. The register gives legal identity and establishment status, free of charge Source, Insee, 2026, but no business phone number, no email, no website. You need a second source for contact details and a third to verify them.
Does outsend replace Evaboot?
Not on Evaboot's own ground. If your targeting runs through roles and people, keep the LinkedIn chain. If it runs through trades, territories and French legal entities, outsend answers on its own and without an access subscription. Combining both remains the most common setup, and the list of available modules shows which ones apply to a file you already have.