CRM and sales

Hunter alternatives

2 open-source projects that already do this job. Free to use - not free to run, which is what the numbers on the right are for.

The full assessment →

The projects

reacherhq/check-if-email-exists9,259licence unclearPerforms SMTP/DNS checks to determine if an email address exists, providing an HTTP backend service.Open on GitHub truemail-rb/truemail1,271MITFramework-agnostic Ruby email verifier supporting regex, DNS, and SMTP-level validation.Open on GitHub

What you give up either way

Hunter’s large, proprietary B2B contact dataset and historical coverage
Proprietary AI/enrichment models and their accuracy at scale
Deliverability optimizations, managed inbox protections, and large-scale sending infrastructure
Prebuilt integrations catalogue and polished UX

An open-source project doing the core job proves a replacement is possible. It does not prove it matches Hunter, and it does not prove anyone has run it for a month. How we decide.