The Forrester Wave for B2B Intent Data Providers, published in February 2025, evaluated 15 vendors across 21 criteria and identified a Leaders category that included 6sense, Bombora, Demandbase, Intentsify, and ZoomInfo. These five share the same core claim: surface companies researching your category before they request a demo. But their data sources, platform scope, and pricing models differ substantially, and those differences are more consequential than the shared category label suggests.
What separates the five Forrester Leaders
The five Leaders fall into two categories based on what they actually sell: data feeds and activation platforms. That distinction shapes the integration work, the vendor commitment, and the team capacity required to get value from the product.
| Provider | Signal Source | Product Scope | Pricing Tier | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bombora | Co-op of 5,000+ B2B sites | Data feed only | From ~$25K/year | Teams wanting standalone intent signals integrated into existing tools |
| 6sense | Proprietary + third-party signals | Full ABM platform | Enterprise, not public | Enterprise ABM with intent, scoring, and advertising in one product |
| Demandbase | Proprietary account ID + intent co-op | Full ABM platform | Enterprise, not public | Enterprise ABM teams prioritizing account identification accuracy |
| ZoomInfo | ZoomInfo network + Bombora partnership | Contact DB add-on | Add-on to existing contract | Teams already on ZoomInfo seeking intent without a second vendor |
| Intentsify | Multiple third-party co-ops | Activation platform | Mid-market | Teams wanting multi-co-op intent coverage without full ABM platform overhead |
Bombora Company Surge: the co-op data model
Bombora operates a content consumption co-op across more than 5,000 business websites covering over 13,000 B2B topic categories. When contacts at a company consume significantly more content than usual on a topic cluster, Bombora registers a surge score for that company. The signal is company-level and threshold-based: you learn that Acme Corp is surging on "marketing attribution software," not who at Acme is doing the research or how serious they are.
Bombora Company Surge holds a 4.2 out of 5 on G2. The pattern across reviews is consistent with what the data model produces: teams running ABM programs against defined target account lists report that surge scores improve sequencing decisions and help reps prioritize which accounts to work now versus next quarter. The most common complaint is the expectation gap between what the signal promises and what it delivers. A surge score tells you which building to call on, not which floor or whether the building has a budget approved.
Bombora's entry-level pricing for Company Surge starts at roughly $25,000 per year. Most mid-market implementations land between $50,000 and $100,000 depending on topic count and data volume. The integration work lives inside your existing tech stack: your CRM and MAP have to receive the signals and your team has to build the processes that respond to them.
6sense Revenue AI: intent signals plus an activation layer
6sense combines intent signals with AI-driven account scoring, advertising orchestration, and pipeline predictions in a unified product. Rather than selling a data feed, it sells a workflow: signals come in, accounts get scored, ads get served to in-market accounts, and sales sequences get triggered based on buying stage predictions. According to its published product documentation, 6sense ingests more than one trillion buying signals per day across 40 languages.
Gartner named 6sense a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for ABM Platforms for five consecutive years through 2025, ranking it highest for ability to execute. That recognition reflects a genuine product capability gap between 6sense and the data-feed providers. The activation layer is real and produces results for teams that have the operational maturity to use it.
The trade-off is implementation complexity and cost. 6sense contracts are not publicly listed and typically start above Bombora's entry point. Implementations take weeks. The platform generates value proportional to the team's operational readiness: defined target account lists, ABM processes already in motion, and RevOps capacity to manage a complex product. Teams that lack those foundations often report that 6sense underperforms relative to its cost, not because the data is weak, but because the activation layer requires a functional workflow to activate against.
Demandbase: account identification as the foundation
Demandbase built its ABM platform through a series of acquisitions, including Engagio in 2020, and constructed a proprietary account identification layer on top of its intent data co-op. Its differentiation from 6sense centers on account identification accuracy: Demandbase claims higher precision in matching anonymous website visitors to named company accounts, which is the step that makes intent signals actionable at all.
The practical implication is that Demandbase's intent signals are most useful when paired with the account identification infrastructure that's built into the platform. Unlike Bombora, which delivers signals into your existing stack, Demandbase's intent data is designed to work within Demandbase's own advertising and orchestration layer. Pricing is not publicly listed and the product is positioned for enterprise buyers with established ABM programs.
For teams choosing between 6sense and Demandbase, the decision often comes down to advertising network and existing tech stack alignment. Both are full ABM platforms with similar capability profiles at the Forrester Leader level. The differences are in data source composition, advertising inventory, and which CRM and MAP integrations each handles more smoothly in practice.
ZoomInfo Streaming Intent: adding signals to the contact database
ZoomInfo offers intent data through its Streaming Intent product, which layers first-party signals from the ZoomInfo network of media properties on top of Bombora's co-op data. The result is a combined intent signal accessible within the ZoomInfo interface that teams already use for prospecting and enrichment.
The practical advantage is consolidation. If your team is already a ZoomInfo customer, Streaming Intent avoids a second vendor contract, a second CRM integration, and a second set of topic taxonomies to maintain. The intent data is available where your reps already work, which reduces the activation friction that causes standalone intent data purchases to underperform. Streaming Intent is priced as an add-on to an existing ZoomInfo contract, rather than as a standalone product.
The limitation is data source overlap. Because ZoomInfo's external intent signals come partly from Bombora, teams that want a distinct data perspective rather than Bombora signals through a different interface should evaluate Bombora directly or consider Intentsify's multi-co-op approach.
Intentsify: multi-co-op coverage without the platform commitment
Intentsify occupies a different position from the other four Leaders. Rather than building a contact database or a full ABM platform, it focuses on aggregating intent signals from multiple third-party data co-ops and providing an orchestration layer to activate those signals. The value proposition is breadth of signal coverage combined with lower platform overhead than 6sense or Demandbase.
Teams that want intent signal coverage beyond a single co-op's network, but that are not yet ready to commit to a full ABM platform, are the primary fit. Intentsify also publishes case studies showing how teams have used its activation layer to run programmatic advertising directly from intent signals, which overlaps with 6sense's advertising functionality at a lower commitment level. As with all five Leaders, the Forrester evaluation confirmed strong signal quality; the question is fit, not data capability.
Data feed vs. activation platform: the decision that matters most
The most useful framework for choosing between these five providers is not data quality. The Forrester Wave evaluated all five on signal quality and all five earned Leader status. The meaningful split is between providers that sell intent signals as a data feed and providers that sell intent signals as part of an activation platform.
Bombora and Intentsify are data feeds. They deliver intent signals that your existing tech stack has to act on. Your CRM has to receive them, your sequences or ads have to be configured to respond to them, and someone on your team has to own the topic taxonomy and signal-to-action mapping. The integration work is yours to build and maintain. The vendor commitment is lighter, and the price reflects that.
6sense and Demandbase are platforms. They bring the intent data and the activation layer together: account scoring, advertising, and orchestration are built into the product. That reduces the integration burden but increases the vendor commitment significantly. You're not buying a data feed; you're buying into an operational workflow that replaces or augments several other tools.
ZoomInfo Streaming Intent sits between those two categories. It's a data feed, but it's delivered inside the ZoomInfo environment your team already uses, which reduces the activation friction that standalone intent feeds typically encounter.
Three questions to narrow the field
Before comparing demos, three questions narrow the field more efficiently than any product evaluation:
- Are you already a ZoomInfo customer? If yes, Streaming Intent deserves evaluation before adding a separate vendor. The consolidation benefit is real, and the pricing structure is more transparent than most alternatives.
- Do you need intent signals only, or intent plus activation? If your team has the RevOps capacity and existing ABM infrastructure to activate a data feed, Bombora or Intentsify avoid paying for platform functionality you'll build yourself. If you want the activation layer included, 6sense or Demandbase are the right comparison set.
- What is your team's current ABM maturity? 6sense and Demandbase are designed for teams with defined target account lists, operational sequencing or advertising workflows, and someone who can own the platform on an ongoing basis. Teams without those elements report that the platform produces less value than the cost justifies, because the activation layer has nothing to activate against. Starting with a data feed and building toward a platform is a sequencing approach that avoids paying for capability you can't yet use.
For a detailed breakdown of what intent signals actually deliver, what reviewers report after implementation, and how to calculate whether the spend is warranted at your current scale, see our analysis of what you actually get from B2B intent data.
The Forrester Leaders all have defensible data quality. The question worth spending evaluation time on is whether you're buying a data asset your team will integrate into an existing workflow, or a platform that expects to replace part of that workflow. Those are meaningfully different purchases with different success conditions.