Bombora built the B2B intent data category. For years, “we do intent” meant “we buy Bombora Company Surge and plug it into 6sense or Demandbase.” It is a real, well-architected product serving real workflows, and that deserves acknowledgment before we get to the question in the title.
I am George, founder of Leadpipe. Teams coming up on a Bombora renewal ask us the same question in different words: can Orbit replace it? This post is the honest decision framework. When yes, when no, when both. Not a sales pitch.
The short answer
For person-level outbound, SDR queues, ABM watchlists, and AI SDR pipelines, Orbit replaces Bombora cleanly and usually improves results while cutting cost. For classic enterprise ABM orchestration inside 6sense or Demandbase where Bombora feeds account-level surge scores into an existing platform investment, Orbit is an addition, not a drop-in replacement; the integration is different and the use case is different. For competitive intercept, keyword-specific topic research, and anything where you need to know the person (not the company), Orbit is the better fit at a small fraction of the cost. For legacy batch workflows keyed off Bombora-shaped company surge data, a migration is a project, not a weekend.
Now the framework.
What each product actually is
Before we compare, here is the architectural split. We cover this more deeply in Orbit vs Bombora.
| Dimension | Bombora | Orbit |
|---|---|---|
| Data unit | Company surge | Person + topic |
| Signal source | Co-op of ~5,000 B2B publisher sites | Cross-site pixel network across ~5M sites |
| Resolution | IP to company | Identity graph to person |
| Topic count | ~12,000 | 20,810 |
| Topic granularity | Category | Keyword |
| Refresh | Weekly | Daily |
| Contact data in payload | No | Name, email, phone, LinkedIn |
| Delivery | Via platform partner (6sense, Demandbase) | Dashboard + REST API + CSV + webhooks |
| Pricing | $25K-$300K/yr | Included in Leadpipe from $147/mo |
| Contract | Annual | Month-to-month |
They solve overlapping but not identical problems. The use case dictates whether the swap works.
When Orbit replaces Bombora cleanly
Five use cases where Orbit is a direct, usually superior, substitute.
1. SDR and AE outbound
If your intent data ends up in an SDR’s morning queue so they can reach out to specific people researching your category, Orbit wins. Bombora gives you “Acme Corp is surging on CRM.” Your SDR spends 30 to 60 minutes per account figuring out who at Acme to actually contact, enriching them, and writing an opener. Orbit gives you “Sarah Chen, VP Marketing at Acme, score 87 on CRM Software, here is her email.” Same signal, thirty minutes saved per lead.
2. ABM watchlists
If you have a 100 to 500 target account list and you want to know which of those accounts are actively researching your category this week, at person level, Orbit is built for this. The companyDomain filter restricts the audience to your list; the topic and score restrict it to intent. We walked through the build in how to build a 200-account ABM watchlist in Orbit.
3. AI SDR daily lists
AI SDRs need person-level data with contact info to take action. Bombora’s company surge data needs a human research step before an AI agent can do anything with it. Orbit’s daily person-level output is what most AI SDR stacks were actually missing. See the data layer AI sales agents are missing.
4. Competitive intercept
If you want to reach people researching your competitors by name, Bombora’s topic breadth covers some branded terms at category level but rarely at the keyword-specific level (“Salesforce alternatives”, “HubSpot vs Pipedrive”). Orbit’s 20,810-topic taxonomy is built at keyword granularity, which is where competitive intercept lives. See Orbit competitive intelligence.
5. Ad retargeting with intent qualification
If you push audiences into LinkedIn Matched Audiences or Google Customer Match, you want the audience to be person-level and in-market. Orbit gives you people; Bombora gives you companies (which require a separate enrichment step to produce a person-level ad audience).
When Orbit does not cleanly replace Bombora
Being honest: three scenarios where Bombora is not a simple swap.
1. You are deep inside a 6sense or Demandbase deployment
If your ABM platform is tuned against Bombora’s company surge data, with account scoring models, orchestration playbooks, and attribution built around the Bombora signal shape, swapping is not a CSV migration. It is an ABM platform reconfiguration. Some teams do it. Most teams in this situation add Orbit as a person-level layer on top of the existing account-level Bombora setup rather than ripping it out.
2. Your use case is pure account prioritization
If the only question you ask of intent data is “which accounts should my sales team focus on this quarter?”, company-level surge from Bombora answers it adequately, and the existing integration with your CRM or ABM platform works fine. Orbit’s person-level advantage does not add proportional value if you never use it.
3. Legacy batch pipelines
If you have batch pipelines (data warehouses, marketing automation segments, account scoring models) that ingest Bombora’s weekly file with its specific schema, you can swap to Orbit but it is an engineering project. The data model is different, the delivery cadence is different, the join keys are different. Plan accordingly.
The honest cost comparison
This is where the decision usually gets made.
| Item | Bombora path | Orbit path |
|---|---|---|
| Intent data license | $25K-$300K/yr | Included in Leadpipe $147/mo ($1,764/yr) |
| Platform to operationalize (6sense or similar) | $50K+/yr | $0 (Orbit works standalone) |
| Contact enrichment (ZoomInfo/Apollo/Clearbit) | $15K-$60K/yr | $0 (person-level data included) |
| Implementation | $5K-$20K | $0 (self-serve) |
| Minimum commitment | Annual contract | Month-to-month |
Even at the low end, Bombora plus the surrounding stack is typically $40,000 to $80,000 per year. At the high end, it is a quarter million. Orbit at $147 per month or the Agency tier at $1,279 per month covers the same use cases for most teams at a small fraction of the spend.
If Leadpipe’s identification is also part of your workflow, note that pricing includes both the identification and Orbit intent product on every plan. The Agency/White-label tier is $1,279/mo for 20,000 identifications with a white-label dashboard and unlimited clients.
The side-by-side test
Before you renew Bombora, run a controlled two-week test. This is the protocol we recommend.
- Pick 10 current Bombora surge accounts. Take the 10 most recent accounts Bombora surfaced as surging in your category. Write them down.
- Research each manually. Spend a half hour per account identifying which person at each one is probably doing the research. Enrich their contact data. Log the time spent.
- Run the same 10 domains through Orbit. Set up an audience with
companyDomainrestricted to those 10 domains, your category topics, score 70+. Pull the result. - Compare. For each account, does Orbit surface a specific person? Is that person senior enough to be a buyer? Is the contact data complete?
- Extrapolate. Your Bombora ROI case becomes: total signal volume x manual research cost per signal. Your Orbit ROI case becomes: monthly subscription cost. The cost per actionable, person-level signal is usually an order of magnitude apart.
One hour of honest testing on 10 accounts produces a clearer answer than any sales pitch.
The hybrid, for teams that need both
Some enterprise teams run both intentionally:
- Bombora at the account level, feeding 6sense or Demandbase for account prioritization.
- Orbit at the person level, feeding the SDR queue and the live ABM heatmap in HubSpot.
This is the most expensive stack but it makes sense when the account-level and person-level use cases are both heavily tooled. For most teams, Orbit alone covers both layers at a fraction of the cost. For large enterprise ABM programs with mature Bombora-based orchestration, the hybrid is a reasonable transition state while the team evaluates whether to consolidate.
See the live heatmap side in connecting Orbit to HubSpot and the build side in how to build a 200-account ABM watchlist.
What you lose by moving
If you move off Bombora, here is what you genuinely give up.
- Publisher co-op coverage of long-tail B2B publications. Bombora sees some research behavior on co-op sites that our pixel network may not cover. Our network is wider (5M sites vs Bombora’s ~5,000 publisher partners), but the co-op’s signal on specific trade publications is real.
- Twelve years of Bombora-shaped integrations. Every major ABM platform has Bombora hooks. Orbit’s REST API and CSV exports are cleaner and more flexible, but the out-of-the-box platform integrations were built for Bombora shape.
- Analyst-report-era brand recognition. If you need to tell a CFO “we use the standard in the category,” Bombora has the longest name-recognition tail.
These are real considerations. None of them are fatal. All of them are weighable against the person-level resolution, daily refresh, keyword-specific topics, and 90 percent cost reduction that Orbit provides.
Decision summary
| Your situation | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| SDR outbound, person-level outreach | Replace Bombora with Orbit |
| ABM watchlist, daily refresh, CRM heatmap | Replace Bombora with Orbit |
| AI SDR feeding daily lists | Replace Bombora with Orbit |
| Competitive intercept, keyword-level topic targeting | Replace Bombora with Orbit |
| Enterprise ABM with mature 6sense/Demandbase + Bombora integration | Add Orbit as a person-level layer; keep Bombora for account orchestration |
| Pure account prioritization, no person-level work | Stay on Bombora if the contract is reasonable |
| Legacy batch pipelines built around Bombora schema | Plan a phased migration, not a swap |
Related reading
- Orbit vs Bombora
- What’s inside an Orbit intent topic
- Reading the Orbit intent score
- Why Orbit refreshes intent daily
- Orbit competitive intelligence
- Leadpipe intent API: 20,000 topics
- Intent data vs visitor identification
- In-market buyer intent
Orbit is the proprietary alternative to licensed intent co-ops: 5M-site pixel network, 24-hour refresh, person-level output, no Bombora dependency. Compare Orbit to your current feed →
