Phyllo vs Tokfluence: consented data or a searchable index
Both sell creator data through an API, and they are built for opposite ends of the same job. Phyllo is best known for data a creator agrees to share with you. Tokfluence is for finding TikTok creators who have never heard of you. Which one you need depends on whether the creator is already in the room.
- Different models. Phyllo's signature product is consent: the creator connects an account and you get the numbers they see. We are a TikTok index you search without asking anyone.
- Consent cannot find anyone. A creator has to know you before they log in to your app. Phyllo sells a separate public layer for discovery; discovery is all we do.
- A price you can work out. Our API is $9.80 per 1,000 profiles on Growth, or $9.95 on Agency with the app and MCP server included. Phyllo publishes no price at all.
- Missing creators get crawled. Our MCP server starts a live TikTok crawl from the chat for 250 credits, and the new creators are searchable a few hours later.
- Pick Phyllo for verified first-party data or 25+ platforms. Pick us to find TikTok creators at a known cost.
How we put this together
Phyllo's products, platform count and pricing were read from getphyllo.com and its pricing page on 16 October 2026, in a browser, and the pricing page is screenshotted below. Our prices are on our pricing page and the TikTok API page.
We build one of the two products here. Where Phyllo does something we do not, the page says so, and every per-1,000 figure shows its arithmetic so you can check it.
What is the difference between Phyllo and Tokfluence?
Phyllo starts from the creator's permission, Tokfluence starts from the creator's public profile. Phyllo's Authenticated APIs use a Linkage SDK that "connects a user's social media profiles to your app", and once the creator approves, you receive what Phyllo calls non-public first-party data: "verified income, real audience demographics and private performance metrics". No index or scraper can give you that. It only exists inside the creator's own account.
Tokfluence never asks the creator for anything. We index public TikTok profiles, so you can search creators by niche, country, follower band, engagement rate, hashtags and the brands they mention, and get a contact email back in the same response when the creator publishes one.
The easiest way to see it is the order a campaign happens in:
Find creators
Search by niche, country, followers and engagement. The creator does not know you exist yet.
TokfluenceOur index, plus live crawls
PhylloPublic APIs
Contact them
Email or DM, agree terms. Most creators you contact never reply, which is normal.
TokfluenceContact emails in the search results
PhylloYour own outreach
Verify with consent
The creator logs in through your app and shares the numbers only they can see.
TokfluenceNot something we do
PhylloAuthenticated APIs
Consent is step 3 by definition. You cannot ask a creator to log in to your app before you have found them and they have agreed to work with you. That is why the consent model is no help for discovery, and why Phyllo also sells a Public Creator Search API that needs "no account connection". For finding creators, the real comparison is Phyllo's public layer against our index.
Which has better creator coverage?
Phyllo is wider, Tokfluence goes deeper into TikTok and fills its own gaps on demand. Phyllo covers 25+ platforms on its homepage (its pricing page says 20+). We cover one, on purpose: the whole crawler sits behind TikTok, and the index holds more than 15 million TikTok creators, 92% of them between 1,000 and 50,000 followers, which is where most campaign budgets go. That share is also a floor for TikTok as a whole: our index held 15.3 million creators in that range on 8 September 2026 (12.8M nano + 2.4M micro), so TikTok has at least that many, about 1 in 104 of the 1.59 billion people its ads reach (DataReportal, January 2025). It has more, because we have not crawled every account.
No index holds every creator, ours included. The difference is what happens when a search comes back thin. Through our MCP server, Claude or another assistant can start a live crawl of that niche straight from the chat. It costs 250 credits, runs for a few hours, and the creators it finds with 1,000+ followers become searchable in the index. We did not find an equivalent on-demand crawl in Phyllo's published material.
How much does each cost per 1,000 profiles?
Tokfluence costs $9.80 to $9.95 per 1,000 profiles depending on the plan. Phyllo cannot be worked out, because it does not publish a price. One credit is one profile on every Tokfluence plan, so the maths is a division:
| Plan | Price | Profiles | Per 1,000 profiles | Maths |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tokfluence API, Growth | $49 / month | 5,000 profiles | $9.80 | $49 ÷ 5,000 × 1,000 |
| Tokfluence API, Pro | $99 / month | 10,000 profiles | $9.90 | $99 ÷ 10,000 × 1,000 |
| Tokfluence Agency (app + API + MCP) | $199 / month | 20,000 profiles | $9.95 | $199 ÷ 20,000 × 1,000 |
 Phyllo | Quote only | Not published | Not computable | "Customized plans" and a Get a Quote form |
Tokfluence prices from tokfluence.com/pricing, October 2026. Phyllo from getphyllo.com/pricing, 16 October 2026.
The monthly plans are where the volume is: 20,000 profiles a month on Agency, shared between the app, the API and the MCP server. If you would rather not run the searches yourself, our Discovery Service ($499 a month, 100,000 credits) has the team build hand-filtered lists for you.
A quote is not a bad sign in itself. Consented data comes with platform partnerships and compliance work, and Phyllo points to SOC 2 and named account managers. It just means you cannot budget the integration until after a sales conversation, which matters if you are a two-person team testing an idea this week.
Phyllo vs Tokfluence, line by line
The losing rows are real. Two of them decide the question on their own if your product needs them.
| Phyllo | Tokfluence | |
|---|---|---|
| Data model | Consented data (the creator connects an account) plus a public data layer | A searchable TikTok index built from public pages, plus live crawls |
| Needs the creator to log in | Yes, for consented data. No, for the Public APIs | Never |
| Creator search | Yes, through the Public APIs, by niche, audience, location and growth | Yes, by keyword, niche, country, followers, engagement, hashtags, brand mentions and contact email |
| Crawl creators who are not indexed yet | Not published | Yes, from the MCP server for 250 credits. New creators are searchable a few hours later |
| Platforms | 25+, including Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, X and LinkedIn | TikTok, with linked Instagram and YouTube profiles where the creator publishes them |
| Verified first-party data | Yes, with consent: verified income, real audience demographics, private metrics, Instagram Stories | No. Public data only |
| Contact emails | Not listed on the site | Returned in the search response, no separate reveal call |
| Published price | No. "Customized plans", Get a Quote | Yes. From $49 / month for 5,000 profiles |
| Cost per 1,000 profiles | Not computable | $9.80 to $9.95, depending on the plan |
| Getting started | Free sandbox sign-up; production plans are quoted | Self-serve: pick a plan, get a key, make the first request |
| AI assistants (MCP) | Yes. Phyllo says it connects to Claude, Cursor, Codex and any MCP client | Yes. Hosted MCP server that searches and can start live crawls (Agency and above) |
Phyllo details from getphyllo.com, 16 October 2026. "Not published" means we could not find it on Phyllo's public pages, not that it does not exist. Every competitor we have compared this way is on the platform comparisons hub.
What Phyllo does well
- Consented first-party data. Verified income and real audience demographics, which no public index can match.
- Breadth. 25+ platforms behind one schema.
- Formats others miss. Phyllo says its consented data covers Instagram Stories, Reels and YouTube Shorts.
- Procurement posture. SOC 2, GDPR alignment and formal platform partnerships, per its homepage.
- More than discovery. Social listening, social screening and account-ownership checks in the same API.
Where it gets harder
- No public price. You cannot work out cost per profile before a sales call.
- Consent depends on the creator. The richest data exists only for creators who log in to your app.
- No published way to fill gaps. We found no on-demand crawl for a niche that comes back thin.
How do you get TikTok creator data from Tokfluence?
Two ways, both on the same credits, so pick whichever fits how you work.
- The REST API. Create a key, send it as a Bearer token, and search. This is the example from our docs:
curl "https://developers.tokfluence.com/v1/creators/search?query=fitness&min_followers=50000®ions[]=US" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" - The MCP server (Agency and above). Add
https://developers.tokfluence.com/mcpas a connector in Claude or Cursor, sign in, and ask for the shortlist in plain language. When the index is thin, ask it to crawl the niche.
Field-by-field detail of what each record holds is on the TikTok influencer database page, and we ranked ten options, Phyllo included, in the best influencer marketing APIs.
Should you pick Phyllo or Tokfluence?
Tokfluence if
- You need to find TikTok creators who have never heard of you.
- You want the cost per 1,000 profiles before you write a line of code.
- You want contact emails in the same response as the search.
- Your niche is thin and you need it crawled, not a "no results".
- You want an AI assistant that builds the shortlist and crawls what is missing.
Phyllo if
- Your creators will log in to your product, and you need the numbers they see in their own analytics.
- You need verified income, for lending, payments or background checks.
- Instagram, YouTube or LinkedIn matter as much as TikTok.
- Procurement needs platform partnerships and a named account manager.
The verdict
If you are building a creator marketplace, a payments tool or anything where creators log in to get paid, use Phyllo. Consented data is the real number, every index (ours too) is an estimate, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
If the job is finding TikTok creators, the consent layer cannot help you, and the question becomes which index to search. Ours costs $9.80 per 1,000 profiles on a plan you can buy today, hands back contact emails with the results, and crawls the niche when it comes back thin. Plenty of teams will end up with both: Tokfluence to find people, Phyllo to verify the ones who sign up.
Try it on your own brief: Agency includes the API and the MCP server, and the app has a free plan with no card.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Phyllo API?
Phyllo sells social data APIs in two layers. The Public APIs return data on any profile with no account connection, including creator search across 25+ platforms. The Authenticated APIs return non-public data, such as verified income and real audience demographics, after a creator connects their own account through Phyllo's Linkage SDK.
How much does the Phyllo API cost?
Phyllo does not publish prices. Its pricing page says "Depending on your exact use case, we offer customized plans" and sends you to a quote form (read 16 October 2026). There is a free sandbox sign-up for testing. Tokfluence's API starts at $49 a month for 5,000 profiles, which is $9.80 per 1,000.
Can Phyllo be used for influencer discovery?
Its consent layer cannot: a creator has to know you before they connect an account to your app. For discovery Phyllo sells a separate Public Creator Search API. Tokfluence only does the discovery side, on TikTok, and can crawl a niche on demand when the index is thin.
Can I use Phyllo and Tokfluence together?
Yes, and for creator marketplaces it is a sensible split. Find and contact TikTok creators with Tokfluence, then ask the ones who sign up to connect their accounts through Phyllo so you hold verified stats on the people you actually pay.
Does Tokfluence have audience demographics?
Estimated ones. Search can filter on model-estimated gender, records carry an audience country split where we hold it, and full audience reports are available on demand. None of it is consented first-party data. If you need the numbers the creator sees in their own analytics, that is what consent-based APIs like Phyllo exist for.