Openpulse vs Trigify: pick a trigger from a list, or derive one from your website?

Pricing checked 7 September 2026. Trigify has published several plan structures; figures below reflect its public pricing page and reported tiers. Verify before buying.

Trigify and Openpulse both sell "signals", and the word is doing very different work in each case.

Trigify watches people. Who engaged with which LinkedIn post, who changed jobs, who is following a competitor, plus a catalogue of 16+ ABM trigger types, with contact data attached and pushes into Attio, Instantly, Outreach and Sheets. The unit is a person doing something observable, and the output feeds a sequencer.

Openpulse watches situations. Somebody publicly describing a problem, a company hiring for the human role your product replaces, a business whose own reviews prove the pain. The unit is evidence of a budgeted problem, and the output is a conversation to enter.

Both are legitimate theories of prospecting. They lead to different tools.

Side by side

The real difference: who picks the trigger

Trigify gives you a catalogue. "Started hiring." "Changed jobs." "Engaged with a competitor's post." "Follows an influencer." You choose which ones matter and configure them.

That is a good interface when you already know which trigger predicts a sale for your product. Many teams do, and for them a catalogue is faster than any derivation step.

It breaks when the trigger that matters for your product is not in the catalogue, or is in it but at the wrong granularity. Here is the canonical example:

Nobody advertises for an "AI receptionist."

If you sell one, "started hiring" is far too coarse. The signal is a company hiring a front desk coordinator, a patient services representative or a scheduling coordinator: the human job your product replaces. Working that list out requires reasoning about what your product does, not about what it is called, and no catalogue can pre-compute it for every buyer.

Openpulse derives it:

POST /v1/listeners/analyse-website
{ "website": "https://yourcompany.com", "objective": "find_customers" }

It crawls your landing page plus product, pricing and about pages, and returns the keywords, the exclusions, the per-source queries and the target roles, all editable before anything runs. The inversion (product → the human job it replaces) is the feature, and it is not expressible as a preset.

The same inversion drives rivals mode, where the derived asset is a painVocabulary: the words of the complaint, not the words of the product. "Waited forty minutes on hold" shares no keyword with "scheduling software" and would be dropped by any product-vocabulary filter.

Contact data: the clearest trade, in both directions

Trigify attaches verified email and phone to the person who triggered. That is a real capability, it is what makes the output sequencer-ready, and Openpulse does not have it for forum sources.

The reason is structural rather than a roadmap gap, and it is worth being precise about because the honest version cuts both ways.

A Reddit or Hacker News username is pseudonymous by design. There is no legitimate route from u/throwaway_dentist to a verified work email. Anything that claims one is doing identity-graph matching whose provenance you inherit. The category has already watched a major provider shut down after litigation over exactly this posture, and GDPR Art. 14 imposes a notice obligation on data not collected from the subject that most scraped lists cannot demonstrate compliance with.

So Openpulse reports unavailable there rather than guessing. And the intended action for market and rivals signals is not an email but a reply in the public thread the person is already in, which is why the outreach draft for those modes is a forum reply rather than a cold email.

Where Openpulse does have contact data, it is the safest kind in the product: in places mode the target is a business, and Google's Maps listing carries its published phone number and website. That is a commercial listing, not personal data, roughly 99% accurate, and it costs nothing extra.

The trade, plainly: Trigify gives you a person and an email; Openpulse gives you a situation and a thread, or a business and a phone number. If your motion is "load 500 verified contacts into Instantly and send", Trigify fits it and Openpulse does not.

If your motion is "be the helpful person in the thread where someone just said our competitor let them down", the reverse.

Where Openpulse is differentiated

Auditability

Ask any signal vendor these four questions. Trigify does not publish answers to them; nor does most of the category.

Did the model read the post or a search snippet? Openpulse labels every source full_text / snippet / best_effort in the wizard, before you commit, and downgrades the badge automatically when a vendor key is missing. Reddit and HN are full text with the author and engagement counts; LinkedIn, X and the job boards are snippet. A model judging a 268-character snippet is the largest driver of bad labels in this category.

What did it throw away? Nine rejection reasons, kept 14 days. Precision needs a denominator.

Which of my queries are dead? Per-query and per-source yield, with queries that produce candidates but no signals for three runs disabled automatically and reported in the run log.

Was this stated or inferred? inferenceHops on every signal (0 they said it, 1 one step away), and the rule that keeps it honest is one hop, and the evidence must be in the post. Two stacked assumptions is indistinguishable from invention, and the classification prompt carries a worked failure as well as a worked success, because a model shown only successes reaches further to produce one.

Depth on the sources that carry intent

rivals and places modes turn on comment search and thread expansion: Reddit filter=comments, plus a second call that opens busy threads (8+ replies) and YouTube comment sections. The complaint is almost always a comment under "what does everyone use for X?", never the post.

LinkedIn engagement (Trigify's core surface) is a signal about attention. Reddit comments are a signal about dissatisfaction. The second is closer to a budget.

Two surfaces Trigify does not have

Google Reviews as prospecting. places mode resolves real businesses, reads the one- and two-star tail (Google's own Places API returns about five reviews with no way to page into it, and forbids storing the content), gates on star rating before spending a model call, and rolls complaints up by theme with the business's phone number attached.

Situations beyond the catalogue. A funding round, a new lease, a regulatory fine, a migration announcement all read the same way as a job ad, through the same situation/opportunity split, rather than as separate preset triggers.

Where Trigify wins

• Verified contact data. Email and phone on the person. Decisive if your motion is cold sequences.
• Native sequencer and CRM pushes. Attio, Instantly, Outreach, Sheets, out of the box. Openpulse gives you webhooks, a scoped REST API and CSV in HubSpot's own header format: enough to build an integration, not the same as having them.
• LinkedIn depth. Post engagement, follower movement, job changes. Openpulse reads LinkedIn as a snippet source and says so.
• Person-level ABM. If you work named accounts and want to know when a specific person does a specific thing, that is Trigify's design centre.
• Entry price and credits. $40/mo and PAYG credits are a genuinely low floor, and a 14-day trial with no card is less friction than one with.
• Trigger catalogue speed. If you already know your trigger, picking it from a list beats reviewing a derived plan.

Where Openpulse wins

• You do not already know your trigger. The derivation from your website is the whole onboarding, and it produces vocabulary you would not have written.
• You want to audit the filter. Source depth, rejection reasons, per-query yield, inference hops, competitor provenance.
• Your competitor's churn is your pipeline. Grounded competitor names, aliases, complaint vocabulary, comment expansion, and a roll-up whose key column is trend.
• You sell to local services. No equivalent anywhere in this comparison set.
• Predictable billing. Capacity, not credits. A viral week does not move the invoice.
• You want conversations, not sequences. A thread reply from someone who read the post beats a cold email, and the product is deliberately built so the only exit from a draft is copy.

They are not mutually exclusive

A real stack: Trigify for person-level LinkedIn triggers with contacts attached, Openpulse for public problem evidence and competitor churn. Both ship webhooks and an MCP server, so both can feed the same intake.

The question to answer first is which half of your funnel is starving. If you have a list and no reason to call them, that is a signal problem. If you have reasons and no contact details, that is an enrichment problem. Buying the wrong one is the common mistake, and it is expensive in wasted quarters rather than in dollars.

Openpulse: $49/mo (Go) or $499/mo (Pro), 14-day trial, card up front.

Sources: Trigify pricing, Trigify, Openpulse pricing