Pricing Options
Pricing for DeleteMe couldn’t be simpler. An individual subscription costs $129 per year. That’s it.
That’s not to say Incogni’s pricing is complicated or confusing. A Standard Incogni subscription costs $99.48 per year. The Unlimited subscription adds human-powered data removal by privacy experts and custom removals for $179.88 per year.
Incogni also allows you to pay by the month, although the price is naturally higher. On a monthly basis, a Standard subscription costs $16.58, while an Unlimited subscription costs $32.98. Monthly could be practical if you just want to clean up your digital footprint once and then cancel after a month or two.
With a lower price of entry and the flexibility of monthly pricing, Incogni wins this round.
Winner: Incogni
Services Available for Free
While neither DeleteMe nor Incogni offers a free subscription, both will run a free scan, revealing just how much your personal information is exposed. If the scan results inspire you to subscribe, that’s great. However, both companies offer detailed DIY instructions, allowing you to opt out yourself.
(Credit: DeleteMe/PCMag)Incogni’s experts have created opt-out guides for 85 prevalent data brokers. Each offers step-by-step guidance with pictures, an estimate of the time required, and a list of items you’ll need to have on hand.
Unlike Incogni’s simple alphabetic list, DeleteMe’s guides appear on almost 40 separate web pages. Some listings feature only a small screenshot and description, while others receive greater emphasis. I estimate between 250 and 400 sets of instructions. In addition to the expected step-by-step guidance, DeleteMe rates each opt-out sequence on Speed and Difficulty.
But wait, there’s more! DeleteMe also has a section on how to totally delete your account from numerous popular sites. Perhaps you've grown tired of Twitter now that it’s evolved into X, or you'd like to lower your online presence. There aren’t as many of these, fortunately. Just four pages.
Here’s the problem. I confirmed with DeleteMe’s chat-based support that the search box is broken on both the list of opt-out guides and the section about how to delete your account across the web. The agent advised doing a general search on the desired (or undesired) broker, but limiting it to the DeleteMe website. Your only other choice is to keep clicking for the next page until you find what you want.
Despite this search quirk, DeleteMe wins out in terms of the features available for free.
Winner: DeleteMe
Breadth of Coverage
How many data brokers do you want your personal data removal service to remove your data from? All of them? These services don’t promise that, but they aim to hit the most prevalent ones.
Looking at DeleteMe’s Sites We Remove From page, you see it removes private data from “850+ data brokers.” When I scraped that page’s data into a spreadsheet, I found a total of more than 870. However, the devil is in the footnotes that decorate each item. Most of the listed brokers are flagged as custom removals, meaning you must specifically ask to have your data removed. Standard DeleteMe users only get automated removal from 135 brokers. Even VIP business plan users just double that amount. And another 150 or so are specific to international accounts.
(Credit: Incogni/PCMag)Incogni’s similar list of data brokers includes only brokers for which the service can handle the opt-out process automatically. The current total is more than 400, with about 60% identified as people-search sites and the rest as marketing or similar categories. Almost all of these apply to consumers in the US, or in specific states, with a mere handful specific to the EU. Incogni also offers custom removals, at least at its Unlimited tier, but doesn’t try to count them as part of its coverage.
Winner: Incogni
Data Removal for Family Members
You can scrub every trace of your personal information from every data broker and still wind up right back on those lists because of your connections to other family members. To thoroughly protect your own personal data, you should also protect theirs. Both DeleteMe and Incogni offer family plans for this purpose.
I mentioned earlier that DeleteMe’s basic pricing is straightforward, at $129 per year. Family plans are simple, too. Privacy for you and your partner costs $229 per year, and a family plan with up to four members runs $329.
Extending Incogni’s protection to your family (up to five members) is also straightforward. At the Standard subscription level, you pay $179.88 per year, the same price as an Unlimited subscription for one individual. Opting for Unlimited protection at the family level costs $359.88 per year.
Basic family protection from Incogni costs less than DeleteMe’s two-person plan. At the top level, an Incogni subscription for five family members doesn’t cost a lot more than DeleteMe for four. Incogni edges out a win for family privacy protection.
Winner: Incogni
Custom Removals
Every personal data removal service checks a finite number of known data brokers. It’s always possible that you’ll find your data on a site outside of the list. With either Incogni or DeleteMe, you can submit your findings for custom removal. There are some limitations, however. DeleteMe limits you to 40 custom removals per year. Incogni only includes custom removals at the more expensive Unlimited pricing tier.
(Credit: Incogni/PCMag)Not every instance of your personal data online is appropriate for removal. Incogni’s custom removal wizard points out that you can’t remove court records, government records, and social media accounts. And neither service can guarantee removal in every case, though they promise to make their best effort.
Winner: Tie
Multi-Factor Authentication
It might seem counterintuitive, but you have to provide a lot of private information to a service like DeleteMe or Incogni so that the service can locate and remove that data from online brokers. That makes your personal data service account a prime target for anyone attempting to steal your identity. Yes, you’ve protected your account with a password—a strong one, I hope. However, passwords can be cracked, stolen, or compromised through shoulder surfing. You need something more.
Fortunately, both DeleteMe and Incogni offer multi-factor authentication. After a simple initial configuration, access to your private details requires both the password and a code generated by your authenticator app. Now, merely knowing your password won’t let a hacker access your private data.
Winner: Tie
Privacy Bonus Features
With a security program like an antivirus or security suite, you expect a lot of security-related bonus features. Personal data removal services, on the other hand, tend to be more focused on their singular task. Incogni, for example, focuses closely on protecting your private data by removing it from data broker sites. It does make full use of suppression lists for brokers that support them. If you're on the suppression list, the broker won't store your data, even if it appears online. Incogni also extends its reach by participating in the consortium developing a cross-site Data Rights Protocol.
DeleteMe offers a temporary email address service, similar to what you get with IronVest (formerly known as Abine Blur). That makes sense. If you don’t promiscuously spread your email address around the internet, data brokers can’t hoover it up as part of building a profile. DeleteMe also allows you to set up temporary phone numbers, enabling you to receive calls and text alerts without exposing your real phone number to SMS spam lists.
(Credit: DeleteMe/PCMag)It’s true that DeleteMe’s masked email isn’t as full-featured as what you get with a dedicated service, but it’s a nice bonus, totally in keeping with the app’s theme. Incogni's suppression list system helps eliminate the problem where a broker reacquires your data after removal. Both have useful and goal-oriented bonuses, so this one winds up in a tie.
Winner: DeleteMe