Pricing Options
A Standard subscription to Incogni’s services costs $95.88, while the top-tier Unlimited subscription goes for $179.88. The Standard subscription gets you everything Incogni offers except for custom removals.
Optery subscriptions are available in three tiers: Core, Extended, and Ultimate, priced at $39, $149, and $249 per year, respectively. At the Ultimate tier, you get automated removal from every data broker site that Optery handles, with human intervention as needed. Extended subscribers also receive machine- and human-assisted removals for a large subset of the full site list. At the Core tier, you receive fully automated data removal from over 100 sites, eliminating the need for human intervention.
(Credit: Incogni/PCMag)As with Incogni, Optery reserves custom removals for its top-tier customers. A Core subscription is subject to some limitations on available features.
Incogni’s Standard subscription is substantially less expensive than Optery Extended, and an Unlimited subscription with Incogni also undercuts the price of an Ultimate subscription with Optery. Yes, you can get started on the cheap with Optery Core, but in the pricing realm, Incogni edges out a win.
Winner: Incogni
Services Available for Free
Optery includes a free Basic subscription as part of the main pricing lineup. You can sign up at no cost to get a free scan that reports which data brokers have profiled you. Optery supplies that report again every quarter.
In Optery’s reporting, details for each broker include an opt-out link, email for opt-out requests, or both. That’s to help with your homework—at the free level, opting out is a do-it-yourself project. Besides those links, Optery supplies detailed opt-out guides for nearly 200 popular data broker sites.
(Credit: Incogni/PCMag)It’s not immediately obvious that you can get a free scan from Incogni. The default way to get started is with a paid subscription, which includes a 30-day money-back guarantee. It took me some digging to find Incogni’s Digital Footprint Checker scan. You supply the scanner with your name, email address, state of residence, and city, and it sends you a scan report by email.
The report includes links to the sites where Incogni found your data; however, these are only generic top-level links. It doesn’t link to an opt-out page or to the page containing your profile. It’s on you to dig into Incogni’s collection of opt-out guides (around seven dozen of them) and make DIY opt-out requests.
Winner: Optery
Breadth of Coverage
Numbers aren’t everything. Comparing the number of data brokers managed by different services becomes hazy, as some lists include multiple URLs that connect to the same broker. Even so, if I showed you one service that covered two dozen data brokers and another that managed two hundred, you’d surely be inclined to pick the latter. The difference between Optery and Incogni isn’t that stark.
(Credit: Incogni/PCMag)Incogni’s list of covered brokers currently has over 400 entries, categorized by data sensitivity, including areas such as people search and marketing, and by geographic area. Most (approximately 60%) are people search sites, and all but a handful are based in the US. Another 1,000 or so are identified as sites where custom removal has succeeded.
As for Optery, its basic list of brokers beats Incogni by about 200. Optery can search for your profile on approximately 630 people-search sites and actively remove it, often providing proof in the form of clear before-and-after screenshots. But its abilities don’t stop there. If you enable the free Expanded Reach mode, it unlocks hundreds more data brokers, ones that don’t make their listings publicly available. Optery handles this by sending out “blind” requests, essentially stating that if you have this person’s data, you must remove it.
Optery also identifies nearly 600 sites where custom removal has been successful, totaling approximately 1,200 sites. That's not so different from Incogni's total of 1,400 sites. It's a bit difficult to get precise numbers here, but overall it's a tie.
Winner: Tie
Data Removal for Family Members
When you dig into the profiles found by your personal data removal service, you’ll often find some that aren’t you but rather represent your partner or a family member. Conversely, even if you carefully remove online references to your own personal data, you may still remain visible through profiles of family members. It’s in your own best interest to get their data cleaned up as well.
Incogni makes family protection simple. A standard family subscription costs $191.88 per year. That’s roughly twice the price of an individual subscription, but it covers five family members. If you figure all five family members will need to make custom requests, you’ll pay $275.88 for an Ultimate family subscription.
With Optery, managing family members is more complicated. To start, there are three subscription tiers: Core for $39 per year, Extended for $149, and Ultimate for $249. Adding family members gets you a discount for the whole family. With two subscriptions, you get 20% off the price of each. Add another family member and the discount jumps to 25%. For four or more family subscriptions, you can take 30% off the total.
(Credit: Optery/PCMag)I had to resort to a spreadsheet to sort out the different combinations of pricing tiers and discounts. With no discount, an Optery Ultimate subscription for five family members would cost a whopping $1,245 per year. The discount brings that down to $871.50. Dialing back to an Extended subscription for five, the discounted price becomes $521.50.
Both at their respective top tiers and standard tiers, the Optery family plan costs more than twice what you’d pay for a five-person Incogni plan. Incogni grabs the brass ring here.
Winner: Incogni
Custom Removals
Let’s say you signed up for personal data cleanup six months ago, and your removals service reports that it has finally wiped out every trace of your data from the sites it covers. The very next day, you find yourself profiled on a people-search site you never heard of. What a bummer! But it’s bound to happen, as any removal service tracks a finite list of known sites.
(Credit: Incogni/PCMag)Don’t worry, though. The best services address this issue by allowing you to submit custom removal requests. Please submit the URL where you found your data, along with a screenshot if available, and they’ll do their best to remove that profile. Incogni and Optery both offer custom removals. They do warn that not every instance of your personal data can be removed. For example, they can’t remove court records or social media posts.
(Credit: Optery/PCMag)Incogni only includes custom removals at the Unlimited pricing tier. Likewise, Optery only permits custom removals for those subscribing at the Ultimate level. In addition, Optery suspends the availability of this feature for the first 30 days to prevent the possibility of an unscrupulous customer abusing the feature and then claiming the money-back guarantee.
There’s no easy way to test custom removals, but it’s clear that both Optery and Incogni intend to take care of them for you, and both promise to do their best. There’s no simple winner here; it’s a tie.
Winner: Tie
Multi-Factor Authentication
The primary purpose of subscribing to a personal data removal service is to protect your privacy by removing your personal profile from data broker and aggregator sites. Of course, the service doesn’t know what to look for until you submit the very data you’re trying so hard to protect. Wouldn’t it be ironic if a cybercrook infiltrated your account and captured that data?
It’s true that when you signed up for the service, you provided a password for security. You may even have used a strong, unique password that nobody would guess. But if someone shoulder-surfs your login on the subway or manages to steal it somehow, you’re hosed.
(Credit: Optery/PCMag)Unless, that is, you were clever enough to protect your account using multi-factor authentication. Both Optery and Incogni let you enhance your security using Google Authenticator or a compatible authenticator app. You initiate the connection by snapping a QR code with the app on your phone. Now, even if a thief nabs your password, they can’t access the account because they don’t have your phone.
Not only do Incogni and Optery both support multi-factor authentication, but they also do so in precisely the same way.
Winner: Tie
Privacy Bonus Features
A personal data removal service should automate the process of opting you out of profiling by data brokers, and it should apprise you of its progress and its successes. Those are the essential tasks, and some services don’t stray far beyond the basics. Others find ways to enhance the opt-out process or protect your privacy in other ways.
(Credit: Incogni/PCMag)Incogni leans toward just doing the basics as well as it can. Its biggest bonus is the use of what it calls suppression lists. If you’re on a broker’s suppression list, that broker promises to refrain from adding your profile in the future. When I last tested Incogni, it reported that it had added me to 151 suppression lists.
With many personal data removal systems, you simply have to believe when they say they have found and removed your personal profile. Not Optery. Wherever possible, it supplements that statement with proof in the form of before-and-after screenshots. You can see that your profile was previously present and is no longer there.
(Credit: Optery/PCMag)Both Incogni and Optery operate from an online dashboard that gives you always-current insight into what they’ve done for you, and what they’re still working on. In addition to keeping you current on its activities in real-time, Optery generates a clear summary report once per quarter, which is a convenient way to review all that it has done for you.
Optery’s GPC (Global Privacy Control) browser extension serves the same general purpose as Incogni’s suppression lists, but more broadly. When the extension is active, it notifies every website you visit that you do not consent to having your data collected and sold. In theory, proceeding to harvest your data despite this notification could violate rules set down by the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act). Even if a broker is willing to risk being slapped with a violation, they may not be keen on creating a profile that will quickly receive an opt-out request. GPC is the product of a consortium that includes Optery, along with dozens of others, such as DeleteMe, Mozilla, and The New York Times.
Optery’s bonuses, especially the before-and-after screenshots that validate its successes, outweigh the extras provided by Incogni.
Winner: Optery
The Verdict: Your Privacy Is the Real Winner
Incogni and Optery both handle the essential task of a personal data removal service, which is automating the process of removing your data profiles from as many brokers and aggregators as possible. They both offer custom data removals for their top-tier subscribers and can protect your account with multi-factor authentication. Incogni has an edge in the pricing realm. Its Standard subscription is roughly equivalent to Optery’s Extended tier and costs significantly less. If you’re aiming to protect multiple family members, Incogni is even more of a bargain.
When considering the total number of broker sites for removal, including those listed as having successful custom removals, the two services yield roughly the same number. If you have more time than money, you can get a free membership from Optery that covers more than a hundred of those brokers, with links to help you perform your own opt-out requests. And Optery shines with more bonus features. That adds up to three ties, two wins for Incogni, and two wins for Optery. Put that all together, and you get a tie, meaning you won't go wrong selecting either of these excellent services, both of which merit our Editors' Choice honor.