Clearbit Logo API Alternative: What to Use After the Shutdown

The Clearbit Logo API, which turned a domain into a logo image, was shut down in December 2025. The practical replacements are a dedicated logo service, your own cached assets, or a fallback to initials. Choose one, store results yourself, and check licensing before showing third-party logos.

What actually happened

The free logo endpoint was one of the small tools many products used without thinking about it: logo.clearbit.com/<domain> dropped into an image tag. HubSpot’s developer changelog announced its deprecation and recommended logo.dev as a free, domain-based alternative. HubSpot community posts give the shutdown date as December 1, 2025, while the changelog entry is reported to say December 8, so the date is inconsistent across HubSpot’s own channels. What is consistent: it is gone, and any image tag still pointing at it will break.

This is separate from the enrichment API. If you used Clearbit for company data, see the alternatives for data enrichment. Logos are an asset problem, not a data problem, and the fixes differ.

Your options compared

Option	How it works	Strength	Risk
Dedicated logo service	Domain in, image URL out	Closest drop-in	Pricing and limits can change like any vendor
Own the assets	Fetch once, store in your bucket	No runtime dependency	You handle freshness and licensing
Site icons	Read the company site’s own icon links	Free	Inconsistent size and quality
Initials fallback	Generate a coloured avatar	Always works	Less recognisable

Dedicated logo services

HubSpot points to logo.dev, and others exist. Evaluate them the way you would any API: free-tier limits, what happens past the limit, whether images are served from a CDN you can cache, and what the terms say about commercial use. We have not tested these services for this article, so verify the details on each vendor’s own page.

Owning the assets

If you display logos for a bounded set of companies, such as customers or CRM accounts, fetch each logo once and store it. This turns a runtime dependency into a one-time job and protects you from the next shutdown. The cost is that logos go stale when companies rebrand, so add a periodic refresh.

Key takeaway: never serve third-party images straight from a vendor’s URL in production. Cache them in storage you control, and keep a generated fallback for when the fetch fails.

A resilient pattern

1. Look up the logo through your chosen provider at the moment you first see a domain.
2. Save the image under a key derived from the domain in your own storage.
3. Render from your storage, never from the provider.
4. If nothing is found, render initials on a colour derived from the domain, so the same company always looks the same.
5. Re-check logos on a schedule, for example quarterly, and on any manual request.

This gives a stable interface where the provider can change without a visible regression. It also keeps your page speed predictable, since images come from your own cache.

Licensing and trademark cautions

A logo is a trademark and often copyrighted artwork. Showing a customer’s logo on a customer page is normally a permissioned use. Showing the logos of arbitrary companies in a CRM-like interface is a different situation, and rules vary by country and context. Read the provider’s terms and, if the use is prominent or commercial, ask your counsel. This site does not give legal advice.

Do you need the rest of Clearbit’s data too?

Often a team lost the logo tool and the enrichment tool in the same sweep, and the second is the bigger project. If you also need firmographic fields for those same domains, one option to test is BusinessMCP’s company lookup. Per its page, it returns name, industry, size, location, phone and LinkedIn page for a domain at $0.02 per company found. It does not appear to return logo images, so you would still pair it with a logo approach from the table above. You can try single domains first with its free company lookup tool.

For the full picture of what moved where, read the explainer on whether Clearbit is still available and the migration guide, which covers cutting over in a safe order.

Checklist before you ship the change

• Search your codebase, emails and templates for the old logo hostname. Transactional email templates are easy to miss.
• Decide where the cache lives and who refreshes it.
• Confirm the fallback renders at every size you use.
• Record the provider’s terms and the date you checked them.
• Add a monitoring check that alerts if the share of fallbacks jumps, which signals the provider failing.

Small tools like this tend to vanish with little notice. Treat every free endpoint in your product as something you may have to replace, keep the integration thin, and the next sunset becomes a one-hour task.

Choosing between the options for your product

The right answer depends on where logos appear and how many companies you display.

A small, fixed set of companies, such as your customers or partners, is best handled by hand or with a one-time fetch: collect approved logo files, store them in your repository or bucket, and be done. This avoids third-party dependency entirely and sidesteps most licensing questions because you hold permission.

A large, growing set of arbitrary companies, such as a CRM or directory, needs automation. Use a provider with a domain-based endpoint, cache aggressively and keep the fallback. Plan for a certain percentage of misses, because small companies often have no clean logo asset available anywhere.

A dashboard or internal tool can afford the lowest-effort option: initials on a coloured tile. Many internal tools never needed logos and only used them because they were free.

Pairing logos with company data

Teams that lost the logo endpoint often also need the data that used to sit beside it. For the data half, the Clearbit API alternative comparison from BusinessMCP sets out what its company lookup returns and what it leaves out, and it states plainly that this is text data and not images. In practice a good split is: a company data API for name, industry and location, a logo provider or cache for the image, and your own fallback for everything else.

When you wire both together, key everything on the normalised domain. Lower-case it, strip the protocol and any leading www., and use that as the cache key for logos and for enrichment results alike. A consistent key prevents duplicate paid lookups and duplicate image fetches, and makes it easy to refresh both together on a schedule.

What to monitor after the change

Add three simple checks. First, the share of requests that fall back to initials; a sudden jump means your provider changed behaviour. Second, image load failures reported by the browser; broken images are a signal of a stale URL. Third, a periodic manual look at the twenty most-viewed companies in your product, since high-traffic entries are where a bad or outdated logo does the most reputational damage.