Seven Apollo alternatives, and the case for staying put

If you searched for “Apollo alternative”, here is the situation in one paragraph. Apollo is a full outbound platform: a database it says holds 240M+ contacts and 30M+ companies, sequences, a dialer, deal boards, a Chrome extension, and an enrichment API, sold per seat with credits on top. Nobody leaves it because it lacks features. People leave for four reasons: they pay for seats they barely use, the phone numbers or European coverage fall short of what the reps need, they want one piece of the bundle and not the rest, or they want an API and not a login. Which of those is yours decides which tool below is the answer, and one of the honest answers is “stay”.

I build one of the tools on this list, so read the recommendations knowing that. I have tried to be exact about what each tool is for, and to say plainly where mine is the wrong choice.

What Apollo does well, and who should stay

Fairness first. Apollo’s free plan is the most generous in the category: unlimited email credits within a fair-use ceiling of 10,000 a month for non-paying accounts, a handful of mobile and export credits, and access to most of the product. Paid seats run $49, $79, and $119 per user per month on annual billing, or $59, $99, and $149 billed monthly, per third-party pricing guides (Apollo’s own pricing table renders client-side and would not load for me). The top tier requires a minimum of three seats. Mobile numbers cost credits on top of the seat, roughly 75 to 200 a month depending on tier, again per third-party guides.

The API is self-serve, documented publicly, and available even on the free plan, though free accounts get tight limits on enrichment endpoints (Apollo’s docs list 50 requests a minute plus hourly and daily ceilings), while paid plans get 1,000 a minute with only the credit balance as a brake. Enrichment consumes credits either way.

If your team runs prospecting, sequencing, and calling out of one tool, and you have a few reps who use it every day, Apollo is priced fairly for that and nothing below does all of it better at the price. Stay. Read on if your usage looks like one of the four cases above.

How to pick

Start from the input at the front of your workflow, because that is what actually determines the tool. Pricing model second.

• Your input is a search filter (title, industry, headcount), you build lists from scratch at enterprise scale, and you have procurement and an integration team behind you: ZoomInfo.
• The same, but your reps sell into Europe and phone connect rate is the metric that matters: Cognism.
• Your input is a name and company and reps reveal contacts one at a time from LinkedIn or a search box: Lusha.
• Your input is a spreadsheet of rows and you want to route each one through several providers and some AI before it lands in the CRM: Clay.
• You want an Apollo-shaped database at a smaller price with a trial you can start today: Lead411.
• Your input is a domain and you want the email addresses at it, verified: Hunter.
• Your input is a LinkedIn or GitHub identifier already sitting in a database column, and you want emails and phones back over HTTP: PeopleDB, mine.

Then the pricing question. Per seat per month rewards steady, human-driven daily use. Per result rewards programmatic, bursty, or low-volume use. Most complaints about Apollo I have read are a mismatch between these two rather than a data complaint, and moving to another per-seat tool will not fix a per-seat problem.

Vendor facts below were verified from their public pricing pages on September 6, 2026. Where a page would not load or a number came from a third-party guide, I say so. Numbers drift; check their sites before you sign anything.

The alternatives

ZoomInfo

The incumbent, and the tool Apollo is usually the cheaper alternative to. ZoomInfo sells a contact and company database with intent data, an engagement product, and a large integration catalog, aimed at teams with a RevOps function. Pricing is not published; every button on the site leads to a demo request or a sales conversation. Third-party pricing guides put a three-seat entry contract at roughly $15,000 a year, with median contracts around $30,000, and describe annual terms only. There is an API, but it comes with the contract, not a signup form. Best for enterprise sales organisations that want one vendor, a named account manager, and a procurement-grade paper trail. The honest caveat: if you are leaving Apollo over cost, this is the wrong direction, and you will not learn the real price until the second call.

Cognism

The European specialist. Cognism leads with phone-verified mobile numbers (it claims up to 3x higher connect rates), decision-maker records refreshed every 30 days, and compliance posture: GDPR and CCPA sourcing, Do-Not-Call coverage across Europe, and claimed parity with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 frameworks. Two tiers, Standard and Pro, each bundling five seats, plus CRM Enrichment and Data-as-a-Service as add-ons or standalone products. Prices are not published; every path ends at “talk to sales”. A credit is one revealed contact, and a revealed contact can be reused without spending another credit unless the data changes. API access requires a prospecting seat. Best for teams selling into EMEA whose reps live on the phone. The caveat: no free trial and no public price, so evaluating it is a project rather than an afternoon.

Lusha

The simplest per-seat option with prices you can read. A free tier with 40 credits a month, then Starter at $49.90 a month (or $37.45 on annual billing) for 400 credits, Professional at $69.90 ($52.45 annual) for 600, and Premium at $399.90 ($299.95 annual) for 3,400. An email reveal costs 1 credit and a phone reveal costs 10, which changes the arithmetic if your reps mostly want phones. Lusha leans on its compliance certifications in its marketing, which helps when legal review is the blocker. The API is self-serve: the API page promises a key “in seconds” for testing or production, but API pricing is not published and is quoted per use case. Best for small sales teams that want Apollo’s contact reveal without Apollo’s everything else. The caveat: at 10 credits a phone, the 400-credit Starter plan is 40 phone numbers a month.

Clay

Not a database. Clay is a spreadsheet that calls other people’s databases: each row goes through a waterfall of providers (it says 150+ in its marketplace) and any AI or HTTP step you add, then out to your CRM. Two meters run at once: “actions” for orchestration work and “data credits” for buying data. Free gives 500 actions and 100 data credits a month with tables capped at 200 rows and no phone enrichment. Launch starts at $54 a month on annual billing ($60 monthly) at the lowest point on its action slider, with 3,000 data credits; Growth starts at $185 ($205 monthly) and is where HTTP API integrations and webhooks unlock. Enterprise is custom with an annual commitment. Best for a growth engineer who wants full control of the enrichment pipeline and is happy to build it. The caveat: there is no Clay endpoint you call for a person; Clay is the thing that calls endpoints, and you pay Clay’s margin on every provider underneath it.

Lead411

The closest like-for-like swap on this list: a US-centred contact database with verified emails, direct dials, intent signals, and a Chrome extension, at a price that is on the page. Spark is $49 a month for 1,000 exports (or $490 a year for 12,000), Ignite starts at $150 a month ($1,500 a year) with flexible export volumes, and Blaze is custom. A 7-day trial with 50 exports needs no sales call. API access is on Ignite and Blaze only. Best for a small team that wants an Apollo-style database and finds Apollo’s credit arithmetic tiring. The caveat: it is a smaller database and a smaller company than the names above, and the API is a $150-a-month feature, not a $49 one.

Hunter

Domain-first. Give Hunter a domain and it returns the addresses and email pattern at it; give it a name plus a domain and it finds the person; verify anything before you send. The free plan carries 50 credits a month and, unusually, an API key. Paid plans start at €34 a month on annual billing (€49 monthly) for 2,000 credits, then €104 for 10,000 and €209 for 25,000 (it localises currency, so you may see dollars). API access is on every plan. Best for anyone whose input is a company website rather than a person, and for cheap, dependable verification. The caveat: it is not a prospecting database with filters, and it has nothing for phones.

PeopleDB

Mine, so I will keep it short and let you check the head-to-head yourself. PeopleDB does one thing: you send a LinkedIn identifier or a GitHub login, and you get back verified email addresses labelled personal or work, phone numbers, and social handles. Pricing is prepaid credits and nothing else: 15¢ a lookup at 100 credits ($15), 12¢ at 500 ($60), 10¢ at 2,000 ($200), 7.5¢ at 10,000 ($750), and 6¢ at 50,000 ($3,000). You are charged only when a lookup returns at least one email. Credits never expire, there is no subscription, and a new account gets 10 free credits and a working API key with no card. There is a separate endpoint for SMTP email verification. The docs are public and the pricing page has the full table.

It is deliberately narrow. No prospecting database, no search filters, no sequences, no dialer, no CRM. If your workflow starts with a filter, use one of the six above. If it starts with a column of identifiers and a script, this is the one, and it is the only tool on this list that resolves GitHub logins. I wrote up what an enrichment API should look like if you want the longer argument.

The short version

Apollo’s real competition is not one tool. It is the realisation that you were paying for a platform and using a feature. If the feature is prospecting, ZoomInfo, Cognism, Lusha, and Lead411 are the same category at different prices and geographies. If the feature is enrichment, Clay, Hunter, and PeopleDB are three different shapes of the same job, keyed on what you already have. And if you use most of the platform, the cheapest alternative to Apollo is Apollo. Every number above was true on September 6, 2026; verify on the vendor’s site before you sign, because several of them will not stay true for long.