The best Apollo.io alternatives in 2026

Apollo.io is the default prospecting tool for a lot of small sales teams. It has a real free plan, public per-seat prices, a contact database (Apollo says 240M contacts and 30M companies), and built-in sequences, a dialer and email warmup. For many teams that is enough, and the honest first answer to "should we leave Apollo?" is often "not yet."

But teams do outgrow it, or find it is the wrong shape for how they sell. The reasons are usually concrete and show up in Apollo's own plan terms:

• Credits run out, and they do not roll over. Apollo grants credits each billing cycle, pools them across the team, and lets unused credits (including add-on credits you bought) expire at the end of the cycle.
• Phone numbers are expensive in credits. An email costs 1 credit, a phone number costs 8. A team that cold calls burns through an allowance much faster than a team that only emails.
• Pricing is per seat, and every seat must be on the same plan. You cannot put two power users on Professional and the rest on Basic. The top Organization plan is annual only with a 3-seat minimum.
• Basic caps outreach. Basic gives each user 1 mailbox and 250 emails a day. Unlimited mailboxes and sends (fair use) start on Professional.
• Some teams need different data. Teams selling into Europe often want phone-verified mobiles and Do Not Call screening. Others only need work emails and see no reason to pay per seat for a full platform.
• Some teams want to build their own enrichment. RevOps teams that want to combine several data providers and AI research steps often want a workflow tool rather than one database.

This guide compares seven alternatives against Apollo on those points: ZoomInfo, Lusha, Cognism, Seamless.AI, Hunter, Clay and lemlist. All prices and limits come from each vendor's own pricing and product pages, checked in October 2026. Where a vendor hides its prices, we say so instead of guessing. We researched these tools from vendor sites; this is not a hands-on test.

On data quality: every vendor claims accurate data, and a pricing page cannot prove it. Before you switch, run the same 50 to 100 target contacts through the free plan or trial of the tool you are considering and compare bounce rates and phone connects against Apollo for your own market.

Comparison Table

Apollo.io: What You Would Be Leaving

It helps to be precise about what Apollo gives you today, because that is the list you need to replace.

Plans and credits

Apollo has four plans: Free ($0, 75 credits per seat per month, 2 sequences), Basic ($49 per seat per month billed annually or $65 monthly), Professional ($79 annually or $99 monthly) and Organization ($119 per seat per month, annual only, minimum 3 seats). Basic includes 2,500 credits per seat per month on monthly billing (30,000 a year upfront on annual), unlimited sequences, warmup, CRM integrations and waterfall enrichment, but only 1 mailbox and 250 emails a day per user. Professional raises credits to 4,000 a month and adds AI lead scoring, call recordings (4,000 minutes) and unlimited Google and Microsoft mailboxes with unlimited daily sends (fair use).

Credit costs on Apollo's pricing page: 1 credit per email, 8 per phone number, 1 to 8 for data enrichment, 1 per AI research run, and 1 credit per 30 seconds on the US dialer. Add-ons include an Advanced Dialer at $119 per team per month billed annually ($149 monthly) and an Inbound add-on from $119 per team per month annually.

Where it is strong

Apollo bundles a lot for the price: the database, a Chrome extension (also on Free), sequences, a dialer, call recording on higher plans, deliverability tools and CRM enrichment. If you leave, you may need two tools to replace it.

Where it pinches

The pain points are the ones listed above: credits that expire every cycle, 8 credits per phone number (about 312 phone reveals per seat from Basic monthly's 2,500 credits), one plan level for every seat, and no mid-cycle downgrade on annual plans.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is the move up from Apollo, not across. It is a public company (its Nasdaq ticker changed from ZI to GTM in May 2025) selling a full go-to-market platform: data, intent, website visitor identification, AI research and workflows, and Chorus conversation intelligence.

How it differs from Apollo

• Database size: ZoomInfo says it has 500M+ contacts and 100M+ companies, against Apollo's claim of 240M contacts and 30M companies. Both are vendor claims.
• Signals: Intent signals, website visitors, account fit scoring and champion (job change) tracking on Copilot Advanced; real-time and custom intent on Copilot Enterprise. Apollo offers intent topics too (1 on Free, 6 on Basic, 12 on Organization), but ZoomInfo's signal layer is broader.
• Compliance: ZoomInfo lists GDPR and CCPA compliance plus ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 2 Type II, TRUSTe GDPR and TRUSTe CCPA certifications. Apollo's pricing page footer says "GDPR Compliant"; we did not find other certifications on the pages checked.
• Pricing model: No public prices at all. Every paid package goes through sales, and a ZoomInfo-owned guide says paid plans are billed annually with a minimum number of seats. Apollo is self-serve with monthly billing available.
• Outreach: ZoomInfo's packages focus on data, intent and AI research, with CRM and sales engagement integrations, AI email generation and dialing. If your team relies on Apollo's multi-step sequences, confirm with ZoomInfo sales how you would replace them, or plan to keep a separate sequencing tool.

Pricing

Sales packages are Professional, Copilot Advanced and Copilot Enterprise; marketing packages are Marketing Demand, ABM Lite and ABM Enterprise. All are custom quotes. A credit is used each time you export a contact or company profile, including through the Chrome extension, CRM integrations and the API, and integrations can carry a base cost and a minimum credit purchase. ZoomInfo Lite is free with 10 credits a month (25 with Community Edition, which requires sharing your email or CRM contacts). ZoomInfo also offers a trial, typically 7 days. ZoomInfo launched GTM Workspace in October 2025 as the successor to Copilot, so ask sales to map package names to what you get.

Pros: very large database (vendor claim), strong intent and visitor signals, long list of compliance certifications, conversation intelligence from the same vendor.

Cons: no public pricing, annual contracts with seat minimums, credits used on every export including syncs, product names that keep changing.

Choose it if you are a mid-market or enterprise team leaving Apollo because you need deeper data and intent, and budget is less of a constraint than coverage. Skip it if you are under five reps, need monthly billing, or chose Apollo because the price was on the page.

Lusha

Lusha is the closest like-for-like swap for a small team that mainly uses Apollo's Chrome extension to look up emails and phone numbers.

How it differs from Apollo

• Phone credits: A phone number costs 5 credits on Lusha against 8 on Apollo. An email is 1 credit on both.
• Rollover: On monthly plans, unused Lusha credits roll over up to twice the monthly limit while you stay subscribed. Apollo credits never roll over. On annual plans, Lusha grants all credits upfront and resets them at year end.
• Credit volume: This is where Apollo wins. Lusha Starter gives 400 credits a month; Apollo Basic monthly gives 2,500 per seat. Lusha's lower phone cost does not make up that gap: 400 credits is 80 phone reveals, against about 312 on Apollo Basic.
• Seats: Lusha prices by plan, not by seat. Starter includes 1 seat, Pro lists 2 free seats and Premium 5 free seats. Teams larger than 5 users go through sales (Scale plan).
• Outreach: Lusha lists automated email sequences and call recording with AI insights from the Free plan, but its focus is lookups and enrichment rather than a full engagement suite.

Pricing

• Free: $0, 40 credits a month, 1 seat.
• Starter: $49.90/month billed monthly (400 credits a month) or $37.45/month billed yearly (4,800 credits a year).
• Pro: $69.90 monthly (600 credits a month) or $52.45 yearly (7,200 a year); adds API, CSV enrichment, signals and webhooks.
• Premium: $399.90 monthly (3,400 credits a month) or $299.95 yearly (40,800 a year); team management and credit allocation.
• Scale: custom.

Lusha says it has 515M+ contacts and 29M+ companies (vendor claim).

Pros: free plan and low entry price, simple extension that works on LinkedIn and any website, cheaper phone reveals than Apollo, rollover on monthly plans, many compliance certifications.

Cons: small credit allowances, prices change often, teams over 5 users must talk to sales, less outreach tooling than Apollo.

Choose it if you are a rep or small team whose Apollo use is mostly "find this person's email and mobile," and you want credits that do not vanish every month. Skip it if you pull thousands of contacts a month or rely on Apollo's sequences day to day.

Cognism

Cognism is the most common answer for teams that leave Apollo because they sell into Europe and cold call. It is UK-based and also owns Kaspr, which it runs as a separate self-serve product.

How it differs from Apollo

• Mobile data: Cognism sells phone-verified mobile numbers (it calls them Diamond Data). Pro adds a premium mobile filter and on-demand mobile verification. Cognism claims a 3x connect rate with these mobiles against the industry average (vendor claim).
• Europe and Do Not Call: Cognism positions itself as European B2B data for global growth, covering EMEA, US and APAC. It scrubs data against Do Not Call and TPS lists in the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany and other countries (its compliance page says 15 major lists).
• Credits: 1 credit reveals 1 contact, phone or email, and you are not charged again for viewing a contact you already revealed (only if that person changes jobs). On Apollo, a phone number costs 8 credits.
• Buying model: No free plan, no self-serve trial and no public prices. Packages start with 5 seats included.
• Outreach: Cognism is a data tool. It integrates with Outreach and Salesloft and its Chrome extension works over Outreach, but it does not replace Apollo's sequences or dialer.

Pricing

Two prospecting packages, Standard and Pro, each with 5 seats included and a credit allocation per seat; prices through sales. Pro adds the premium mobile filter, on-demand verification and Bombora intent data (up to 12 topics). CRM Enrichment is an add-on or a standalone product. Contract length and billing frequency are not published.

Pros: phone-verified mobiles for calling, strong European coverage, DNC/TPS screening, no repeat charge for revealed contacts, broad certifications.

Cons: no public pricing, no free plan or trial, 5-seat packages, intent only on Pro, and you still need a sequencing tool.

Choose it if you have a team of five or more calling prospects in the UK and Europe and need data you can defend to a compliance team. Skip it if you are a solo founder or an email-only team.

Seamless.AI

Seamless.AI sells contact data plus an engagement hub with emailing, an AI dialer and social selling. G2 now lists it as "Seamless (formally Seamless.AI)"; the vendor's own site still uses Seamless.AI.

How it differs from Apollo

• How data is found: Seamless.AI says its AI searches the public web in real time to find and verify contact details on each search, rather than only serving a stored database. Its own pages claim 1.6B+ or 2.2B+ verified contacts depending on the page, and 448M+ mobile numbers (vendor claims).
• Bad data protection: "100% Credit Back Protection": if an email is invalid, Seamless.AI says it refunds the credit automatically.
• Outreach: Emailing with AI writing, bulk "Email All" sends, tracking and inbox warming, plus an AI-powered dialer. That makes it one of the few tools here that covers both halves of Apollo.
• Pricing model: No public prices. The pricing page is a contact form and mentions volume discounts, unlimited users on custom deals, no setup fees and switch discounts of up to 50% of a competitor's remaining contract value. If you are midway through an annual Apollo contract, that last point is worth raising.
• Credit costs: The vendor site does not publish how many credits an email or phone lookup costs, so you cannot compare it with Apollo's 1 and 8 credits until you get a quote.

Pricing

Free for up to 50 credits (the site does not say whether they refresh). Paid plans are custom: licenses or pooled Bulk Credits used across Search, Enrich, AI Assistant, Autopilot and the API. Seamless.AI lists GDPR, CCPA and SOC 2 Type II.

Pros: free plan to test data, automatic refunds for invalid emails, data plus emailing and dialing in one place, a free Chrome extension.

Cons: no public pricing, unclear credit costs, a small free plan, and database claims that differ between the vendor's own pages.

Choose it if you want to replace Apollo with one platform that still does data, email and calling, and you are comfortable negotiating. Skip it if you want to see the price before you talk to anyone.

Hunter

Hunter is the answer for teams that realise they only use Apollo to find work emails. It is email-only, cheap, and does not charge per seat.

How it differs from Apollo

• No phone numbers: Hunter finds and verifies professional email addresses. It does not advertise a phone product. If you call, Hunter is not a full replacement.
• No per-seat pricing: Every Hunter plan, including Free, has unlimited team members sharing one credit pool. Apollo charges per seat.
• Credits: 1 credit per email found, 0.5 per email verified, and no charge if no email is found or a verification returns Unknown. Monthly credits reset and do not roll over (the same as Apollo).
• Data focus: Domain Search and Email Finder with confidence scores and sources. Hunter claims more than one hundred million professional email addresses (vendor claim), far smaller than Apollo's database claim, and its Discover database is company-level.
• Sequences: Hunter Sequences sends cold email from connected Gmail, Outlook or SMTP accounts: 1 account on Free, 3 on Starter, 10 on Growth, 20 on Scale. The default is 15 emails a day per account, raisable to 400 a day for Gmail or 250 for Outlook and SMTP. Warmup (Inbox Protection) is a paid add-on from $6 per account per month, while Apollo includes warmup on Basic.

Pricing

• Free: $0, 50 credits a month, 1 email account.
• Starter: $49/month monthly or $34/month billed yearly ($408/year), 2,000 credits a month.
• Growth: $149/month or $104/month yearly ($1,248/year), 10,000 credits a month.
• Scale: $299/month or $209/month yearly ($2,508/year), 25,000 credits a month.
• Enterprise: custom.

Pros: low price, unlimited users, no charge for empty results, simple sequences built in, monthly plans you can cancel any time.

Cons: no phone numbers, smaller data set, warmup and extra mailboxes cost extra, no rollover.

Choose it if your team emails rather than calls, and you would rather pay one flat fee than per seat. Skip it if phone numbers or intent data matter.

Clay

Clay is a different kind of tool. It is not one database: it is a workflow builder that buys data from 150+ providers (vendor claim) and runs them in a waterfall until it finds a match. Apollo itself is one of the providers in Clay's work email waterfall, alongside Hunter, Lusha and others.

How it differs from Apollo

• Coverage by combining sources: Waterfall enrichment is on every Clay plan, including Free. Clay says this routinely triples its customers' data coverage and quality (vendor claim). Apollo also offers waterfall enrichment on paid plans, but within its own product.
• AI research: Claygent is an AI web research agent that can fill in fields no database has, such as details from a company's website.
• Seats: Unlimited seats on every plan. Cost is driven by usage, not headcount.
• Two meters: Clay bills Actions (platform work, "less than a cent each") and Data Credits (data and AI, "start at $0.05 each"). No charge when a lookup returns nothing. Actions do not roll over; Data Credits roll over on Launch and Growth within a cap.
• CRM sync: CRM auto-sync and data warehouse sync are only on Growth and Enterprise. Apollo includes CRM integrations from Basic.
• Outreach: Clay Sequencer sends email on Launch and up, and Clay integrates with sequencing tools, so you can keep a dedicated sender if you prefer.

Pricing

• Free: $0, 500 actions and 100 data credits a month, 200 rows per table, no phone enrichment.
• Launch: from $185/month monthly or $167/month billed annually, with 15,000 actions and 2,500 data credits a month; adds phone enrichment and signals.
• Growth: from $495/month monthly or $446/month billed annually, with 40,000 actions and 6,000 data credits a month; adds CRM and warehouse sync, HTTP API and web intent.
• Enterprise: custom, annual commitment.

Pros: higher coverage from many providers, unlimited seats, strong AI research, no charge for empty lookups.

Cons: steep learning curve, cost that is hard to forecast, CRM sync only from Growth, and no built-in dialer.

Choose it if you have someone in RevOps or growth who will build and maintain enrichment tables. Skip it if your reps just want to search, click and call.

lemlist

lemlist is on this list because many teams leave Apollo for the outreach side, not the data. It is a sequencing tool first, with a lead database (vendor claim: 650M+ leads) and pay-per-result enrichment bolted on. lemlist is owned by lempire and bought Claap, a call recording tool, in October 2025.

How it differs from Apollo

• Multichannel sequences: On the Multichannel plan, one sequence can mix email, LinkedIn steps (profile visits, invitations, messages, voice messages, InMail), calls, SMS and WhatsApp (an add-on). lemlist automates the LinkedIn steps inside the same sequence as your emails.
• Mailboxes: The Email plan includes unlimited users and email senders, priced by monthly email volume. Multichannel includes 5 senders per user. On Apollo Basic you get 1 mailbox per user.
• Deliverability: lemwarm warmup and the Deliverability Hub are on every plan, plus inbox rotation and in-app domain and mailbox purchase.
• Data: Lead data needs credits, sold as an add-on from $20/month ($16 yearly) for 2,000 credits. lemlist says email finding costs $0.05 per verified result and phone finding $0.20, credits are charged only for successful results, and unused credits roll over while you stay subscribed. Apollo includes credits in the seat price but never rolls them over.
• Free plan: None. lemlist offers a 14-day trial with Multichannel features and 200 credits.

Pricing

• Email plan: $69/month monthly or $55/month billed yearly for 50,000 emails a month, rising to $659 / $527 for 1,000,000. Quarterly billing saves 10%, yearly 20%. No LinkedIn steps.
• Multichannel: $109 per user per month monthly or $87 billed yearly, with LinkedIn, calls, SMS and 5 senders per user.
• Enterprise: custom.
• Add-ons: data credits from $20/month, buying intent signals from $29/month ($21 yearly) for 100 signals.

Pros: real multichannel sequences, unlimited senders on the Email plan, warmup included, pay-per-result data.

Cons: no free plan, LinkedIn needs the per-user Multichannel plan, data and intent cost extra, LinkedIn automation runs through the Chrome extension and browser session.

Choose it if Apollo's sequencer is what you use most and you want LinkedIn steps and more mailboxes. Skip it if you mainly need a large searchable database with phone numbers included.

Cost Comparison at 1 and 5 Seats

These figures use list prices from each vendor's pricing page. Annual figures are the monthly price billed yearly times 12. ZoomInfo, Cognism and Seamless.AI publish no prices, so they are not in the table.

How the math works:

• Apollo Basic, 5 seats, annual: $49 x 5 = $245 a month, x 12 = $2,940 a year, with 30,000 x 5 = 150,000 credits a year pooled across the team.
• Apollo Organization: the 3-seat minimum means one person cannot buy it alone. The smallest purchase is $119 x 3 = $357 a month.
• Lusha at 5 users: Starter includes 1 seat and Pro lists 2, so a team of 5 lands on Premium, which lists 5 free seats: $299.95 x 12 = $3,599.40 a year with 40,800 credits.
• Hunter, Clay and lemlist Email: these plans do not charge per seat, so the 5-seat cost equals the 1-seat cost. The usage limits are shared, though: Hunter Starter's 2,000 credits a month or Clay Launch's 2,500 data credits are split across everyone.
• lemlist with data: the Email plan does not include lead credits. Adding the smallest data credit pack (2,000 credits) brings it to $69 + $20 = $89 a month billed monthly, or $55 + $16 = $71 a month billed yearly.

What the table does not show is credit value. Per seat, Apollo Basic includes far more credits (2,500 a month on monthly billing) than Lusha Starter (400) or Hunter Starter (2,000 for the whole team). If your team spends most of its Apollo credits each month, a cheaper sticker price can cost more once you buy top-ups. Count the emails and phone numbers you actually reveal per month before comparing.

Data Coverage, Phone Numbers and Compliance

If you are leaving Apollo over data, compare these three things.

Region. Cognism is built around European data and says it covers 90% of Director-level and above contacts in Europe and the US (vendor claim). ZoomInfo's strength is depth on companies plus intent, and Lusha says 132M of its contacts are in the US (vendor claim). Clay sidesteps the question by querying many providers, which helps when one source is thin in your market.

Phone versus email. Phone numbers are where credit costs diverge most:

Compliance. If GDPR or Do Not Call screening is the reason you are leaving, Cognism (DNC and TPS screening across many countries, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 2 Type II), ZoomInfo (ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 2 Type II, TRUSTe) and Lusha (ePrivacyseal GDPR, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 2 Type II and others) publish the longest lists. Ask for the DPA before you sign.

Replacing Apollo's Sequences and Dialer

Apollo's outreach tools are the part people forget to replace. Seamless.AI (emailing, warmup, AI dialer) and lemlist Multichannel (email, LinkedIn, calls, SMS) come closest to a full swap. Hunter and Lusha include simpler email sequences. Cognism, ZoomInfo and Clay are mainly data tools: Clay has its own Sequencer on Launch and up, and with Cognism or ZoomInfo you should plan on a separate sequencing tool or confirm the options with sales.

Switching From Apollo

Plan the move before your renewal date, not after.

1. Check your contract and credits

Apollo credits, including add-on credits, expire at the end of each billing cycle, so use what you have before the cycle ends. Annual Apollo plans cannot be switched to monthly or downgraded mid-cycle, and downgrades get no refund. If you are locked in, Seamless.AI advertises switch discounts of up to 50% of a competitor's remaining contract value; other vendors may negotiate too.

2. Enrich, then export

Apollo's help center says CSV exports do not automatically enrich emails and mobile numbers on existing records, so run enrichment on the contacts you want to keep before you export. Then, from Search > People, filter to your saved contacts or lists, select them and click Export.

• Exporting saved contacts does not use credits. Selecting net-new people from search saves them first, and each one with a verified email costs 1 credit.
• Emails and phone numbers are not always included by default. Click "Edit export CSV settings" and tick the fields you need (Email, Mobile phone, Work direct phone, Email status, Do not call, Stage, Lists, Contact owner and any custom fields). Unticked fields export as blank columns.
• How many records you can select at once depends on your plan: 25 on Free, 1,000 on Basic, 2,500 on Professional and 10,000 on Organization. Exports over 1,000 contacts can take several minutes; check Settings > Import & Exports > CSV Exports.
• Spreadsheet apps can reformat phone numbers, ZIP codes and long IDs. Import those columns as text.
• Repeat for accounts (companies), which have their own export fields.

3. Know what you lose

The contact export includes activity flags such as Email sent, Email open, Replied and Last contacted, but these are fields on each contact. Your sequence steps, email templates and call recordings are not in the contact export field list, so copy templates out by hand and download any recordings you need to keep. When the subscription ends you also lose:

• Built-in sequences, the unified inbox and the meeting scheduler.
• The dialer (and the Advanced Dialer add-on if you bought it) and call recordings with AI insights on Professional and Organization.
• The deliverability suite and warmup included from Basic.
• Automated CRM enrichment and Apollo's intent topics, AI research and AI lead scoring.

You can drop back to Apollo's Free plan rather than cancelling outright. It keeps 75 credits a month, 2 sequences and the Chrome extension, which some teams use as a second source while they test the new tool.

How to Choose

Start from the reason you are leaving:

• "We keep running out of credits." Check whether the issue is phone reveals. If yes, Lusha (5 credits per phone) or Cognism (1 credit per contact) may stretch further; if you need volume, stay on Apollo and move up a plan, since its per-seat allowances are large.
• "Per-seat pricing is too expensive for our team size." Hunter, Clay and lemlist's Email plan do not charge per seat.
• "We sell into Europe and need mobiles." Cognism.
• "We need intent data and enterprise compliance." ZoomInfo.
• "We only need emails." Hunter.
• "We want to build our own enrichment." Clay, possibly with Apollo as one of the providers in the waterfall.
• "We want better sequences, with LinkedIn." lemlist, paired with a data source if you need more than its add-on credits.
• "We want one platform with data and calling, and will negotiate." Seamless.AI.

Conclusion

Apollo is still hard to beat on value for a small team that wants data and outreach in one tool with a public price. Most teams that leave do so for a specific gap: phone-heavy prospecting that burns credits, European calling, per-seat costs for a growing team, or a need for custom enrichment or better multichannel sequences. Name your gap, pick the tool built for it from the list above, export your Apollo data cleanly, and run both side by side for one billing cycle before you commit.