Apollo.io vs Clay: pricing, features and which to choose

Apollo.io is a sales intelligence and go-to-market platform made by ZenLeads, Inc., doing business as Apollo.io. Founded in 2015, it released its first product in 2016 and says it reached $150 million in annual recurring revenue in May 2025. Apollo also reports more than 500,000 companies using the platform and more than 50,000 weekly active users in 2025. Its 2023 Series D raised $100 million at a reported $1.6 billion valuation. The product combines a business contact database with prospect search, enrichment, sequencing, calling, pipeline support, analytics, and AI features. That combination places Apollo closer to a sales operating system than a standalone lead database, serving founders, sales teams, marketers, and revenue operations groups.

Apollo’s workflow usually begins with finding people or companies through filters, then selecting records for enrichment, lists, sequences, or exports. Email campaigns are available on every account. Free users can connect Gmail, while paid users can connect Microsoft Office and other providers. Teams can create sequences, manage pipeline activity, record calls, prepare for conversations, and review AI-generated insights. The AI Assistant accepts natural-language requests, uses Apollo data and saved messaging context, and can find decision-makers, research accounts, build sequences, export lists, and report on performance. Scheduled agents can run some outbound tasks in the background. Permissions still govern available actions, and Apollo advises reviewing generated messages, matches, and credit estimates before execution.

Apollo’s main limitation is pricing and usage complexity: the final amount depends on seats, billing frequency, credits, add-ons, and selected features. Basic includes one mailbox, 250 daily emails, five team workflows, and 1,000 records per selection, while Professional raises several limits and adds AI and call features. Standard plans are for internal business use, so powering external products, sharing data with customers, or reselling it requires a separate agreement. Apollo competes with ZoomInfo, Cognism, Outreach, Salesloft, and HubSpot Sales Hub. It combines data and enrichment more closely than Outreach or Salesloft, and adds execution tools beyond ZoomInfo or Cognism. Choose Apollo if one team needs prospect intelligence, outbound execution, enrichment, and AI actions together.

Clay is a GTM data enrichment and workflow platform for sales, marketing, growth, and RevOps teams. Its table-based workspace supports prospect lists, company and contact enrichment, provider waterfalls, AI research, signals, audiences, scoring, and outbound actions. Clay says it began as a data marketplace for researching prospects, with early use focused on enriching and exporting company and contact lists. The current product is positioned as infrastructure for acquiring data, running agentic workflows, and launching GTM plays. Clay says users can combine more than 150 marketplace partners, while Claygent supports web research for custom data points. The platform suits teams that need configurable processes for prospecting, enrichment, research, qualification, and activation instead of a single packaged database.

A typical Clay workflow begins with a table of companies or people, then applies search, enrichment, AI research, scoring, filtering, and an outbound or destination action. Provider waterfalls can use several marketplace sources, and users can bring their own provider or AI API keys. Claygent supports custom web research fields, while Clay Sequencer supports email workflows. Launch adds phone enrichment, job-change and other signal tracking, reusable functions, email campaign integrations, and larger table capacity. Growth adds CRM synchronization, data-warehouse synchronization, HTTP API connections, webhooks, web-intent signals, ad audiences, and priority support. Enterprise adds larger-scale administration, SSO, SCIM, RBAC, connection controls, custom agreements, and a dedicated growth strategist.

Clay requires careful workflow and usage management because teams must understand tables, provider waterfalls, Actions, Data Credits, AI pricing, and reruns before forecasting spend. Actions reset each billing cycle, while unused Data Credits on monthly plans can accumulate up to twice the monthly allowance. Annual plans can roll over up to 15 percent of annual credits under stated renewal conditions. G2 reviewers praise centralized prospect research, enrichment, AI capabilities, and automation, while reported drawbacks include cost, a steep learning curve, and credit consumption. Apollo is a closer fit for packaged prospecting and sequencing, ZoomInfo for a proprietary intelligence database, and Outreach for sales engagement. Clay is more focused on configurable data operations and orchestration.