Apollo.io vs Lusha: 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.

Lusha is a B2B data and sales intelligence company founded in 2016 by Assaf Eisenstein and Yoni Tserruya. The company says its database covers more than 515 million business contacts and 29 million company profiles across North America, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM. It reports 280,000 or more revenue teams, 300 employees, and 7 million new signals processed each week. Lusha says email verification ranges from 95% to 98% by region, while direct dial accuracy exceeds 86%. The privately held company says it raised $245 million across a $40 million Series A and a $205 million Series B in 2021. Its customers include sales, marketing, recruiting, and RevOps teams, with access through Workspace, a browser extension, CRM connections, API, and MCP.

A typical Lusha workflow begins with a person, company, domain, or filter-based search. Users preview records, reveal verified emails or phone numbers, save prospects, enrich existing records, and monitor account activity. The browser extension displays contact information while users browse professional-network pages and business websites. Workspace organizes prospecting tables, while CRM integrations move records into connected systems. Developers can use the REST API for search, enrichment, prospecting, lookalikes, decision makers, website visitors, signals, and webhooks. The API supports real-time and bulk operations. Lusha MCP adds a conversational route through compatible AI clients, including Claude, ChatGPT, n8n, and Cursor. It can search, enrich, find lookalikes, pull signals, score lists, and manage Workspace tables, but it does not send messages or add contacts to sequences.

Lusha’s credit model is its main constraint: phone reveals consume five credits, and API charges vary by field and signal activity. The agreement limits data to internal B2B sales, marketing, recruiting, intelligence, and fraud-prevention purposes, and prohibits resale or embedding without written consent. Apollo.io adds email sequences and engagement tools, making it better suited to teams that want prospecting and outbound execution together. ZoomInfo targets larger enterprise deployments with broad intelligence and sales workflows. Cognism offers another enterprise-focused contact data option with compliance positioning. Lusha publishes a free tier and self-serve prices, while its API and MCP materials emphasize search, enrichment, signals, and AI access. Pick Lusha if your team needs credit-based B2B prospecting across web, CRM, API, and MCP workflows.