Apollo.io vs Clay

Both help you build prospect lists, but they are different products wearing similar clothes. Apollo.io is the database: 275M-plus verified B2B contacts and 35M companies, with built-in email sequences, a dialer, and an AI assistant, on a free plan plus paid tiers from $59/user/month (Basic) to $99 (Professional) and $149 (Organization). Clay is the orchestration layer: not a database but a workflow engine pulling from 75-plus data providers for waterfall enrichment, scoring, and list building, from $185/month (Launch) to $495/month (Growth) on a dual credits-and-actions model, and it needs a data source underneath. Pick Apollo for fast, self-serve list building with outreach included; pick Clay when you need custom multi-source enrichment workflows and already have data sources to feed it. No hands-on data-quality test was run; no winner is claimed.

Decision point	Apollo.io	Clay
Best suited to	Sales and go-to-market teams that want prospecting data, outreach sequences, and deal management in one platform.	Go-to-market and revenue teams that want to enrich prospect data from many providers, run AI research agents, and automate outbound plays in one workspace.
Plans and cost	Free is $0 with 900 credits per seat per year, granted monthly. Basic is $49, Professional is $79, and Organization is $119 per seat per month billed annually (Organization has a min 3 seats note); paid plans offer a 14-day trial ('Start 14-day trial'). Annual billing is shown with 'SAVE 24%' versus monthly billing.	Free includes 6,000 actions/year and 1,200 data credits/year. Paid pricing combines an actions component and a data-credit component: in the captured view Launch totals $167/month ($54 actions + $113 data credits) and Growth totals $446/month ($185 + $261). $54 and $185 alone are not complete plan prices. The page offers monthly/annual billing and annual saving; confirm the selected billing commitment and credit quantities at checkout. Paid plans advertise a 14-day trial; Enterprise is custom.
Limitations	Value depends on credits: emails cost 1 credit, phone numbers 8 credits, and enrichment 1-8 credits, so heavy prospecting consumes the yearly credit grant quickly. Paid prices shown are per seat per month billed annually, and Organization requires a minimum of 3 seats. The homepage capture failed on screenshots in this review, so this entry rests on the official pricing page.	Pricing runs on two meters, actions and data credits, with separate tier tables for each, so costs take modeling. The Free plan caps tables at 200 rows and excludes phone number enrichment; bulk enrichment over 50K rows, CRM and warehouse integrations, and SSO sit on higher plans.

Decision point

Apollo.io

Clay

Best suited to

Sales and go-to-market teams that want prospecting data, outreach sequences, and deal management in one platform.

Go-to-market and revenue teams that want to enrich prospect data from many providers, run AI research agents, and automate outbound plays in one workspace.

Plans and cost

Free is $0 with 900 credits per seat per year, granted monthly. Basic is $49, Professional is $79, and Organization is $119 per seat per month billed annually (Organization has a min 3 seats note); paid plans offer a 14-day trial ('Start 14-day trial'). Annual billing is shown with 'SAVE 24%' versus monthly billing.

Free includes 6,000 actions/year and 1,200 data credits/year. Paid pricing combines an actions component and a data-credit component: in the captured view Launch totals $167/month ($54 actions + $113 data credits) and Growth totals $446/month ($185 + $261). $54 and $185 alone are not complete plan prices. The page offers monthly/annual billing and annual saving; confirm the selected billing commitment and credit quantities at checkout. Paid plans advertise a 14-day trial; Enterprise is custom.

Limitations

Value depends on credits: emails cost 1 credit, phone numbers 8 credits, and enrichment 1-8 credits, so heavy prospecting consumes the yearly credit grant quickly. Paid prices shown are per seat per month billed annually, and Organization requires a minimum of 3 seats. The homepage capture failed on screenshots in this review, so this entry rests on the official pricing page.

Pricing runs on two meters, actions and data credits, with separate tier tables for each, so costs take modeling. The Free plan caps tables at 200 rows and excludes phone number enrichment; bulk enrichment over 50K rows, CRM and warehouse integrations, and SSO sit on higher plans.

Use the same input

Build the same 500-prospect list for one ICP on both platforms and compare data accuracy (bounce rate on a verification pass), enrichment depth, and total cost.

What a successful result must preserve

The tool must help a sales team find and enrich B2B prospects, with transparent pricing and a way to validate data quality before an annual commitment.

Evidence and test status

Pricing and feature comparison based on publicly available information. Plan details reflect the tools' published pricing pages and third-party reviews of them, re-checked October 2026. We did not run a scored data-quality test; no quality ranking is claimed.

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