Apollo vs Clay

A note on bias: Reachkit is my company. It competes with both on cold email and has its own lead search. Every Apollo and Clay price on this page comes from their own sites, as they stood in October 2026.

My verdict: buy Apollo when you want contacts quickly and one place to work them, and buy Clay when a single database isn’t enough. Apollo is one large database (it reports 240M+ contacts) wrapped in sequences, a dialer and CRM sync, billed per seat with credits. Clay is a workbench where you build tables that ask 150+ data providers in turn and run AI research on each row, billed by usage. You don’t have to choose only one: Clay can enrich through your Apollo account and push contacts into Apollo sequences.

Pick Apollo if:

• You want to search, reveal an email or mobile number and start a sequence or a call without building anything.
• A few seats with bundled credits cover your volume, and you’d rather not watch two meters.
• Your reps work in Salesforce or HubSpot and need two-way sync on every plan.

Pick Clay if:

• Your market is niche and one database keeps coming back thin.
• Qualifying a lead means chaining several sources, research prompts and signals.
• Someone on your team enjoys building tables and their own logic.

Prices in USD as listed in October 2026, on monthly billing unless a cell says yearly.

Apollo and Clay disagree on where good data comes from: Apollo keeps one large database of its own, and Clay asks many providers until one answers.

By Apollo’s count, its database holds 240M+ contacts and 30M companies, fed by a contributor network of 2M+ people, public-web crawling and licensed third parties. On paid plans you can filter on tech stack, hiring, funding and revenue, run lookalike searches and track more intent topics, sourced from Bombora. Revealing a verified email takes 1 credit; a mobile number takes 8. Some comparisons still say Apollo has no waterfall, but it has run one since 2025, on by default since December; its API docs put a waterfall email at typically 1 to 4 credits. Apollo’s knowledge base puts accuracy for verified emails at 91%, while its marketing pages claim 98%.

Clay starts from its own search (it cites 800M+ contacts), which costs nothing to run. Each waterfall column then tries providers in order: Prospeo, Hunter, People Data Labs, Apollo and others for emails, ContactOut and others for mobiles. A lookup that finds nothing costs no credits. Clay’s 2025 test of work-email providers in North America shows how much sources differ: Findymail found 90% of emails and Hunter 53%, at similar accuracy.

My rule of thumb: if Apollo’s search returns enough verified emails for your market, it’s the quicker route. If it comes back thin, Clay’s waterfall is built for that gap. I’ve written about when it pays to go further and scrape your own leads.

Apollo is ready to use the moment you sign in, while Clay hands you building blocks, and that decides who on a team can use each one.

In Apollo, a rep sets filters, saves a list, reveals emails and drops contacts into a sequence or a call list. Every seat on an account sits on the same plan, and credits are pooled across the team, with optional caps per user. G2’s summary of Apollo reviews notes that some users find the interface overwhelming.

In Clay, someone builds a table: a source, then a column for each lookup, AI prompt or formula, then an action at the end. Seats are free on every plan, so the whole team can open the table. G2’s summary of Clay reviews flags how long new users take to get comfortable, and Clay runs courses, certifications and a partner directory around the product.

Clay bills on two meters. Data credits pay vendors for data and AI; actions count platform work such as every enrichment run, AI prompt, sync or API call, even with your own provider key plugged in. Budgets and credit-spike alerts arrived in 2026, and Sculptor, Clay’s chat co-pilot, helps turn plain-language ideas into workflows. Still, if nobody on your team wants to build tables, Apollo is the honest answer.

Both tools send email now, but neither started as a cold email sender, and Apollo goes much further into the rest of a sales workflow.

Apollo sends sequences through mailboxes you connect, and since September 2025 it also sells domains and mailboxes, paid in credits (800 a month for a Google Workspace mailbox, 1,500 for Microsoft 365). Basic links a single mailbox per user and caps sends at 250 a day, so real volume pushes you to Professional at $99 a seat. Warmup runs through Warmbox, a third party; one mailbox per seat is included and each extra costs 200 credits a month. The guardrails are good: bounce protection pauses a sequence at 6%, catch-all domains are restricted out of the box, and on paid plans Apollo checks your sending domains against blocklists every week. Apollo adds a dialer, meeting scheduler and call recording.

Clay’s Sequencer left beta on September 1, 2026. Under the hood it’s Smartlead, and it handles email only: four steps at most per sequence, two copy variants. Launch users connect their own inboxes, and Growth adds Google or Outlook inboxes bought through Clay at about $4.50 a month, each limited to 30 sends a day. Sequences default to plain text with tracking off, and leads join or leave as they match a live segment. Clay also pushes rows to Instantly, Smartlead, lemlist, Outreach and Salesloft, or into Apollo sequences.

Both sort replies by sentiment and can draft answers with AI; Clay posts its drafts in Slack for a rep to approve. Warmup takes patience on both: Apollo wants six weeks on mailboxes it sold you, Clay about three.

Apollo builds AI into its sales workflow, while Clay treats AI as one more column you can point anywhere.

Apollo’s AI research runs a prompt on each person or company, using models from OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity, at 1 credit per record per column. Paid plans get unlimited use of the AI Assistant. Professional and Organization gained agents in September 2026: scheduled jobs that source prospects, draft sequences and repair underperforming ones, each step waiting for your sign-off. Apollo’s MCP server, a connector that lets assistants like Claude or ChatGPT work inside other apps, is on every plan, Free included.

Clay’s Claygent researches each row on the web for 1 data credit on Clay’s Helium model or 3 on Argon, plus an action per prompt. On Growth, the HTTP API column can call almost any endpoint, so a table can feed tools Clay has no native action for. Free accounts can use Clay’s MCP too, in Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants, but it returns capped result sets, so it isn’t meant for bulk lists.

For a sales team that wants AI help inside a tool it already uses, Apollo is ahead. For a builder chaining providers, prompts and outside APIs, Clay goes further, though Apollo is moving that way with Builder Studio, a no-code app builder in early access since September 2026.

Apollo and Clay price data in different units, so I priced one job on each: a verified work email for every new prospect, at the two volumes I use on all my comparisons. All figures use list prices from Apollo’s, Clay’s and Reachkit’s sites as of October 2026, on monthly billing.

Assumptions: Apollo at 1 credit per verified email and per AI research run, extra credits at its published rates (a range, since Apollo doesn’t say how its tiers apply); Clay at the step costs in its docs (free search, a person enrichment, a free validator), an email found for 9 in 10 people, and its 1-credit Helium model for research; Reachkit at 1 credit per verified lead, top-ups $25 per 1,000.

Apollo’s own calculator assumes 2 credits per email with waterfall, which matches the AI rows. A fuller Clay recipe (company data, pricier email providers, the 3-credit Argon model) costs about $520 and $3,040, and Clay’s plan guide points 1,000+ records a month to Growth ($495). Clay’s higher figures also pay for reaching people a single database misses, which per-record prices don’t show. Reachkit also limits stored contacts: at these volumes, Growth’s 5,000 fill in about month four and the $99 Scale tier’s 25,000 in about 11 weeks, so you delete finished campaigns or upgrade. Billed yearly, Apollo Basic is $49 a seat, Clay about 10% less and Reachkit Growth $29.

Sending at volume costs extra on both. Apollo needs Professional plus credits for bought mailboxes and extra warmup; Clay’s Sequencer adds an action per enrolled lead, and bought inboxes need Growth.

Both tools review well on G2, and both draw steady complaints about credits.

Apollo: in October 2026, about 9,800 reviewers gave it 4.7 out of 5 on G2, about 400 gave it 4.5 on Capterra, and Trustpilot sits lower, at 3.1 from about 1,360. G2’s summary credits the size of the verified-contact database, the outreach automation and the Salesforce link. The complaints that repeat are bounces on emails marked verified, credits that drain faster than expected (one Trustpilot reviewer: “Credits get consumed unpredictably”; Apollo answered that review and restored the lost credits) and a busy interface. On the other side, a post in the Apollo-focused r/UseApolloIo reports verified-email hard bounces around 2.5% on average.

Clay: 234 reviewers average 4.6 on G2, while an unclaimed Trustpilot page shows 2.9 out of 5 from 27 reviews. G2’s summary says reviewers like how Clay centralizes and automates prospect research and enrichment. The complaints are the learning curve and cost: one r/gtmengineering post on the March 2026 pricing change listed the Explorer tier going away, HTTP API access moving to the $495 plan and every API call now counting as an action. Clay’s own announcement promised data costs 50 to 90% lower.

If what you need is verified emails and inboxes to send from, you may not need either tool. Reachkit is a cold email platform with a search across 500M+ people and 70M+ companies built in, using filters for job title, industry, headcount, tech stack and more. It checks every email before a lead is added and charges 1 credit only for leads that pass. The $39 Growth plan comes with unlimited inboxes, unlimited teammates, AI-written warmup and 1,000 lead credits a month. Done-for-you Google or Microsoft inboxes run $5 a month, on domains at $15 a year.

Reachkit doesn’t offer phone numbers, a dialer, a waterfall across outside providers or AI research columns in the app. If you need those, keep Apollo or Clay. A Clay table or an Apollo export can come into Reachkit as a CSV, with extra columns kept as custom merge variables, or row by row through the REST API on Scale; there’s no native Clay integration. The full comparisons are Reachkit vs Apollo and Reachkit vs Clay.

Moving between Apollo and Clay is mostly about lists, because sender reputation stays with mailboxes you own, not with either tool.

• Apollo to Clay. Exporting saved Apollo contacts uses no credits, and each net-new person with a verified email costs a credit. Importing a CSV into Clay uses no credits or actions. Apollo’s terms let you keep using contact data already in your own records, for internal business purposes. Mailboxes bought from Apollo depend on an active plan and credits, with no documented transfer out.
• Clay to Apollo. CSV export from Clay is free of both meters. Clay sources the inboxes it sells from Smartlead, which uses Zapmail, and doesn’t document moving them.
• Keeping both. Clay’s Apollo actions, on every Clay plan, enrich people through your own Apollo account and add contacts to Apollo sequences.

Watch the contracts. Apollo’s yearly plans renew automatically unless you send written notice at least 30 days before the term ends, and neither vendor refunds fees.

I’d choose by who does the work. If your reps want to search, email and call from one screen, Apollo is the practical pick, and it costs less at both volumes above. If the list is the hard part (a niche market, research on every lead, signals) and someone enjoys building tables, Clay earns its higher price. The list decides most of a cold email campaign (I put it at 80%), so I’d run both on the same 200 prospects and compare verified emails per dollar. If you mostly need verified emails and inboxes to send from, try Reachkit for 30 days without a card.

How each compares with Reachkit: Reachkit vs Apollo and Reachkit vs Clay. More head-to-heads: Instantly vs Apollo, Instantly vs Clay, Smartlead vs Apollo and lemlist vs Apollo.