Apollo vs ZoomInfo

Reachkit makes a competing cold email tool with a built-in lead database. Every Apollo and ZoomInfo price below was checked in October 2026 against their own pages, and figures from third parties are labelled.

My verdict: Apollo is the one a founder or small team can buy today, and ZoomInfo is the one large sales and marketing teams buy for depth. Apollo publishes its prices, starts free and puts sequences, a dialer and CRM sync around its 240M+ contacts. ZoomInfo quotes every paid contract, counts 500M+ contacts and 100M+ companies, and sells intent data across 4,500+ topics, org charts and direct dials. Its sequences come in an add-on, Engage, and I found no inbox setup or warmup.

Pick Apollo if:

• You want to test the data free this week and pay monthly per seat.
• You’d rather find a contact and email or call them without leaving the app.
• A contract Vendr puts at $33,500 a year for the median buyer is out of reach.

Pick ZoomInfo if:

• Your reps call as much as they email and work from buying signals.
• Your company already buys software on yearly contracts, with procurement and security reviews.
• You want an accuracy remedy written into the license terms.

Checked October 2026, from each vendor’s own pages unless a cell names another source.

Apollo and ZoomInfo both sell a database you search and export from; they differ in size, in sources and in what each vendor promises about accuracy.

By Apollo’s count, it holds 240M+ contacts and 30M companies, gathered from a contributor network of 2M+, a web crawl and third-party sources. Since December 2025 its waterfall enrichment, which asks outside vendors when Apollo’s own record falls short, runs by default. Intent signals come from Bombora since June 2026. A verified email costs 1 credit and a mobile number 8. Apollo’s help center rates verified emails 91% accurate (its AI fact sheet says 98%), and Apollo refunds the credit when a verified email sent through Apollo bounces within 30 days.

ZoomInfo states 500M+ contacts and 100M+ companies, built with machine learning, third-party partners and more than 300 human researchers. Free Lite users who connect an inbox add to it: ZoomInfo’s Lite terms let it read signature blocks and contacts from their connected inboxes. ZoomInfo advertises 96% email deliverability and 87% mobile accuracy, both its own figures. Its license terms back them with a remedy: if more than 5% of contacts aren’t at the stated company, ZoomInfo has 30 days to reach 95%, or the customer can end the contract with a prorated refund.

Neither database escapes age, and users of both complain about stale records. For cold email I care less about the headline count than about how many addresses still work on the day you send.

Apollo sells from a public price list and ZoomInfo sells through a quote, and that shapes everything from the first trial to the renewal.

Apollo’s Free plan includes 75 credits a month with no end date. Paid seats are Basic at $65 a month ($49 billed yearly), Professional at $99 ($79) and Organization at $119 billed yearly, three seats minimum, as of October 2026. Each seat adds credits to one shared pool, and unused credits don’t roll over. Monthly plans cancel anytime. Yearly plans are non-refundable, can’t be downgraded mid-cycle and renew unless you give notice 30 days before the end.

ZoomInfo publishes plan names but no prices. Its own pricing guide says every contract is scoped, paid plans are annual and mostly billed upfront, and monthly billing is not standard. Vendr, which tracks real purchases, puts the median at $33,500 a year across 1,577 deals, from $7,240 to $156,042 (updated February 2026). Many rival guides say ZoomInfo starts at $15,000; ZoomInfo’s FAQ says it doesn’t. The license makes the agreement not cancellable mid-term, and ZoomInfo’s guide warns that contracts auto-renew, with the notice window set in your order: third-party guides cite 60 days, Vendr 30 to 90.

ZoomInfo has opened two cheaper doors: free Lite with 10 credits a month, and GTM.AI, a pay-as-you-go API and MCP service from $20 that starts with 1,000 free data credits. In August 2026 ZoomInfo also told investors that seat customers would get packaging built on pre-bought usage, with pricing not yet final.

Apollo runs email sequences itself, while ZoomInfo sells sequences as an add-on or passes contacts to another tool.

Apollo sends through mailboxes you connect with Google or Microsoft sign-in, or through domains and mailboxes it sells for credits: 1,500 a year per domain, 800 a month per Google Workspace mailbox and 1,500 per Microsoft 365 mailbox. Basic allows one mailbox per user and 250 sends a day, so cold email at any volume points to Professional, where Apollo’s plan chart lists unlimited Google and Microsoft mailboxes. Warmup runs through Warmbox.ai, a third party: one mailbox per seat is included and each extra costs 200 credits a month. By default Apollo flags sending for review at a 4% bounce rate, pauses it at 6% and, since September 2026, holds back catch-all addresses. A dialer and meeting scheduler sit next to the sequences.

ZoomInfo Professional includes AI email writing and a dialer, and Copilot Advanced adds workflows for automated outreach and email exports to Outreach or Salesloft. ZoomInfo’s pricing guide lists Engage, with outreach sequences and a dialer, as an add-on, and its site now sends sales automation buyers to a Salesloft partnership. I found no inbox setup or warmup anywhere on ZoomInfo’s pages, so the sending inboxes and their warmup come from somewhere else.

Both companies now sell themselves as AI platforms for sales and marketing, and both offer an MCP server, a standard way for AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT to use other apps.

Apollo’s AI Assistant is unlimited on paid plans. Since September 2026, Professional and Organization also get agents that find leads, build sequences and tune them on a schedule, each run capped in credits. AI research runs a prompt on each record for 1 credit. The MCP server is on every plan, Free included, though searching the database through it needs a paid plan. Apollo’s developer docs put the API on every plan (its pricing FAQ says Custom plans), limited per team to 2,000 calls a day on Basic and Professional and 6,000 on Organization.

ZoomInfo’s AI sits in GTM Workspace, launched in October 2025 with agents for account research, meeting prep and deal prioritization, and in GTM Studio, which runs waterfall enrichment from 25+ sources in plain language. Agent Teams, multi-agent plays with approval steps, followed in October 2026. Its MCP server and API run through GTM.AI, with either a free account or a subscription that carries data credits; ZoomInfo notes some older contracts only carry monthly credits, which MCP can’t use. AI actions cost $0.05 a credit, and search and lookups are free.

For a small team that wants AI inside the tool it already pays for, Apollo’s is closer to hand. For a RevOps team enriching a CRM at scale, ZoomInfo’s API, at 25 requests a second by default, is built for that job.

Apollo’s prices are public, so I can price my two standard setups on it exactly. ZoomInfo’s main plans are quoted, so its column uses the one price list it publishes, GTM.AI’s pay-as-you-go data credits. That column covers data only, because ZoomInfo sells no inboxes or cold email sender.

Assumptions: about 4,000 and 25,000 emails a month; 1 credit per new contact; Apollo warmup, Google mailboxes and domains in credits at its add-on rates (a range, since Apollo doesn’t say how its tiers apply); GTM.AI at $0.41 and $0.38 a record for monthly buys; Reachkit at $5 an inbox, $15 a domain a year and $25 per 1,000 extra credits.

The caveats cut each way. A GTM.AI credit buys any ZoomInfo record, while Apollo only charges for verified emails, and Apollo’s own calculator assumes 2 credits per email, which adds about $27 to its second row. Buying a year at once lowers ZoomInfo’s rate (18,000 credits for $5,760), though the team’s 120,000 a year passes the 100,000 mark where GTM.AI sends you to sales, and its page disagrees with itself on whether credits expire after 12 months. A full ZoomInfo seat contract with phones and intent is another purchase: Vendr’s median is $33,500 a year. Reachkit’s Growth plan stores 5,000 contacts, full in about month four at this pace, and Scale’s 25,000 last about 2.5 months, so you delete old leads or upgrade.

Apollo rates higher than ZoomInfo on G2, Capterra and Trustpilot, and stale contacts are a common complaint about both.

Apollo (October 2026): 4.7 from about 9,800 reviews on G2, 4.5 from about 400 on Capterra, where customer service is its lowest sub-score at 4.2, and 3.1 from about 1,360 on Trustpilot. G2’s summary says users like “the extensive database of verified contacts”. The complaints that repeat are bounces on emails marked verified (one Capterra reviewer calls the reliability of email addresses “the biggest concern”), credits that run down faster than planned, and slow support.

ZoomInfo (October 2026): 4.5 from more than 9,100 reviews on G2, where it’s listed as GTM Workspace, 4.1 from 322 on Capterra, 8.2 out of 10 from 1,887 on TrustRadius, and 1.8 from 344 on Trustpilot. G2 reviewers praise the contact data and ease of use. Trustpilot’s AI summary of recent reviews says the database “constantly provided outdated information and incorrect contact details”. Renewals come up often too: one customer in 2025 cancelled “five days past the notification date” and was still held to the contract. Pushy sales outreach and people finding their own details in the database round out the list.

If you’re comparing Apollo and ZoomInfo to fill cold email campaigns, a third route is a sender with the lead data built in. Reachkit’s Lead Finder searches 500M+ people and 70M+ companies by title, industry, company size, technologies and more, and searching is free. A lead costs 1 credit once its email is verified, and the credit is refunded automatically when no verifiable email turns up. Leads go straight into a campaign the AI drafts from one sentence.

Reachkit also sets up the sending side. It registers domains ($15 a year) and creates Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 inboxes ($5 a month), with AI warmup on every inbox, and inboxes you connect yourself have no per-inbox fee. New inboxes ramp from 3 emails a day up to 20, and a campaign pauses at a 5% bounce rate. Growth is $39 a month per workspace, with 1,000 credits and unlimited teammates.

Reachkit has no phone numbers, dialer, intent data, org charts or Salesforce sync, so if your reps call, keep Apollo or ZoomInfo. See Reachkit vs Apollo or our ZoomInfo alternatives.

Moving between Apollo and ZoomInfo is mostly a contract question, because both sets of terms let you keep using contacts you already pulled into your own records.

• Data you exported. Apollo grants a perpetual license to contact data you’ve added to your own records during the term; ZoomInfo lets you keep using what you obtained during the term. Both may delete data you uploaded once you leave.
• Your CRM is the bridge. Both connect to Salesforce and HubSpot, so your records and history stay put while the data source changes.
• Sequences and mailboxes. Apollo documents no sequence export. Apollo says mailboxes bought from it may be deactivated if your credits run out or your plan changes, and it documents no way to take them out of Apollo. Mailboxes you connected yourself keep their warmup history and replies.
• Timing. A ZoomInfo contract can’t be cancelled mid-term, so find your opt-out date first. Apollo’s yearly plans need notice 30 days before the end; monthly ones stop anytime.

Leaving ZoomInfo, I’d run Apollo’s free plan on a few hundred contacts in my own market and count bounces before the notice date.

I’d choose by budget and by how your team reaches people. A founder or small team will get further with Apollo: free to test, billed per seat by the month, with sending in the same app. A large team that calls as much as it emails, buys on yearly contracts and wants intent signals in its CRM is who ZoomInfo is built for, and its accuracy clause is worth reading before you sign. For cold email the list decides most of the result, so count bounces on a sample from your own niche first. If email is the whole job, try Reachkit for 30 days.

Related: Reachkit vs Apollo, the ZoomInfo profile, Apollo vs Clay, Instantly vs Apollo and Apollo alternatives.