With a colossal database of 280+ million contacts and many useful features, Apollo may seem like an outstanding sales engagement solution. Still, the platform has various drawbacks, from data accuracy issues to dangerous breaches that have exposed many users to security risks.
Whatever your reasons for browsing different options, this guide will help by showing you the factors to consider when seeking an Apollo alternative. You’ll then see concise reviews of four platforms based on our first-hand assessments, as well as the feedback we gathered from our extensive network of industry experts.
What To Look for in Apollo Alternatives
When browsing alternatives to Apollo, you should start with individual factors to determine a reference point. Specifically, you should ask the following questions:
- How many SDRs do you have?
- What’s your ideal budget range?
- Which CRM and other platforms are you using?
The answers to the above questions will serve as disqualifying factors that will shorten your search by immediately weeding out unfit platforms. When you shortlist a few options, you can compare them according to the following criteria:
- 🎯 Data availability and accuracy—This is by far the most important factor to consider because you shouldn’t use a platform with a low hit rate or outdated/inaccurate information regardless of its other features and benefits
- 🧩 Ease of use and integrations—Look for a user-friendly solution that won’t require a bunch of additional tools and expose you to extra costs. Your sales engagement platform should also fit the rest of your workflow seamlessly, which means it needs to support your existing processes and software
- 🔍 Data enrichment capabilities—Every platform should offer basic contact information, but your chosen solution needs to go far beyond it. This is necessary for launching effective outbound campaigns that involve highly personalized messages
- 💲 Pricing—Besides comparing a platform’s price to your budget, you should look at the value for money it offers. Not every platform you can afford is worth the investment, so you should do a cost-to-benefit analysis to find the best option
Best Apollo Alternatives—4 Platforms To Check Out
The sales engagement market has a bunch of players, so you might encounter analysis paralysis while comparing different solutions. To help you avoid it, we’ve picked four platforms worth considering:
- Clay
- ZoomInfo
- Hunter
- Lemlist
1. Clay
Clay blends robust data enrichment with various sales automation features to uplevel your outbound campaigns in many ways. The platform’s philosophy is simple—why have one data provider when you can have more than 50?
Specifically, a Clay account gives you access to 50+ data sources to ensure maximum coverage. Some of the main providers encompassed by Clay include the following:
You don’t need to sign up for these platforms to access their data—all you need is a Clay account. Ask for the info you need, and the platform will examine data sources one by one through waterfall enrichment until it finds what you’re looking for.
With Clay, you’re not limited to prospects’ contact information. Want to find company data like the number of employees, tech stack, or office locations? Clay does it all and so much more.
To make your research as simple as possible, the platform also offers Claygent—an AI assistant and web scraper. Ask Claygent to find any information from anywhere on the web, and it’ll have an answer in no time.
If you want to avoid manual email writing, Clay’s AI email builder will take care of all the heavy lifting. It pulls all the data you’ve gathered to create a personalized draft in seconds, saving you a ton of time.
You can’t send emails with Clay, but you can export them to most major email senders, such as Outreach and Salesloft. Clay integrates with 100+ other tools, so you can adapt it to your workflow without issues.
Clay is stronger fit for growth teams focused on the instrumentation and orchestration of outbound motions, ultimately serving SDRs and sales teams. Apollo is a stronger fit SDRs working on these leads.
2. ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is one of Apollo’s main competitors, and the two platforms share many similarities. Firstly, ZoomInfo also offers a large database, though it’s a bit smaller than Apollo’s at 265+ million contacts.
Rather than being a single solution, ZoomInfo is a collection of platforms, with SalesOS being the flagship product aimed at sales and go-to-market teams. It offers contact and company search, sales automation, and conversation intelligence that helps sales teams improve their outreach efforts.
Besides SalesOS, you can leverage the following three platforms:
- MarketingOS for cross-channel advertising and in-depth customer insights
- OperationsOS for data cleaning and deduplication
- TalentOS for candidate outreach and employer branding
Due to such a wide variety of features, ZoomInfo is undoubtedly a capable platform aimed at more advanced teams and users. It removes manual work from many processes throughout the sales cycle and can be a game changer if used properly.
Still, not everyone will find the platform useful. A significant drawback is data accuracy, with some users reporting the majority of their information being incorrect. While this isn’t the standard, and many users have found ZoomInfo helpful, it’s still a considerable risk.
What makes such risks worse is ZoomInfo’s astronomical pricing. While no pricing information is available on the website, ZoomInfo states an average user spends a whopping $30,000 on the platform annually. There’s also no monthly billing, so you might spend a ton of money and end up stuck with ZoomInfo even if you don’t get the expected results.
3. Hunter
If you’re looking for a more stripped-back platform than Apollo or ZoomInfo, Hunter can be an excellent option. Unlike Apollo, it doesn’t try to do everything at once but focuses on a specific aspect of outbound campaigns—data gathering and enrichment.
It has a smaller database—around 107 million emails—so it’s not as robust as some of its competitors. While this means you won’t need to spend as much money on it, it also impacts the hit rate and increases the risk of not getting all the data you need.
Besides email finding and verification, Hunter offers the following features:
- Domain search
- Buyer intent data
- Email sender
The email sender works natively with Gmail and Outlook, but you can connect other providers to it via SMTP/IMAP. The sender also lets you automate emails through custom attributes based on the data you have on a prospect, which streamlines the email creation process.
Hunter’s notable benefit is a free plan, which gives you limited access to some of the platform’s core features. If you wish to upgrade, you can choose between four paid plans:
- Starter—$49/month
- Growth—$149/month
- Business—$499/month
- Enterprise—Custom
As for the downsides, there have been complaints about the email verifier, which doesn’t seem to be as accurate as some users expect. Data availability also isn’t as robust as with some competitors, which is expected considering Hunter’s smaller database.
4. Lemlist
Lemlist is another capable solution that has quite a few advantages over Apollo. The first one is its database, which is significantly larger than most competitors’ at over 450 million contacts. This means there’s a lower chance of not finding the information you need and having to use additional tools.
The platform’s standout feature is lemwarm, which helps you boost email deliverability and prevent your messages from ending up in the recipient’s spam folder. It does this by sending emails to a large network of qualified users, which improves your email domain’s credibility and authority.
Other notable features of Lemlist include the following:
- Multichannel prospecting
- Email personalization through custom text and image variables
- Dozens of native integrations, plus many others via Zapier
As for the pricing, you can choose between four options:
- Email Starter—$39/user per month
- Email Pro—$69/user per month
- Multichannel Expert—$99/user per month
- Outreach Scale—$159/user per month
There’s no free plan, but you get a 14-day free trial to test the platform’s features. Unfortunately, some of Lemlist’s key features, such as lemwarm and integrations, aren’t included in the Starter plan, which somewhat damages its cost-effectiveness.
Speaking of integrations, some users feel like they’re not robust enough, especially when it comes to CRMs. Integrations via Zapier can sometimes be buggy, which can add inefficiencies to your workflow.
The Verdict—Which Apollo Alternative Should You Use?
Each sales intelligence platform has a unique set of selling points, but as mentioned above, most of them also come with significant trade-offs or huge investments.
If you want a large database like ZoomInfo’s, you need to pay massive amounts of money that many businesses don’t have in their budget. Even if you do, you still get access to a single database. This means that if you don’t get the info you need, you must pay even more for another platform.
That’s why your best option is a product like Clay. It gives you access to dozens of data sources, and you pay a fraction of the price you’d pay for other solutions that provide much more limited data.
Flexible Plans, No Waste
You don’t need to burn a hole in your pocket to use Clay’s many features. In fact, you don’t need to pay anything if you’re new to outbound campaigns and only need some basic features—they’re all included in the free plan.
If you do need advanced functionalities, you can choose from four affordable paid tiers:
- Starter—$149/month
- Explorer—$349/month
- Pro—$800/month
- Enterprise—Custom
Each plan includes a specific amount of credits you can use for enrichments and other features, and you can choose the amount that fits your needs to get the most out of every dollar you invest. 💰
With Claygent, AI email writing, and lots of useful templates, you’ll remove hours of manual labor from your workflow. Each SDR will have the power to complete the work of multiple people so you can get results faster and without hefty investments. 🧠
Sign Up for a Free Clay Account
If you want to get started with Clay, you can create an account in three steps:
- Visit the signup page
- Create a free account
- Explore Clay’s many features
If you want to learn more about the platform before making the final decision, you can watch this demo to see it in action:
💡 Bonus read: Want to read about other data enrichment and cold outreach solutions? Check out our alternative pages for:
You can also visit the platform’s Learn hub for more tutorials and join the Slack community to see how others are using Clay. For more resources and useful tips on scaling your outbound efforts, sign up for Clay’s newsletter.
With a colossal database of 280+ million contacts and many useful features, Apollo may seem like an outstanding sales engagement solution. Still, the platform has various drawbacks, from data accuracy issues to dangerous breaches that have exposed many users to security risks.
Whatever your reasons for browsing different options, this guide will help by showing you the factors to consider when seeking an Apollo alternative. You’ll then see concise reviews of four platforms based on our first-hand assessments, as well as the feedback we gathered from our extensive network of industry experts.
What To Look for in Apollo Alternatives
When browsing alternatives to Apollo, you should start with individual factors to determine a reference point. Specifically, you should ask the following questions:
- How many SDRs do you have?
- What’s your ideal budget range?
- Which CRM and other platforms are you using?
The answers to the above questions will serve as disqualifying factors that will shorten your search by immediately weeding out unfit platforms. When you shortlist a few options, you can compare them according to the following criteria:
- 🎯 Data availability and accuracy—This is by far the most important factor to consider because you shouldn’t use a platform with a low hit rate or outdated/inaccurate information regardless of its other features and benefits
- 🧩 Ease of use and integrations—Look for a user-friendly solution that won’t require a bunch of additional tools and expose you to extra costs. Your sales engagement platform should also fit the rest of your workflow seamlessly, which means it needs to support your existing processes and software
- 🔍 Data enrichment capabilities—Every platform should offer basic contact information, but your chosen solution needs to go far beyond it. This is necessary for launching effective outbound campaigns that involve highly personalized messages
- 💲 Pricing—Besides comparing a platform’s price to your budget, you should look at the value for money it offers. Not every platform you can afford is worth the investment, so you should do a cost-to-benefit analysis to find the best option
Best Apollo Alternatives—4 Platforms To Check Out
The sales engagement market has a bunch of players, so you might encounter analysis paralysis while comparing different solutions. To help you avoid it, we’ve picked four platforms worth considering:
- Clay
- ZoomInfo
- Hunter
- Lemlist
1. Clay
Clay blends robust data enrichment with various sales automation features to uplevel your outbound campaigns in many ways. The platform’s philosophy is simple—why have one data provider when you can have more than 50?
Specifically, a Clay account gives you access to 50+ data sources to ensure maximum coverage. Some of the main providers encompassed by Clay include the following:
You don’t need to sign up for these platforms to access their data—all you need is a Clay account. Ask for the info you need, and the platform will examine data sources one by one through waterfall enrichment until it finds what you’re looking for.
With Clay, you’re not limited to prospects’ contact information. Want to find company data like the number of employees, tech stack, or office locations? Clay does it all and so much more.
To make your research as simple as possible, the platform also offers Claygent—an AI assistant and web scraper. Ask Claygent to find any information from anywhere on the web, and it’ll have an answer in no time.
If you want to avoid manual email writing, Clay’s AI email builder will take care of all the heavy lifting. It pulls all the data you’ve gathered to create a personalized draft in seconds, saving you a ton of time.
You can’t send emails with Clay, but you can export them to most major email senders, such as Outreach and Salesloft. Clay integrates with 100+ other tools, so you can adapt it to your workflow without issues.
Clay is stronger fit for growth teams focused on the instrumentation and orchestration of outbound motions, ultimately serving SDRs and sales teams. Apollo is a stronger fit SDRs working on these leads.
2. ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is one of Apollo’s main competitors, and the two platforms share many similarities. Firstly, ZoomInfo also offers a large database, though it’s a bit smaller than Apollo’s at 265+ million contacts.
Rather than being a single solution, ZoomInfo is a collection of platforms, with SalesOS being the flagship product aimed at sales and go-to-market teams. It offers contact and company search, sales automation, and conversation intelligence that helps sales teams improve their outreach efforts.
Besides SalesOS, you can leverage the following three platforms:
- MarketingOS for cross-channel advertising and in-depth customer insights
- OperationsOS for data cleaning and deduplication
- TalentOS for candidate outreach and employer branding
Due to such a wide variety of features, ZoomInfo is undoubtedly a capable platform aimed at more advanced teams and users. It removes manual work from many processes throughout the sales cycle and can be a game changer if used properly.
Still, not everyone will find the platform useful. A significant drawback is data accuracy, with some users reporting the majority of their information being incorrect. While this isn’t the standard, and many users have found ZoomInfo helpful, it’s still a considerable risk.
What makes such risks worse is ZoomInfo’s astronomical pricing. While no pricing information is available on the website, ZoomInfo states an average user spends a whopping $30,000 on the platform annually. There’s also no monthly billing, so you might spend a ton of money and end up stuck with ZoomInfo even if you don’t get the expected results.
3. Hunter
If you’re looking for a more stripped-back platform than Apollo or ZoomInfo, Hunter can be an excellent option. Unlike Apollo, it doesn’t try to do everything at once but focuses on a specific aspect of outbound campaigns—data gathering and enrichment.
It has a smaller database—around 107 million emails—so it’s not as robust as some of its competitors. While this means you won’t need to spend as much money on it, it also impacts the hit rate and increases the risk of not getting all the data you need.
Besides email finding and verification, Hunter offers the following features:
- Domain search
- Buyer intent data
- Email sender
The email sender works natively with Gmail and Outlook, but you can connect other providers to it via SMTP/IMAP. The sender also lets you automate emails through custom attributes based on the data you have on a prospect, which streamlines the email creation process.
Hunter’s notable benefit is a free plan, which gives you limited access to some of the platform’s core features. If you wish to upgrade, you can choose between four paid plans:
- Starter—$49/month
- Growth—$149/month
- Business—$499/month
- Enterprise—Custom
As for the downsides, there have been complaints about the email verifier, which doesn’t seem to be as accurate as some users expect. Data availability also isn’t as robust as with some competitors, which is expected considering Hunter’s smaller database.
4. Lemlist
Lemlist is another capable solution that has quite a few advantages over Apollo. The first one is its database, which is significantly larger than most competitors’ at over 450 million contacts. This means there’s a lower chance of not finding the information you need and having to use additional tools.
The platform’s standout feature is lemwarm, which helps you boost email deliverability and prevent your messages from ending up in the recipient’s spam folder. It does this by sending emails to a large network of qualified users, which improves your email domain’s credibility and authority.
Other notable features of Lemlist include the following:
- Multichannel prospecting
- Email personalization through custom text and image variables
- Dozens of native integrations, plus many others via Zapier
As for the pricing, you can choose between four options:
- Email Starter—$39/user per month
- Email Pro—$69/user per month
- Multichannel Expert—$99/user per month
- Outreach Scale—$159/user per month
There’s no free plan, but you get a 14-day free trial to test the platform’s features. Unfortunately, some of Lemlist’s key features, such as lemwarm and integrations, aren’t included in the Starter plan, which somewhat damages its cost-effectiveness.
Speaking of integrations, some users feel like they’re not robust enough, especially when it comes to CRMs. Integrations via Zapier can sometimes be buggy, which can add inefficiencies to your workflow.
The Verdict—Which Apollo Alternative Should You Use?
Each sales intelligence platform has a unique set of selling points, but as mentioned above, most of them also come with significant trade-offs or huge investments.
If you want a large database like ZoomInfo’s, you need to pay massive amounts of money that many businesses don’t have in their budget. Even if you do, you still get access to a single database. This means that if you don’t get the info you need, you must pay even more for another platform.
That’s why your best option is a product like Clay. It gives you access to dozens of data sources, and you pay a fraction of the price you’d pay for other solutions that provide much more limited data.
Flexible Plans, No Waste
You don’t need to burn a hole in your pocket to use Clay’s many features. In fact, you don’t need to pay anything if you’re new to outbound campaigns and only need some basic features—they’re all included in the free plan.
If you do need advanced functionalities, you can choose from four affordable paid tiers:
- Starter—$149/month
- Explorer—$349/month
- Pro—$800/month
- Enterprise—Custom
Each plan includes a specific amount of credits you can use for enrichments and other features, and you can choose the amount that fits your needs to get the most out of every dollar you invest. 💰
With Claygent, AI email writing, and lots of useful templates, you’ll remove hours of manual labor from your workflow. Each SDR will have the power to complete the work of multiple people so you can get results faster and without hefty investments. 🧠
Sign Up for a Free Clay Account
If you want to get started with Clay, you can create an account in three steps:
- Visit the signup page
- Create a free account
- Explore Clay’s many features
If you want to learn more about the platform before making the final decision, you can watch this demo to see it in action:
💡 Bonus read: Want to read about other data enrichment and cold outreach solutions? Check out our alternative pages for:
You can also visit the platform’s Learn hub for more tutorials and join the Slack community to see how others are using Clay. For more resources and useful tips on scaling your outbound efforts, sign up for Clay’s newsletter.
