A per-seat contact database with outreach built in vs a credit-based enrichment workbench.
| Apollo | Clay | |
|---|---|---|
| Core job | Find contacts and run outreach | Enrich, clean, and orchestrate data |
| Pricing model | Per user per month | Per workspace with credits; unlimited seats |
| Entry paid plan | Basic, $49/user/mo billed annually | Launch, from $167/mo billed annually ($185 monthly) |
| Free tier | Yes, with limited credits and features | Yes, 100 data credits per month |
| Waterfall enrichment | No, one database | Yes, across many providers |
| AI research | Built-in AI assistant features | Claygent, an AI agent you point at any research question |
| Outreach | Built in: sequences, dialer, warmup and deliverability tools | None native; pushes to sequencers and CRMs |
| CRM | Integrations from the Basic plan up | Auto-sync and CRM enrichment from Growth up |
| Phone data | Mobile credits scale by plan | Phone enrichment from the Launch plan up |
| Top self-serve tier | Organization, $119/user/mo | Growth, $446/mo billed annually ($495 monthly) |
From each vendor's pricing page, checked in August 2026. Apollo's advertised prices are per user, billed annually; month-to-month billing runs higher.
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Apollo Free | $0 | Limited credits, basic filters, capped AI features |
| Apollo Basic | $49/user/mo | Unlimited sequences, deliverability suite and warmup, CRM integrations |
| Apollo Professional | $79/user/mo | Adds call recordings with AI insights and advanced filters |
| Apollo Organization | $119/user/mo | Security controls, customizable reports and dashboards |
| Clay Free | $0 | 100 data credits per month |
| Clay Launch | $167/mo annual, $185 monthly | 3,000 data credits and 15,000 actions per month, phone enrichment |
| Clay Growth | $446/mo annual, $495 monthly | 6,000 data credits and 40,000 actions, CRM auto-sync, HTTP API |
| Clay Enterprise | Custom | 100,000+ credits, SSO, dedicated support |
One timing note: Clay overhauled its pricing in March 2026, splitting data credits from platform actions and cutting many data costs, so older comparisons quote plans that no longer exist. Check the live page before budgeting.
Pick Apollo when you want one tool and a predictable bill. Prospecting, sequencing, and a dialer live in one login, and $49 a month per seat is easy to reason about. For a solo founder or a two-person sales effort, that simplicity beats a more capable stack you have to assemble yourself.
I can speak to this one directly: I pull lead lists from Apollo through its API for my own outreach, and as a supply of names, titles, and companies at a fixed price, it does the job. One habit I would keep regardless of vendor: run any email list through a separate verifier before sending, because no database is clean enough on its own to protect your sender reputation.
Apollo is also the pick when calling matters. The Professional tier adds call recordings with AI insights, which is a lot of sales-stack surface area for the money.
Pick Clay when coverage and data quality are the bottleneck. No single provider finds every email or phone number, and Clay's core trick, waterfalling a lookup across many providers until one hits, reliably beats any one source. When your list is large or each contact is valuable, that lift pays for the subscription.
Clay is also the pick for custom signals. Claygent can visit a company's site and answer questions no database holds, like what stack they use or whether they mention a compliance need, and that feeds real personalization instead of a mail-merged first name. The catch is that Clay is a power tool: someone on the team has to enjoy living in tables and own the credit budget, or the workspace turns into an expensive experiment.
Unlimited seats on every plan is a quiet advantage for larger teams, since viewing and collaborating cost nothing extra. The meter is credits, not people.
The biggest miss is that these tools compose. Apollo is one of the data sources a Clay waterfall can draw on, so the realistic architecture for a growing team is Apollo for supply and Clay for quality, not one or the other. The versus framing hides the and.
Second, credit math is the real Clay price. A single row can consume several data credits as it moves through providers and AI steps, so a 10,000-row build can get through an entry plan's monthly allowance quickly. Budget by rows times enrichment steps, not by the sticker price, and give one person ownership of that number.
Third, the seat math cuts in opposite directions. Apollo scales linearly with every SDR you add, which gets expensive for big teams. Clay's flat workspace pricing gets cheaper per head as the team grows, but in practice only one or two operators ever touch it, so a small team can end up paying for capacity nobody uses. Run the numbers for your actual headcount rather than trusting either vendor's framing.
Start with Apollo unless you already know coverage is your bottleneck. It is the simpler purchase, the per-seat pricing is easy to forecast, and the built-in sequencing means one tool instead of three. Add Clay when wasted outreach from thin or wrong data starts costing more than Clay's subscription, and staff it with someone who will own the credit budget. Both have free tiers, so the cheap answer is to test each on a few hundred real rows before paying for either. That is how I would spend the first month deciding.