Apollo.io

Apollo.io is an all-in-one B2B sales intelligence and engagement platform combining a 240M+ contact database with autonomous outreach automation, email sequencing, a built-in dialer, and CRM sync. Founded in 2015, $251M raised, valued at $1.6B. Over 600,000 companies use Apollo, a figure the vendor states on its own homepage, and named customers on that page include Google, Microsoft, Customer.io, and Census. The core agentic capability is autonomous sequence execution. Once a prospect is enrolled in a sequence, Apollo sends emails, waits for replies, follows up based on engagement behavior, and logs all activity to your CRM without requiring human approval at each step. AI-powered Plays are multi-step automated workflows triggered by prospect signals including job changes, funding rounds, hiring activity, website visits, and intent data events. When a trigger fires, Apollo enriches the contact, enrolls them in the configured sequence, and begins outreach automatically. AI Research generates personalized insights per prospect automatically before outreach begins. AI Lead Scoring prioritizes prospects based on fit signals without manual scoring rules. The AI Assistant is included as introductory free on all paid plans, providing conversational access to Apollo data and workflows. AI Writing is available across all tiers. Projects (BETA) enable structured campaign organization, and Recommendations (BETA) surface AI-powered next-step suggestions. Integration depth is action-level, not read-only. Apollo writes to Salesforce and HubSpot natively, creating contacts, updating field values, logging email and call activity, and running a documented bidirectional sync that keeps Apollo and CRM records consistent rather than only reading them. Apollo states that bidirectional syncing is available on certain plans. Outreach and Salesloft connect as sequence platforms for teams that run Apollo for data and a separate SEP for execution. The Salesforce extension and Gmail extension enable Apollo workflows directly within those interfaces. Additional integrations include Marketo, SendGrid, and LinkedIn. API access is included on every plan, including Free: Basic and Professional allow 200 calls per minute, 400 per hour and 2,000 per day, Organization allows 600 per hour and 6,000 per day, Free runs at trial-level limits, and higher limits are available on Custom plans through sales. Apollo publishes a first-party remote MCP server at mcp.apollo.io using Streamable HTTP with OAuth, with prebuilt connectors for Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity AI. The vendor states that any plan qualifies for MCP, including the free plan. Pricing uses a per-seat subscription plus credit-based consumption model, in USD, and both billing rates are published. Free: $0, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, AI Assistant, AI Research, 2 sequences, 250 daily email sends, basic filters, Gmail and Salesforce extensions. Basic: $49 per seat per month billed annually or $65 month to month, 30,000 credits per seat per year granted upfront, unlimited sequences, advanced filters, CRM integrations, and waterfall enrichment. Professional: $79 annual or $99 monthly, 48,000 credits per seat per year. Includes Agents, automated workflows, call recordings with AI insights, dialer, unlimited daily email sends, A/Z testing, and analytics with pre-built reports. Organization: $119 per seat per month billed annually with a minimum of 3 seats, 72,000 credits per seat per year, advanced security, SSO, customizable reports and dashboards, and the ability to supply your own LLM API key. Apollo labels Organization Annual Only, so unlike Basic and Professional it cannot be bought month to month. Apollo also directs large enterprises to a sales-gated Custom plan, which carries no published rate. Basic and Professional offer a 14-day trial alongside the permanently free plan. Two add-ons are sold separately, each at $119 per team per month billed annually, and the vendor labels both as introductory pricing. The Inbound package includes website visitor identification for up to 50,000 companies per month globally, contact-level identification for up to 10,000 contacts per month in the US, domain tracking for up to 100 domains, and form enrichment for 5,000 contacts per month. The Advanced Dialer includes parallel dialer, power dialer, international calling, and local presence. Credit consumption is the variable that decides real cost. Apollo publishes its rates: a verified email costs 1 credit, a phone number 8 credits, data enrichment 1 to 8 credits per record, AI Research 1 credit per run, and US dialing 2 credits per minute. Teams enriching several hundred contacts per month per rep will exceed the Basic allowance. Upgrades take effect immediately, downgrades take effect immediately but no refunds are processed mid-term, and cancellations take effect at the end of the billing cycle. Apollo suits teams that want prospecting data, email sequencing and calling in one platform. Teams that want LinkedIn, SMS and WhatsApp steps in the same sequence should look at lemlist (from $55/mo billed annually). Enterprise teams centered on conversation intelligence and deal execution should look at Outreach or Salesloft, and teams that want waterfall enrichment across many data providers should look at Clay. Teams whose priority is high-volume cold email sending and deliverability across many inboxes should look at Instantly.ai (from $37.60/mo billed annually). Teams that want an agent to source prospects from buying signals such as competitor engagement and job changes, then run LinkedIn and email outreach for them, should look at Gojiberry AI. Current state Q3 2026: Apollo holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CCPA. The Apollo Trust Center at trust.apollo.io lists the SOC 2 Type 2 report as covering Security, Availability and Confidentiality. Apollo's security page names A-LIGN as the auditor for both its ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications. Apollo also holds CASA Tier 2, CPRA and EU-US DPF, which sit outside our published certification set. Buyers should note Apollo's AI policy: Apollo may use Customer Data as an input to train its own internal models, and no customer opt-out is published. Those internal models run on Apollo infrastructure and are not shared with third parties, and Apollo commits to obtaining customer consent before sharing Customer Data with third-party AI providers for training. Apollo states separately that data flowing through customer-configured AI integrations is not used for its own model training or algorithm improvement.