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. This is genuine outbound automation running continuously in the background, not a manual prospecting database that requires human intervention per record. 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 syncing sequence enrollment status rather than just reading records. 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 requires Professional ($79/user/month) or the Custom plan. 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. 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, and the minimum tier for API access. Includes automated workflows, call recordings with AI insights, dialer, unlimited daily email sends, A/Z testing, and analytics with pre-built reports. Organization: $119 annual or $149 monthly 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 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. API access at Professional combined with programmatic enrichment volume is the most common source of budget overrun. 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 is not the right fit for teams that need multichannel outreach beyond email and calling. lemlist ($55/mo billed annually) adds LinkedIn automation, SMS, and WhatsApp in a single sequence builder that Apollo does not offer natively. Outreach and Salesloft serve enterprise sales teams needing conversation intelligence, deal execution workflows, and deep Salesforce governance that exceeds what Apollo provides at the Professional tier. For teams that need only a prospecting database without sequencing, ZoomInfo and Clay offer data-only access at different data source depth. Current state Q3 2026: Apollo holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CCPA, confirmed on the Apollo Trust Center at trust.apollo.io, where the ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate is issued by A-LIGN and runs to May 2028 and the SOC 2 Type 2 report covers Security, Availability and Confidentiality. Apollo also holds CASA Tier 2, CPRA, EU-US DPF and PCI DSS, 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.