An Apollo alternative makes sense when you pay per seat for a full sales platform but mostly use one part of it: getting the work email of people you already have in mind. Apollo’s strength is everything around that, from prospect search to sequences and the dialer. If you don’t use those, an email finder with a verification API does the email part on one monthly allowance. Apollo’s figures below come from its pricing page, API pricing documentation and help center, checked October 10, 2026.
Disclosure: we make emailvalidation.io, one of the alternatives on this page. Apollo’s strengths are listed in their own section, and the sources are at the end.
Quick verdict
- Stay with Apollo if your team prospects by filters, runs sequences from Apollo, uses the dialer or enriches your CRM with Apollo data. Replacing that would take several tools.
- Choose emailvalidation.io if you need verified work emails for known people (from LinkedIn, a CRM or an event list) and want to check lists before you send, without paying per seat.
- Combine Apollo’s free plan for occasional prospecting with a separate finder and verifier for volume.
Apollo.io pricing in 2026
| Plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing | Credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 75 per seat a month (900 a year) |
| Basic | $65 per seat / month | $49 per seat / month | 2,500 per seat a month; 30,000 a year on annual billing |
| Professional | $99 per seat / month | $79 per seat / month | 4,000 per seat a month; 48,000 a year on annual billing |
| Organization | Annual only | $119 per seat / month, min. 3 seats | 72,000 per seat a year |
Prices exclude taxes; Apollo says annual billing saves 24%. How credits work, in Apollo’s words and documentation:
- Credits are “the currency to perform activities throughout the platform”: emails, phone numbers, email warmup, domains and mailboxes, AI-researched data. The pricing page lists 1 credit for an email, 8 credits for a phone number and 1–8 credits for enriched data.
- Through the API, enriching a person costs 1 credit for email or demographic data plus 8 credits if a mobile number is returned, “only if credit-consuming data is found”.
- Credits are pooled across the team, granted at the start of each billing cycle and expire at its end, including add-on credits.
- On the free plan you can connect Gmail accounts only, and Apollo’s help center says free plans are limited to one seat after 100 days of use.
Apollo vs. emailvalidation.io side by side
| Row label | Apollo | emailvalidation.io |
|---|---|---|
| What you start with | Search filters, a LinkedIn profile, a CRM record | First name, last name and company domain, or a LinkedIn profile |
| What you get | Contact and company data, emails, phone numbers | One work address, checked with the company’s mail server; on catch-all domains the most common pattern, marked as risky |
| Pricing model | Per seat, credits per seat | Per account, credits per account |
| Smallest paid plan | $65 per seat / month (Basic, 2,500 credits) | $9.99 / month (Small, 5,000 credits: 500 searches) |
| About 2,500 email searches | Basic (1 credit per email) | $34.99 / month (Medium) |
| About 10,000 email searches | Credits from several seats or add-on credits | $94.99 / month (Large) |
| Free tier | 75 credits per seat a month | 100 credits a month (10 searches, or 100 verifications) |
| Phone numbers | Yes, 8 credits each | No |
| Browser extensions | Prospecting, Gmail and Salesforce extensions, on every plan | LinkedIn email finder for profiles, Sales Navigator and Groups |
| Sequences and dialer | Yes (2 sequences on Free; dialer with credits) | No; we don’t send email |
| API | Listed from the Free plan; credit use and rate limits vary by plan | Every plan, plus an MCP server |
| CRM | Native CRM integrations and enrichment | Zapier |
Our search numbers assume every credit goes to searches (10 credits each). The Apollo rows use the 1 credit per email that Apollo’s pricing page lists.
Where Apollo is stronger
- One platform for outbound. Prospect search, unlimited sequences from Basic, the dialer, call recordings, meeting scheduling and automated workflows. emailvalidation.io finds and verifies addresses; it doesn’t send.
- A generous free plan. 75 credits per seat a month, the extensions and 2 sequences, with no time limit.
- Phone numbers and enrichment. Mobile numbers, waterfall enrichment and CSV, CRM and API enrichment on paid plans.
- Pay for data, not for empty lookups. Apollo’s API charges enrichment credits only when it finds data.
- A similar cost per email on annual Basic. At 1 credit per email, 30,000 credits for $588 a year work out to about 2 cents per email, the same as a search on our Small plan, and they come with the rest of the platform.
Where emailvalidation.io is the better Apollo alternative
No seats. Apollo’s credits come per seat, so a team of three on Basic pays three times. Our plans are per account: Small at $9.99, Medium at $34.99, Large at $94.99 a month, with two months free on yearly billing. See email validation API pricing.
Cheap verification. Checking a list costs 1 credit per address: 5,000 checks for $9.99, 100,000 for $94.99 a month. The email validation API returns 15 fields per address, including state, reason and a score from 0 to 1; the bulk API takes up to 100,000 addresses per job and calls a signed webhook when it is done. Useful for exports from Apollo too.
Every found address is checked first. The email finder checks each address with the company’s mail server before it returns it. On catch-all domains, which accept any address, it returns the most common pattern (first.last@) and marks it as risky; our guide to catch-all email addresses explains why no tool can confirm a single mailbox there.
LinkedIn workflow on the free plan. The Chrome extension finds addresses for people on LinkedIn profiles, in Sales Navigator and in Groups, and saves them to lists you can download as CSV. The free plan includes 100 credits a month; a LinkedIn email search uses 10.
What you give up compared with Apollo: the contact database, phone numbers, sequences, the dialer and native CRM enrichment.
Other Apollo alternatives
- Lusha: verified emails (1 credit) and phone numbers (5 credits); free plan with 40 credits a month, paid plans from $49.90 a month. See the Lusha alternative page and Apollo vs Lusha.
- RocketReach: a database of 700 million professionals with emails and phone numbers; 5 free lookups, from $39 a month. See RocketReach vs Apollo.
- Snov.io: email finder, verifier and cold email campaigns with unlimited team seats; from $39 a month for 1,000 credits. See the Snov.io alternative page.
Sources
Checked October 10, 2026: Apollo pricing (plans, monthly and annual prices, credits, credit costs per email and phone, plan features, credit FAQ); Apollo API pricing and credits; Customize and manage your Apollo plan (free plan seats, updated October 6, 2026); Lusha pricing; RocketReach pricing; Snov.io pricing; emailvalidation.io pricing, email finder and LinkedIn email finder.