Apollo vs Lusha is a choice between two ways of buying the same kind of data. Both give you verified work emails and phone numbers for B2B contacts, a Chrome extension and CRM integrations. Apollo wraps that data in a sales platform with sequences, a dialer and workflows and charges per seat. Lusha concentrates on data and enrichment and charges per credit, with seats bundled into its plans. Below are both side by side, each figure from the vendor’s own pricing page or documentation, checked October 10, 2026.
Disclosure: we make emailvalidation.io, a third option covered briefly at the end. We have no partnership with either vendor, and the sources are at the end.
Apollo vs Lusha at a glance
| Row label | Apollo | Lusha |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per seat, credits per seat | Per plan, credits per plan with seats included |
| Free plan | 75 credits per seat a month | 40 credits a month |
| Entry plan, monthly billing | Basic: $65 per seat, 2,500 credits a month | Starter: $49.90, 400 credits a month |
| Entry plan, yearly billing | Basic: $49 per seat a month, 30,000 credits a year | Starter: $37.45 a month, 4,800 credits a year |
| Mid plan | Professional: $99 per seat monthly (4,000 credits) or $79 yearly (48,000 credits a year) | Pro: $69.90 monthly or $52.45 a month yearly, 600 credits a month, 2 seats |
| Top self-serve plan | Organization: $119 per seat a month, annual only, min. 3 seats | Premium: $399.90 a month, 3,400 credits, 5 seats |
| Email cost | 1 credit | 1 credit |
| Phone cost | 8 credits | 5 credits |
| Charge when nothing is found | API: only if credit-consuming data is found | No charge for a lookup without a match |
| Unused credits | Expire at the end of the billing cycle | Roll over on monthly Pro and Premium, up to 2× the monthly allowance |
| API | Listed from the Free plan; limits vary by plan | Every plan; strict rate limits on Free and Starter |
| Data export | Bulk export of saved records; up to 10,000 leads at once without a selection limit | CSV export on paid plans; export to CRM |
| Chrome extension | Prospecting, Gmail and Salesforce extensions on every plan | LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, company websites; on the free plan |
| CRM integrations | CRM integrations from Basic | Salesforce, HubSpot, Bullhorn, Pipedrive, Outreach, Salesloft, Zoho, Dynamics, Capsule; on the free plan |
| Outreach | Sequences (2 on Free, unlimited from Basic), dialer, call recordings | Email sequence automation |
Apollo’s monthly prices are per seat; Lusha’s Pro and Premium include 2 and 5 seats (expandable to 10 and 25). Premium’s credits are adjustable; the table shows its default.
Apollo vs Lusha pricing for the same volume
Say you need about 500 work emails a month for one person.
- Apollo: the Basic plan’s 2,500 credits a month cover that at 1 credit per email, for $65 a month, or $49 a month on annual billing. That works out to about 2.6 cents per credit on monthly billing.
- Lusha: Starter’s 400 credits are not enough; Pro’s 600 credits cost $69.90 a month, or $52.45 a month on yearly billing. That is about 11.7 cents per email on monthly billing.
With phone numbers, an email plus a phone number costs 9 credits on Apollo and 6 on Lusha. Because Apollo’s credits are cheaper, that is about 23 cents on Apollo’s Basic and about 70 cents on Lusha’s Pro, both on monthly billing.
For teams the comparison shifts. Apollo charges every seat; Lusha’s Pro includes 2 seats and Premium 5, sharing one credit pool (Premium and Scale can also set per-user limits).
Lusha vs Apollo: which one fits
Apollo fits if you want one tool for the whole outbound process: finding prospects in a database of 240 million contacts and 30 million companies (Apollo’s figure), sequencing them, calling them and tracking deals. Its free plan is generous and its credits are cheap per email, but they don’t roll over and every seat costs extra.
Lusha fits if you mostly reveal contacts in LinkedIn, Sales Navigator or your CRM and want the data enriched into Salesforce, HubSpot or another CRM, with few seats and credits that carry over on monthly Pro and Premium plans. Lusha names its data sources and states that it “does not scrape professional networks or social platforms”; it lists GDPR certification by ePrivacyseal, CCPA validation by TrustArc and SOC 2 Type II.
Neither vendor publishes an independent accuracy test on these pages, and we haven’t run one, so we don’t compare data quality here.
A third option: an email finder without a database
If you mostly need work emails for people you have already picked, a dedicated finder can cost less than either platform. emailvalidation.io’s email finder takes a first name, last name and company domain and checks the address with the company’s mail server before it returns it; on catch-all domains it returns the most common pattern (first.last@) and marks it as risky. The LinkedIn email finder does the same from LinkedIn profiles, Sales Navigator and Groups.
- An email search or LinkedIn search uses 10 credits, a verification 1 credit.
- Free plan: 100 credits a month (10 searches); Small $9.99 for 5,000 credits (500 searches); Medium $34.99 for 25,000; Large $94.99 for 100,000 a month. See email validation API pricing.
- Exports from Apollo or Lusha can go through the email validation API or the bulk API (up to 100,000 addresses per job) before you send.
It has no phone numbers, prospect search or sequences. More detail on our Apollo alternative and Lusha alternative pages; RocketReach vs Apollo compares Apollo with another database.
Sources
Checked October 10, 2026: Apollo pricing (plans, monthly and annual prices, credits, features, credit and export FAQ); Apollo API pricing and credits; Apollo homepage (database size); Lusha pricing (plans, monthly and yearly prices, credits, plan comparison); Lusha FAQ (credit costs, API, export, extension, integrations, seats, data sources, compliance); How credits work in Lusha; emailvalidation.io pricing.