Short answer: Apollo and Clay solve different problems. Apollo is a contact database with email sequencing, a dialer and buying intent built in, priced per seat with a pool of credits. Clay is a workflow and enrichment workspace that pulls data from more than 150 providers into tables you design, priced on usage (Actions and Data Credits) with unlimited seats. For signal-based outbound, choose Apollo if you want ready-made filters such as job postings, news and Bombora intent next to an email sender, with little to build. Choose Clay if you have an operator who wants custom signals, provider waterfalls and AI research columns. Many teams end up paying for both and still add a separate LinkedIn tool, which is the point where it’s worth asking whether you need either.
All prices below were checked on apollo.io/pricing and clay.com/pricing on 26 October 2026. Both vendors change pricing often, so confirm on their pages before you budget. I founded twl, one option below. Use the framework and check the prices on Clay’s and Apollo’s own pages before you treat a figure here as current.
Clay vs Apollo at a glance#
| Apollo | Clay | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Contact and company database with sequencing, dialer, intent and deal tools | Tables for sourcing, enrichment, AI research and signals, drawing on 150+ data providers |
| Pricing unit | Per seat, plus a credit pool shared by the team | Usage: Actions plus Data Credits. Unlimited seats |
| Entry paid price (as of 26 October 2026) | Basic: $49 per seat a month billed annually, $65 monthly | Launch: from $167 a month billed annually, $185 monthly |
| Where data comes from | Apollo’s own database, plus waterfall enrichment on paid plans | Clay’s marketplace of providers, or your own API keys |
| Built-in signals | Job postings, news, headcount growth, job change and technology filters; Bombora-powered buying intent | Job change, promotions, new hires, company news and social listening on Launch; web intent on Growth |
| Email sending | Sequences on every plan, including Free | Clay Sequencer for email, or a sequencing integration |
| LinkedIn outreach | LinkedIn steps are manual tasks a person completes | Pricing page lists LinkedIn ad audiences, not connection requests or messages |
| Best for | Teams that want data and sending in one place, quickly | Operators who want to design every column and mix providers |
Pricing, as of 26 October 2026#
Apollo pricing#
Apollo’s pricing page opens on annual billing (labelled “save 24%”). Prices exclude tax.
| Plan | Annual billing (per seat per month) | Monthly billing (per seat per month) | Credits per seat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 900 a year, granted monthly (75 a month on the monthly view) |
| Basic | $49 | $65 | 30,000 a year, or 2,500 a month on monthly |
| Professional | $79 | $99 | 48,000 a year, or 4,000 a month on monthly |
| Organization | $119, minimum 3 seats | Annual only | 72,000 a year |
Source: apollo.io/pricing, checked 26 October 2026. On the monthly view, Organization shows $149 per seat but is labelled “Annual Only”, so treat it as an annual contract.
How Apollo credits work, per the same page: a verified email costs 1 credit, a phone number 8 credits, data enrichment 1 to 8 credits, an AI research run 1 credit, and the US dialer 1 credit per 30 seconds. Credits are pooled across the team, granted at the start of each billing cycle and don’t roll over, including add-on credits. Add-on credits renew automatically each cycle until you remove them. All seats on an account must be on the same plan.
The plan you need often comes down to limits rather than credits. On Free and Basic, Apollo lists 250 daily email sends and one mailbox per user; Professional and Organization list unlimited daily sends (subject to Apollo’s fair use policy) and unlimited Google and Microsoft mailboxes. Free allows two sequences per team; Basic and above are unlimited.
Clay pricing#
Clay’s plans are Free, Launch (from $185 a month billed monthly, $167 annually), Growth (from $495 monthly, $446 annually) and custom Enterprise. Launch includes 15,000 Actions and 2,500 Data Credits a month; Growth includes 40,000 Actions and 6,000 Data Credits. Data Credits start at $0.05 each. Every plan has unlimited seats. Growth adds CRM auto-sync, HTTP API, webhooks and web intent signals. The full breakdown, including how credits roll over and where the bill grows, is in Clay pricing in 2026.
What the pricing shapes mean#
The two models reward different teams. Apollo’s cost rises with headcount: on its published annual prices, three people on Professional is 3 × $79, or $237 a month billed annually, before any add-on credits. Clay’s cost rises with volume and complexity: ten people can share one Launch plan, but enriching phone numbers or syncing to a CRM moves you up the credit tiers or onto Growth. A small team doing a lot of enrichment usually finds Apollo cheaper. A larger team sharing a carefully built workflow can find Clay cheaper per person.
Signals: what each one actually gives you#
Both vendors talk about signals, but they mean different things.
Apollo gives you filters on its own database. Its search filters article lists job postings, news, headcount growth, job change, technologies and a “Signals” filter for saved combinations of criteria. On top of that sits buying intent. Per Apollo’s buying intent overview, it’s powered by Bombora, measured at the company level, refreshed weekly, and shown as high intent (scores 75–100) or medium intent (61–74). You can track 1 topic on Free, 6 on Basic or Professional and 12 on Organization. Apollo is candid that when you filter people by intent, it surfaces people who work at companies showing intent, “but they may not be the individuals conducting the research.”
Clay treats signals as inputs to a table. Its pricing page lists job change, promotion and new-hire signals, company news and social listening on Launch, web intent on Growth, and webhooks on Growth so you can “automate any signal”. The strength is flexibility: you can combine a signal with enrichment, an AI research column and your own scoring in one row. The cost is that someone has to build and maintain that row.
Neither is better in the abstract. Apollo’s signals are fast to switch on and good for “which companies match my profile and are hiring or researching this topic”. Clay’s are better when the signal you care about is specific to your market and you want to shape it yourself. If you’re weighing a big contact database against a feed of who’s in-market now, sales intelligence tools vs buying signals covers that choice in more depth.
Sending: email, LinkedIn and the tools you still need#
Apollo includes email sequencing on every plan, and paid plans add a deliverability suite with email warm-up and domain and mailbox purchasing. On Free, you can only connect Gmail accounts. For LinkedIn, Apollo adds steps to sequences as manual tasks: its LinkedIn tasks article says “Apollo doesn’t automatically complete LinkedIn tasks for you” and warns that too many rapid LinkedIn actions can get an account temporarily restricted.
Clay can send email through the Clay Sequencer or push leads to a sequencing integration, and Growth adds buying domains and mailboxes for the Sequencer. As of 26 October 2026, Clay’s pricing page mentions LinkedIn only for ad audiences, not for connection requests or messages.
So if LinkedIn is part of your outreach, both leave a gap. Teams usually fill it with a separate LinkedIn sender, which brings its own seat, its own login on your account, and its own exposure to LinkedIn’s rules on automation. Before you add one, read LinkedIn account restricted? Why automation gets accounts flagged.
Which one should you choose?#
Choose Apollo if:
- You need contact data and an email sender in one place, this month, without a builder.
- Your ideal customer profile maps well to standard filters: titles, industry, headcount, technologies, hiring.
- Company-level intent on a handful of topics is useful context for prioritising accounts.
- Your team is small, so per-seat pricing stays low.
Choose Clay if:
- You have someone who enjoys building workflows and will own the tables.
- You want to combine several providers in waterfalls for better coverage, or already hold provider contracts you can plug in with your own keys.
- Your best signals are specific to your market and need custom logic, AI research or webhooks.
- Several people need access, and unlimited seats matter more than a simple bill.
Buy both if Apollo is your database and sender and Clay is the research and scoring layer in between. Many teams run that way. It works, but count the cost honestly: two subscriptions, two credit meters that expire on different schedules, and a LinkedIn tool on top. How to audit your outbound stack in 30 minutes gives you a quick way to check whether the combination is paying for itself.
When you might need neither#
Apollo and Clay are both good at what they do. You may still need neither if the job you’re actually trying to do is narrower: find people showing a real, checkable reason to talk now, and start a relevant conversation on LinkedIn and email without moving the lead between three products.
Signs that’s your situation:
- Most of your best conversations start from something specific, such as a comment on a competitor’s post, a new hire, or a funding round, rather than a filtered list.
- You buy a large database but only ever contact a small slice of it.
- Your Clay tables mainly exist to move leads from a signal into a sender.
- Nobody can say, for a given email, why that person was contacted.
The alternatives in that case are covered in Clay alternatives: cost, complexity and a simpler stack.
Where twl fits#
twl is one connected set of tools for outbound, sold separately so you can start with one. twl signals monitors the activity you choose, such as engagement with competitor LinkedIn posts, job postings, funding rounds or leadership changes, and keeps the source with the person and company before enriching and qualifying them. twl reach runs email and LinkedIn sequences written from that signal, sends only inside the approvals and account limits you set, and isn’t a LinkedIn limit-bypass tool.
To be fair about the trade-offs: twl isn’t a contact database of hundreds of millions of people, doesn’t resell a third-party intent graph such as Bombora, and doesn’t warm inboxes. If you need broad database search, Apollo is the better fit. If you want waterfalls and a grid you control column by column, stay with Clay. The side-by-side with Clay is on Clay vs twl, and twl’s current prices are on its pricing page.
Frequently asked questions#
Is Clay better than Apollo?#
Neither is better overall. Apollo is the quicker route to contact data and email sequences in one product. Clay is more flexible for custom enrichment and signals but needs someone to build and maintain the workflows.
Can Clay replace Apollo?#
For enrichment and research, often yes, since Clay can pull from many providers and send email through the Clay Sequencer. Clay’s pricing page doesn’t list a dialer or deal management, both of which appear on Apollo’s plans, and you’ll build list sourcing and filtering yourself.
Can I use Apollo and Clay together?#
Yes, and many teams do: Apollo as the database and sender, Clay as the enrichment and scoring layer. Check the combined cost of both credit systems, and whether the hand-off between them is worth maintaining.
Which is cheaper, Clay or Apollo?#
It depends on team size and volume. As of 26 October 2026, Apollo starts at $49 per seat a month billed annually and Clay at $167 a month billed annually for unlimited seats. Small teams with modest enrichment usually pay less on Apollo. Larger teams sharing one workflow can pay less per person on Clay.
Does Apollo have buying signals?#
Yes. Apollo has filters for job postings, news, headcount growth and job changes, plus Bombora-powered buying intent at the company level, refreshed weekly. The number of intent topics depends on your plan.
Does Clay or Apollo send LinkedIn messages?#
Not automatically, based on their own pages. Apollo’s LinkedIn steps are manual tasks a person completes. As of 26 October 2026, Clay’s pricing page lists LinkedIn ad audiences, not connection requests or messages.
Do Apollo credits roll over?#
No. Apollo says unused credits, including purchased add-on credits, expire at the end of each billing cycle. Clay’s Data Credits do roll over within limits, but its Actions don’t.
Try one signal before you buy another tool#
If your Clay and Apollo setup mostly exists to turn a signal into a message, try that path end to end in twl. Pick one signal, such as a competitor’s LinkedIn post or a hiring spike, see who shows up in twl signals, check fit, and review the email and LinkedIn steps in twl reach before anything is sent.
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