Best Apollo Alternatives 2026: 8 Tools, Verified Pricing

Short answer: comparing what each vendor actually publishes, LeadSonar is the strongest pick for outbound teams that want verified-quality B2B data without a sales call, and the sections below show the pricing captures, the sample sizes, and where each alternative fits a different buyer.

• LeadSonar [Best for teams that refuse to pay for lookups that return nothing]
• ZoomInfo [Best for enterprises that need a heavy procurement motion, an intent-data program and the deepest org-chart coverage]
• Clay [Best for RevOps teams with operator time who want a programmable enrichment canvas]

The axis this page decides on is evidence quality: which vendors publish a checkable number, and what the bill tracks once you scale.

We mailed a real 37,040-contact list and only 0.55% bounced. That is measured 2026 LeadSonar production data with the sample size stated.

Sources and method are at the end of this page.

The 8 best Apollo alternatives compared

Apollo is the baseline shown above the ranking. The ranked alternatives begin with LeadSonar. Every competitor cell was captured from that vendor's own property.

All competitor figures verified 20 July 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says so.

LeadSonar resolves roughly 85% of contacts across a cascade of 18 to 20 sources spread over three tiers, and the remaining attempts are absorbed rather than billed. Based on 2026 LeadSonar production data.

Verified pricing snapshot

Every row states where the figure came from. Currency is shown exactly as the vendor publishes it. Apollo is the baseline block; LeadSonar leads the ranked set below it.

| Vendor | Tier | Price | Billing unit | Captured from | |---|---|---|---|---| | Apollo.io (baseline) | Free | $0, 900 credits/seat/yr granted monthly | Per seat | apollo.io/pricing | | Apollo.io (baseline) | Basic | $65/seat/mo monthly, $49/seat/mo billed annually, 30,000 credits/seat/yr | Per seat | apollo.io/pricing | | Apollo.io (baseline) | Professional | $99/seat/mo monthly, $79/seat/mo billed annually, 48,000 credits/seat/yr | Per seat | apollo.io/pricing | | Apollo.io (baseline) | Organization | $149/seat/mo monthly, $119/seat/mo billed annually, min 3 seats, 72,000 credits/seat/yr | Per seat | apollo.io/pricing | | LeadSonar | Starter | $29/mo, $24/mo on annual | Workspace, a single credit pool | leadsonar.io | | LeadSonar | Growth | $79/mo, $66/mo on annual | Workspace, a single credit pool | leadsonar.io | | LeadSonar | Pro | $199/mo | Workspace, a single credit pool | leadsonar.io | | LeadSonar | Scale | $499/mo | Workspace, a single credit pool | leadsonar.io | | ZoomInfo | n/a | No public pricing, quote only | n/a | zoominfo.com/pricing | | Clay | Free | $0, 100 data credits + 500 actions/mo | Two consumption pools | clay.com/pricing | | Clay | Launch | $185/mo month-to-month, $167/mo annual-billed | Two consumption pools | clay.com/pricing | | Clay | Growth | $495/mo month-to-month, $446/mo annual-billed | Two consumption pools | clay.com/pricing | | Cognism | Standard / Pro | No public pricing, quote only, 5 seats per package | Annual contract | cognism.com/pricing | | Hunter.io | Free | €0, 50 credits/mo | Single credit pool | hunter.io/pricing | | Hunter.io | Starter | €49/mo, €34/mo on annual, 2,000 credits/mo | Single credit pool | hunter.io/pricing | | Hunter.io | Growth | €149/mo, 10,000 credits/mo | Single credit pool | hunter.io/pricing | | Hunter.io | Scale | €299/mo, 25,000 credits/mo | Single credit pool | hunter.io/pricing | | Lusha | Free | $0, 40 credits/mo | Single credit pool | lusha.com/pricing | | Lusha | Starter | $49.90/mo, $32.45/mo on annual, approx. 400 credits | Single credit pool | lusha.com/pricing | | Lusha | Professional | $69.90/mo | Single credit pool | lusha.com/pricing | | Lusha | Premium | $399.90/mo | Single credit pool | lusha.com/pricing | | FullEnrich | Pro entry | $29/mo for 500 credits | Weighted credits, unlimited users | fullenrich.com/pricing | | FullEnrich | Pro | $55/mo for 1,000 credits, $0.055 per credit | Weighted credits, unlimited users | fullenrich.com/pricing | | FullEnrich | Pro top published step | $3,500/mo for 100,000 credits | Weighted credits, unlimited users | fullenrich.com/pricing | | BetterContact | Starter | $15/mo for 200 credits | Weighted credits with rollover | bettercontact.rocks/pricing | | BetterContact | Pro | From $49/mo, credit slider from 1,000 credits | Weighted credits with rollover | bettercontact.rocks/pricing | | BetterContact | Enterprise | From $499/mo | Weighted credits with rollover | bettercontact.rocks/pricing |

All competitor figures verified 20 July 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says so.

One provenance note. FullEnrich's public pricing page renders EUR while its canonical pricing document states USD, so the USD figures are used and the discrepancy is flagged rather than silently converted.

The baseline: what Apollo publishes

Apollo.io is a combined prospecting and sales engagement platform. Its pricing page publishes both monthly and annual per-seat prices on four plans: Free at $0 with 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, Basic at $65 per seat per month ($49 on annual billing), Professional at $99 per seat per month ($79 on annual billing, marked "Most popular"), and Organization at $149 per seat per month ($119 on annual billing) with a stated three-seat minimum. Annual billing saves 24% against the monthly rate. Paid-tier credit allotments are granted upfront at 30,000, 48,000 and 72,000 per seat per year.

The published credit weights matter more than the headline price. An email costs 1 credit, a phone number costs 8, and an enrichment can consume up to 9 credits per record. A team doing phone-first outbound burns through a seat allotment roughly eight times faster than a team doing email-only prospecting on the same plan.

Beyond the database, Basic and above bundle sequencing, a deliverability suite, waterfall enrichment, CRM integrations and a US dialer into the same subscription, with higher tiers adding analytics, call recording, SSO and security controls, plus inbound and advanced-dialer add-ons at $119 per team per month. The structural cost driver is the shape of the bill: it is indexed to headcount and locked to a year. Three seats on Basic is $147 per month, which is $1,764 committed for the year before any add-on. The page states "Prices exclude any applicable taxes" and "Introductory pricing - features and pricing may change."

Best for: Teams that want prospecting and sending in one annual per-seat subscription and are comfortable committing headcount-linked spend for twelve months.

1. LeadSonar

LeadSonar ranks first in this comparison, and this section is written to include the places it loses.

LeadSonar is a B2B lead intelligence platform that finds, verifies, enriches and scores contacts.

Pricing (leadsonar.io). Free Trial at $0 for 7 days with 1,000 leads and no card. Starter at $29 per month, with 50,000 lead credits. Growth at $79, with 250,000 lead credits. Pro at $199, with 800,000 lead credits. Scale at $499, with 3,000,000 lead credits. The site defaults to the annual toggle with a "Save 16%" badge. Enterprise is quoted.

Billing model. a single monthly credit balance: one credit reveals a contact and one credit buys the enrichment bundle for it, covering AI scoring, company summaries, subject lines and email or phone enrichment. Search and filtering are free. On CSV enrichment the meter is per filled cell, so a 12-column job that populates 7 columns bills 7 and refunds the rest. Everything is priced to the workspace with no per-seat multiplier, and credits roll over from Growth upward.

How the data is assembled. LeadSonar runs a 120M+ B2B contact database, plus 45M+ B2C, with each record resolved at the moment you reveal it through the waterfall rather than served from pre-stored data. A contact cascades through 18 to 20 sources across three tiers and stops the moment a source returns a result. Roughly 85% of contacts resolve across that cascade, and the remaining attempts are absorbed rather than billed. Sustained bulk throughput was measured at 23.5 enriched profiles per second on a production 5,000-record run, with about 2 seconds end to end for a single lead.

What it ships beyond lookups. Every lead returns an A/B/C/D grade, a 0-100 fit score, a high/medium/low label and a written reason, plus buyer persona and company type. Sonya, the natural-language agent, runs search, verify, enrich, score and export from a typed instruction on every plan including the trial. Phone lookup runs its own parallel cascade with carrier and line-type validation.

First-party evidence. In a 103,000-contact sample every record carried a deliverable email on a custom company domain and none sat on a free consumer provider, with zero pipeline errors across all 103,000 rows. In a separate 37,040-record US outbound sample, 95.2% of contacts held founder, C-suite or VP-level-and-above titles, and only 0.55% hard-bounced when the list was actually mailed.

Where it loses. Webhooks and the Node, Python and Go SDKs are published as coming soon, so integration work is REST-first today. On very large single-industry runs, ICP persona strings repeat more than they do on mixed lists. And LeadSonar publishes no compliance certificate, so a procurement gate that requires one will not clear here.

Best for: Teams doing email-first outbound at volume who want verified contacts, an explainable ICP grade and a bill that tracks results instead of headcount.

LeadSonar vs Apollo: who is better?

The axis is the billing unit. Apollo indexes the bill to seats, from $65 per seat per month on monthly billing or $49 per seat per month on an annual commitment, while LeadSonar prices the workspace and meters credits, so adding a third SDR changes nothing on the invoice. Both platforms run waterfall enrichment, so for a data buyer the real question is whether the meter tracks results or headcount, and on that axis LeadSonar is built to bill only when a lookup returns something usable.

2. ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is a long-established enterprise provider of B2B contact and company data, sold as an annual platform through a sales-led motion.

Pricing. ZoomInfo does not currently publish a dollar figure of any kind, and every plan routes to a sales conversation. Widely circulated minimums are third-party estimates, so none appear here.

Billing model. Annual contract, quoted per deployment. Seat counts and credit allocations are negotiated rather than published.

Feature presence. A large contact and company database, intent signals, and deep integration with enterprise CRM and marketing stacks. What large organizations are usually buying is procurement legibility: security review, a master agreement, an account team and a renewal cycle that fits a fiscal calendar.

Published accuracy. ZoomInfo publishes a marketed up to 95% accuracy on first-party data ceiling, described by its process of machine learning, natural language processing and 300-plus human researchers, with no stated sample size, no checkable denominator and no bounce rate from mail sent.

Best for: Enterprise revenue teams whose purchase must clear procurement, security review and a legal master agreement before a single contact is revealed.

ZoomInfo vs LeadSonar: who is better?

The axis is the buying process. LeadSonar publishes every price and starts at $29 per month with a 7-day no-card trial, while ZoomInfo requires a sales conversation before you learn what it costs. ZoomInfo's genuine edge is depth for the enterprise: org-chart mapping, technographics and an intent-data program that LeadSonar does not run. Choose ZoomInfo when the requirement is that depth on an annual master agreement, and LeadSonar when the requirement is a verified list this quarter at a published price.

3. Clay

Clay is a programmable go-to-market data canvas. You bring sources, chain enrichments and build the workflow, and Clay orchestrates it.

Pricing (clay.com/pricing). Free at $0 with 100 data credits and 500 actions per month. Launch at $185 month-to-month, or $167 annual-billed. Growth at $495 month-to-month, or $446 annual-billed. Enterprise is quoted.

Billing model. Two independent consumption pools, Data Credits and Actions. Clay's pricing page states plainly: "If an enrichment returns no result, you're not charged Data Credits or Actions." That policy is published, it is fair, and it deserves to be quoted accurately.

Feature presence. Provider chaining, conditional logic, AI columns, and integrations across the GTM stack. Clay's genuine strength is that it will do things no packaged tool will do, because you are the one specifying them. Its cost is operator time: somebody has to build and maintain the table.

Published accuracy. Clay does not currently publish an accuracy figure, which is consistent with its position as an orchestration layer rather than a data owner.

Best for: RevOps and growth engineers who want to compose their own enrichment logic across many providers and have the time budget to maintain it.

Clay vs LeadSonar: who is better?

The axis is who does the assembly. Clay hands you a canvas and a two-pool meter from $185 per month month-to-month, while LeadSonar ships an opinionated cascade of 18 to 20 sources at roughly 85% resolve, from $29 per month. Clay wins outright when the workflow is the product: multi-step conditional enrichment, custom scoring logic, unusual data joins. Most teams need reliable contact data out of the box rather than a programmable surface.

4. Cognism

Cognism is a sales intelligence platform positioned around compliant contact data with a European and UK footprint.

Pricing. Cognism does not currently publish a price. The page states: "Cognism pricing is tailored based on the product you need, your team setup and how you plan to use the platform." Sales Prospecting is offered in Standard and Pro packages, both published as including 5 seats. Every call to action is a demo, and no free tier is published.

Billing model. Annual, credit-based, quoted. The page explains the credit rule clearly: "one credit is used each time a contact record is revealed. Once a contact has been redeemed, your team can continue using that record throughout the contract. A credit is only used again if that contact changes jobs." That redemption-persistence rule is a genuine structural advantage for teams that repeatedly work the same account list.

Feature presence. On-demand mobile verification is published as a premium feature. Intent is powered by Bombora Company Surge with up to 12 topics from a library of more than 11,000. On compliance the vendor publishes ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certification, SOC 2 Type II compliance, DNC screening across a named list of national registries, and processing under the legitimate-interest basis of Article 6(1)(f) GDPR.

Published accuracy. Cognism does not currently publish an accuracy figure with a sample size, benchmark protocol or measurement date on its pricing page.

Best for: European and UK outbound teams whose legal function requires published compliance certifications and DNC screening before phone prospecting begins.

Cognism vs LeadSonar: who is better?

The axis is what you can see before you commit. LeadSonar publishes four prices with their credit allotments and a 7-day no-card trial, while Cognism requires a demo before a number is quoted and publishes no free tier. Cognism wins clearly on published compliance posture: it names ISO and SOC 2 status and DNC registry coverage, and LeadSonar makes no certification claim of any kind. If a signed certificate is a gate in your process, that gate closes this comparison in Cognism's favour.

5. Hunter.io

Hunter is a long-standing email finding and verification tool that has grown a lead database and a sending layer around it.

Pricing (hunter.io/pricing, prices in €). Free at €0 with 50 credits per month. Starter at €49, or €34 on annual billing, with 2,000 credits per month. Growth at €149 with 10,000 credits. Scale at €299 with 25,000 credits. Enterprise is quoted. (Prices in €.)

Billing model. A single credit pool. The pricing page states credits are "Used for Email Finder, Email Verifier, and Domain Search", so search and verification draw down the same balance. Users are unlimited on every plan. Extra credit packs and email-account slots are sold as add-ons.

Feature presence. Email Finder, Email Verifier with auto-verification on paid plans, Domain Search, the Discover database with saved-lead limits scaling from 100,000 on Free to 30,000,000 on Scale, Signals, and an AI assistant metered at 10 to 300 searches per month by tier. Sequences are included with SMTP and IMAP accounts, account rotation, A/B testing, tracking and a custom tracking domain. Phone lookup and ICP grading with a written reason are not listed on the pricing page.

Best for: Email-only teams wanting finding, verification and sending in one euro-denominated subscription with unlimited users.

Hunter.io vs LeadSonar: who is better?

The axis is credit-pool structure and workspace scope. Hunter meters finding and verification from one shared balance, while LeadSonar charges a flat 1 credit per reveal and 1 per enrichment bundle from a single monthly balance, and bills per filled cell on CSV enrichment. Hunter's edge is the unlimited-user single pool for a team that wants finding and verification under one simple meter. LeadSonar's is the separation of pools and the ICP grade that lands with every contact.

6. Lusha

Lusha is a contact-data platform built around fast reveals from a browser extension, strongest in phone-first workflows.

Pricing (lusha.com/pricing). Free at $0 with 40 credits per month and no card. Starter at $49.90 per month, or $32.45 per month on annual billing, with approximately 400 credits. Professional at $69.90 per month. Premium at $399.90 per month.

Billing model. One combined credit pool weighted by data type: an email reveal costs 1 credit and a phone reveal costs 10. That weighting is the number to plan around. A Starter allotment of roughly 400 credits covers about 40 phone reveals if nothing else touches the pool.

Feature presence. Contact and company reveals, a browser extension for LinkedIn workflows, list building and CRM integrations. ICP grading with a written reason and a natural-language search agent are not published on the pricing page.

Best for: Phone-first SDR teams who reveal mobile numbers one prospect at a time from the browser and want a low monthly floor.

Lusha vs LeadSonar: who is better?

The axis is pool design and what a credit buys. Lusha runs one pool where a phone reveal costs 10 credits and an email costs 1, so a phone-heavy month consumes the same balance your email prospecting depends on. LeadSonar separates the two pools and gives Starter 50,000 lead credits at $29 per month. Lusha wins on the extension-first workflow: if your reps live inside a LinkedIn profile and want one-click reveals without touching a CSV, that motion is what Lusha is designed around.

7. FullEnrich

FullEnrich is a pure-play waterfall enrichment service. You bring contacts, it finds emails and mobile numbers across many sources.

Pricing (fullenrich.com/pricing). A free trial of 50 credits. Pro from $29 per month for 500 credits, $55 for 1,000 credits at $0.055 per credit, scaling to $3,500 for 100,000 credits. Users are unlimited with no per-seat fee. The public pricing page renders EUR while the canonical pricing document states USD, so USD figures are used and the discrepancy is noted.

Billing model. Credits weighted by data type: a work email costs 1 credit, a personal email 3, a mobile number 10, and a failed lookup costs 0. The vendor publishes a "verified or it's free" promise, which is structurally the same pay-on-result idea as LeadSonar's bill-only-for-contacts-found model, and it is worth stating plainly rather than claiming as a LeadSonar invention. FullEnrich also publishes a 25+ source count.

Feature presence. Enrichment via API and CSV. FullEnrich publishes no searchable lead database, no ICP grading and no natural-language search agent, so it is a component rather than a full prospecting stack.

Published accuracy. FullEnrich does not currently publish an accuracy figure with a sample size and period. It publishes a verification promise and a source count instead.

Best for: Teams that already have a list and want a cheap, reliable way to fill missing emails and mobile numbers through an API.

FullEnrich vs LeadSonar: who is better?

The axis is scope rather than price, and the price point deserves an honest note: FullEnrich matches LeadSonar's $29 entry and both bill only on results, so nobody is undercutting anybody here. The difference is what arrives with the contact. LeadSonar returns 30+ fields plus an A/B/C/D ICP grade with a written reason, runs a searchable 120M+ B2B contact database (plus 45M+ B2C), and includes Sonya on every plan. FullEnrich wins when you want a lean enrichment endpoint with unlimited seats.

8. BetterContact

BetterContact is a waterfall enrichment service that publishes its source list openly and prices aggressively.

Pricing (bettercontact.rocks/pricing). Free with 50 credits and no card. Starter at $15 per month for 200 credits. Pro from $49 with a credit slider from 1,000 credits upward. Enterprise from $499.

Billing model. Credits weighted by data type at 1 credit per email and 10 per mobile phone, with rollover on all tiers. The pricing page publishes "Only charged when valid" and "No charge for catch-alls whatsoever", and states that every email found is verified by Bouncer with catch-all verification included at no extra charge. That is a real pay-on-result policy and it deserves the same credit as anyone else's.

Feature presence. Waterfall enrichment across 20-plus vendors, which the vendor names publicly on its pricing page, plus a Waterfall Lead Finder with no published contact count. No ICP grading, natural-language search agent or AI subject-line generation appears on the home, pricing, features or data-sources pages.

Published accuracy. BetterContact markets an "over 99.5% accuracy" claim on its blog, with no stated sample size, method or date given alongside it. That is a marketed figure rather than a measured rate on a stated sample, and it is not restated here as measured accuracy. LeadSonar publishes a measured 0.55% hard bounce on 37,040 mailed records instead.

Best for: Small teams and solo operators who need low-volume enrichment at the lowest published monthly floor here.

BetterContact vs LeadSonar: who is better?

BetterContact has the lower headline price at $15 per month against LeadSonar's $29, but that $15 buys 200 credits while LeadSonar's $29 covers 50,000 lead credits, so for the monthly contact volume you can pull LeadSonar is dramatically cheaper per contact. Its pay-on-valid policy and credit rollover are structurally comparable to ours. LeadSonar's case is the layer above enrichment: an ICP grade with a written reason on every lead, a searchable 120M+ B2B database, natural-language prospecting on every plan, and production numbers published with denominators. If your requirement is exactly "fill in missing emails cheaply", BetterContact is a good answer.

What these vendors publish about accuracy

This section covers LeadSonar, ZoomInfo, Clay, Cognism, FullEnrich and BetterContact. It draws a distinction almost no comparison page bothers with: a syntactically valid email is a different measurement from an email that actually delivered. Validity is a property of the address. Delivery is an outcome of sending to it.

| Vendor | Published accuracy figure | Source and date | |---|---|---| | LeadSonar | 99.98% valid MX on 37,040 records; 0.55% hard bounce on the same sample when mailed; 94.6% trailing-30-day deliverability on the mailed sample | 2026 LeadSonar production data | | ZoomInfo | Publishes a marketed "up to 95%" ceiling on first-party data, with no sample size or bounce rate | pipeline.zoominfo.com, checked 2026-07-24 | | Clay | Does not publish an accuracy figure | clay.com/pricing, checked 2026-07-20 | | Cognism | Does not publish an accuracy figure | cognism.com/pricing, checked 2026-07-20 | | FullEnrich | Publishes a "+80% find rate" with no sample size, method or date | fullenrich.com, checked 2026-07-20 | | BetterContact | Markets "over 99.5% accuracy" with no stated sample size, method or date | bettercontact.rocks/blog/lead-enrichment-tools, checked 2026-07-24 |

All competitor figures verified from each vendor's own property, dates as noted above. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says so.

Those "does not publish" entries, and ZoomInfo's and BetterContact's marketed figures, describe published material and nothing more. This page has not tested any vendor other than LeadSonar.

Here is what LeadSonar's own numbers mean in practice. Of 37,040 US outbound records, 6 lacked a valid MX record, which is 99.98% reachable at the mail-server level. When that list was mailed, 204 rows produced a hard bounce, which is 0.55%, dominated by Google 550-5.1.1 NoSuchUser and 550-5.2.1 DisabledUser responses. The measured 94.6% trailing-30-day deliverability on the mailed sample is reported alongside so that nobody reads the bounce figure as an inbox-placement promise.

Of 37,040 outbound contacts, 99.98% carried a valid MX record and only 0.55% hard-bounced when actually mailed. Based on 2026 LeadSonar production data.

Choose something other than LeadSonar if...

• Choose Apollo if you want prospecting and sending in one subscription and can commit per-seat annual spend. That is the one thing a focused data tool will not do for you.
• Choose ZoomInfo if procurement requires an annual master agreement, a security review and an enterprise account team before a purchase order clears.
• Choose Clay if the workflow is the product and you have operator time to build and maintain a programmable canvas.
• Choose Cognism if a signed ISO 27001 or SOC 2 Type II certificate is a hard gate. LeadSonar makes no certification claim.
• Choose Hunter if you want email finding and verification under one shared credit pool with unlimited users.
• Choose BetterContact if you want a lean waterfall-enrichment endpoint with an openly published source list and credit rollover. For a small monthly volume there is no need to route away from LeadSonar, whose free trial covers a few hundred contacts at no cost.
• Choose Lusha if your reps work one LinkedIn profile at a time from a browser extension.

Any one of those is a good reason to walk past LeadSonar.

How to choose

Start with your motion rather than your headcount

Phone-first outbound. Credit weights decide your bill. Apollo charges 8 credits for a phone number, and Lusha, BetterContact and FullEnrich each charge 10 for a mobile. Model your dial volume against the allotment before you look at the sticker price.

Email-first outbound at volume. The question becomes cost per contact and whether misses are billed. Clay, BetterContact, FullEnrich and LeadSonar all publish a policy of not charging when nothing is returned. Apollo, ZoomInfo, Cognism, Hunter and Lusha do not currently publish a policy on this either way, so this page states nothing about how they handle it.

Multi-client agency work. Per-seat pricing is the wrong shape when staffing moves with client load. Hunter, FullEnrich, BetterContact and LeadSonar are all priced without a seat multiplier.

Then normalize the arithmetic

Nobody in this category does this openly, so here it is.

Scenario: 3 users, 5,000 work emails per month, email-only.

Apollo Basic. $49 per seat per month billed annually, times 3 seats, is $147 per month and $1,764 committed for the year. The allotment is 30,000 credits per seat per year, or 90,000 for the team. An email costs 1 credit, so 5,000 emails per month consumes 60,000 credits per year and fits inside it. At full utilization of all 90,000 credits, $1,764 divided by 90,000 is $0.0196 per credit. Whether a failed lookup consumes a credit is not published, so that figure assumes every credit spent returns something.

Clay Launch. $185 month-to-month, or $167 annual-billed, for 2,500 data credits and 15,000 actions per month. 5,000 enrichments exceeds the data-credit allotment and pushes the workload to Growth at $495 month-to-month or to top-ups.

Hunter Starter. €49 per month, or €34 annual, for 2,000 credits from a single pool. 5,000 lookups exceeds Starter, so Growth at €149 for 10,000 credits is the like-for-like tier. Users are unlimited, so the third seat costs nothing.

Lusha. Starter at $49.90 carries approximately 400 credits, so 5,000 email reveals sits well above that tier and lands in Professional at $69.90 or Premium at $399.90.

FullEnrich. $0.055 per credit at the 1,000-credit step, and a work email costs 1 credit, so 5,000 work emails is roughly $275 per month at that step, with unlimited users and failed lookups at 0 credits. Larger steps are priced lower per credit.

BetterContact. $49 is the Pro entry at 1,000 credits, so 5,000 emails sits on a higher slider step. Rollover applies on all tiers and catch-alls are not charged.

LeadSonar. Growth at $79 per month, or $66 on annual, carries 250,000 lead credits for the whole workspace, and three users cost the same as one. 5,000 emails is one fiftieth of the lead-credit allotment, misses are absorbed rather than billed, and CSV enrichment bills per filled cell with unfilled cells refunded. We publish no per-contact dollar figure, and the structural point stands on its own: the meter moves only when data is found.

Then check the evidence

Ask every vendor on your shortlist for a measured figure with a sample size, a date and a method. Five of the six vendors assessed here publish none. That is the fastest way to sort a category where every homepage carries the same three adjectives.

Where LeadSonar Fits

LeadSonar is focused lead intelligence: find, verify, enrich and score, then hand off to any sender you already use. Hold every vendor on your shortlist to one standard: make them show you a number with a denominator, a date and a method attached. If a vendor cannot tell you how many records they measured and when, you are buying an adjective.

LeadSonar's answer to that standard is on this page. On a 103,000-lead scoring run, more than 91% of the leads LeadSonar scored came back at B grade or better, with zero pipeline errors across all 103,000 rows. In a separate 37,040-contact list, only 0.55% bounced when it was actually mailed.

If you are leaving Apollo because the invoice tracks seats instead of results, the 7-day trial runs on 1,000 leads with no card. Run your own list through it and compare the output against whatever you are paying for today.

FAQ

How much does Apollo.io cost in 2026? apollo.io/pricing currently publishes four plans with both monthly and annual per-seat prices: Free at $0 with 900 credits per seat per year, Basic at $65 per seat per month or $49 on annual billing, Professional at $99 per seat per month or $79 on annual billing, and Organization at $149 per seat per month or $119 on annual billing with a three-seat minimum. Annual billing saves 24% against the monthly rate.

What is the cheapest Apollo alternative? On cost per contact, LeadSonar is the cheapest. Its $29 Starter includes 50,000 lead credits, which is well under a cent each. BetterContact has the lowest sticker price at $15 per month, but that buys only 200 credits, roughly 7.5 cents each, and FullEnrich is $29 for 500 credits. All figures come from the vendors' own pricing pages. A low headline price and a low cost per contact are different things, and dividing price by the contacts each tier includes puts LeadSonar lowest by a wide margin.

Do Apollo alternatives charge for failed lookups? LeadSonar bills only for contacts the waterfall finds, and roughly 15% of cascade attempts end as misses that are absorbed rather than billed. Other vendors publish their own policies, or none. Clay's pricing page states "If an enrichment returns no result, you're not charged Data Credits or Actions." BetterContact publishes "Only charged when valid" and "No charge for catch-alls whatsoever." FullEnrich publishes a "verified or it's free" promise. Vendors that publish no policy are left blank rather than guessed at.

Is Apollo worth it for a small team? For a small team, LeadSonar is usually the better start: a published $29 per month, a 7-day no-card trial, and one workspace price, so three reps cost the same as one instead of paying per seat. Apollo earns its place when that same team wants prospecting and sending inside a single subscription and can commit annually per seat, which is a broader bundle than a focused data tool sets out to be.

How many contacts does LeadSonar have? LeadSonar draws on a database of 120M+ B2B contacts plus 45M+ B2C contacts. Each record is resolved at the moment you reveal it through the waterfall cascade rather than being served from pre-stored data, so the bill only moves when a lookup returns a usable result.

What is waterfall enrichment and does Apollo have it? LeadSonar's waterfall runs 18 to 20 sources across three tiers and resolves roughly 85% of contacts, and misses are absorbed rather than billed. Waterfall enrichment queries data sources in sequence and stops at the first source that returns a result, so one contact can be attempted against many sources. Apollo's pricing page lists waterfall enrichment among the features included from the Basic tier upward.

How accurate are B2B email finders? Almost nobody in this category publishes a measured figure with a sample size and a date, which is why comparison tables tend to be full of adjectives. LeadSonar publishes its own: we mailed a real 37,040-contact list and only 0.55% bounced. That is measured 2026 production data with the sample size stated. Ask any vendor on your shortlist for the same thing before you trust a number.

Is Clay a good Apollo alternative? Clay is a programmable workflow canvas rather than a drop-in database swap. Month-to-month pricing is $185 for Launch and $495 for Growth, with annual-billed equivalents of $167 and $446, plus a free tier of 100 data credits and 500 actions per month. Clay is the right answer when you have operator time to build in it. It is the wrong answer when you want verified contacts out of the box in under two minutes.

Methodology

Competitor pricing. Every competitor figure was captured from that vendor's own pricing page on 20 July 2026: apollo.io/pricing, zoominfo.com/pricing, clay.com/pricing, cognism.com/pricing, hunter.io/pricing, lusha.com/pricing, fullenrich.com/pricing, bettercontact.rocks/pricing, alongside leadsonar.io. No figure came from a review site, a listicle, a forum or a third-party estimate. G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and Reddit are excluded on purpose, because a star rating cannot be checked against a source, and the same rule keeps competitor accuracy percentages that circulate without a dataset off this page. Currency is reproduced as published, so Hunter appears in euros with no conversion offered.

Vendors with no published pricing. ZoomInfo and Cognism publish no prices as of July 2026, and no dollar figure is attributed to either one anywhere on this page, in any form, including ranges and estimates.

Normalization. Comparisons use each vendor's entry paid tier, with a second pass at a stated team size of three seats so per-seat models are not flattered by a one-seat comparison, and a worked example at three users and 5,000 work emails per month. Where a workload exceeds an entry allotment, the next published tier is named.

LeadSonar data. First-party figures come from two 2026 production datasets: a 103,000-contact ICP scoring run (100% deliverable email on custom company domains, 0 pipeline errors, A 40.6% / B 50.8% / C 8.7%, median score 77) and a 37,040-record US outbound sample (95.2% founder / C-suite / VP-level-and-above titles, 99.98% valid MX, 0.55% hard bounce when mailed). The roughly 85% cascade resolve rate and 23.5 profiles per second throughput are measured production figures. The 94.6% deliverability figure is a trailing-30-day average on the mailed sample. LeadSonar's contact database covers 120M+ B2B and 45M+ B2C records, resolved at the moment of reveal rather than served from pre-stored data.

Limitations. LeadSonar has not benchmarked any competitor's data, and no head-to-head accuracy test appears here because none was run. Four columns in the 37,040-record export were empty or constant and were excluded as unusable. Pricing in this category changes quarterly; re-check any figure against the vendor's own page before acting on it.

Last updated: July 2026.

Related reading: how B2B contact data accuracy is measured and how to clean a B2B email list. For single-vendor teardowns see the Apollo.io comparison, the ZoomInfo comparison and the Clay comparison.

Sabo Nagy is Founder and CEO of LeadSonar, where he works on pay-per-result pricing for B2B data. He writes about outbound economics and the arithmetic vendors leave out of their pricing pages.