Apollo.io vs Clay (2026): Data, Pricing and API Compared

Apollo.io and Clay both help you find and enrich B2B contacts, but they are different products. Apollo is a sales platform on its own database, priced per seat. Clay is a workflow layer over many data providers, priced by usage.

Verdict

• Pick Apollo if reps need one workspace with a database, sequences and calling, and you want a low price per email at small scale. Its email credit works out to about $0.02.
• Pick Clay if a GTM engineer will build waterfalls and research workflows across many providers. You get unlimited seats and pay only for results.
• Pick neither if you need volume through an API at a price you can read. Apollo at 1M records is hundreds of seats, and Clay has no public 1M price. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month, flat.

Side by side

Data and coverage

Apollo sells one database: 240M contacts and 30M companies. Clay sells access to many. Its pricing page lists 150+ data partners, and Clay's own blog says 200+ (Clay pricing, September 2026; Clay blog, September 2026).

That changes what coverage means. With Apollo, a record is mostly whatever Apollo holds. With Clay, a waterfall checks providers in turn until one returns an answer. Clay describes it that way itself, so read it as its claim, not a test.

Neither publishes email or phone counts. Clay also publishes no size for the database its Searches run over. You cannot compare coverage on paper, so test it.

Phones are the costly part on both. Apollo charges 8 credits for a phone number and delivers it by webhook or poll, not in the same response (Apollo docs, September 2026). Clay has no phone enrichment on Free. Its credit price per phone is not on the pricing page or the credits doc (Clay docs, September 2026).

Match rate depends on what you feed in. A LinkedIn URL or work email matches far more reliably than a name alone. Apollo warns that a name without a domain or email may return a 200 with no record enriched.

Run the same 500 people through both free plans and compare. Apollo's Free plan gives 75 credits a month. Clay's gives 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions, with no phones.

API and developer experience

Both have APIs on every plan, including Free. The difference is shape. Apollo is a direct lookup call. Clay runs a routine you build first, then polls for results.

Apollo authenticates with an x-api-key header (Apollo docs, September 2026). The enrichment call is POST /api/v1/people/match:

curl --request POST \
  --url "https://api.apollo.io/api/v1/people/match?linkedin_url=https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-blake-4a7c21" \
  --header "x-api-key: $APOLLO_API_KEY" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json"

The call costs 1 to 9 credits: 1 for an email, plus 8 if a mobile comes back. Phones are off by default. You set reveal_phone_number and supply a webhook URL, or set poll_only.

Clay uses a clay-api-key header and runs routines, which are functions you build in Clay or Clay-managed functions. The run is asynchronous. You start it, then read results by run id (Clay developer docs, September 2026):

curl --request POST \
  --url "https://api.clay.com/public/v0/routines/function:t_abc123/run" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --header "clay-api-key: $CLAY_PUBLIC_API_KEY" \
  --data '{"items":[{"id":"row-1","inputs":{"domain":"clay.com"}}]}'

The response holds a routine_run_id. You poll GET /routines/run/{id}/results until it returns 200. A run takes 1 to 100 items. Apollo's bulk call takes 10 people.

Limits differ in kind. Apollo limits are per team and per endpoint, across three windows at once. Free gets 600 general requests a day. Paid plans get 1,000 enrichment requests a minute (Apollo rate limits, September 2026).

Clay's Public API limit is per workspace and has no published number. You get a 429 with a Retry-After header when you pass it. The HTTP API column, which calls other APIs from a table, lets you set your own limit, for example 10 requests per second (Clay docs, September 2026).

Clay also caps API search by plan. Free allows 50 results per request and 100 per 30 days. Paid allows 500 per request (Clay developer docs, September 2026).

On MCP, both have an official server. Apollo's works with OAuth or an API key on any plan, and enrichment through it spends the same credits. Clay MCP runs in Claude, ChatGPT and Codex, and exposes its providers, research agents and your saved functions (Apollo docs, September 2026; Clay MCP guide, September 2026).

Pricing

Apollo charges per seat, and each seat comes with a monthly credit grant. Clay charges a plan fee built from an Action tier plus a Data Credit tier. To compare, convert both to cost per record.

At 10,000 records a month

Take 10,000 work emails from Apollo. That is 10,000 credits at 1 credit each. On monthly billing, Basic gives 2,500 credits per seat at $65, so 4 seats x $65 = $260 a month. Professional needs 3 seats for 12,000 credits: 3 x $99 = $297 (Apollo pricing, September 2026).

On yearly billing, Basic is $49 a seat. So 4 seats x $49 = $196 a month. A phone costs 8 credits, so 10,000 emails plus 10,000 mobiles is 90,000 credits. On Professional that is 90,000 / 4,000 = 22.5, so 23 seats x $99 = $2,277 a month.

For Clay, take the same 10,000 emails at its worked example of 0.5 credit per email find. That is 5,000 Data Credits and 10,000 Actions. On monthly billing, the 15,000 Action tier is $60 and the 6,000 credit tier is $290, so $60 + $290 = $350 a month. On yearly billing it is $54 + $261 = $315 (Clay pricing, September 2026).

The 0.5 credit is an example, and real cost varies by provider. Clay says a fully enriched record typically costs 6 to 20 Data Credits (Clay docs, September 2026). So 10,000 full records need 60,000 to 200,000 credits. The top self-serve tier is 50,000 a month.

An empty result costs nothing on Clay. Seats are unlimited, so ten reps cost the same as one. On Apollo, each rep is a seat.

At 1M records a month

For Apollo, 1,000,000 work emails is 1,000,000 credits. On monthly billing, Professional gives 4,000 credits per seat, so 1,000,000 / 4,000 = 250 seats x $99 = $24,750 a month. On yearly billing, Basic gives 2,500 a month, so 400 seats x $49 = $19,600 a month ($235,200 a year) (Apollo pricing, September 2026).

Two caveats apply. Apollo prints no price for add-on credits, so a cheaper seats-plus-add-ons path cannot be priced. Whether Apollo allows 250 to 400 self-serve seats is also not stated.

For Clay: no public 1M price. One million lookups need 1,000,000 Actions, and Actions cannot be bought as top-ups. The largest self-serve tier is 200,000 Actions and 50,000 Data Credits a month. Above that, Clay sells Enterprise by quote (Clay pricing, September 2026).

The top Growth tier costs $850 + $2,125 = $2,975 a month on monthly billing. At 0.5 credit per email, its 50,000 credits cover 100,000 lookups, not 1M. Do not multiply that out and call it a quote.

Where Apollo.io wins

• A sales workspace on its own data. Sequences, a dialer and lists sit next to the database. A rep can work from day one.
• Low cost per email at small scale. About $0.02 to $0.03 per email credit, before phones.
• A flat, readable price. Seats times a known rate. Clay's price moves with Actions, credits and provider.
• Published rate limits. 1,000 enrichment requests a minute on paid plans, in writing.

Where Clay wins

• Many providers in one flow. A waterfall tries one source after another, so a miss on one does not end the search.
• Unlimited seats. The whole team works in the same workspace for one plan fee.
• Research beyond a database. Claygent, its research agent, is on every plan including Free (Clay pricing, September 2026). It gathers hiring trends, tech stack and funding from the web.
• No charge for a miss. An enrichment with no result uses no credits and no Actions.

If you need volume through an API

We build LeadOcean, so weigh this section accordingly. LeadOcean holds 693M people and 63M companies, and you reach them over REST and MCP. Free is 1,000 records, one-off, with no card. Pro is $499 a month, flat, with unlimited searches and lookups and a limit of 100 requests per second per key (LeadOcean pricing, September 2026).

For bulk work, POST /v1/exports returns up to 50,000 rows per request. The app also has an Exports page with a filter builder and CSV download (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). There is no sequencer, dialer or table builder. If your reps live in Apollo or your ops team lives in Clay, keep them and compare the data source. The Apollo alternative page and the Clay alternative page have line-by-line versions.

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