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

Apollo.io and Coresignal both sell B2B data through an API, but they are different products. Apollo is a sales platform with a contact database, priced per seat. Coresignal is a data source for profiles, companies and job postings, priced in credits.

Verdict

• Pick Apollo if reps need sequences, a dialer and a workspace, or if you want contact emails at about $0.02 each and an official MCP server on any plan.
• Pick Coresignal if you need job postings, company signals or flat-file datasets. It lists 907M+ employee records and 482M+ job postings.
• Pick neither if you need volume through an API at a price you can read. Apollo at 1M emails is hundreds of seats, and Coresignal has no public 1M price. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month, flat.

Side by side

Data and coverage

Coresignal is bigger on raw profiles and adds job postings. Apollo is smaller but built around contact data. The counts are not like for like.

Apollo lists 240M contacts and 30M companies. Coresignal lists 907M+ employee records, 70M+ companies and 482M+ job postings (Coresignal, September 2026).

Neither publishes a count of records with an email or a phone. Coresignal's multi-source employee records carry a professional email with four status levels: verified, matched_email, matched_pattern and guessed_common_pattern. Its Base Employee API pages list no email field (Coresignal data dictionary, September 2026).

Phone is the clearest gap. Apollo sells a phone number at 8 credits. No phone field appears in either Coresignal employee dictionary, so a dial list needs another source.

Coresignal's MCP email lookup excludes employees in the EEA and UK (Coresignal MCP docs, September 2026). If your list is European, test that first.

Coresignal's edge is signals. Job postings cost 1 credit each, and the homepage says company data is delivered daily. Apollo adds intent topics and a Chrome extension, which Coresignal does not.

API and developer experience

Both are REST APIs with a one-call enrichment path. Apollo matches a person and bills 1 to 9 credits. Coresignal collects a record by ID, URL or shorthand name and bills per record.

Apollo sends the key in 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/jane-doe" \
  --header "x-api-key: $APOLLO_API_KEY" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json"

The call costs 1 credit for an email or demographics, plus 8 if a mobile comes back. Phone numbers are off by default and arrive by webhook or polling (Apollo docs, September 2026).

Coresignal sends a key in an apikey header (Coresignal docs, September 2026). The collect call takes a shorthand name from a profile URL and costs 20 credits on the multi-source API (Coresignal docs, September 2026).

curl -X GET \
  "https://api.coresignal.com/cdapi/v2/employee_multi_source/collect/jane-doe" \
  -H "accept: application/json" \
  -H "apikey: $CORESIGNAL_API_KEY"

Search differs. Coresignal search by filter or Elasticsearch DSL is free and returns IDs. You pay when you collect, and a search preview costs 10 to 20 credits (Coresignal docs, September 2026).

Rate limits scale differently. Apollo limits are per team and per endpoint, in three windows at once. Free gets 600 general requests a day (Apollo rate limits, September 2026). Coresignal ties speed to the plan: 10 requests a second on Pro, 50 on Premium, 100 on Scale (Coresignal rate limits, September 2026).

Both have an official MCP server. Apollo's runs at https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp, works on any plan including Free, and spends the same credits as the API. Coresignal's signs in with OAuth 2.1 and has 5 tools. entity_search costs 20 credits a call. An email lookup costs 20 credits when found, per the server's tool text. The MCP docs page still says 10 (Coresignal MCP docs, September 2026).

For bulk work, Coresignal's Bulk Collect is asynchronous and takes up to 10,000 records per request. Apollo's bulk enrichment takes 10 people per request, and its UI selection caps at 10,000 records on Organization.

Pricing

Apollo charges per seat, and each seat carries a monthly credit grant. Coresignal sells monthly plans that hold a credit balance. To compare them, price both as work-email lookups: 1 credit on Apollo, 20 on Coresignal.

At 10,000 records a month

Apollo, 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. Billed yearly, Basic is $49 a seat, so 4 x $49 = $196 a month (Apollo pricing, September 2026). That is $0.026 an email on the monthly price.

Coresignal, monthly billing: 10,000 lookups x 20 credits = 200,000 credits. Contact enrichment starts at Pro, and Growth stops at 150,000 credits. That leaves Premium: $1,500 a month for 1,000,000 credits, or $1,350 a month billed yearly ($16,200). You use a fifth of it, so $0.15 a lookup on the monthly price (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

Premium, Scale and Elite show Get started buttons, but the pricing page data flags them as contact-sales, so expect a sales step (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

The unit differs. An Apollo email credit returns one email. A Coresignal lookup returns an email from a multi-source record that also carries experience and company fields. Phones cost Apollo 8 credits each, and Coresignal has none.

At small scale the order flips. Coresignal Pro is $499 for 35,000 credits, which is 1,750 lookups, or about $0.29 each. Apollo Basic is about $0.026 an email, so Apollo is cheaper at 10,000 lookups and below.

At 1M records a month

Apollo: 1,000,000 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, or $235,200 a year (Apollo pricing, September 2026).

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

Coresignal: no public 1M price. 1,000,000 lookups x 20 credits = 20,000,000 credits, and no public plan reaches that. The top plan, Elite, is $5,000 a month for 10,000,000 credits, which covers 500,000 lookups.

Two Elite months at $0.0005 a credit would come to $10,000. That is derived, not published, and Coresignal does not document buying two Elite plans at once (Coresignal pricing, September 2026). That is about $0.01 a lookup, below Apollo's $0.02 to $0.025 at 1M, but only if Coresignal sells it that way. Ask for a quote. Do not read $10,000 as a price.

Where Apollo.io wins

• A workspace. Sequences, a dialer, lists and a Chrome extension sit in the same product as the data. Coresignal is an API.
• Cheap emails at small scale. About $0.02 to $0.03 per email credit, against $0.15 to $0.29 per Coresignal lookup at 10,000 and below.
• Phone numbers. 8 credits for a mobile, where Coresignal lists no phone field.
• Official MCP on any plan. Connect it to Claude or Cursor at no extra cost, even on Free.
• A usable Free plan. 75 credits a month and API access, against a 7-day trial.

Where Coresignal wins

• Signals. 482M+ job postings, historical headcount and company data, sold as their own datasets.
• Raw size. 907M+ employee records against Apollo's 240M contacts.
• A public price ladder. Seven paid plans from $49 to $5,000 a month, with 100+ requests a second at the top.
• Bulk and datasets. Bulk Collect takes 10,000 records per request, and flat-file datasets start at $1,000 a month.
• No seats. You pay for credits, not for logins nobody opens.

If you need volume through an API

We build LeadOcean, so weigh this section accordingly. LeadOcean holds 693M people and 63M companies, reachable over REST and MCP. Free is 1,000 records, one-off, with no card. Pro is $499 a month, flat, with no credits or per-record price, 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). It has no sequencer or dialer. See the Apollo alternative page or the Coresignal alternatives roundup for a line-by-line version.

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