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

Apollo.io and People Data Labs (PDL) both sell B2B contact data, but they sell it in different ways. Apollo is a sales platform with a data API attached, priced per seat. PDL is a data API, priced per match.

Verdict

• Pick Apollo if reps need a workspace with sequences and calling, or if you want an official MCP server on any plan. Its email credit works out to about $0.02.
• Pick People Data Labs if you are a developer who needs raw profiles, phone coverage or licensed bulk files. You pay per match, with no seats.
• Pick neither if you need volume through an API at a price you can read. Apollo at 1M records is hundreds of seats, and PDL has no public 1M price. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month, flat.

Side by side

Data and coverage

Apollo lists 240M contacts and 30M companies. PDL lists 2.47B person profiles and 76.6M companies. The two counts are not like for like.

PDL's 2.47B is its full person dataset, and only part of it carries contact data. Its email dataset is 592M profiles, and its mobile dataset is 470M. Apollo publishes no count for emails or phones, so you cannot compare coverage on paper.

Phone coverage is where they differ most. PDL says 764M profiles have any phone number and 470M have a mobile. Apollo charges 8 credits for a phone number and delivers it by webhook or poll, not in the same response (Apollo docs, September 2026).

Test on your own list before you buy. Run the same 500 people through each free plan and compare the match rate. PDL's Free plan obscures contact data, so you will need to pay to see its emails and phones.

Match rate depends on what you feed in. A LinkedIn URL or a 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 (Apollo docs, September 2026).

Company data is a separate question. Apollo lists 30M companies and charges 1 credit per organization enrichment. PDL lists 76.6M company records, and its company plan starts at $100 a month for 1,000 records (PDL pricing, September 2026).

API and developer experience

Both are REST APIs with one-person enrichment calls. Both charge only when data comes back, with a few caveats below. The real differences are in how you ask for phones, how fast you can search, and what an agent can reach.

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 or demographics, plus 8 if a mobile comes back. Phone numbers are off by default. To get them, you set reveal_phone_number and supply a webhook URL, or set poll_only. Bulk enrichment takes up to 10 people per request (Apollo docs, September 2026).

PDL sends a key in the X-Api-Key header to GET /v5/person/enrich. A match returns 200 and is billed. A miss returns 404 and is not (PDL docs, September 2026).

curl -G "https://api.peopledatalabs.com/v5/person/enrich" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: $PDL_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "profile=https://linkedin.com/in/seanthorne"

Rate limits shape how each one scales. Apollo limits are per team and per endpoint, across three windows at once. Free gets 600 general requests a day, and paid plans get 1,000 enrichment requests a minute (Apollo rate limits, September 2026).

PDL limits are per key, in a fixed one-minute window. Enrichment allows 1,000 a minute on paid plans, but Person Search allows only 10 a minute by default (PDL usage limits, September 2026). A search-heavy job will queue on PDL unless you ask for more.

On MCP, only Apollo has an official server. It works with OAuth or an API key, on any plan, and enrichment through it spends the same credits. PDL lists no MCP server in its docs, and only community servers exist (Apollo docs, September 2026; PDL llms.txt, September 2026).

Pricing

Apollo charges per seat, and each seat comes with a fixed monthly credit grant. PDL charges per credit, and one credit is one matched profile. To compare them, 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, or $2,352 a year. Phones cost 8 credits each, so a phone pull costs eight times as much.

For PDL, 10,000 profiles is 10,000 credits. PDL says Pro profiles cost about $0.20 to $0.28 each, depending on volume and plan. So 10,000 x $0.20 = $2,000 and 10,000 x $0.28 = $2,800 (PDL blog, February 2026). PDL does not publish the exact rate near 10,000 credits a month, because its credit selector is behind login. Treat $2,000 to $2,800 as PDL's stated range, not a quote.

The unit matters here. A PDL credit returns a full profile, while an Apollo email credit returns one email. Apollo's 8-credit phone works out to $0.16 to $0.21 at the Basic rates above.

PDL also points buyers above about 100,000 profiles to Enterprise. Its docs and blog disagree on whether that is per month or per year (PDL blog, September 2026).

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 PDL: no public 1M price. Self-serve Pro stops near 100,000 profiles, and above that PDL quotes Enterprise only. Do not multiply the Pro rate out to 1M and call it a quote.

Where Apollo.io wins

• A workspace. Sequences, calling and lists sit in the same product as the data. PDL is an API, not a workspace.
• Official MCP on any plan. Connect it to Claude or Cursor with no extra cost, even on Free.
• Low cost per email at small scale. About $0.02 to $0.03 per email credit, before phones.
• Usable Free plan. It has 75 credits a month and API access, while PDL's Free plan obscures contact data.

Where People Data Labs wins

• Bigger dataset and phone counts. 2.47B profiles, 592M with an email, and 764M with any phone, by PDL's own stats.
• Bulk files. An annual Data License delivers person data to S3, GCP or Azure (PDL docs, September 2026).
• No seats. You pay per match, and a miss is free. Nobody buys logins they never use.
• Bigger batches. Bulk enrichment takes 100 people per request against Apollo's 10.

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 or dialer. If your reps live in Apollo, keep it for that and compare the data source. See the Apollo alternative page for a line-by-line version.

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