Apollo vs Clay
Apollo unless Apollo cannot find your people. Apollo's $0.0196 credit buys a found email outright, while a contact found through Clay costs an action for Clay's work plus the data credits of whichever provider answered, $0.0452 a credit on annual Launch, unless you bring your own provider keys. Neither charges for a miss. The pattern that works for most teams is both: Apollo underneath, Clay over the top on the rows Apollo missed.
Where they actually differ
Every value comes from the same record that drives the Enrichment APIs listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are data one provider returns and the other does not.
| Compare | Apollo API | Clay |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Search, enrich and sequence from one credit balance | One table that fans out to 150+ providers |
| Entry price | $49/seat/mo | $167/mo |
| Unit cost | $0.02 per credit | $0.045 per data credit |
| Billing model | Per seat Credit packs Free tier | Subscription Credit packs Free tier |
| Free tier | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | Free plan, 500 actions and 100 data credits per month |
| GTM motion covered | Source Enrich Engage Sync | Source Enrich Signal |
| Data returned | Work emailMobile phoneFirmographicsTechnographicsJob postingsIntent and newsLinkedIn profileCRM records | Work emailPersonal emailMobile phoneFirmographicsTechnographicsJob postingsJob changesIntent and newsLinkedIn profile |
| MCP server | Yes https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp | Yes https://api.clay.com/v3/mcp |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async Native in Clay |
| Auth | API key in the x-api-key header | Optional token on a webhook source. The HTTP API column uses the other service's key |
| Rate limits | 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. | Concurrency governed by plan, not a published per-minute cap |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II |
| Best for | Best all-in-one GTM API | Best orchestration layer |
Pick each one when
Neither vendor publishes a match rate you could hold them to, so the rate card only tells you half the story. Take 500 rows from the segment you actually sell into, run them through both free tiers, verify both result sets, and divide spend by survivors. Half a day and about $20, and on a close pair it changes the answer often enough to be worth it.
What each one costs, tier by tier
Both publish a full rate card, so this comparison runs on numbers rather than on adjectives. Apollo API lists 4 tiers and Clay lists 4. Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, and the pages they came from are listed at the foot of this one.
| The short version | Apollo API | Clay |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Basic, $49 | Launch, $167 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 4 |
| Free tier | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | Free plan, 500 actions and 100 data credits per month |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.0196 per credit | $0.0452 per data credit |
The cheapest paid plan is rarely the plan you end up on, because what moves you up a tier is usually volume rather than a feature. The two rate cards below are what you are choosing between.
Apollo API
Apollo API publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $119.
Free
- Full API access, not a trial of it
- Granted monthly, so 75 credits a month in practice
- 2 sequences and basic filters
Basic
- US$588 a seat a year, credits granted upfront and pooled across the team
- 2,500 credits a month, at $0.0196 each
- Annual billing saves 24% against paying monthly
Professional
- 4,000 credits a month, at $0.0198 each
- AI lead scoring and multi-touch outreach
Organization
- 72,000 credits a seat a year, so 6,000 a month
- $0.0198 a credit, so the rate is flat across every paid tier
- The three-seat minimum makes US$357 a month the real floor
Clay
Clay publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $167 to Custom.
Free
- 100 data credits a month, 1,200 a year
- Unlimited seats and tables, up to 200 rows per table
- Multi-provider waterfalls and Claygent
- Bring your own API key
Launch
- 2,500 data credits a month, 30,000 a year, unused ones roll over up to 2x
- Phone number enrichment
- Job change and other signals, unlimited Audiences search
- Send through the Clay Sequencer or an integration
Growth
- 6,000 data credits a month, 72,000 a year, unused ones roll over up to 2x
- Integrate with any HTTP API. This is the tier that unlocks it
- Auto-sync and enrich CRM, warehouse sync
- Web intent signals, webhook-driven automation
Enterprise
- Custom action and data credit volume, and Clay API access for calling Clay from your own code
- Auto-delete, so one webhook takes unlimited submissions
What Apollo and Clay cost at your volume
Put your own volume in. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers it on each side, which is the question a rate card cannot answer and the one that decides the bill.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices before any discount you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for. Every column moves with volume, because all of these meter usage rather than seats.
| A year at | Apollo API | Clay |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $588 Basic | $5,352 Growth |
| 10,000 a month | $2,352 Basic | $5,352 Growth |
| 50,000 a month | $11,760 Basic | Quoted |
2 of the 2 providers here publish enough to be put in this table. These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, so they are the number before you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount by between a fifth and a half.
How this plays out once it is running
The practical difference is in how each one bills a result. Both charge only for a result. Apollo bills one credit at $0.0196. Clay bills an action at $0.0036 for routing the request and then data credits for the data itself, at $0.0452 each on annual Launch, so a lookup priced at one data credit comes to $0.0488 through Clay's marketplace.
Clay pays each of the 150 providers behind it for the data and charges for the work of choosing between them. What it means is that the two products are priced for opposite conditions: Apollo rewards you for a segment it covers well, Clay earns its money on a segment nobody covers well.
What each one is genuinely good at
Not a feature list. These are the things that make somebody keep paying after the novelty has worn off, which is a different question from what the marketing page leads with.
Apollo API
One credit buys the result
Apollo charges $0.0196 a credit, spends one on a found email and nothing when a lookup finds nothing. Clay does not charge for a miss either, but a hit there costs an action for Clay's work plus the data credits of whichever provider answered, $0.0452 a credit on annual Launch.
Sequencing and CRM writes cost nothing to call
The sequence, contact and task endpoints are 0 credits. You can push a contact into a sequence, log a task and write back to the CRM without touching your balance, which means the parts of the motion that run most often are the parts you never pay for twice. Nothing else here prices the plumbing at zero.
An MCP server you can point an agent at today
Apollo publishes one at mcp.apollo.io/mcp. Clay now publishes one too, at api.clay.com/v3/mcp, with an admin-set credit budget for each rep who connects. If the thing calling this API is an assistant rather than your own code, that is the difference between a configuration line and a week of wrapping endpoints yourself.
Clay
Coverage you cannot buy any other single way
Clay fans out to more than 150 providers on one contract. Reaching the same coverage directly means signing with a dozen vendors, holding a dozen keys and reconciling a dozen invoices, and most teams never get past the third. The waterfall logic that would take a week to build is a column setting.
The logic is editable by the person who owns the list
Clay's real product is the workbench: branching conditions, research steps and a permissions model a non-engineer can use. If the person who decides what counts as a good lead is not the person who can deploy code, that gap is what you are paying to close. Apollo's logic lives wherever your engineer put it.
Fields Apollo does not return at all
Clay carries personal emails and job-change signals, and Apollo carries neither. For a reactivation play built on people who moved jobs, that is not a nice-to-have, it is the whole input. The honest version of this comparison is that on those two fields Clay has no competition on this page.
Where each one falls down
Every provider on this site has a case it handles badly, and the people who find out are the ones who bought it for that case. These are the ones worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
Apollo API
Credits are granted per seat per year, which is easy to misread
Basic is $49 a seat a month billed annually and 30,000 credits a seat a year, not a month. That is 2,500 a month, and it is the single most misread number on Apollo's pricing page. Scaling past it means buying seats rather than moving up a tier, so 10,000 lookups a month is four seats at $196.
The daily cap bites before the per-minute one
Basic allows 200 requests a minute and 2,000 a day. A backfill that would finish in an afternoon at the minute rate takes most of a fortnight at the daily one, and the two numbers are far enough apart that people size their job against the wrong one. Enrichment is the exception, at 1,000 a minute with no daily cap.
Clay
Two meters on every hit
This is the easiest thing to misread on this page. A found contact costs an action for Clay's work and data credits for the data, and the credits a lookup costs depend on which provider answered. Clay does not charge for an enrichment that returns nothing, so the bill tracks what you find, but forecasting it means knowing both rates. Bring your own provider keys and only the action is billed.
There is no API key in the way you expect
Clay authenticates with an optional token on a webhook source, and its HTTP API column uses the other service's key rather than one of its own. Below Enterprise, where the pricing page lists Clay API access, you are integrating with a table that calls out, not with an endpoint that answers. That is a different shape of dependency, and it is the thing teams discover after they have built around it.
The HTTP API is gated two tiers up
Integrating any HTTP API is what Clay's Growth plan unlocks, at $446 a month against $167 for Launch. If calling arbitrary endpoints is why you wanted Clay, the entry price for your use case is the higher number and the cost model above uses it.
Using Apollo and Clay together
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of them. On this pairing it often is not, and the arrangement below is what teams actually end up running.
The arrangement that works is both, in a fixed order: Apollo underneath and Clay over the top of whatever Apollo missed. Apollo absorbs the easy majority at a rate it only charges on a result, and Clay only ever sees the residue, which is the part nobody covers well.
The arithmetic is the whole argument. Run 10,000 rows through Apollo first and suppose 6,000 resolve; Clay then works on 4,000 rows instead of 10,000, and the 6,000 Apollo found cost $0.0196 each rather than an action plus data credits. Reverse the order and you pay Clay's rate for the rows Apollo would have found anyway.
Two things make this concrete rather than a slogan. Cap the rows the Clay table runs on so a bad input list cannot run up an unbounded invoice, because the spend lands as the table runs rather than after anyone reviews the results. And measure the split after a month: if Apollo's share of resolved rows is above about 80%, the Clay layer is probably costing more in subscription than it is returning in coverage.
Apollo or Clay, for you
Four questions, answered from the same records as the rest of this page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no result to email yourself.
Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two.
A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your segment, and the one test that does is the bake-off further down: real rows, cheapest entry on each side, spend divided by survivors.
Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is not how good the data is, it is who is allowed to hold it. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apollo API | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Job postings, Intent and news, LinkedIn profile, CRM records | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | Not stated |
| Clay | Work email, Personal email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Job postings, Job changes, Intent and news, LinkedIn profile | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor, not your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving between Apollo and Clay
Most readers of this page are already on one of these two. A swap is four hours of code and a month of watching, and the order below is the one that catches the expensive mistakes while they are still free.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Run 500 rows you already have through Apollo API and record the match rate, the fields that came back populated and the cost. Without that number a migration cannot be judged, because every provider looks cheaper per unit than the one you are paying for today.
Check the fields, not the field count
Clay does not return CRM records, which Apollo API does. If anything downstream reads crm records, that is a change to your pipeline and not just to your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Apollo API authenticates with API key in the x-api-key header. Clay uses optional token on a webhook source. The HTTP API column uses the other service's key.
The limits are the part that bites later. Apollo API rate: 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap.
Clay rate: Concurrency governed by plan, not a published per-minute cap. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date, not before
Credits on most of these plans do not survive a downgrade. Check what happens to the balance you have already paid for, and time the switch so you are not buying the same records twice.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new match rate against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your segment looks like a provider that is fine.
What practitioners say about Apollo
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written, linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above. Where a comment makes its point in crude words, we summarize it in our own words instead of quoting it.
The rate limit, not the credit price, is what people actually hit
In our words: A practitioner building on the API says the rate limits are what their team hit, that they got past them by routing requests across three Apollo accounts, and that Apollo charges per request even when a lookup returns nothing.
r/gtmengineering · May 2026 · summarized rather than quoted
Two halves worth separating. The limit is real and it is on this page: 200 requests a minute and 2,000 a day on Basic, with enrichment on a separate 1,000 a minute and no daily cap, which is why a bulk job and a per-row loop feel like different products.
The charge-on-no-output half needs care, because Apollo publishes 0 credits when nothing is found and that matches what we read. What a miss does spend is a request against the rate limit, and when the limit is the binding constraint that is the cost you feel. Pooling accounts to get round a published limit is a terms question before it is an engineering one.
The answer to the limit is the bulk endpoint, and it gets missed
Are you using bulk enrichment? You should be able to compress 10 enrichments per call, and based on the documentation I'm reading, the limit should be 600 calls, so that's 6000 total contacts per hour. If you have more, you can write some code to stagger them with 60 minute delays per 6000.
r/gtmengineering · May 2026 · 1 point
This is the right instinct and it is the same one the batch endpoints exist for: ten records in one call is one request against the limit rather than ten. The arithmetic here is this person's reading of Apollo's documentation rather than ours, so check the current bulk limit on Apollo's own reference before sizing a job around 6,000 an hour. The shape of the advice holds whatever the number is.
11 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
What practitioners say about Clay
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written, linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above.
Use it as a filter, not as a bulk provider
One thing I've seen with Clay is that it feels expensive when you use it like a bulk data provider, but much more reasonable when you use it as a filter first. I rarely enrich everything. I narrow the list with cheap signals and firmographics, then only run waterfall email/phone on leads that actually look worth it. That shift alone cut my credit usage a lot, and the outreach quality went up because fewer bad leads made it through. At that point you're paying for decisions, not just data.
r/gtmengineering · January 2026 · 16 points
This is the argument the pricing section makes, arrived at from the other direction. The lever that moves a Clay bill is not the rate, it is how many rows ever reach the expensive step. Narrowing on firmographics first costs almost nothing and keeps the paid enrichments for rows worth contacting.
It also explains why a team that thinks it wants to leave Clay often does not need to. The complaint is usually the spend, and the fix is usually an ordering change rather than a migration.
Bringing your own keys is a real line item, not a hack
Working in tech sales at a large 8 figure SaaS, our current setup for the team is as follows: [...] We do still have Clay but we bring our own API keys to keep the cost down
r/gtmengineering · January 2026 · 32 points
Clay lets you connect your own provider keys instead of spending its credits on that provider. The team above keeps the workbench and pays the underlying vendors directly, which is the arrangement that makes Clay a router rather than a reseller.
Worth knowing before you compare rate cards, because it changes what you are comparing. A Clay bill with your own keys attached is a subscription for the logic; a Clay bill without them is a subscription plus a margin on every lookup. Clay's own documentation is the authority on which integrations accept your key.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Where each one sits in a working pipeline
Neither of these is bought in isolation. These are the worked stacks on this site that use one or both, with the cost run end to end.
Waterfall email enrichment
$0.0364Four providers chained cheapest-first, each taking only what the last one missed, then verification routed per source.
Hiring signal to outbound
$0.13A company hiring three SDRs has already decided to spend. Turn that job posting into a sequenced contact inside a day.
Inbound speed to lead
<60sForm submission to enriched, verified, routed and sequenced in under a minute, with no human in the path.
The wider field for both
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of these two. Often it is not, and the reason you are comparing them at all points somewhere else entirely: Apollo alternatives and Clay alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
Apollo API alternatives
6Apollo's credit is level with the specialists once you read the period on it. What sends teams looking is the seat it is attached to, the license, or a European list.
See the alternatives →Clay alternatives
4Clay bills two meters on every row it finds, actions and data credits. That, and paying for a workbench nobody opens, is why teams look elsewhere.
See the alternatives →Everything in Source
13The full category these two sit in, filtered by data returned, billing model and entry price.
Browse the category →Related comparisons
The 26 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: Apollo vs People Data Labs, Clay vs FullEnrich and Apollo vs ZoomInfo.
And: Clay vs People Data Labs and Apollo vs RocketReach. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
Apollo API vs People Data Labs
A go-to-market license at two cents a credit against a license written for redistribution.
Compare them →Apollo API vs LeadMagic
A seat license with 30,000 credits against a published per-operation rate card.
Compare them →Apollo API vs Prospeo
Two $49 plans that look identical and meter completely differently.
Compare them →Comparison pages end at the rate card. Your list does not.
We run the bake-off on your actual data, pick the provider order, and build the pipeline behind it: waterfall routing, credit ceilings and the write-back that puts a verified contact in front of a rep the same day.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
Apollo and Clay, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Apollo or Clay cheaper?
On the entry plan it is Apollo, $49/seat/mo against Clay at $167/mo. Per unit it is $0.02 per credit against $0.045 per data credit.
Can I try Apollo and Clay for free?
Apollo: Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month. Clay: Free plan, 500 actions and 100 data credits per month.
What are the rate limits on Apollo and Clay?
Apollo: 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. Clay: Concurrency governed by plan, not a published per-minute cap.
Do Apollo and Clay both have MCP servers?
Both do. Apollo: https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp. Clay: https://api.clay.com/v3/mcp.
Which is better, Apollo or Clay?
Apollo unless Apollo cannot find your people. Apollo's $0.0196 credit buys a found email outright, while a contact found through Clay costs an action for Clay's work plus the data credits of whichever provider answered, $0.0452 a credit on annual Launch, unless you bring your own provider keys.
Can you use Apollo and Clay together?
The arrangement that works is both, in a fixed order: Apollo underneath and Clay over the top of whatever Apollo missed. Apollo absorbs the easy majority at a rate it only charges on a result, and Clay only ever sees the residue, which is the part nobody covers well.
Can I migrate from Apollo to Clay without losing data?
Not without losing a field. Clay does not return CRM records, which Apollo does, so anything downstream that reads it has to change. Either way, measure your match rate on 500 rows before you switch, because that number is the one you cannot recover afterwards.