Apollo vs Cognism
Cognism
Best for notified, DNC-screened contact data Quote onlyApollo vs Cognism is a compliance decision wearing a price tag, and it resolves cleanly. Apollo is $49 a seat with a free plan and a published rate card. Cognism publishes no price at all, has a five-seat minimum on both plans, and meters you three separate ways: rate limits for speed, search tokens for rows returned, and credits for contacts revealed. So the question is not which is better data, it is whether anybody will ever ask you where the phone number came from.
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 | Cognism |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Search, enrich and sequence from one credit balance | Three quotas, and none of them is a price |
| Entry price | $49/seat/mo | Quote only |
| Unit cost | $0.02 per credit | Not sold by the unit |
| Billing model | Per seat Credit packs Free tier | Per seat Subscription Credit packs |
| Free tier | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | No free tier and no published price. Both plans include 5 seats. |
| GTM motion covered | Source Enrich Engage Sync | Source Enrich Signal |
| Data returned | Work emailMobile phoneFirmographicsTechnographicsJob postingsIntent and newsLinkedIn profileCRM records | Work emailMobile phoneFirmographicsTechnographicsIntent and newsJob postingsJob changes |
| MCP server | Yes https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp | Yes https://mcp.cognism.com/mcp |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node | REST API MCP server Bulk or async |
| Auth | API key in the x-api-key header | OAuth 2.0 client credentials, from M2M Connect in platform settings |
| Rate limits | 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. | 500 req/min per operation, separate windows. Plus search tokens and credits. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | ISO 27001 ISO 27701 SOC 2 Type II GDPR notified data |
| Best for | Best all-in-one GTM API | Best for notified, DNC-screened contact data |
Pick each one when
Apollo API
- Published pricing and a free tier matter to the decision.
- Volume is high and unit cost drives the bill.
- Your outreach is email-first in markets with light calling rules.
Cognism
- You are cold calling in the UK or EU and need DNC and TPS screening.
- Legal has asked where the contact data came from.
- Notified data and ISO 27701 are on the requirements list.
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 one free tier and one trial, 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
Only one of these two publishes a rate card. Apollo API lists its tiers, and Cognism quotes everything, so half of this comparison is a number you have to go and get. 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 | Cognism |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Basic, $49 | Not published |
| Tiers published | 4 | None |
| Free tier | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | No free tier and no published price. Both plans include 5 seats. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.0196 per credit | Not sold by the unit |
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, and the two cards below say what each side publishes and what it keeps off the page.
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
Cognism
Cognism publishes no price at all, so there is no rate card to put here. Everything is quoted, which means the number you get depends on what you ask for and on where in their quarter you ask it.
Get these in writing before you sign: the per-unit rate at your volume, the annual minimum, how many seats that price assumes, whether API access is included or an add-on. Without the first two you cannot compare this against anything else on this page.
What Apollo and Cognism 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.
Apollo API
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Cognism
Publishes no price, so there is nothing here to model and the lines below say what to ask for.
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. Cognism publishes no price, so nothing is modeled there and the panel says what to ask for instead.
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 | Cognism |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $588 Basic | Quoted |
| 10,000 a month | $2,352 Basic | Quoted |
| 50,000 a month | $11,760 Basic | Quoted |
1 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
What the premium buys is a defensible basis for calling people. Cognism notifies the business contacts it holds within GDPR timeframes and screens its phone data against 15 major Do Not Call and TPS registries, including the UK TPS and CTPS. Nothing else in this directory does that.
If you are cold calling in the UK or EU, that question arrives eventually. If your reps work North American email, Apollo does the job for a published fraction of the price.
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
Everything is published, including what it costs to be wrong
A $49 seat on annual billing, $0.0196 a credit, 200 requests a minute and 2,000 a day on Basic, and a free plan with full API access. Cognism publishes rate limits and no price at all, so only one of these can be evaluated without a sales conversation.
One seat is a valid purchase
Cognism's prospecting plans both include five seats minimum. For an unattended enrichment job that no human will ever log into, that is four seats of pure overhead, and Apollo's per-seat model at least lets you buy one.
One balance, one meter
Apollo meters credits. Cognism meters three ways at once: rate limits for speed, search tokens for rows returned at one per row, and credits for contacts revealed. A broad search that returns thousands of rows spends the second pool before you have revealed anything.
Cognism
Notified data and DNC screening, which nothing else here has
Screening against 15 DNC and TPS registries, and a notified-data position. If you are cold calling in the UK or EU, this is not a feature comparison, it is the thing that makes the motion defensible, and no amount of per-credit saving substitutes for it.
ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 alongside SOC 2
A privacy-information-management certification as well as the security ones. When legal asks where the contact data came from, that combination is the published answer, and Apollo's GDPR DPA, SOC 2 Type II and CCPA is a different and narrower set.
Rate limits documented before you build
Cognism publishes its limits and error codes, which is unusual for a quote-only vendor and more than Lusha or ZoomInfo offer. You can design the integration properly and negotiate the price afterwards.
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
Thin exactly where Cognism is strong
European coverage and the compliance position. Apollo's database is its own rather than a waterfall, so where it is thin there is no fallback, and a European calling list is the segment where that shows up fastest.
The daily cap is what stops a backfill
Two hundred requests a minute and 2,000 a day on Basic. Sizing a job against the minute figure and discovering the daily one is the standard Apollo mistake. Enrichment is the exception at 1,000 a minute with no daily cap.
Cognism
No published price at any tier
Both prospecting plans route to a sales conversation and nothing on the site carries a number. That is survivable for an enterprise buyer with a procurement process and disqualifying for a team that needs to know whether this is affordable before spending a week on it.
Five seats minimum, even for a pipeline
Both plans include five. If what you want is API access for an unattended job, you are buying four seats for nobody, and that is before the quote.
Search tokens are a second allowance nobody mentions
Credits meter contacts revealed; a separate pool of search tokens meters rows returned, one per row. A broad search can exhaust the second pool without revealing a single contact, which is a cost model you have to discover rather than read.
Using Apollo and Cognism 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 split that works is geographic rather than a waterfall. Apollo for North America and anywhere the calling rules are light, Cognism for the UK and EU where notified data and DNC screening are the requirement.
Draw that line by territory before buying rather than after, because the alternative is enriching the same account twice at two very different rates. The territory field you already have in the CRM is usually enough to route on.
If the budget only covers one and you call Europe, it is Cognism, and the price gap is the cost of being able to answer for the data. If you do not call Europe, the compliance premium is buying a permission you will never exercise.
Apollo or Cognism, 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 |
| Cognism | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Job postings, Job changes | Global | ISO 27001 ISO 27701 SOC 2 Type II GDPR notified data | 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 Cognism
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
Cognism does not return LinkedIn profile and CRM records, which Apollo API does. If anything downstream reads linkedin profile, 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. Cognism uses OAuth 2.0 client credentials, from M2M Connect in platform settings.
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.
Cognism rate: 500 req/min per operation, separate windows. Plus search tokens and credits. 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 Cognism
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.
The regional split is the real difference, and practitioners buy both
Each data tool only really excels at one or two things. ZI is solid for NA mid-market and enterprise, while Cognism crushes it in EMEA and cell numbers. Every time I need one, we run a trial. If you've got the budget, use 2-3 tools to cover more ground. Right now, I'm using Clay for data infrastructure, Cognism for EMEA, and ZoomInfo for the US. sometimes Cognism finds data that ZI can't-and vice versa.
r/SalesOperations · November 2024 · 5 points
The comparison pages here reach the same place from the rate cards rather than from experience: Cognism sells notified EMEA data and mobile coverage, ZoomInfo sells North American breadth, and neither of them publishes a price. This is somebody running both with Clay in front, which is the arrangement those verdicts describe rather than the either-or the question usually assumes.
Coverage is the one thing nobody in this category will put a number behind, so "crushes it in EMEA" is an experienced opinion and not a measurement. The thread it sits in is itself a request for accuracy benchmarks that do not exist, which is a fair summary of the evidence available on either vendor.
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 Cognism 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 →Cognism alternatives
4Nobody leaves Cognism over the data. They leave over the quote, the five-seat floor, and the second allowance nobody mentioned.
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, Cognism vs ZoomInfo and Apollo vs ZoomInfo.
And: Cognism vs UpLead and Apollo vs RocketReach. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
Apollo API vs Clay
One key for the whole motion against a router sitting in front of 150 vendors.
Compare them →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 →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 Cognism, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Apollo or Cognism cheaper?
Cognism does not publish a price at any tier, so the two cannot be compared on cost. Apollo starts at $49/seat/mo, which is as far as the comparison goes.
Can I try Apollo and Cognism for free?
Apollo: Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month. Cognism: No free tier and no published price. Both plans include 5 seats.
What are the rate limits on Apollo and Cognism?
Apollo: 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. Cognism: 500 req/min per operation, separate windows. Plus search tokens and credits.
Do Apollo and Cognism both have MCP servers?
Both do. Apollo: https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp. Cognism: https://mcp.cognism.com/mcp.
Which is better, Apollo or Cognism?
Apollo vs Cognism is a compliance decision wearing a price tag, and it resolves cleanly. Apollo is $49 a seat with a free plan and a published rate card.
What are the downsides of Apollo and Cognism?
Measured against each other rather than in general. Apollo: none of the structural gaps in this answer; the limits section carries its operational ones. Cognism: there is no free tier, so you cannot measure your own match rate before paying; nothing is priced publicly, so every comparison starts with a sales call.
Can you use Apollo and Cognism together?
The split that works is geographic rather than a waterfall. Apollo for North America and anywhere the calling rules are light, Cognism for the UK and EU where notified data and DNC screening are the requirement.
Can I migrate from Apollo to Cognism without losing data?
Not without losing a field. Cognism does not return LinkedIn profile and 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.