Apollo vs HubSpot
Most teams asking this should run both, because Apollo holds a database HubSpot does not and HubSpot holds a CRM Apollo cannot replace. If you genuinely have to pick one, pick on which half you cannot build: a sales team without a system of record is in trouble sooner than one buying contact data by hand. The useful finding is that the orchestration is free on both sides, since Apollo charges 0 credits for sequence and contact writes and HubSpot includes full CRM object access on its free tier. What you are actually choosing between is a database you rent and a record system you own.
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 | HubSpot API |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Search, enrich and sequence from one credit balance | Write back to the CRM your team already lives in |
| Entry price | $49/seat/mo | Free tier |
| Unit cost | $0.02 per credit | $0.0000 free tier |
| Billing model | Per seat Credit packs Free tier | Free tier Subscription Per seat |
| Free tier | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | Free CRM including API access |
| GTM motion covered | Source Enrich Engage Sync | Sync Engage |
| Data returned | Work emailMobile phoneFirmographicsTechnographicsJob postingsIntent and newsLinkedIn profileCRM records | CRM recordsWork emailFirmographics |
| MCP server | Yes https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp | Yes Official remote and local servers |
| 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 n8n node |
| Auth | API key in the x-api-key header | Private app token or OAuth 2.0 |
| Rate limits | 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. | 100 req/10s on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Daily cap shared across apps. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA |
| Best for | Best all-in-one GTM API | Best free CRM endpoint |
Pick each one when
Apollo API
- You need the contact data itself, which HubSpot does not sell.
- Sourcing, enrichment and sequencing behind one key is the point.
- The CRM requirement is light and a thin object model will hold.
HubSpot API
- You need a system of record a whole revenue team will work in.
- The free tier matters: full API access with no clock and no credit meter.
- Marketing, forms, workflows and reporting have to live in the same place.
These two do different jobs, so the useful question is not which one wins but whether you need both. Run the same 500 rows through the broader product on its own, then through the specialist as a second pass, and count the rows the second pass actually adds. If you can count them on one hand, the broader product is the whole stack.
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 HubSpot API 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 | HubSpot API |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Basic, $49 | Starter, $20 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 4 |
| Free tier | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | Free CRM including API access |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.0196 per credit | $0 free tier |
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
HubSpot API
HubSpot API publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $20 to Quote.
Free
- Full CRM object access over the API
- Free Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, Data and Revenue tools
- 100 calls per 10s, 250,000 a day
- No credit card required
Starter
- Same API, same limits as Free
- 500 HubSpot Credits included
- 1,000 marketing contacts
- From $7/seat/mo on the current new-customer offer
Professional
- 190 calls per 10s per app
- 625,000 calls a day per account
- Where the limit increase starts to matter
Enterprise
- 190 calls per 10s per app
- 1,000,000 calls a day per account
- Highest published daily ceiling
What Apollo and HubSpot 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.
HubSpot API
Priced per seat, so the bill moves with headcount rather than with volume.
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. HubSpot API is priced per seat, so that column does not move with volume. The figure shown is 3 seats for a year.
| A year at | Apollo API | HubSpot API |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $588 Basic | $720 Starter |
| 10,000 a month | $2,352 Basic | $720 Starter |
| 50,000 a month | $11,760 Basic | $720 Starter |
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 reason this comparison exists is that both vendors describe themselves as the whole go-to-market platform, and both are telling a partial truth. Apollo sells a contact database with sequencing and a thin CRM attached. HubSpot sells a CRM and a marketing suite with no contact database underneath it at all. Put them side by side on what each actually returns and the overlap is a narrow band in the middle, which is why so many teams end up paying for both and feeling vaguely overcharged.
The cost shapes are different enough that a direct comparison needs care. Apollo meters credits: $0.0196 each, granted 30,000 a seat a year on Basic at $49 a seat a month. HubSpot meters nothing on the CRM: object access, associations, properties and workflows are all free over REST on the free tier, and the paid tiers buy seats and features rather than allowance. So Apollo gets more expensive as you enrich more and HubSpot gets more expensive as more people log in, which means the right question is whether your bottleneck is rows or headcount.
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
It holds a database, which is the thing HubSpot cannot sell you
People and organization search across Apollo's own index, enrichment at one credit for an email, and job postings at one credit for up to 10,000 results. HubSpot has no equivalent at any tier: it stores what you bring it. If the problem is that you do not know who to contact, only one side of this page addresses it.
The write endpoints cost nothing
Sequences, contacts, deals and tasks are all 0 credits. That means the orchestration layer is free and the only thing you are paying for is data, which is the right way round and not how every vendor in this category does it. Combined with free people search, the cheap pattern is to filter hard and enrich narrowly.
One key covers sourcing, enrichment and sending
It is one of the few providers in this directory that does all three behind a single credential, with an MCP server at mcp.apollo.io/mcp over the same surface. Replacing it means three vendors, three rate limits and three invoices, and that cost is real even when each individual piece is cheaper.
HubSpot API
The free tier includes the API, not a trial of it
Full CRM object access over REST on the free plan, with no clock and no credit meter, up to two users. That is the cheapest legitimate place in this directory to put rows you have already paid to enrich, and it is why so many waterfall pipelines terminate here regardless of what found the data.
Two official MCP servers
HubSpot publishes a remote server for the CRM and a local one for builds, which is more MCP surface than anything else in the directory offers and a real convenience when the thing writing to your CRM is an agent. Apollo has one, covering its own motion rather than a record system.
It is a system of record, with the governance that implies
Associations, properties, workflows, permissions and reporting that a whole revenue team works inside, with SOC 2 Type II behind it. Apollo's CRM exists so that Apollo has somewhere to put a sequence result. If more than a couple of people need to agree on what a deal is, that difference decides this.
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 attach to seats, and the grant is annual
30,000 credits on Basic is per seat per year, so 2,500 a month, and Organization enforces a three-seat minimum at US$357. A pipeline with no human in it still buys a user's worth of software, which is the opposite of HubSpot's free tier and the single clearest structural difference between the two.
The CRM is thin, and you will notice at about twenty people
Apollo's object model exists to support its own sequencing rather than to be the place a revenue team lives. There is no marketing suite, no forms, no landing pages and no reporting layer worth the name. Teams outgrow it in one direction and almost never in the other.
Three rate windows, enforced at once
200 requests a minute and 2,000 a day on Basic, with enrichment separately on 1,000 a minute and no daily cap. The limits are per team rather than per key, so a colleague's integration spends your allowance, and sizing a backfill against the minute figure is the standard way to be surprised.
HubSpot API
No contact data at all
HubSpot stores and does not source. Every row has to come from somewhere else, which means a HubSpot-only answer to this comparison is incomplete by construction and you will be buying one of the providers in this directory regardless of which side of this page you land on.
The ceiling is a ten-second window shared across apps
100 requests per 10 seconds on Free and Starter and 190 on Professional, with a daily cap shared across every app on the account. That is a tight burst ceiling for a bulk sync, and because it is shared, a marketplace integration somebody installed can quietly consume it.
The CRM tiers above Starter are not on the pricing page
Free is free and Starter is $20 a seat a month; Professional and Enterprise are a quote. The free tier is genuinely generous and the step up from it is a conversation, which is worth knowing before you build a motion that depends on a Professional feature.
Using Apollo and HubSpot 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 default arrangement is both, with Apollo as the source and HubSpot as the destination, and it is the one most of this directory's stack pages assume. Apollo finds and enriches, the rows land as HubSpot contacts and companies over the free CRM API, and the sequence runs from whichever side owns sending. Neither write costs anything, so the join between them is the cheapest part of the pipeline.
Decide early which system owns the truth, because running sequences from both is how data drifts. The usual answer is that HubSpot owns the record and Apollo owns the discovery, with a single field recording which provider resolved each row so you can re-order the chain later on evidence rather than on memory. That field costs nothing and is the thing teams most often wish they had added.
The case for dropping one is usually about seats rather than features. Apollo's credits are per seat per year, so a team that enriches in bursts is buying a lot of idle allowance; HubSpot's paid tiers are per seat too, so a team that mostly needs a database is paying for logins nobody uses. Count the humans on each side honestly before you renew either, because that count is what both rate cards are really billing.
Apollo or HubSpot, for you
Five 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 |
| HubSpot API | CRM records, Work email, Firmographics | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | 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 HubSpot
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
HubSpot API does not return Mobile phone, Technographics, Job postings, Intent and news and LinkedIn profile, which Apollo API does. If anything downstream reads mobile phone, 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. HubSpot API uses private app token or OAuth 2.0.
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.
HubSpot API rate: 100 req/10s on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Daily cap shared across apps. 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 HubSpot
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 per-app rate limit is why people end up running several private apps
API limits are not being respected or the sync isn't really set up in a way that someone with knowledge of the api. They may not be using a queue system. They haven't optimized and paid attention to api limits. [...] This may need to be done using multiple private app keys because you are hitting specific limits. [...] If these updates are happening all at once, batch and import/export APIs are the way to go
r/hubspot · April 2025 · 2 points
This corroborates the shape of HubSpot's limits rather than the numbers. The rate, 100 requests per 10 seconds on Free and Starter and 190 on Professional, is per app, which is exactly why splitting work across several private apps raises throughput at all.
The part that is easy to miss is that the daily cap is not per app, so the same trick does nothing for it. Splitting a sync across three private apps triples the requests a second you can make and shares one daily budget between them, which is a fix for the wrong half of the problem if the daily cap is what you were hitting.
The search endpoint is the one to design around
When building custom integrations or custom data migrations, always set the external ID as a unique property so you can use the unique identifier endpoint to read/query records... instead of using the search endpoint which has a 5 calls per second limit. Use batch endpoints as much as possible.
r/hubspot · August 2025 · 10 points
The same lesson the Pipedrive side of this directory records as a token cost, arriving here as a separate rate. Search is the expensive call on every CRM in this listing and it is the one a first integration reaches for, because searching by email is the obvious way to find a contact when you have not stored its id.
Storing an external id on creation is the fix in both products, and it is cheaper to do on day one than to retrofit. Treat this as a design note rather than as a published figure: HubSpot's own documentation is the authority on the per-endpoint limits.
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 HubSpot 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 →HubSpot API alternatives
4The free tier is the best in the category. The bill when you outgrow it is why people look at HubSpot alternatives.
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, HubSpot vs Freshsales and Apollo vs ZoomInfo.
And: HubSpot vs Copper 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 HubSpot, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Apollo or HubSpot cheaper?
On the entry plan it is HubSpot, free against Apollo at $49/seat/mo. Per unit it is $0.02 per credit against $0 free tier, which is the figure that decides it at volume.
Can I try Apollo and HubSpot for free?
Apollo: Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month. HubSpot: Free CRM including API access.
What are the rate limits on Apollo and HubSpot?
Apollo: 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. HubSpot: 100 req/10s on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Daily cap shared across apps.
Do Apollo and HubSpot both have MCP servers?
Both do. Apollo: https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp. HubSpot: Official remote and local servers.
Which is better, Apollo or HubSpot?
Most teams asking this should run both, because Apollo holds a database HubSpot does not and HubSpot holds a CRM Apollo cannot replace. If you genuinely have to pick one, pick on which half you cannot build: a sales team without a system of record is in trouble sooner than one buying contact data by hand.
Can you use Apollo and HubSpot together?
The default arrangement is both, with Apollo as the source and HubSpot as the destination, and it is the one most of this directory's stack pages assume. Apollo finds and enriches, the rows land as HubSpot contacts and companies over the free CRM API, and the sequence runs from whichever side owns sending.
Can I migrate from Apollo to HubSpot without losing data?
Not without losing a field. HubSpot does not return mobile phone, technographics, job postings, intent and news and LinkedIn profile, 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.