Apollo vs Hunter
Apollo if you are starting from a list of people and want the whole motion behind one key, because its credit is cheaper, its search costs nothing and its write endpoints are free. Hunter if you are starting from a domain and want every address on it, which is a question Apollo's person-level index does not answer. The rates are closer than they look, $0.0196 against $0.0245, so this is a shape decision rather than a price one. The catch on Hunter is that finding and verifying share one credit pool, so a bulk list clean competes with the thing you bought the plan for.
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 | Hunter |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Search, enrich and sequence from one credit balance | Domain search, email finder and verifier |
| Entry price | $49/seat/mo | $49/mo |
| Unit cost | $0.02 per credit | $0.025 per 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, 50 credits per month |
| GTM motion covered | Source Enrich Engage Sync | Enrich Verify |
| Data returned | Work emailMobile phoneFirmographicsTechnographicsJob postingsIntent and newsLinkedIn profileCRM records | Work emailFirmographics |
| MCP server | Yes https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp | Yes https://mcp.hunter.io/mcp |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node | REST API MCP server Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node |
| Auth | API key in the x-api-key header | API key in X-API-KEY, as a Bearer token, or as a query parameter |
| Rate limits | 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. | Per endpoint: 15/s and 500/min on most, 10/s on Verifier, 5/s on Discover |
| 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 documented starter |
The same workload, priced both ways
Computed from each provider's published entry-plan rate. The monthly floor is shown separately, because at low volume the floor is the bill.
| Workload | Apollo API | Hunter | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 verified work emails | $196.00 $0.02 per email |
$245.00 $0.025 per email |
Apollo API by 25% |
| Monthly floor at entry | $49/seat/mo | $49/mo | Identical |
| Charged on a miss | No | No | Neither |
Rates read from each vendor's own pricing page between 8 and 19 October 2026. Bulk figures assume the entry-plan rate holds at that volume, which in practice means moving up a plan tier.
Pick each one when
Apollo API
- You have names and companies and want contact details for them.
- Sequencing, CRM writes and sourcing behind one credential matter.
- You need mobiles as well as emails, which Hunter does not sell.
Hunter
- You have a domain and want every address pattern on it.
- Verification is a first-class part of the job, not an afterthought.
- You want a free tier that keeps working: 50 credits a month, indefinitely.
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 Hunter 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 | Hunter |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Basic, $49 | Starter, $49 |
| 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, 50 credits per month |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.0196 per credit | $0.0245 per 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
Hunter
Hunter publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $299.
Free
- Full API access, not a trial
- Domain Search, Email Finder and Email Verifier
- Enough to measure your own match rate
- Renews every month, indefinitely
Starter
- $34 a month paid yearly, 24,000 credits upfront
- $0.0245 per credit at the monthly rate
- Credits shared across find, verify and search
Growth
- $104 a month paid yearly, 120,000 credits upfront
- $0.0149 per credit at the monthly rate
Scale
- $209 a month paid yearly, 300,000 credits upfront
- $0.0120 per credit at the monthly rate
What Apollo and Hunter 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.
Hunter
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is 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 | Hunter |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $588 Basic | $588 Starter |
| 10,000 a month | $2,352 Basic | $1,788 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 per-credit prices are close enough that neither side wins on them. Apollo is $0.0196 and Hunter is $0.0245, a 25% gap that almost no real workload will notice against the difference in match rate on your own list. What separates them is the direction of the question. Apollo takes a person and returns their details; Hunter takes a domain and returns the addresses on it, with the pattern inferred and each result verified automatically on the way out.
The metering difference is the one that bites in practice. Hunter runs a single credit pool across Email Finder, Email Verifier and Domain Search, so a one-off list clean draws on the same 2,000 a month that Starter buys for finding. Apollo meters enrichment and charges nothing for search or writes, and does not sell verification at all, so a verifier is a separate vendor either way. Hunter's credits also reset monthly and do not roll over, which removes the obvious way out of a bad month.
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
Cheaper per credit, and free where it matters most
$0.0196 against $0.0245 is a modest edge; search costing nothing and a miss costing nothing is not. Apollo lets you filter a list down for free and only spends on the rows you decided to enrich, which is a bigger lever on the final bill than a 25% rate difference will ever be.
Mobiles, job postings and signals, none of which Hunter sells
Apollo returns direct dials at eight credits on top of the email credit and job postings at one credit for up to 10,000 results. Hunter is email and nothing else. If the motion needs a phone number or a hiring signal, Hunter is not a narrower version of Apollo, it is a different product.
The whole motion behind one key
Sourcing, enrichment, sequences, contacts and tasks, with the write endpoints at 0 credits and an MCP server at mcp.apollo.io/mcp. Hunter finds and verifies addresses and stops, so an Apollo-to-Hunter move usually adds a sequencer to the bill rather than removing anything.
Hunter
Domain Search answers a question Apollo cannot
Give Hunter a domain and it returns every address it knows on it, with the pattern and a confidence score. Apollo indexes people, so it answers "what is this person's email" and not "who can I reach at this company". For account-based work that starts from a target list of domains, that is the whole reason Hunter is on the page.
Verification is built into the find
A verification runs automatically on every address found, and if no address is found no credit is charged. That removes the separate validation pass most pipelines bolt on afterwards with a second vendor, which in this directory's own modeled waterfall is 35% of the bill.
A free tier that does not expire
50 credits a month, indefinitely, which is enough to keep a staging environment alive and to run a small sample before committing. Apollo's free plan is 900 credits a seat a year, granted monthly, so 75 a month: comparable in size and attached to a seat rather than to an account.
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 per seat per year
30,000 on Basic is per seat per year, which is 2,500 a month, and Organization adds a three-seat minimum at US$357. Hunter sells a plan, not a seat, so for a workload nobody logs into the license shape favors the smaller vendor even though the unit price does not.
No verification, and no domain-level view
Apollo does not sell verification, so its output needs a separate verifier, and it has no equivalent of Domain Search. Two of the three things Hunter is good at are simply absent here rather than worse.
Three rate windows, enforced per team
200 requests a minute and 2,000 a day on Basic, plus a separate 1,000 a minute for enrichment. The limits are per team rather than per key, so another integration on the account spends your allowance. Hunter publishes a simpler picture even if the pool behind it is shared.
Hunter
One credit pool across finding and verifying
Email Finder, Email Verifier and Domain Search all draw on the same monthly allowance. On Starter that is 2,000 credits, so a 10,000-address list clean is five months of the plan spent on a job that found nothing new. The route Hunter publishes for exactly this is the Data Platform, where search credits and verification credits are bought separately, and it is worth knowing before concluding the plan is the wrong shape.
Credits reset monthly and do not roll over
Unused allowance is gone at the end of the cycle unless you move to annual billing, which releases the whole year upfront. For lumpy work, that turns a quiet month into wasted spend and removes the obvious defence against the pool problem above.
Email only
No mobiles, no personal emails, no intent and no job postings, though Hunter now publishes an MCP server. Hunter is deliberately narrow and does its one job well, but it means the comparison is rarely Apollo against Hunter so much as Apollo against Hunter plus whatever covers the rest.
Using Apollo and Hunter 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.
These two sit next to each other more naturally than most pairs in this directory, because they start from different inputs. Hunter takes your target domains and returns who is reachable at them; Apollo takes the people you already named and returns their details and a sequence. A pipeline that does account-based work usually wants both, and the join is the domain.
Order them by what you actually have. Starting from a company list, Hunter first is cheaper and faster, because Domain Search is one call per company rather than one per person and the results arrive verified. Starting from a person list, Apollo first wins outright, since search costs nothing, a miss costs nothing and the credit is 20% cheaper.
Keep the verification on Hunter's side of the line even when Apollo found the row, and watch the pool while you do it. Hunter verifies at find time for free on its own results but charges a credit from the same allowance to check somebody else's, so pushing Apollo's whole output through it will eat a finder plan quickly. For volume that is the Data Platform rather than a subscription, and for small runs it is fine.
Apollo or Hunter, for you
Three 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 |
| Hunter | Work email, Firmographics | 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 Hunter
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
Hunter does not return Mobile phone, Technographics, Job postings, Intent and news, LinkedIn profile and CRM records, 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. Hunter uses API key in X-API-KEY, as a Bearer token, or as a query parameter.
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.
Hunter rate: Per endpoint: 15/s and 500/min on most, 10/s on Verifier, 5/s on Discover. 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 Hunter
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.
A bulk verification competes with the thing you bought the plan for
I've used hunter for quite some time. I needed to do a bulk verification and now my plans ruined. Looking for a new option. Spent hundreds with hunter - way more expensive than it once was
r/agency · October 2024 · 1 point
Hunter's subscription plans run one credit pool across Email Finder, Email Verifier and Domain Search, so a one-off list clean draws on the same allowance as finding does. On Starter that allowance is 2,000 credits a month, which makes a 10,000-address verification five months of the plan spent on a job that found nothing new. Credits reset monthly and do not roll over, so there is no banking your way out of it either.
What Hunter publishes for exactly this case is the Data Platform, where search credits and verification credits are bought separately and priced apart from the subscription. That is worth knowing before concluding the plan is the wrong shape, because the complaint is really about using the wrong product rather than about the price.
Only one comment from this harvest is quoted, and that is the finding. Of 83 candidates the highest-scoring were people promoting their own tools, two of them linking a Hunter URL with an affiliate parameter on it, and five more threads turned out to be about LinkHunter, a link-building product with no connection to Hunter.io.
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 Hunter 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 →Hunter alternatives
4The best documentation in the category, attached to the narrowest dataset.
See the alternatives →Everything in Enrich
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, Hunter vs Prospeo and Apollo vs ZoomInfo.
And: Findymail vs Hunter 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 Hunter, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Apollo or Hunter cheaper?
They start at the same price, $49/seat/mo each. Per unit it is $0.02 per credit against $0.025 per credit, which is the figure that decides it at volume.
Can I try Apollo and Hunter for free?
Apollo: Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month. Hunter: Free plan, 50 credits per month.
What are the rate limits on Apollo and Hunter?
Apollo: 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. Hunter: Per endpoint: 15/s and 500/min on most, 10/s on Verifier, 5/s on Discover.
Do Apollo and Hunter both have MCP servers?
Both do. Apollo: https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp. Hunter: https://mcp.hunter.io/mcp.
Which is better, Apollo or Hunter?
Apollo if you are starting from a list of people and want the whole motion behind one key, because its credit is cheaper, its search costs nothing and its write endpoints are free. Hunter if you are starting from a domain and want every address on it, which is a question Apollo's person-level index does not answer.
Can you use Apollo and Hunter together?
These two sit next to each other more naturally than most pairs in this directory, because they start from different inputs. Hunter takes your target domains and returns who is reachable at them; Apollo takes the people you already named and returns their details and a sequence.
Can I migrate from Apollo to Hunter without losing data?
Not without losing a field. Hunter does not return mobile phone, technographics, job postings, intent and news, 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.