Apollo vs LeadMagic
These two are within one percent of each other per unit, $0.0196 a credit against $0.0198, so the rate card does not decide it. The floor does: Apollo starts at $49 for 2,500 credits a month and LeadMagic at $99 for 5,000, and Apollo stays cheaper at every volume once you buy seats to scale. LeadMagic's real advantage is not price, it is that every operation has a stated cost you can forecast and credits come off only on success.
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 | LeadMagic |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Search, enrich and sequence from one credit balance | One credit pool, published per-operation rates |
| Entry price | $49/seat/mo | $99/mo |
| Unit cost | $0.02 per credit | $0.02 per credit |
| Billing model | Per seat Credit packs Free tier | 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. Essential starts at $99 for 5,000 credits, and failed lookups cost nothing. |
| GTM motion covered | Source Enrich Engage Sync | Source Enrich Verify Signal |
| Data returned | Work emailMobile phoneFirmographicsTechnographicsJob postingsIntent and newsLinkedIn profileCRM records | Work emailMobile phoneFirmographicsJob postingsJob changesLinkedIn profile |
| MCP server | Yes https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp | Yes Bundled with every plan |
| 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 the X-API-Key header |
| Rate limits | 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. | 5 req/s account-wide on Professional, 10 req/s on Ultimate |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | GDPR DPA |
| Best for | Best all-in-one GTM API | Best priced per operation |
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 | LeadMagic | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 verified work emails | $196.00 $0.02 per email |
$198.00 $0.02 per email |
Apollo API by 1% |
| 2,000 mobile numbers | $352.80 $0.176 per mobile |
$198.00 $0.099 per mobile |
LeadMagic by 78% |
| Monthly floor at entry | $49/seat/mo | $99/mo | Apollo API is lower |
| 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
- Volume is over about 3,000 lookups a month.
- You want sending and CRM endpoints in the same product.
- Someone on the team logs into Apollo anyway.
LeadMagic
- The pipeline is headless and a seat is dead weight.
- You need a bill you can forecast to the cent.
- Usage is uneven and rollover matters.
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
Both publish a full rate card, so this comparison runs on numbers rather than on adjectives. Apollo API lists 4 tiers and LeadMagic 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 | LeadMagic |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Basic, $49 | Essential, $99 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 4 |
| Free tier | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | No free tier. Essential starts at $99 for 5,000 credits, and failed lookups cost nothing. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.0196 per credit | $0.0198 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
LeadMagic
LeadMagic publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $99 to Higher.
Essential
- $83/mo billed annually, $990 a year, saving $198
- $0.0198 a credit, or $0.0165 on the annual 60,000
- 3 seats sharing one credit pool
- Rollover up to 2 months
Growth
- $208/mo billed annually
- $0.0124 a credit, or $0.0104 on the annual 240,000
- 5 seats, one shared pool
Professional
- $0.0100 a credit, or $0.0083 on the annual 600,000
- The published floor is $0.007 a credit at volume
Free tier
- No way to measure your own match rate before paying
- The clearest gap in an otherwise clear rate card
What Apollo and LeadMagic 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.
LeadMagic
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 | LeadMagic |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $588 Basic | $1,188 Essential |
| 10,000 a month | $2,352 Basic | $2,988 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
Run the arithmetic on your own volume rather than on either headline, because the two rates are effectively identical and the shape of the plans is not. Apollo is $49 a seat a month for 30,000 credits a seat a year, which is 2,500 a month, and scaling means buying seats: 10,000 lookups a month is four seats at $196. LeadMagic is $99 for 5,000 credits a month and $249 for 20,000, so the same 10,000 is $249.
What LeadMagic sells that Apollo does not is forecastability. Every operation has a published credit cost, credits come off only on success, and they bank for two months. If your finance team wants a number for next quarter rather than a range, that is worth real money, and it is the reason agencies pick it even where Apollo comes out cheaper on the arithmetic.
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
Half the monthly floor for the same per-credit rate
$0.0196 against $0.0198 is a one percent difference, so the rate card does not decide this. The floor does: Apollo is $49 a seat for 2,500 credits a month and LeadMagic is $99 for 5,000. Below about 2,500 lookups Apollo is half the price for the same work.
A free plan with full API access
Nine hundred credits a seat a year. LeadMagic has no free allowance at any price, which is the clearest gap in an otherwise unusually clear rate card, so the first measurement costs $99 there and nothing here.
Sending and CRM endpoints in the same product
Sequence, contact and task endpoints cost zero credits, so the parts of the motion that run most often never touch the balance. LeadMagic is enrichment and search; anything downstream is a second vendor.
LeadMagic
A published cost for every operation
Email finder 1 credit, mobile 5, validation 0.25, job change 3. You can cost a month's pipeline on paper before signing, which is the thing a single credit price and an endpoint table does not quite give you.
Credits deducted on valid results only
Never on a miss, so your effective cost per useful row is the rate rather than the rate divided by your match rate. People, company and jobs search spend nothing at all from Essential upward, so exploring a list costs nothing before you decide to enrich it.
No seat license, and an MCP server on every plan
LeadMagic charges for credits, not for people, so a headless pipeline carries no dead weight. Apollo couples credits to seats, which means an unattended job still pays $49 a month for a login nobody uses.
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
A seat you may not need
Credits and seats are coupled, so an unattended pipeline with no human user still pays for one. For a headless build that is a per-person price for zero people, and it is the single most common objection to Apollo in this category.
Credits are granted per seat per year
Thirty thousand on Basic is 2,500 a month. Reaching 10,000 means four seats at $196 rather than a bigger plan, which is cheaper than LeadMagic's $249 Growth tier and is not the shape most people expect.
LeadMagic
No free tier at any price
Essential starts at $99 for 5,000 credits. There is no way to measure your own match rate before paying, which matters most to exactly the team that has to prove the data before a budget exists.
Twice the entry floor
Ninety-nine dollars against $49. Below about 2,500 lookups a month you are buying 5,000 credits to use a fraction of them, and the per-credit advantage is one percent, which does not recover the difference.
Rate limits are account-wide, not per key
Five requests a second on Professional and 10 on Ultimate, shared across every credential. Two pipelines on one account share the ceiling, which is the detail to design around rather than discover.
Using Apollo and LeadMagic 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.
At a one percent difference in unit cost there is no waterfall argument here: running both means paying two floors to buy the same row at the same price.
The one case where both appear sensibly is a team that wants Apollo's sequencing and CRM endpoints alongside a forecastable enrichment line that finance owns separately. If that is you, keep the split clean by operation rather than by segment, so each provider has a job you can point at on an invoice.
Otherwise pick on floor and shape. Under 2,500 lookups a month and happy with a seat, Apollo. Headless, uneven, or answerable to a forecast, LeadMagic.
Apollo or LeadMagic, 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 |
| LeadMagic | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Job postings, Job changes, LinkedIn profile | Global | GDPR DPA | 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 LeadMagic
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
LeadMagic does not return Technographics, Intent and news and CRM records, which Apollo API does. If anything downstream reads technographics, 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. LeadMagic uses API key in the X-API-Key header.
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.
LeadMagic rate: 5 req/s account-wide on Professional, 10 req/s on Ultimate. 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.
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 LeadMagic 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 →LeadMagic alternatives
4A clear rate card and no free tier. The second half is what sends people looking.
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, ZeroBounce vs LeadMagic and Apollo vs ZoomInfo.
And: LeadMagic vs Prospeo 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 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 LeadMagic, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Apollo or LeadMagic cheaper?
On the entry plan it is Apollo, $49/seat/mo against LeadMagic at $99/mo. Per unit it is $0.02 per credit against $0.02 per credit, which is the figure that decides it at volume.
Can I try Apollo and LeadMagic for free?
Apollo: Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month. LeadMagic: No free tier. Essential starts at $99 for 5,000 credits, and failed lookups cost nothing.
What are the rate limits on Apollo and LeadMagic?
Apollo: 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. LeadMagic: 5 req/s account-wide on Professional, 10 req/s on Ultimate.
Do Apollo and LeadMagic both have MCP servers?
Both do. Apollo: https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp. LeadMagic: Bundled with every plan.
Which is better, Apollo or LeadMagic?
These two are within one percent of each other per unit, $0.0196 a credit against $0.0198, so the rate card does not decide it. The floor does: Apollo starts at $49 for 2,500 credits a month and LeadMagic at $99 for 5,000, and Apollo stays cheaper at every volume once you buy seats to scale.
What are the downsides of Apollo and LeadMagic?
Measured against each other rather than in general. Apollo: none of the structural gaps in this answer; the limits section carries its operational ones. LeadMagic: there is no free tier, so you cannot measure your own match rate before paying.
Can you use Apollo and LeadMagic together?
At a one percent difference in unit cost there is no waterfall argument here: running both means paying two floors to buy the same row at the same price.
Can I migrate from Apollo to LeadMagic without losing data?
Not without losing a field. LeadMagic does not return technographics, intent and news 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.