Apollo vs Lusha
Lusha
Best published credit costs for contact data $37.45/Apollo vs Lusha is a bundling argument. Apollo sells a $49 seat with 2,500 credits a month and a free plan at 900 credits a year, and covers search, enrichment and sequencing from the same balance. Lusha sells credits with a price on every operation: an email is 1 credit, a phone number is 5, a company profile is 1, a recorded call is 8. The deciding factor is usually phone.
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 | Lusha |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Search, enrich and sequence from one credit balance | Every credit cost published, no rate limit published |
| Entry price | $49/seat/mo | $37.45/mo annual |
| Unit cost | $0.02 per credit | $0.087 per credit |
| Billing model | Per seat Credit packs Free tier | Credit packs Subscription Per seat Free tier |
| Free tier | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | Free plan, 40 credits a month, 1 seat, no card. API is rate limited strictly. |
| 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 changes |
| MCP server | Yes https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp | Yes https://mcp.lusha.com |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async |
| Auth | API key in the x-api-key header | API key in the api_key header, generated in the Lusha dashboard |
| Rate limits | 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. | Per plan, across minute, hour and day windows. Numbers are not published. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | GDPR DPA CCPA |
| Best for | Best all-in-one GTM API | Best published credit costs for contact data |
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 | Lusha | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 verified work emails | $196.00 $0.02 per email |
$870.00 $0.087 per email |
Apollo API by 4.4x |
| 2,000 mobile numbers | $352.80 $0.176 per mobile |
$874.00 $0.437 per mobile |
Apollo API by 2.5x |
| Monthly floor at entry | $49/seat/mo | $37.45/mo annual | Lusha 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 high and per-unit cost drives the bill.
- You want sequencing and search in the same account.
- A free tier to build against matters.
Lusha
- You need an exact published price for every operation.
- Usage is light enough that a seat license is poor value.
- You are buying mostly emails rather than mobiles.
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 Lusha lists 5. 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 | Lusha |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Basic, $49 | Starter, $37.45 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 5 |
| Free tier | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | Free plan, 40 credits a month, 1 seat, no card. API is rate limited strictly. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.0196 per credit | $0.087 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
Lusha
Lusha publishes 5 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $37.45 to Quote.
Free
- 40 credits a month, 1 seat
- No credit card required
- API access, but strictly rate limited
Starter
- 4,800 credits a year, granted up front
- 1 seat. Works out at $0.094 a credit
- API still strictly rate limited
Pro
- 7,200 credits a year, at $0.087 each
- 2 free seats, full API, webhooks, CSV enrichment
- Credits roll over to twice the monthly cap
Premium
- 40,800 credits a year, at $0.088 each
- 5 free seats, API Advanced, team management
- Credit allocation across the team
Scale
- Custom annual credit volume
- SSO and a dedicated customer success team
- No rollover: the cap does not apply
What Apollo and Lusha 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.
Lusha
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 | Lusha |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $588 Basic | $3,599 Premium |
| 10,000 a month | $2,352 Basic | Quoted |
| 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
At the Pro tier a Lusha credit works out around 8.7 cents, so an email is roughly 9 cents and a mobile about 44. Apollo is about four and a half times cheaper per credit once you are past the seat, and Lusha is the one you can model exactly before you buy.
If your motion is mobile-heavy, Lusha charges five credits a number and that line will dominate the bill, while Apollo charges nine credits, or about 18 cents. If you want a spreadsheet you can defend to finance, Lusha publishes a rate for every operation and Apollo publishes one credit price and a table of what each call spends.
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
Roughly four and a half times cheaper per credit
$0.0196 an Apollo credit against about $0.087 on Lusha's Pro tier. An email is about 2 cents here and 9 there. On a list of 10,000 emails that is $196 against $870, which is the kind of gap that decides a purchase on its own.
The plumbing costs nothing to call
Sequence, contact and task endpoints are 0 credits, and search, enrichment and sequencing all draw on one balance. Lusha prices every operation separately, so the parts of the motion that run most often are free on one side and metered on the other.
An MCP server, and a free plan with full API access
At mcp.apollo.io/mcp, with 900 credits a seat a year on the free tier. Lusha also publishes an MCP server and a free plan at 40 credits a month, so this is a narrower lead than the price gap, but the free allowance is the more usable of the two.
Lusha
A published price for every single operation
An email is 1 credit, a phone number is 5, a company profile is 1, a recorded call is 8. Nobody else in this directory breaks it out that far. You can build a spreadsheet of next quarter's cost and defend it, which Apollo's single credit price and endpoint table does not quite let you do.
No seat license to carry
Lusha's Starter is $37.45 a month billed yearly with one seat, and the credits are the product. Apollo couples credits to seats, so an unattended pipeline with no human user still pays $49 for a seat nobody logs into.
Credits granted up front on an annual plan
Four thousand eight hundred a year on Starter, 7,200 on Pro and 40,800 on Premium, all delivered at the start. For a motion that runs in bursts rather than evenly, having the year's allowance available on day one is a different shape from a monthly drip.
Where each one falls down
Every provider on this site has a case it handles badly, and the people who find out are the ones who bought it for that case. These are the ones worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
Apollo API
Credits are granted per seat per year, which is the number people misread
Thirty thousand on Basic sounds generous until you read the period. It is 2,500 a month, and reaching higher volume means buying seats rather than moving up a tier: 10,000 lookups a month is four Basic seats at $196.
A mobile costs nine credits
About 18 cents. Lusha charges 5 credits, roughly 44 cents at the Pro rate, so Apollo is still cheaper on phone, but the nine-credit charge means a phone-heavy motion burns the monthly allowance far faster than an email-only one and the seat arithmetic bites sooner.
Lusha
The allowance is annual, and the monthly figure is small
Four thousand eight hundred credits a year on Starter is 400 a month. Comparing that against a competitor's monthly number without dividing is the single easiest mistake to make on Lusha's pricing page, and it flatters the plan by twelve.
No published rate limits
Lusha discloses prices and not limits, which is the exact inverse of Cognism and the opposite of what an integrator needs. You find out what the API tolerates by hitting it, which is a poor way to size a backfill.
Volume buys almost no discount
About 9.4 cents a credit on Starter, 8.7 on Pro and 8.8 on Premium. The rate is effectively flat across the ladder, so growing into a bigger plan buys you more credits and not a better price, which is unusual in this category.
Using Apollo and Lusha 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 overlap enough that running both is usually waste rather than a waterfall, because both are general-purpose contact providers rather than specialists with different coverage.
The one arrangement that earns its keep is Apollo underneath for volume and Lusha for the operations you need to account for exactly. A finance team that wants a defensible per-operation cost on a specific motion can have that on the Lusha side while the bulk work happens at a quarter of the price elsewhere.
Before building that, measure. Run the same 500 rows through Apollo's free plan and Lusha's 40 free credits and compare what comes back. If Apollo's match rate on your segment is within a few points of Lusha's, the price gap settles it and the second vendor is a line item with no job.
Apollo or Lusha, 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 |
| Lusha | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Job changes | Global | GDPR DPA 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 Lusha
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
Lusha does not return Job postings, LinkedIn profile and CRM records, which Apollo API does. If anything downstream reads job postings, 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. Lusha uses API key in the api_key header, generated in the Lusha dashboard.
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.
Lusha rate: Per plan, across minute, hour and day windows. Numbers are not published. 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 Lusha 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 →Lusha alternatives
4A phone number costs five credits, volume buys no discount, and the rate limits are not published. Those are the three reasons people look.
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, Lusha vs RocketReach and Apollo vs ZoomInfo.
And: Lusha 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 Lusha, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Apollo or Lusha cheaper?
On the entry plan it is Lusha, $37.45/mo annual against Apollo at $49/seat/mo. Per unit it is $0.02 per credit against $0.087 per credit, which is the figure that decides it at volume.
Can I try Apollo and Lusha for free?
Apollo: Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month. Lusha: Free plan, 40 credits a month, 1 seat, no card. API is rate limited strictly.
What are the rate limits on Apollo and Lusha?
Apollo: 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. Lusha: Per plan, across minute, hour and day windows. Numbers are not published.
Do Apollo and Lusha both have MCP servers?
Both do. Apollo: https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp. Lusha: https://mcp.lusha.com.
Which is better, Apollo or Lusha?
Apollo vs Lusha is a bundling argument. Apollo sells a $49 seat with 2,500 credits a month and a free plan at 900 credits a year, and covers search, enrichment and sequencing from the same balance.
Can you use Apollo and Lusha together?
These overlap enough that running both is usually waste rather than a waterfall, because both are general-purpose contact providers rather than specialists with different coverage.
Can I migrate from Apollo to Lusha without losing data?
Not without losing a field. Lusha does not return job postings, 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.