Apollo vs Lusha: the head-to-head for B2B contact data

Apollo is positioned as a sales operating system, not a data tool. The product bundles a contact database, a sequencer, a dialer, intent signals, conversation intelligence, and a built-in CRM into a single subscription. For mid-market sales teams that would otherwise pay separately for ZoomInfo, Outreach, Gong, and HubSpot, Apollo is a compelling consolidation play.

Pricing in 2026

Apollo runs four tiers. Free gives every user 60 credits per month with limited filters. Basic is $59 per user per month and unlocks 2,500 email credits, basic sequences, and CRM integrations. Pro is $99 per user per month and is where most growing teams land: 12,000 emails per user, the full sequencer, A/B testing, and call recordings. Organization is $149 per user per month with unlimited emails, advanced reporting, and custom dispositions. All paid tiers are per-seat, which is the single biggest cost lever as your team grows.

Where Apollo is strong

Database size and breadth. With 275M+ contacts, Apollo covers more small and mid-sized companies than almost any competitor. The G2 score of 4.7 across 8,000+ reviews puts it in the top tier of sales tools by user sentiment. The sequencer is solid for teams running standard outbound cadences, and the built-in CRM is functional enough that early-stage teams can defer buying HubSpot or Salesforce. Buyer intent signals (built on partnerships with Bombora and similar providers) help SDRs prioritize accounts that are actively researching.

Where Apollo is weak

Per-user pricing is brutal at scale. A ten-person SDR team on Apollo Pro is $11,880 per year before any usage overages. Email accuracy is competitive on US enterprise contacts but degrades on smaller companies and non-US markets (Reddit threads report bounce rates in the 25 to 80 percent range on certain segments). The sequencer is functional but not best-in-class. Teams that care about deliverability and reply rates often end up replacing it with Smartlead, Instantly, or Outreach within twelve months. Mobile-phone accuracy is decent but not great, and Apollo charges 8 credits per direct-dial reveal which can drain credit pools fast.

Lusha is a focused B2B contact data tool. The product strategy is the opposite of Apollo: rather than bundle everything, Lusha doubles down on accuracy and compliance for the data layer itself. The pitch is simple. Give us a LinkedIn URL or a name plus company, and we will return a verified email and a direct-dial mobile number for the decision-maker.

Pricing in 2026

Lusha runs four tiers. Free gives every user 5 credits per month, which is essentially a try-before-you-buy allocation. Pro is $39 per user per month for 480 credits per user. Premium is $69 per user per month for 960 credits per user. Scale starts at $79 per user per month with custom credit allocations negotiated with sales. Every paid tier is strictly per-seat. There is no Hunter-style flat-rate option.

Where Lusha is strong

Phone-number coverage is the headline feature. In multiple side-by-side tests, Lusha returns more direct-dial mobile numbers per query than Apollo, ZoomInfo, or Cognism, especially on EU contacts where data is harder to source. The Chrome extension is the cleanest LinkedIn workflow on the market. Hover over a profile, click the Lusha button, and you get an email and a phone in under three seconds. Compliance is the second strong card: ISO 27701 certification, public GDPR and CCPA documentation, and a Do Not Sell mechanism. For procurement teams in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, EU enterprise), Lusha clears legal review faster than most competitors.

Where Lusha is weak

Credit allocations are small. 480 credits per user per month on Pro is a tight budget for any team doing volume outbound. Email accuracy varies, particularly on smaller companies outside Lusha's curated dataset, where coverage drops sharply. There is no built-in sequencer, no dialer, and no CRM, so Lusha is always one piece of a larger stack rather than a standalone solution. The G2 score of 4.4 across roughly 1,500 reviews is solid but not at Apollo's level, and pricing per credit is meaningfully higher than email-finder specialists.

Marketing pages make Apollo and Lusha sound like direct competitors. In practice, they sit in different parts of the outbound stack. Looking at how mature sales teams actually run the day shows where each tool is load-bearing and where it gets replaced or supplemented.

The Apollo workflow

A typical Apollo team builds an ICP filter inside the platform (industry, headcount, revenue, technologies installed, intent signal), pulls 5,000 to 25,000 contacts, runs the verification pass, drops the list into a multi-step sequence, and lets the built-in dialer handle follow-up calls. Replies route into the Apollo inbox, and deals flow into the built-in CRM until the company outgrows it and migrates to HubSpot or Salesforce. The whole flow happens inside one tab, which is the core value proposition. The hidden cost is that sequencer deliverability is mediocre, so teams running high volume end up exporting Apollo lists into Smartlead or Instantly for sending while keeping Apollo as the data layer.

The Lusha workflow

A typical Lusha workflow starts inside LinkedIn. An SDR or recruiter runs a Sales Navigator search, opens each result, clicks the Lusha extension, and pulls the email and direct-dial mobile number. The contact gets pushed into Outreach, Salesloft, or HubSpot via native integration, and the actual sending or dialing happens in those tools. Lusha is rarely the only data source. Most teams pair it with Apollo or ZoomInfo for bulk pulls and use Lusha when they need a verified mobile number for a specific high-value account. The credit pool is small enough that you cannot use Lusha as your only data tool unless your volume is tiny.

When teams run both at once

Many mid-market sales orgs end up running Apollo and Lusha side by side. Apollo handles the bulk: filtering ICP, building sequences, running campaigns. Lusha gets used surgically for high-value accounts where a wrong number kills the deal. The combined bill for a five-person SDR team can run $1,000 to $1,500 per month before any usage overages. If your dominant workflow is finding and verifying email addresses for outbound campaigns and you do not need phone numbers, intent data, or a built-in CRM, replacing the email-finding leg of the stack with Mailsfinder cuts the bill by 80 to 95 percent while delivering more credits per dollar than either tool.

Switching from Lusha to Apollo

The most common move is consolidating onto Apollo to cut seat count across multiple tools. Expect a two to four week onboarding before the team is productive on the new sequencer and CRM features. Plan to export all Lusha contact records and re-verify them through Apollo's verification pass before launching any campaign, because credit definitions differ between tools. The single biggest risk is losing phone-number quality on EU contacts, so if your dial motion targets European decision-makers, keep at least one Lusha seat live for the first quarter.

Switching from Apollo to Lusha

Going the other way is rare and usually driven by procurement pressure on compliance. The trade-off is real: you lose the sequencer, the dialer, the CRM, and the intent feed. You will need to wire Lusha into HubSpot, Salesforce, Outreach, or Salesloft to replace those layers, which means evaluating new vendors and signing new contracts. Budget for a higher per-credit cost on Lusha and plan to ration credits more aggressively than your team did on Apollo.

Switching either to a focused email-finding stack

If the audit reveals that 80 percent of your usage is email finding and verification with a small slice of phone reveals, the cleanest move is to split the workflow. Run Mailsfinder for email finding and verification at $9.99 per month for 300,000 credits per cycle (or $249 lifetime for 2,000,000 credits). Keep a small Lusha seat allocation for phone numbers on priority accounts. Send campaigns through a dedicated sequencer like Smartlead or Instantly that is built for cold email deliverability. The combined monthly bill typically lands between 10 and 25 percent of what an Apollo Pro team paid, with better email deliverability and equivalent phone-number depth.