Is Clay or Apollo cheaper?

For a small team that just wants contacts and sequences, Apollo usually is: Basic is $49 per seat a month billed annually. Clay's Launch plan is $167 a month with unlimited seats, so it gets relatively cheaper as more people use it.

Does Clay charge for failed lookups?

Not any more. Clay's pricing page says that if an enrichment returns no result, you are not charged data credits or actions. Older reviews describing billed misses predate its March 2026 repricing.

Can you use Clay and Apollo together?

Yes. Apollo is one of the data sources many teams call from Clay, and Apollo's sequences can be the sending step for lists built in Clay.

Which has better data accuracy?

Clay's waterfall asks many providers, so it tends to find more. Apollo's accuracy is reported around 88% in the US and 60 to 73% internationally, with reported bounce rates of 15 to 35% (third-party figures).

Clay vs Apollo: a platform you build on, or a database you search

They are not the same kind of tool

Clay and Apollo turn up in the same searches, but they solve different problems.

Apollo is a database with an outreach tool attached. You filter by job title, company size, industry and location, get people with emails and phone numbers, and send sequences or call from the same screen.

Clay is a spreadsheet that can call other tools. You bring a list (or build one), then each column runs an action: look up an email across many providers, research a company with its AI agent, check for a job change, push the result to your CRM. It does not send email itself.

So the question is less "which is better" and more "do you want to search a database, or build a process?"

Side by side

All prices as of October 2026, from each vendor's pricing page unless marked.

	Clay	Apollo
What it is	Enrichment and workflow platform	Contact database with sequences and dialler
Entry paid plan	Launch $167/mo	Basic $49/seat/mo annual
Next tier	Growth $446/mo	Professional $79/seat, Organization $119/seat (3-seat minimum)
Seats	Unlimited	Per seat
Units	Actions and data credits (two currencies)	Credits: 1 per verified email, 8 per phone (third-party)
Data source	Waterfall across 150+ providers, or your own API keys	Its own database plus an optional waterfall
A lookup that finds nothing	Not charged	No charge for contacts without a valid email
Outreach	None built in	Sequences and dialler
CRM sync	On Growth	Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, Salesloft
Learning curve	20 to 40 hours (third-party reviews)	Hours

What does each cost for a real team?

Say a three-person sales team wants about 500 new contacts with verified emails a month.

Apollo Basic: 3 seats at $49 is $147 a month billed annually. At 1 credit per verified email, 500 emails a month is well within Basic's 30,000 credits a year. Add phones and the arithmetic changes fast: at 8 credits each, 500 phone numbers is 4,000 credits a month.

Clay Launch: $167 a month regardless of seats, with 15,000 actions and 2,500 data credits. Whether 500 enriched contacts fit depends on how many providers your waterfall tries and how many columns each row runs. This is the most common complaint about Clay: with two currencies, cost per contact is hard to predict before a run. A March 2026 repricing reportedly raised mid-tier costs by about 28% and cut credits by about 40% (third-party reports).

At three people, Apollo is cheaper and simpler. At ten people who all need access, Clay's unlimited seats start to look better. More on the economics in Apollo pricing and Clay pricing.

Data quality and what a miss costs

Clay's waterfall is its main data advantage. If one provider does not have an email, it asks the next. That usually finds more people than any single database. Since its repricing, Clay says a lookup that returns nothing costs nothing.

Apollo also does not charge for contacts without a valid email, and refunds a verified email that bounces within 30 days. One catch worth knowing: when you use Apollo's own waterfall, it charges per source that returns data, including unverified emails found on the way. Third-party testing reports US accuracy around 88% and international accuracy between 60 and 73%, with bounce rates of 15 to 35% in some reports. If you sell outside the US, test a sample before committing. See cold email bounce rates for what those numbers do to a domain.

Who has to run it?

This is often the deciding factor.

Apollo can be used by a salesperson on day one. Search, save, sequence, call.

Clay rewards someone who thinks in workflows: a growth or RevOps engineer, or a founder who enjoys building. There is a large community and many agencies that build Clay tables for clients, which tells you both how capable it is and how much skill it takes. Reviews put the learning curve at 20 to 40 hours. That role even has a name now: GTM engineering.

A decision rule

No one on the team wants to build workflows: Apollo.
You need sequences and calling in the same tool: Apollo.
You need the widest possible enrichment coverage, research agents, or custom logic: Clay.
Many people need access and you have an operator: Clay.
You want both: build in Clay, use Apollo as one of its sources and as the sender.

A third option, briefly

Both tools start from a description of who you want (titles, industries, company sizes). If your problem is that people matching the description do not reply, it may be worth starting from what people do instead: commenting on a competitor's post, leaving a bad review, hiring for a role. That is what Sluice does, scoring each person against your customer profile, from $9 a month. It is narrower than either tool above, new, and only integrates with HubSpot. Our comparisons with Clay and Apollo say where each is the better choice.