Sluice vs Apollo
Apollo sells access to a database of around 270 million contacts plus sequencing, which is ideal when you know exactly which titles and industries you want. Sluice finds people by what they publicly said or what their listing shows, which finds buyers a database filter cannot describe.
What Apollo is good at
Apollo owns its data rather than reselling it, which makes it cheap at volume and predictable in a way resellers cannot match. It also sends, tracks and reports, so it can be the only tool in a stack.
Use them if: If your ICP is cleanly describable by title, industry and headcount, and you want volume with sending attached, Apollo is the efficient answer and probably cheaper than assembling the equivalent.
| Apollo | Sluice | |
|---|---|---|
| How you find people | Filter a static database | Follow what people publicly said or what a listing shows |
| Timing | None. A record is a record | Built in. Somebody posted about it this week |
| Local trades | Thin. Not what the database is for | First-class, by trade and town |
| Sending | Built in and mature | Optional, approved message by message |
| Data freshness | As fresh as the last refresh | As fresh as the post |
Two different questions
Apollo answers "who matches this description?" Sluice answers "who just showed a sign of needing this?"
That is the whole distinction and it decides which is right for you more than any feature list.
When a database wins
If you sell to Heads of Engineering at software companies of 50 to 200 people, that is a filter, and a database will hand you thousands of them at a lower cost per record than any signal tool.
Trying to find those same people by watching posts would be slow and expensive. Use the database.
When a database cannot help
Some of the best customers are not describable as a filter. "Recruitment agency owners who are frustrated their consultants will not prospect" is not a field. It is a state of mind, and it shows up in what somebody writes, not in what their title says.
Local trades are the other gap. A database row for a plumber tells you a plumber exists. The listing tells you they have no website, eleven reviews and a rating that slipped last year, which is the difference between a name and a reason to call.
Running both
Plenty of teams should. Apollo for the volume where your ICP is a filter, something signal-led for the accounts where timing is the whole advantage. They are not really competitors; they are different halves of the same job.
Find out cheaply
Free credits, no card, and misses are not billed, so testing whether this beats what you use now costs close to nothing.
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