Clay vs Apollo: Workflow Builder or All-in-One Tool?

Short answer: Choose Apollo if you want one tool that finds contacts and sends sequences, priced per seat from $49 a month billed annually. Choose Clay if someone on your team will build data workflows across many providers, and you already have a way to send. They overlap less than the comparison articles suggest, and Clay can use your Apollo account as one of its data sources.

A note on who is writing this. When we checked Google for “clay vs apollo” in October 2026, the top results came from an outreach tool, an agency that sells Clay services, a data tool and the two vendors themselves, and the prices quoted across them did not agree. We sell neither tool and have no affiliate deal with either. Every price below comes from Clay’s and Apollo’s own pricing pages, read in October 2026.

Clay vs Apollo at a glance

	Clay	Apollo
What it is	A workflow tool: tables where each column pulls data from a provider, runs AI research or pushes to another system	A contact and company database with outreach (sequences, dialer, deliverability) built in
Data	150+ third-party providers, run as “waterfalls” that try one provider after another (Clay pricing)	Its own database: 240M contacts and 30M companies, per Apollo’s site
AI research	Claygent, an AI agent with web research, fills custom columns	AI research and an AI assistant, limited on the free plan
Sending	Its own email sequencer, or a sequencing integration	Unlimited sequences from the Basic plan
Pricing model	Per workspace, unlimited seats; price rises with actions and data credits	Per seat, with credits per seat per year
Free plan	6,000 actions and 1,200 data credits a year, up to 200 rows per table	900 credits per seat per year, 2 sequences
Best fit	Teams with a GTM engineer or ops person who builds workflows	Founders and small sales teams that want to start sending this week

How much does Clay cost compared with Apollo?

Apollo lists three self-serve plans on its pricing page, plus custom plans:

• Free: $0, 900 credits per seat per year.
• Basic: $49 per seat per month billed annually, 30,000 credits per seat per year.
• Professional: $79 per seat per month billed annually, 48,000 credits per seat per year.

Apollo advertises a 24% saving for annual over monthly billing. Our Apollo pricing guide covers monthly prices, the credit rules and the add-ons.

Clay lists three self-serve plans on its pricing page, plus Enterprise:

• Free: 6,000 actions and 1,200 data credits a year.
• Launch: $185 a month, or $167 a month billed annually, starting at 180,000 actions and 30,000 data credits a year.
• Growth: $495 a month, or $446 a month billed annually, starting at 480,000 actions and 72,000 data credits a year, adding CRM auto-sync, HTTP API calls, webhooks and web intent signals.

Clay sells actions and data credits in larger blocks on each plan, so the price above is a floor. A team that enriches tens of thousands of rows a month will buy more.

The structures differ, so the comparison depends on headcount. For three sellers on one year, using only the published figures:

Three sellers, one year, billed annually	Apollo Basic	Apollo Professional	Clay Launch	Clay Growth
Software	3 x $49 x 12 = $1,764	3 x $79 x 12 = $2,844	$167 x 12 = $2,004	$446 x 12 = $5,352
Included per year	90,000 credits	144,000 credits	180,000 actions, 30,000 data credits	480,000 actions, 72,000 data credits
Sending	Included	Included	Clay sequencer or a separate tool	Clay sequencer or a separate tool

Per seat, Apollo gets more expensive as you hire. Clay’s price does not change with seats, but it rises with how much data you run through it. At ten sellers, Apollo Professional comes to $9,480 a year, while Clay’s cost depends on volume rather than headcount.

Which has better data?

They answer the question differently. Apollo has one database and says it holds 240M contacts and 30M companies. Clay does not have one database; it queries 150+ providers in sequence until one returns a result. The idea is that when one provider has no result, the next one may. Each lookup spends credits, though, and someone has to choose and order the providers.

Neither vendor publishes an independent accuracy test, and the accuracy numbers in competitor comparisons come from tools selling a third option. The only reliable test is your own: export 200 accounts from your ideal customer profile, pull contacts in both tools for the same three roles, verify the emails with a separate checker, and count bounces and wrong titles. Our Apollo vs ZoomInfo comparison lays out that test step by step, and our B2B data providers comparison covers a third-party email test of Apollo, ZoomInfo and Lusha.

Outreach and workflows: where each tool is stronger

Apollo is stronger as a single tool for a small team. The Basic plan includes unlimited sequences, a deliverability suite with email warm-up, domain and mailbox purchasing, CRM integrations, waterfall enrichment and a US dialer, according to its pricing page. A founder can find contacts, write a sequence and start sending the same afternoon.

Clay is stronger when the research is the product. Its tables can combine a company’s hiring data, tech stack, funding and a custom AI-researched field (“does this company sell to hospitals?”) before anyone writes a word. That is the work a GTM engineer does. Our growth engineering page explains how we set up processes like this and keep them running.

Clay takes more setup. Every workflow is something someone built and has to maintain. If nobody on your team will own the tables, Clay becomes an expensive spreadsheet. Our Clay alternatives guide covers the tools teams test instead, by the job they use Clay for.

They work together. Clay lists Apollo.io as an integration, with its actions marked “Bring Your Own Account Required.” One setup that works: Apollo for sequencing and as one data source, with Clay running the research around it.

Which should you choose?

Choose Apollo if:

• You have one to five sellers, or the founder still prospects.
• You want contacts and sequences in one tool, with no build time.
• Your outbound is mostly email, with some calling.
• Nobody on the team has time to build and maintain data workflows.

Choose Clay if:

• You have a GTM engineer, RevOps lead or growth person who will own it.
• Your best outbound depends on research a database cannot give you, such as signals from job posts, product pages or news.
• You already have a sequencer and CRM, and want better data going into them.
• Your team is growing, and per-seat pricing is starting to add up.

Choose both if you already pay for Apollo and want Clay to enrich and research on top of it, using your own Apollo account inside Clay.

Where Growigami fits

We do not resell either tool. Our automations service builds and monitors the connections between your tools, on Zapier, Make, n8n or your CRM’s own workflows, and our ABM and outbound service runs the weekly outreach on top: AI researches accounts and drafts each message, our team reviews the drafts before anything is sent, and replies reach your sellers the same day.