Clay vs Apollo in 2026: a contact database against an orchestration layer

29 October 2026Tulina

KEY POINTS

Apollo is a contact database with a sequencer and a dialer attached. Clay is an orchestration layer that buys data from 150+ providers, Apollo among them. They overlap on enrichment and on sending, and the overlap grew in 2026.
Read on 29 October 2026: Apollo is $49, $79 or $119 per user a month on annual billing, with credits that expire each cycle. Clay's Launch plan is $185 a month ($167 billed annually) and Growth $495 ($446), with unlimited seats and two meters, actions and data credits.
Both now run waterfalls, billed differently. Clay's email waterfall stops at the first result that passes validation and bills the provider that found it. Apollo's starts with its own data, then tries your partners in order, and charges every source that returns data.
Pick Apollo when one database covers your market and reps want one screen. Pick Clay when you need several providers and someone to build tables. An agent layer such as Tulina can run Apollo as one step of a wider cascade, or send finished rows into a Clay table.

Tulina sells a product that does part of what Clay does and reads Apollo as one of its sources, so it has an interest in both answers, and that is declared before anything else. This page quotes Clay from clay.com and Clay's own docs, and Apollo from apollo.io and Apollo's own help centre, all read on 29 October 2026. It says what each does better than the other, who should pick which, and where a third layer fits. It is about Clay the GTM data platform and Apollo.io the sales platform.

Two of the pages ranking for this search describe a market that has since moved. One says Apollo "does not offer waterfall enrichment at all"; Apollo now runs one across 20+ partners. Another prices Clay's Starter plan at $149 and Apollo's Professional at $99; Clay replaced Starter with Launch, and Apollo's own pages list Professional at $79. Where a figure below disagrees with a page you read elsewhere, check the date on both.

How is Apollo different from Clay?

Apollo owns its data and Clay rents everyone else's. Apollo is one seat that holds a database of 240M+ people and 30M+ companies (Apollo's figure), an email and phone finder, sequences and, from Professional up, a dialer. Clay holds no database of its own: it routes each enrichment request to providers in its marketplace, in an order you set, inside a spreadsheet where every column is a step.

Apollo's own comparison page draws the line the same way: "Apollo covers the full sales motion in one system, while Clay excels as a data orchestration layer for teams that already have sequencing and dialing tools in place". Clay, for its part, lists Apollo.io as a data provider in its marketplace, so a Clay table can call Apollo as one of its steps.

	Apollo	Clay
What it is	A contact database with sequencing, a dialer and a CRM sync in one seat	An orchestration layer: a table that calls data and AI providers row by row
Own database	240M+ people, 30M+ companies (Apollo's figure)	None of its own; each request goes to a provider
Data sources	Apollo first, then 20+ waterfall partners or your own vendor	150+ providers in the plan comparison (the menu says 200+), plus your own keys
Waterfall	Emails and phones, Apollo data first, partners in your order	Multi-provider waterfalls on every plan, providers in your order, stops at the first valid result
Sending	Sequences on every account (Gmail only on Free), dialer from Professional	Clay's own email sequencer, or a sequencing integration; the plan table lists email campaigns from Launch
AI research	AI research runs at 1 credit each	Claygent, a web research agent per row
Seats	Per user; every seat on the same plan	Unlimited on every plan
From an AI assistant	Apollo's own MCP server and CLI	An MCP for reps, and a CLI and API for builders
Built for	Reps who prospect and send from one screen	Operators who build and maintain enrichment tables

The table is the short answer. The rest of this page is what it costs, how each one fills a missing email, and who should take which. What Claygent and Clay's other agents do, and where they stop, has its own page: Is Clay built for AI agents?

Is Clay a competitor to Apollo?

Partly. Clay buys from Apollo, so on data Clay is a customer as much as a rival, and a team can run both at once. Where they do compete is on the seat: a team choosing where its reps build lists and send from picks one of them, and each has moved onto the other's ground since the March 2026 pages that rank for this search were written. Apollo added its own waterfall across 20+ partners, an MCP server and a CLI for GTM engineers. Clay added its own email sequencer and, on Growth, buying domains and mailboxes for it.

What has not moved is the centre of each product. Apollo is still sold per rep, around the data it owns. Clay is still sold per unit of work, around the data it orchestrates. That difference decides most of the choice below.

How much do Clay and Apollo cost in October 2026?

Apollo is cheaper for one rep and Clay is cheaper per seat for a large team, because one bills seats and the other bills work. All figures below were read on 29 October 2026. Clay's are from clay.com/pricing. Apollo's pricing page loads its plan cards in the browser only, so Apollo's prices are from Apollo's own Apollo vs Clay page (dated 31 July 2026) and its alternatives article (18 August 2026); the credit rules are from the pricing page FAQ.

	Apollo	Clay
Free plan	$0, 900 credits a year, 2 sequences	$0, 500 actions and 100 data credits a month, 200 rows per table
Entry plan	Basic, $49 per user a month (annual), 30,000 credits a year	Launch, $185 a month, or $167 billed annually; 15,000 actions and 2,500 data credits a month
Next plan	Professional, $79 per user a month (annual), 48,000 credits a year, US dialer	Growth, $495 a month, or $446 billed annually; 40,000 actions and 6,000 data credits a month
Top plan	Organization, $119 per user a month, 3 users minimum (the pricing FAQ calls it Custom)	Enterprise, custom, annual commitment
What is metered	Credits: an email 1, a phone 8, enrichment 1 to 8, an AI research run 1	Actions (platform work, under $0.01 each) and data credits (the data, from $0.05 each)
Seats	Per user, all on the same plan	Unlimited
Unused allowance	Expires each cycle, add-on credits included	Actions reset; data credits roll over on Launch and Growth, up to 2x the monthly amount per the FAQ (the plan table says up to 1 month's credits)
Running out	Add-on credits, charged at once and renewed each cycle until removed	Data credit top-ups at a 30% premium; actions only by moving up a tier
Your own provider keys	Not the model: Apollo's waterfall can add your own vendor	No data credits, still 1 action per run
No result	Not charged	Not charged

Clay's page disagrees with itself in one place: the FAQ gives Launch 2,500 data credits a month while one plan card shows 3,000, and the FAQ figure is used above.

The arithmetic that follows from the seats is simple. One rep on Apollo Basic is $49 a month on annual billing; five reps are $245; Clay Launch is $167 a month on annual billing for any number of people. What grows on Clay instead is rows times steps: every enrichment of a row is one action plus the provider's data credits, and every row sent to another tool is another action. Clay pricing explained works that out per enriched contact, plan by plan.

FIG. 01 Underneath the two price lists is the same unit: one call per row per step. Apollo charges it in credits on a seat that expires each cycle, Clay in actions plus data credits on a shared plan, and in both a row with nothing to look up is never called and costs nothing. Count rows times steps before comparing plans.

How does waterfall enrichment differ between Clay and Apollo?

Both try several providers in an order you choose, and they differ on when they stop and on who gets paid. Read on 29 October 2026 in Clay's Work Email waterfall doc and Apollo's Waterfall Enrichment overview, cross-checked against apollo.io/product/waterfall:

	Clay's Work Email waterfall	Apollo's waterfall enrichment
First source	An optional free Infer Email step, then the providers you pick	Apollo's own data, always
Partners	Clay's marketplace, or your own keys	20+ partners in Apollo's marketplace, or your own vendor
Fields	Work emails in this doc; the pricing page lists multi-provider waterfalls on every plan	Emails and phone numbers
When it stops	"As soon as one returns a valid result"	When a validated result is found or every source has been tried; "it does not stop at the first result returned"
Who gets paid	"You only pay credits for the provider that finds a match"	Every source that returns data, plus the validator each time it checks one
Validation	Optional, with Conservative, Balanced and Aggressive strategies	Optional validator, run after each source
Guard against repeat spend	Stop after the same invalid email comes back N times	No re-call of a source that answered for the same contact in the last 30 days

Two numbers from those pages are worth keeping. Clay's free Infer Email step, which guesses first.last@domain and validates it, found a valid email "roughly 31% of the time" in Clay's own test on a software-industry dataset. And Apollo's rule that several sources can each charge on one contact means a waterfall with a validator can cost more than its first hit, by design: it is buying certainty, not the first answer.

FIG. 02 Two records that look the same until one says where its email came from. Both waterfalls can keep the source: Clay can write the successful provider's name in a column, and Apollo shows which source enriched each contact and what it cost. Turn it on, because a bounce traced to a provider tells you which step to move down the order.

Which has better data coverage, Clay or Apollo?

Neither, in general; it depends on your market, and no page ranking for this search measured both on the same list. Apollo's coverage is one database, its 240M+ people, then whatever its partners fill. Clay's is the union of the providers you switch on, which is why teams with an unusual geography or segment reach for it: the provider that wins in the Nordics is rarely the one that wins in US mid-market software.

What we measured, with the denominator. On 29 October 2026 we ran two people searches on Apollo through Tulina's Apollo connector, on one domain, clay.com. By domain alone, Apollo returned 750 profiles. With the title set to "GTM engineer", it returned 93, or 12% of them. The records shown had been refreshed between 6 and 22 October 2026. A people search costs no credit and returns names with the last name masked; the reveal is what costs one. So Apollo's database knows the company that lists it as a provider well enough to find its GTM engineers by title, and on that one domain the data was weeks old, not months. That is one domain on one day. It says nothing about a market Apollo covers thinly, which is the case Clay's waterfall exists for, and we ran nothing on Clay for this page.

Which should you choose, Clay or Apollo?

Choose by who will do the work and how many sources your market needs.

If your situation is	Take	Why
One to five reps, one market Apollo covers well, nobody to build tables	Apollo	Database, sequences and dialer in one seat from $49 a month
You need the dialer and call recording next to the list	Apollo Professional	Clay has no native dialer
Several segments or regions where different providers win	Clay	The waterfall is the product, with 150+ providers behind it
Many people need the data, few of them send	Clay	Unlimited seats on every plan
You push audiences to ads or sync a data warehouse	Clay Growth	Ad audiences and warehouse syncs are on Growth
An operator builds the lists and reps send from Apollo	Both	Clay for the table, Apollo for sequences; Apollo's page describes the same split
Your workflows have stopped changing and the bill is the issue	Neither as is	Read the bill by table or by credit type first, then decide what to move

Teams that buy both usually do it in one of two shapes: Clay enriches and routes records into Apollo for sequencing, or Apollo stays the reps' database and Clay runs only the tables where Apollo misses. Apollo's comparison page answers "Can Apollo and Clay be used together?" with the first shape, then adds that Apollo's own enrichment often covers the core cases. It would, and sometimes it does.

How do you run Apollo as one source in a cascade?

You keep Apollo for what it does well, and put other providers behind it only for the rows it misses, with a table in the middle. This works in Clay, in your own scripts, or in an agent; the steps are the same.

Search wide, reveal narrow. Search Apollo by domain, title, seniority and, for a multinational, the person's country. The search is free; each reveal costs a credit. Reveal only the people who pass your filters.
Check the CRM before you buy anything. Match every candidate by email or company domain and drop customers, open deals and anyone in a colleague's sequence.
Put the rest in a table with a row id, the inputs (a LinkedIn URL, or a name and a company domain) and a status column. A row with neither is marked, not dropped.
Run the cascade. Apollo first if you already pay for it, then one or two providers that cover what it misses, first hit wins, a cap on paid steps per row.
Write the source and the date next to every value, so a bounce points to a provider instead of to nobody.
Verify, then send, as separate steps. Load the sequence, in Apollo or elsewhere, after the table is clean, never as a side effect of enrichment.

At a few hundred contacts a month this is light work. Across several segments it is a job, and that job is what Clay's table, or Apollo's own waterfall, is charging for.

How do you use Clay and Apollo from Claude or ChatGPT?

With Tulina, Claude or ChatGPT runs the steps above as an agent: Apollo's search for the list, your CRM for the check, an email cascade across the providers you hold keys for with Apollo as one step, and, if your team keeps Clay, the finished rows sent into a Clay table. A person still chooses the filters, approves the plan and decides what is sent where. Tulina is an agentic RevOps workflow builder, AI agents that run sales and GTM processes on a schedule or a webhook across the tools a team already uses, with every step and its cost visible; enriching a list across providers is one of those processes.

What each piece does, from the connector cards on 29 October 2026:

Apollo: searches people and companies (free, names masked), reveals a person by their search id (1 Apollo credit), and, on your own key, manages contacts and sequences.
Email and phone waterfalls: one person per call, first hit wins, nine email providers and seven phone providers in a set order, only the ones you hold a key for are called, your own keys first, and the waterfall adds no cost of its own. A dry run returns the plan without calling anything, and a cap limits paid steps.
Clay: writes rows into a Clay table through the table's webhook, up to 50 rows a call, with a dry run first; with your Clay API key it can also run your Clay functions and search Clay's database. Each call spends your Clay credits, as the same work in Clay would.

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT once Apollo and your CRM are connected (and a Clay table, if you keep one):

Find the heads of RevOps and sales ops at the companies in my table
"Q4 accounts" (one company domain per row) and get each a work email,
with Apollo as the database and my other providers behind it.

1. Search people in Apollo at those domains, titles "RevOps" and
   "sales operations", seniority director and above, the person's
   location set to the country of each account. Give me the count per
   company first and do not reveal anyone yet.
2. Keep at most three people per company on the fields the search
   returned. Check them against my CRM by company domain and drop
   customers and open deals.
3. For one person, run the email waterfall as a dry run: which
   providers would be tried, in what order, on whose key, at what cost.
   Wait for my go.
4. Run the email waterfall on the others, at most two paid steps per
   person. Write the email, the provider that found it and the status
   (found, no match, pending) back on each row. Do not verify here.
5. If a Clay table is connected, send the finished rows to it as a dry
   run and show me what would land. Send for real only when I say so.
6. Write nothing to my CRM and load no sequence.
7. Report: people found per company, kept, dropped by the CRM check,
   emails found by provider, not found, and what each step cost.

The process behind that prompt, with every step and the tools it uses:

Le processus dans Tulina

Enrichir des contacts par email et téléphone

Déclencheur · Événement

Liste créée

Un lot fraîchement assemblé ouvre l'exécution, si bien que l'enrichissement démarre sans que personne n'ait à le soumettre.

Claude exécute la suite en autonomie

1
Rassembler chaque contact identifiable
Le lot contient chaque contact avec au moins un moyen de l'identifier : un email, un profil professionnel, ou un nom et une entreprise.
2
Enrichir tout le lot d'un coup
Dropcontact
Dropcontact
Toute la liste part en une seule requête et les résultats sont récupérés dès qu'ils sont prêts, sans supposer un temps d'attente fixe.
3
Compléter les emails manquants
Kaspr
Kaspr
Quiconque n'a toujours pas d'email utilisable reçoit un second passage, email uniquement, via un fournisseur de repli basé sur le profil.
4
Retourner un tableau, signaler chaque manque
Un seul tableau propre revient, avec chaque vrai manque signalé plutôt qu'abandonné, et rien n'est écrit dans le CRM sauf demande séparée.

Voir le processus complet

That page shows the cascade with two providers, one batch pass and a second provider for the emails still missing. The prompt generalises it to whichever providers your team holds keys for, Apollo among them.

What we can say from running it, with the denominator. On 29 October 2026 we ran the email waterfall once as a dry run in our own workspace, default order, for one person at clay.com with a LinkedIn URL, a name and a domain. The plan listed nine providers. Four were planned, each with its key and its cost named before anything was spent: lemlist on our own key, then AI Ark, Apollo at 1 credit, and FullEnrich, on shared keys. Five were skipped: four because no usable key was connected, one because that step only runs on the team's own key. Apollo was the third of the four planned steps, behind lemlist and AI Ark, which is the point: in a cascade Apollo is one source among several, where it is the first in Apollo and one option in Clay. The same day, a dry run of the people-at-a-company waterfall for clay.com and "GTM engineer" planned four sources (lemlist's database and Apollo's search, both free, then a Google search of LinkedIn and AI Ark) and skipped a fifth, LinkedIn's employee list, for want of the company's LinkedIn page. Nothing was charged in either. That is a claim about seeing the plan before paying, not about find rates, which we did not measure.

For the version that starts from a sentence instead of a table, see Build a target list from a sentence, which runs on Apollo and fills a paused Lemlist campaign.

Clay vs Apollo vs an agent on both

The three are paid for on different things, and Tulina does not publish its plan prices, so its column says so instead of inventing one.

	Apollo	Clay	Tulina
Price (29 October 2026)	$49 to $119 per user a month, annual	$167 or $446 a month billed annually, unlimited seats	Quoted on a call; each provider bills its own key
Where the data comes from	Apollo first, then its partners	The providers you switch on	The providers you hold keys for, Apollo and Clay among them
When a source misses	Apollo's waterfall, more credits per source that answers	The next provider, paid only on a valid result	The next provider in your order, capped per row
Where the work happens	Apollo's app, extension, MCP or CLI	A Clay table, Clay's MCP or API	Claude, ChatGPT or Slack, or on a schedule as a hosted agent
Sending	Apollo sequences and dialer	Clay's sequencer or an integration	Your own sequencer through its connector
What a person maintains	Filters and sequences	The tables, their columns and their order	The process and the order of providers

None of the three is cheaper by default. A team with one market and a few reps will spend less on Apollo Basic than on anything else here. A team whose tables are the product will spend less time in Clay than rebuilding them. The agent column pays off when the same list has to go through Apollo, the CRM, a cascade and a sequencer every week, and someone is doing that by hand.

What this comparison cannot tell you

Which one has better data in your market. We measured no find rates or bounce rates for this page, on either side. The figures above are one domain on one day and two dry runs, which price a plan and find nothing.
What either will cost next quarter. Every price here is dated 29 October 2026. Clay replaced its plans once this year; Apollo's pricing cards load in the browser only and its top tier is called Organization in its articles and Custom in its pricing FAQ.
API access on Apollo. Apollo's pricing FAQ lists API access for advanced or custom integrations on Custom plans. Tulina's Apollo connector uses the API key from your Apollo settings, and what that key may do depends on your plan; the contact tools need a master key.
Tulina's Clay connector in use. It is described here from its card; we did not run it for this page, because no Clay key is connected in our workspace.
Tulina's plan price. It is quoted on a call, not published, so the last table cannot do the arithmetic the first two allow.

For Clay's plans and what an enriched contact costs on each, read Clay pricing explained, and a Clay alternative. For what to use if Apollo is the problem, sorted by the Apollo job you are replacing, read Apollo alternatives. For what Apollo can do from Claude or ChatGPT, see Apollo for Claude and ChatGPT, and for the enrichment process itself, Enrich contacts with email and phone.