Lusha vs Apollo: Full Comparison (2026)

Most people comparing these two tools are trying to answer one of three questions. Which one has better data? Which one costs less? And which one won't wreck my sender reputation three months in?

All three are the right questions. Most comparisons don't actually answer them.

I spent time going through both tools' official product pages, pricing pages, G2 review data, and third-party accuracy tests to get numbers I could actually stand behind. What I found is that both tools are widely misrepresented, usually in their own favor. Apollo markets a 275M+ database. The reality of that number is a lot messier. Lusha claims 85% phone accuracy. Independent testing puts it closer to 62-68%.

None of that makes either tool bad. It just means you need better information than the marketing copy gives you.

Here's what's actually true about both.

What Each Tool Is Built For

These two tools solve different problems. That framing matters before you look at any feature.

Lusha is a data and intelligence layer. It started as a Chrome extension you'd open while browsing LinkedIn to pull verified contact details. That origin still defines how most people use it. You use Lusha to find and verify contact information, enrich CRM records, and trigger outreach based on buying signals like job changes and funding rounds. It doesn't try to be your sequencer. If you already have Outreach, Salesloft, or HubSpot Sequences, Lusha feeds them better data.

Apollo is an all-in-one GTM platform. It combines a contact database with email sequencing, a built-in dialer (on Professional and above), intent data, and a basic CRM layer. The pitch is that you can replace multiple tools with one. For a team that has no outbound stack yet, that's a real advantage. The trade-off is depth. Every module in Apollo does the job, but none of them are best-in-class. I'll get into where that hurts you in practice.

The Database: What the Numbers Actually Mean

Apollo's 275M Claim vs What You Can Actually Use

Apollo markets a 275M+ contact database. That's the number you see in every ad, comparison article, and G2 summary. Here's the part those same articles leave out.

Apply the "Verified Emails" filter inside Apollo and the database drops from 275M to roughly 96M contacts. 65% of Apollo's total database has unverified emails.

That's not a knock on Apollo. It's just how their data model works. They pull from a 2 million+ contributor network, public web crawling, engagement signals, and third-party providers. The result is one of the largest prospecting databases in B2B sales, with real variation in how fresh and verified each record actually is. When G2 users report email bounce rates of 15-25% on Apollo-sourced contacts, this is why. You're often pulling from the unverified portion without realizing it.

For context: the accepted standard for cold email bounce rates is under 5%. Anything above that starts damaging your sender domain over time. At 15-25%, you're not just wasting credits. You're burning infrastructure.

What to do: Always filter to "Verified Emails" inside Apollo before building lists. You'll be working with 96M contacts instead of 275M, but you'll be working with contacts that don't crater your deliverability. Most experienced Apollo users know this. Most new ones learn it the hard way.

Lusha's 280M and the Phone Accuracy Gap

Lusha's official data page lists 280M+ verified contacts, 280M+ direct dials, and 152M+ emails across 30M+ company profiles. By raw database size, Lusha is now larger than Apollo. Most comparison articles still write it the other way around. (That gap has closed and flipped in the last 18 months.)

Lusha claims 98% email deliverability and 85% phone accuracy. The email number is close to what third-party testing shows. The phone accuracy number is not.

Independent testing published by CheckThat.ai ran Lusha against a sample of B2B contacts and found phone accuracy landing between 62% and 68%. G2's aggregated accuracy rating (based on 609 user responses) puts Lusha at 7.6 out of 10 for contact data accuracy.

62-68% phone accuracy means roughly one in three phone reveals connects to the wrong person, a disconnected line, or an outdated number. For a team paying 10 credits per phone reveal (more on that below), that math gets painful fast.

The b2b data decay problem underlies both tools' accuracy issues. B2B contact data decays at roughly 30% per year. Phone numbers go stale faster than emails. Any tool making absolute accuracy claims at 280M+ scale should be viewed with some skepticism.

Pricing: The Real Cost Per Contact

This is where most people get surprised. Both tools have credit systems that look simple and get expensive fast.

Lusha Pricing (2026)

Lusha removed its paid plan prices from its public pricing page. You now have to contact sales to get a quote, which makes comparing plans harder than it should be.

Here's what is publicly confirmed on their official pricing page: the credit system. Email reveal costs 1 credit. Phone reveal costs 10 credits. That's a recent change. Lusha previously charged 5 credits per phone. They doubled it. Most comparison articles still use the old number.

Based on third-party sources and procurement data, Lusha's paid plans fall roughly here:

The credit math that matters most: if you want a full contact reveal (email + phone), that's 11 credits per person. On a Pro plan with 250 credits per month, you can fully enrich 22 contacts. For a 3-person team, that's about 7 fully enriched contacts per rep per month.

That's not a typo. Seven fully enriched contacts per SDR per month.

Phone-first outbound teams will hit that ceiling on day two. This is why most Lusha users end up using it for email enrichment and relying on a different source for direct dials, or upgrading to Premium at significantly higher cost.

Unused credits on monthly plans roll over up to twice the monthly limit. On annual plans, credits are granted upfront and expire at year end.

For a detailed breakdown of how the Apollo side compares, the apollo.io pricing breakdown is worth reading before you budget.

Apollo Pricing (2026)

Apollo's pricing is publicly listed and has stayed consistent:

Unlimited email credits sounds like a major win. In practice it comes with a ~250 emails per day per rep fair use cap. For most teams that's fine. Where Apollo gets constrictive is mobile credits.

75 mobile credits per month on Basic means 3 verified dials per working day. A rep running any serious cold calling motion will exhaust that before the end of week three. At that point you're looking at either upgrading to Professional or supplementing with another data source.

The per-seat model also compounds fast. Five reps on Professional costs $395 per month. Add in the cost of a dedicated email sender (because experienced teams don't use Apollo's sequencer for high-volume cold email, for reasons I'll cover below) and you're at $550-700 per month before you've accounted for overages.

Real-world total cost of ownership on Apollo, according to Salesmotion's analysis of actual customer invoices, runs $150-$400 per user per month once credit overages and add-ons are factored in. The $49 headline is the floor, not the average.

Features: Where Each Tool Actually Wins

Search and Filter Depth

Apollo wins this clearly. 200+ filters: job title, seniority, company size, revenue, funding stage, technology stack, hiring trends, job change recency, buying intent. There's a natural language search that lets reps describe their ICP in plain English and get a filtered result without touching a single dropdown. For building large, highly targeted lists from scratch, Apollo's search is the best in its price range. Full stop.

Lusha's search is competent but narrower. It's more effective as a contact reveal tool on top of LinkedIn browsing than as a cold list-building engine. The AI Recommendations feature surfaces ICP-matched contacts based on your history. Useful. Not as flexible as Apollo's raw filter depth.

Outreach and Sequences

Apollo includes multi-step email sequences, a built-in dialer (Professional and above), LinkedIn task steps, call recording, and AI email writing. For a 1-3 person team with no existing stack, this replaces several tools at once. Genuinely useful.

Here's the problem, and it's well-documented in G2 reviews: sending high-volume cold email through Apollo's native sequencer damages your sender reputation over time. One G2 reviewer tracked average inbox rates dropping from 65% in month one to 23% by month six while sending from Apollo's infrastructure. Another reported bounce rates "consistently above 20%" on Apollo-sourced contacts sent through Apollo sequences.

Most experienced outbound teams I've seen end up using Apollo for prospecting data and piping leads into Instantly, Smartlead, or Lemlist for actual sends. Which defeats the one-tool-for-everything pitch and adds another $50-100 per month to the stack.

Lusha's sequencing product (Engage) is newer and more limited. If you're buying Lusha, you're buying it for the data, not the outreach. Budget for a separate sequencer from day one.

CRM Enrichment

Both tools connect to Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho. Apollo's enrichment covers bi-directional sync, CSV uploads, and API. Lusha's enrichment runs on a similar architecture with daily AI cross-referencing to catch stale records.

One thing that rarely gets addressed in comparison articles: both are single-source enrichment. A single provider, no matter how large the database, maxes out at 40-60% field coverage on a diverse B2B list. For teams where crm data enrichment completeness is a priority, waterfall enrichment across multiple providers is the only way to consistently clear 80%+ coverage. Neither Apollo nor Lusha alone gets you there.

Intent Data and Buying Signals

Apollo includes Bombora-powered buying intent on every paid plan. You can filter prospects by companies actively researching specific topics. For demand-gen teams and ABM campaigns, this adds genuine prioritization value.

Lusha's buying signals operate differently. They're contact-level: job changes, promotions, new roles, funding rounds, hiring surges, and website visitor intent. Apollo's signals are primarily account-level. Lusha's are contact-level. For outbound teams that care about reaching a specific person at the right moment (not just the right company), Lusha's signal depth is the more useful layer.

For teams evaluating dedicated intent platforms, the best intent data providers guide covers what's available beyond what's built into either tool.

International Coverage: Where Both Fall Short

I'll be direct here because most articles aren't.

Both Apollo and Lusha have significant coverage gaps outside North America and the UK. The gap is larger for Apollo.

Apollo's own documentation has at points recommended customers exclude EU data to limit GDPR exposure. More than 60% of Apollo's contacts are US-based. In real-world tests, Apollo's data accuracy in the US runs 80-88%. Outside the US, it drops to 60-73%. In APAC and LATAM specifically, G2 reviewers consistently report outdated job titles, wrong phone numbers, and email addresses that go nowhere.

Lusha's European coverage is better, particularly in Western Europe. Their data across APAC and LATAM shows higher bounce rates in G2 reviews, though they've invested more in these regions than Apollo has. If you sell into Southeast Asia or South America, expect to need a supplementary source regardless of which tool you start with.

This matters most if your ICP spans multiple geographies. Testing each tool against 50 real contacts from your specific target market, before signing an annual contract, is not optional. It's basic due diligence.

Compliance

This section matters more than most buying teams treat it.

Lusha holds GDPR certification, CCPA compliance, ISO 27701, ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, and TRUSTe Responsible AI certification. Third-party verified, not self-declared.

Apollo is GDPR "compliant" per its own website. It does not hold formal GDPR certification from an accredited body. That is self-declaration.

For teams selling into regulated industries, or any company where vendors go through InfoSec review, the Lusha certification stack is a real differentiator. Legal teams ask for ISO 27701 and SOC 2 documentation. Lusha can produce them. Apollo cannot.

If this matters for your team, the compliant b2b data guide and our detailed breakdown of GDPR and cold calling are worth reading before you commit.

Quick Comparison Table

Who Should Actually Use Lusha

Small teams doing phone-first outbound in North America and Western Europe who already have a sequencer and need a clean, verified data layer on top of it. Lusha plugs into your existing stack without replacing anything.

Companies in regulated industries where GDPR certification matters for procurement. Financial services, healthcare tech, legal. The ISO 27701 and SOC 2 certifications close deals that Apollo's self-declaration won't.

RevOps teams running systematic CRM enrichment. Lusha's daily contact change tracking and API enrichment reduce the manual cleanup that accumulates when records go stale. The bad crm data problem is real and Lusha addresses it reasonably well at the Pro level.

Teams where data quality matters more than outreach volume. If you'd rather have 22 highly verified contacts per month than 1,000 unverified ones, Lusha's model fits. If you need volume, it doesn't.

Who Should Actually Use Apollo

Early-stage teams (pre-Series A to Series B) that have no outbound stack and need to get something running fast. Apollo replaces a data provider, a sequencer, and parts of a CRM for one monthly fee. For a 1-3 person team, that's genuinely efficient.

Email-first outbound teams targeting US-based prospects. The unlimited email credits, deep filter options, and Bombora intent data make Apollo strong for email-heavy motions where mobile connects aren't the primary channel.

Founders doing their own outbound. Apollo's free plan with access to 275M contacts and basic sequencing is one of the most generous free tiers in the market. You can run real campaigns before spending a dollar.

Teams that use the "Verified Emails" filter. Worth repeating: if you filter to verified contacts only, Apollo's data quality improves significantly. Teams that do this consistently report much better deliverability than the average review suggests.

When Neither Fully Fits

Both tools share the same structural weakness: they're single-source providers with meaningful international coverage gaps, credit systems that get expensive for phone-heavy teams, and accuracy numbers that diverge from their own claims at scale.

I think the bigger problem is what happens 60 to 90 days in. Apollo teams often realize they need a separate sending tool because the deliverability degrades. Lusha teams on Pro plans hit their credit ceiling by week two if they're doing real phone prospecting. Both scenarios lead to either upgrading (which adds cost) or supplementing (which adds complexity).

If your team's outbound requires strong US mobile coverage, genuine global reach, and real-time verification at the point of use instead of batch processing, SMARTe is worth evaluating seriously. The database sits at 289M+ verified B2B contacts globally, with 75%+ US mobile (direct dial) coverage. That's significantly above what either Apollo or Lusha consistently delivers on phone data. Global direct dial coverage is 50%+, with real depth in APAC and LATAM, not just US and UK.

The pricing model is also different. No per-seat charges on the Pro tier, which means a team of five SDRs doesn't pay five times the single-user rate. And verification happens in real time at the point of use, not on a batch refresh cycle.

See how SMARTe stacks up against both tools, or try it free at smarte.pro. No credit card required.

For more options, the apollo.io alternatives guide and the lusha alternatives page both cover the broader landscape.

The Bottom Line

Apollo is the right starting point if you need an all-in-one stack with zero upfront infrastructure and US-focused email outreach. Its filter depth and free plan are genuinely hard to beat at the price point. Just filter to verified contacts, use a dedicated sender for volume sends, and plan for the credit ceiling on phone data.

Lusha is the right choice if you care about compliance certifications, need clean data for an existing stack, and are primarily targeting North America or Western Europe. Understand that the 10-credit phone reveal cost makes phone-heavy outbound expensive fast, and that independent accuracy testing puts phone data closer to 62-68% than the claimed 85%.

Both tools are honest about their strengths. Less honest about their limits. Now you know both.