Clay vs Apollo: a workflow builder and a contact database
GTM Data Comparison
Clay vs Apollo: a workflow builder and a contact database
Clay gives you a canvas and 100+ providers to wire together. Apollo already did the wiring, inside its own database.
What Clay and Apollo.io actually do
Both sell B2B data to sales teams. The split is whether you assemble that data yourself from many providers or buy it from the company that collected it.
Clay
Clay is a GTM data platform shaped like a spreadsheet. Each column can call a provider from its marketplace, cascade across several of them, or hand the row to an AI research agent. It sells to growth and GTM engineering teams who would rather design the enrichment logic themselves than accept a vendor's fixed schema, and it has become the category's reference point.
Apollo.io
Apollo.io is an all-in-one sales platform built on a B2B contact database it collects and maintains itself, 240M+ contacts by its own count. Reps search it by title, headcount, industry and intent, then run email sequences and calls without leaving the tool. It grew up inside the SMB and US mid-market segment, and the free plan is how most of its users arrive.
Clay vs Apollo, feature by feature
Side by side on where the data comes from, what it costs, and what it takes to get a record into your CRM.
Clay
Apollo.io
Product category
Table workflow builder over a provider marketplace
All-in-one sales platform on its own contact database
Where the data comes from
100+ third-party providers, chained into a waterfall you build
Apollo's own database, 240M+ contacts by its own count
When the first lookup misses
Falls through to the next provider in the chain
Comes back blank; nothing sits behind the database
Set up time
Native email sequencer, no dialer
Email sequences, a parallel dialer and call analytics
Outreach in the same tool
Growth tier, $446/mo on the pricing card
Included, though export credits apply on some plans
Two-way CRM sync
Warehouse sync only, from $446/mo
Not supported; enrichment runs from its own database
Pricing model
Two meters: Actions and Data Credits, sized on separate sliders
Two meters: Actions and Data Credits, sized on separate sliders
Free tier
500 actions and 100 data credits, capped at 200 rows per table
Free plan with limited credits, no card and no sales call
Programmatic access
HTTP API from Growth, full API at Enterprise
Documented REST API
Who ends up using it
GTM operators who want to own the enrichment logic
Reps prospecting and sending into the US mid-market
Clay vs Apollo: strengths and limitations
Clay
Apollo.io
One field, several providers behind it
Chaining providers for the same field lifts match rates well past what one source returns. Clay publishes customer numbers moving from the low 40s into the high 80s on coverage.
A free tier you can do real work in
Apollo's free plan runs a genuine workflow without a credit card, which is why so many founders already have it open. Signup takes minutes rather than a procurement cycle.
Claygent researches what nobody sells as a field
An AI column reads a website, summarises recent news or answers a question per row. Most of what makes an account interesting is not available as a clean field from any vendor.
Find them, email them and call them in one tool
Search, sequences, a parallel dialer and call analytics ship together. For a small team, that is one subscription instead of three and one place for a rep to work.
It bends to whatever your motion is
Conditional logic, reusable functions and a mature template library mean the table does what you designed rather than what a vendor assumed. Nothing else in the category is as flexible.
Depth in the US mid-market
Inside its core segment the database returns solid contact and company coverage, and a documented REST API means you are not locked to the UI to work with it.
Two meters make the bill hard to predict
Actions and Data Credits are sized on separate sliders with token-billed AI underneath, and you pick the provider for every operation — the same mobile phone runs 1 credit to 25.
One database, with nothing behind it
When Apollo misses a record the field comes back blank. There is no fallback to an outside provider, and coverage thins noticeably outside North America.
The infrastructure features start at $446
Two-way CRM sync, warehouse sync, the HTTP API and webhook automation all begin at Growth. Below that tier, Clay is a table you export from by hand.
The bill tracks headcount, not data
Apollo bills per seat and its Organization tier carries a three-seat minimum, about $447 a month at its smallest. Hiring two reps raises the data bill even if nobody enriches another record.
Our Suggestions
Choose Clay if someone on your team enjoys building enrichment logic and you want coverage no single database can match.
Choose Apollo if your ICP is US mid-market and you want the list, the sequence and the dialer in one tool your reps already live in.
Neither one of them feels right to you?
If what you actually wanted was the accounts already in your CRM enriched, ranked and pushed into sequences, Oneprofile does that on every paid plan at $20 and writes the results back.
How Oneprofile fills that gap
One table pulls from 127 tools you already pay for, ranks the accounts with AI, and writes the score back to your CRM on every paid plan.
Difference 1
Enrichment lands back in your CRM on every paid plan
Your CRM is the source and the destination. Oneprofile reads accounts and contacts out of HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive or Attio, enriches them in the table, then writes the result back on a schedule and creates the property first if it does not exist yet. That runs on the $20 plan, with no per-destination fee waiting behind it.
Difference 2
Your own systems become enrichment columns
Bought data describes a stranger. It cannot tell you that an account downgraded a seat in Stripe last week, filed four Zendesk tickets, or quietly stopped logging in. Any of our 127 integrations can be a column in the same table, so billing, support desks, product analytics and your own Postgres sit next to third-party firmographics and feed the same score.
Difference 3
The waterfall orders itself
There is no provider chain to build. We order providers by cost and hit rate, try them until one returns a match, then stop. You get the coverage a multi-provider waterfall gives you without spending an afternoon deciding which vendor belongs in slot three. A miss costs nothing, so a hard-to-find contact never bills you three times for one blank cell.
Clay vs Apollo: which is better for data enrichment?
Clay vs Apollo pricing: which one costs more?
Apollo vs Clay: does either write enriched data back to my CRM?
Can I use Clay and Apollo together?
Clay or Apollo for a five-person sales team?
Clay vs Apollo.io: what does Oneprofile do differently?