If you’re looking for a tool to go hand in hand with your sales process then this honest Apollo review will give you an idea if using Apollo.io as your sales intelligence platform to find and close deals is right for you and your business needs.

We all know the sales is the lifeblood of most businesses, ultimately without sales most business don’t survive so making sure you’ve got all the best sales tools at hand is important. 

What Apollo offers?

Apollo is a sales intelligence and engagement platform, holding over 275 million contacts and over 70 million companies in its database. The platform allows you to search for companies or contacts at companies and get accurate contact information for them. 

Most commonly the platform is used for:

• Building a pipeline - Including finding accurate contact information, checking on scores and signals to help make sure its the right person and ensuring your sales engagement is the best it can be.
• Closing deals - Making sure you get the meetings you want, closing the deals as well as improving the actual management of the deals.
• Improving your sales - learning from what has and hasn’t worked, using their analytics and coaching features to improve.
• Streamline future sales - Making sure your workflow is optimized, automating the parts you can, moving faster on leads and automatically syncing everything with CRM’s and other tools you use.

Their platform is a cloud-based sales automation tool that allows you to do all of the above including sending emails quickly and efficiently. 

Imagine your looking to get in touch with the ‘Head of HR’ for all the top companies in the Education sector in your country, with a tool like Apollo, you’ll be able to quickly find all of the suitable contacts that fit this criteria, find their email and other contact information without spending hours and days trying to do it manually. 

As you can see you can narrow your search for contacts based on a number of different filters including the industry, location, job title, company, revenues, buying intent, company headcount and much more. 

Once presented with the list of contacts you can then access their email address and other contact information such as phone number, LinkedIn and other social profiles. 

The next step will depend on your sales approach, you can either take this contact information and reach out the way you already do, reach out via socials, via a phone call or add them into your automate sequences or you can send them a personalized email.

How much data do Apollo have?

Obviously the key to success of a tool such as Apollo.io is the accuracy and amount of data that they have. From our experience and as a consensus from the thousands of Apollo.io reviews online, Apollo is one of the leaders in terms of amount and accuracy of B2B data. 

They currently have some big figures they show including:

• Over 275 million total contacts
• 73 million accounts
• Over 97% email accuracy
• 90m contacts verified each month

This data is collected in various ways including from over two million contributors, 650 million touchpoints, public data crawling and third party providers of data.

Who is Apollo good for?

In basic terms, Apollo is great for anyone who wants to find contact information faster, more accurately and make the whole sales workflow more efficient and successful.

Having said that, their is a caveat and this is that the tool is designed for B2B data, not for B2C sales, so if it’s not suitable for those who are trying to increase sales directly to consumers.

The tool is designed for everyone who fits this but their core customers are:

• Founders - Looking to improve sales and the sales process
• Sales people - A great tool to make their job more efficient and successful
• Account execs - Makes building pipelines better, winning more clients
• Marketers - a great way to boost conversions, making databases clear and improve your marketing communication

We’ve used Apollo as founders and in more of a sales role and found it pretty great at doing everything it states. 

In terms of pricing it has a free plan, great for those who are bootstrapping or simply want to try the tool out as well as three other paid plans to fit all budgets. So from a price point of view it does have options available to businesses of all sizes. 

Apollo Pros

As one of the highest rated and most popular sales tools online we’ll look at the pros of using Apollo, some of the most common reasons that people love Apollo include:

• One of the largest databases online
• Huge range of filters
• Data enrichment
• User friendly platform that’s easy to use
• Powerful sequences that you can set up
• Rated top sales tool across various platforms

From all of the Apollo reviews that we've encountered as well as from our own experience the Apollo.io platform is one of the best sales and engagement platforms we've come across.

Having raised millions in funding ($250m overall) they have invested a lot of this into making the platform and offering even better and it really shows.

Apollo Cons

As you’d expect with any tool in the space of sales, there may be some downsides and Apollo also has some.

• Occasional issues with data accuracy (as to be expected)
• Credit limits on free and low plans

One of the common negatives is that although there is a high level of accuracy on the data it’s no surprise that some data will be wrong.  This can lead to emails bouncing and if used incorrectly you can also find your emails ending up in the spam folder and causing issues with your deliverability rates. 

You can avoid this by using other avenues for the outreach such as social media but you’ll also need to make sure you abide by all of the rules relating to each social network to ensure you aren’t spamming or breaking them.

Credit limits can be an issue for some who have low budgets and can’t upgrade to higher plans, this will always be the case for those wanting to use a tool a lot but have a limited budget.

Apollo pricing

It’s no surprise that when we write this Apollo review that a large section is dedicated to the Apollo pricing options available to you. Pricing can and often is the key decision making factor for many as to whether to use a piece of software or not.

The good news is that Apollo’s pricing plans have multiple options including a free plan which opens up the options to customers with varying budgets.

For those looking for a quick pricing summary, Apollo.io pricing is competitive and offers a free plan and multiple paid plans that fit most budgets, offering a good value for money offering for the majority of businesses.

Note:  Each plan gives you a different number of export and mobile credits.

Email credits count when you save one of the contacts you find and Export credits count when you export one of the contacts away from Apollo. 

The Free Plan

Having a free plan is always great, it allows you to try out the platform, get an idea of what it offers and often get to use many of the features for free. With the Apollo free plan you get the following:

• Unlimited export credits - 10,000/month per account
• 60 mobile credits/year and 120 export credits/year
• Basic sequence automation
• Basic filters
• Option to send up to 250 emails/day
• Linkedin extension
• And quite a few more options

This plan is great for small businesses, startups, freelancers and solo entrepreneurs who are wanting to improve their B2B sales but may not be at a point where they have a budget available. 

It’s also fantastic for those who are happy to spend money but want to get hands on with a tool first in order to test its results, its data and more.

Basic plan

The lowest paid plan is currently the ‘Basic’ plan which costs $49/month when purchased annually or $59/month on a monthly basis. This gives you access to all of the features in paid but increases the volume as well as adding additional features.

These include:

• Unlimited email credits - 120,000/year per account
• 900 mobile credits each year
• 12,000 export credits each year
• Select up to 10,000 records at a time
• Increased buying intent filters
• Job changes
• Outreach & Salesloft integration
• Advanced filters
• Email open and click tracking
• Data enrichment

This plan is suited to those that are looking to take their sales to the next level as well as those founders and users looking to both streamline and make the whole sales process more efficient. 

Professional plan

As with the previous plans, you’ll get everything included in those but more features and increased credits per year. This plan is for those who take sales and outreach seriously. Suited to businesses of all sizes but often slightly larger companies happy to pay the slightly higher fee. 

Currently priced at $79 a year (billed annually) or $99/month (billed monthly) it offers a well rounded option for many.

You’ll get all previous features as well as:

• 1,200 mobile credits each year
• 24,000 export credits each year
• No sequence limits
• Uncapped sending limits
• Advanced reporting and dashboards
• Email reply and meeting tracking
• A/B testing
• AI assisted email writing
• Manual tasks
• Dialer
• Call records
• And much more

This is Apollo’s most popular plan and in our opinion it does fit really well as a happy medium between the lowest and highest plans giving you the best value for money and features that give you the best experience.

Organization plan

For those where sales is critical as well as larger companies, the Organization plan is often the best choice, this is the most powerful plan giving you all of the features that Apollo has to offer with the biggest limits. 

This plan does require a minimum of 5 users and is priced at $99 per month per user for those opting for annual billing and $119 a month per user for those wanting to pay each month.

Expect to have everything in all previous plans as well as:

• 2,400 mobile credits each year
• 48,000 export credits each year
• 12 intent topics
• Up to 1m words on the AI assisted email writing
• Call transcriptions, international dialing + local presence
• Login with SSO
• Advanced security 
• Advanced API Access
• Track website visitors (up to 500/day)
• And more

Apollo.io discounts

If you are thinking of using Apollo then you may want to check out the Apollo discount code that members of FounderPass can get giving them 50% off your first year of the platform.

This large discount can save you up to $4750 off the cost of your subscription and thus is a popular option for those wanting to better their sales and prospecting. 

Apollo.io features

So what sets Apollo apart from other sales and B2B databases available, we’ll look through these below so you can get a good picture of the features this tool has and if it will work for your use case.

Contact database

A large majority of users use Apollo for it’s database, it’s one of the most comprehensive and largest databases of B2B data available online, as mentioned previously it has over 275 million contacts in its database from over 70 million companies, pretty impressive figures!

This database can be searched, filtered and ultimately used by yourself to find the right people you want to get in touch with. 

Data enrichment

Chances are you’ll have a lot of existing data whether this is from previous sales, prospecting, inbound and outbound outreach and other sources. You can import this and use Apollo’s powerful data enrichment to ensure the data is accurate, update anything that has chances and ultimately make that existing data you have much cleaner. 

Powerful search filters

The ability to be able to filter down search results may not seem a feature to talk about but the advanced filters that Apollo.io has mean it can be really effective at getting you the data you need and that will give you the best results.

Some of these filters include:

• Company name
• Job title
• Country
• Email status
• Buying intent
• Scores
• Technologies
• Company funding
• Company revenue
• Industry
• Keywords
• Number of employees
• Email opening
• And many more filters

Streamlining your sales process

Apollo isn’t just about getting the data and letting you just take it off to your email to pop an email across, they have fully customized sequences that you can create for your outreach including sending personalized emails, email follow ups, Linkedin outreach and calling. 

You can design these sequences around what you know has worked previously as well as predetermined criteria and filters and make each unique dependent on these. 

Analytics and reporting

Of course no outreach and sales platform would be complete without in depth analytics and reporting so you can access, learn and improve on your outreach.

It’s no surprise then that Apollo has the core features you’d expect including the ability to track your sales engagement including open rates, call connections and response rates as well as the ability to measure your ROI of your efforts. 

There is also the ability to use email and call tracking on some of the paid plans to increase your analytical ability. 

Other Apollo.io Reviews

As you’ll know, we love to give you our opinion on software and tools but we also like to make sure you get an overview of other Apollo.io reviews so you can make sure that you get a full picture of the software and if it’s right for you.

Currently, as of 2024 Apollo is the number one ranked sales platform according to several different review platforms, this includes G2 which has over 6,900 reviews with a 5 out 5 star rating overall. 

Who’s behind Apollo?

Apollo was founded in 2015 by Ray Li, Roy Chung and Tim Zheng, the company has since raised multiple rounds of funding totalling over $250 million with the latest being a Series D round in which they managed to secure $100 million at a valuation of $1.6 billion. 

So you’ll be sure that they have the cash to invest in their software and data to ensure customers get the best tool possible. 

Apollo.io review conclusion

When it comes to sales tools there isn’t a better tool in our opinion than Apollo for finding and using B2B data to help prospecting, closing deals and your sales workflow as a whole. 

The plans are well priced giving various options for companies of all sizes, this paired with the full range of data available means it’s suitable for such a wide range of customers that we think it’s one of the best sales tools around.

Don’t forget you can try it out for free or use our discount code to save 80% on your first year.