Prospeo vs Apollo: which one to pay for, and when to stay

Pick Prospeo if you already have a sender and you are buying contact data, emails and European mobiles, and stay on Apollo if your team runs its day inside sequences, calls and workflows, because the two products bill a similar entry price for very different work. The test that settles it costs nothing: run 100 contacts from your real list through both free tiers and count what comes back. I have run Prospeo since 2024, on every client account, as one source in the enrichment chain we built ourselves; I have never run Apollo, so everything about Apollo below comes from its own pages and from third-party tests I name.

Compare the plans credit to credit

Both vendors set the entry ticket at 49 dollars per user per month on annual billing, and the same 49 dollars buys very different machines: Apollo's Basic hands a seat 30,000 credits a year plus unlimited sequences, a dialer path and AI research, while Prospeo's Starter hands the same seat 24,000 credits a year and no sending feature at all.

On raw credits per dollar, Apollo's Basic wins: 30,000 a year against Prospeo's 24,000 at the same monthly rate. Fullenrich, which competes with both and has run the arithmetic, prices a Starter credit at about 1.8 cents and says Apollo stays near 2 cents on every paid plan. On what a credit buys, a Prospeo credit only ever pays for contact data, and it charges nothing when nothing comes back, a rule the Prospeo pricing FAQ states in writing. An Apollo credit also covers sequencing, dialing and AI research inside the platform, so the price-per-credit comparison only holds if you would have bought those features anyway.

The billing rules match more than you would expect. Neither vendor rolls unused credits over: both pricing FAQs say so explicitly. Both grant the full allowance upfront each cycle, and Apollo pools credits across the team while Prospeo pools them per seat. One Apollo condition has no Prospeo equivalent: all seats on an Apollo account must sit on the same plan, so a team with one heavy user and three light ones buys four seats of the heavy user's tier. On monthly billing, the figures are not printed in the static text of Apollo's pricing page that I read; Revspire recorded 65 dollars for Basic and 99 for Professional with the monthly toggle on, on 21 October 2026, so treat those two as probable and unconfirmed by the page text itself.

Test both free tiers on last month's list

You do not need a trial window on either side, because both free tiers are permanent. Prospeo gives 100 credits every month with no end date. Apollo's free plan carries 900 credits per seat per year, granted monthly, which is 900 / 12 = 75 a month.

Take 100 contacts from the exact segment you will actually sell to, not a demo list, and run them through both. Count three things: how many returned a verified email, how many returned a callable mobile, and how many of the emails were flagged catch-all or risky rather than clean. The free run of Prospeo's plans has one shape limit: a selection caps at 25 rows, so the hundred goes through in four passes, and CSV upload is a Starter feature, so the free test works through the dashboard. Apollo's free plan connects Gmail accounts only, which is enough for a data test and not for a sending setup.

On mobiles specifically, the published live test is not close. ColdIQ ran mobile finders on 28 European numbers on 23 July 2026 and Prospeo returned 26 of them, plus 25 of 25 American numbers in the same run; the dataset is published and dated. Apollo's pages give a 240 million contact database and a 98 percent accuracy claim for emails, but the page I read publishes no mobile finding rate for Europe. Our own number is narrower and honest about what it is: the full four-source chain we run, Prospeo in front, returned a mobile for 1,798 of 8,948 French decision-makers in August 2026, which is 20 percent, and that is the waterfall, not any single provider.

Check the bounce numbers before you trust either

Both vendors claim 98 percent email accuracy, and neither publishes the list or the method behind the number. Apollo's own bounce-rate guide says it more plainly than any competitor could: no audited independent study ranks these platforms head to head, and bounce rate is a workflow outcome, not a vendor badge. The vendor also prints 97 percent accuracy on one of its own pages and 98 percent on another, which tells you how much weight the self-reported figure can carry.

The tests that exist all have a stake, so here they are with their stakes named. The closest head-to-head, run by smartreviewinfo, an affiliate review site, on 2,500 contacts per tool pushed through live campaigns, measured 96.8 percent deliverability for Prospeo with a hard bounce rate under 1.8 percent, against 89.4 percent and around 6.5 percent for Apollo. Evaboot, which sells a Sales Navigator exporter, puts Prospeo at 5 to 8 percent bounce against 8 to 12 for Apollo. Fullenrich, itself a competitor of both, rounds up every published figure and reports Apollo's measured bounce rate anywhere between 6.5 and 38 percent depending on who measured it. No test used one shared list. The direction leans Prospeo on email data; treat it as a signal, not a verdict, and let the 100-contact run above decide it on your segment.

Catch-all domains are the shared weak spot, and the numbers above are why they matter. A catch-all domain accepts mail for any address, so the Prospeo validator and Apollo's verifier alike cannot confirm that an inbox exists. Prospeo's documentation says its five-step validation flags those domains as catch-all or risky instead of valid, which is honest labelling, but you still decide whether to send to them. Re-verify before the send whichever tool you buy; a dedicated verifier costs a tenth of a credit per check on our side of the stack, and one bounce costs more than a thousand checks.

Switch the data, keep the sender: integrations and CRM sync

Switching from Apollo to Prospeo breaks one thing, and you should name it before you pay anything: Apollo's sequences, dialer, workflows and AI research do not come with you, because the Prospeo pages list no sending, dialing or engagement feature at all. If your reps work inside Apollo's sequences today, the move means buying or building a separate sender, and the 12-dollar-a-seat saving on yearly billing (37 against 49) disappears into the second subscription. That is where the switch causes problems, not in the data migration.

The data itself travels easily. Prospeo exports to CSV from Starter, enriches by API from Starter, and syncs natively to HubSpot and Salesforce from Growth, at 99 dollars a month per user. The one cost jump to plan for: a team whose hard requirement is native CRM sync has an entry ticket of 99 on Prospeo, against Apollo's own free plan, which lists CRM integrations. Apollo's page also lists Outreach, SalesLoft, Marketo, Sendgrid and LinkedIn connections, so an existing stack built around those keeps working on either side of the move.

If you are assembling a chain rather than replacing one tool, the order matters more than the brand: the waterfall page covers the ordering that keeps a found mobile cheap, and putting the catalogue entry first rather than alone costs around forty percent less than the reverse for the same data, because the ordering wastes nothing on rows the first step misses.

Stay on Apollo when sequences run the day

The honest answer to who should not switch is the team that already uses the platform half of Apollo. If your week is built on Apollo sequences, the power and parallel dialer, automated workflows and the AI research layer, Prospeo is not competing with any of that: it competes with Apollo's database, and you would keep paying Apollo for the engagement anyway. A one-seat team running sequences and calls inside Apollo at 49 dollars a seat, billed yearly, has a cheaper total stack than the same team paying 49 for data plus a separate sender.

The reverse case is ours, and I will give it with its measurement. We buy data by the result and send through tools we choose, so a provider that bills only on contacts it actually finds, and hands back the email and the mobile in one call, fits the way we work. Two years in, it has never left the chain, and the figures behind that are in the review: the ColdIQ live test, the 20 percent mobile rate on 8,948 decision-makers, and the eleven credits a callable contact actually costs. If none of that describes your setup, and your setup is a team living inside one platform, Apollo's own comparison of the two, which ranks itself first and I read today, is directionally right about one thing: it sells the whole motion, and Prospeo sells the data that feeds it.

For teams that want neither extreme, the split works: keep Apollo for what it is good at, or drop to its free tier for the workflow, and buy the contact data from a source that bills on results. The worst option is paying Apollo for data you do not trust and Prospeo for a platform it does not sell, so decide which half of the job you are actually hiring for before the credit arithmetic starts.

Prospeo is an affiliate of this site: we earn a commission if you buy through our links. Apollo is not, and we earn nothing if you choose it.