Apollo publishes per-user prices you can add up today. ZoomInfo publishes no dollar amounts on its pricing page; it prices by features, licenses and credits after you talk to sales. For a company of one to ten people, that difference in how the price is shown matters more than most feature lists.
This page sticks to what each vendor says on its own site as of October 2026, lays the jobs side by side, and ends with a test you can run on 25 real prospects. It won't name a winner, because the right answer depends on how many contacts you need a month and who is going to send the emails. Prices and terms change, so confirm on the vendors' pages before you buy.
What a company of ten actually buys these for
Four jobs get bundled together, and it helps to pull them apart. First, finding the right person at a target company. Second, getting a working email address or phone number for that person. Third, sending a sequence of messages. Fourth, calling. A database sells the first two. The sequencing and dialing are extras that each vendor sells to different degrees.
A six-person land surveying firm is a good example. Call it Stonebridge Surveying. It sells boundary and construction-staking work to small developers and civil engineering firms, and its owner wants about 120 new named contacts a month. That's 120 people to find, verify, write to, and follow up with. Both products can supply names. What differs is the bill and the contract.
What Apollo publishes
Apollo's own pricing information lists four levels. A $0 level with 900 credits a year, 2 sequences and basic filters. Basic at $49 per user per month on annual billing, with 30,000 credits a year, unlimited sequences and CRM integrations. Professional at $79 per user per month, with 48,000 credits a year, a US dialer, 5 mailboxes and automated workflows. Organization at $119 per user per month, with a three-user minimum, 72,000 credits a year and an international dialer. Apollo says monthly billing is also available on Basic and Professional.
The structure is a seat license plus a yearly credit allowance. Credits are spent when you reveal or enrich a contact, so how many contacts you pull decides whether the allowance is enough. Phone numbers generally use more credits than emails, which is worth checking on the current page.
What ZoomInfo publishes
ZoomInfo's pricing page lists sales packages (ZoomInfo Professional, Copilot Advanced, Copilot Enterprise) and marketing packages, and shows no dollar amounts. It says pricing is based on features and functionality, the number of licenses, and credit usage. A credit, in its words, represents exporting one professional or company profile. Its site also describes ZoomInfo Lite as a permanent no-cost entry level, and says paying customers get credits sized to their package.
So Apollo shows you a price list and ZoomInfo shows you a way to get a quote. Neither is wrong. They suit different buyers, and for a small company the practical effect is that you can budget Apollo tonight and ZoomInfo after a call.
Contract and billing terms to read before you sign
I haven't seen either vendor's contract text, and you shouldn't take anyone's summary of it, including this one. Ask for the terms in writing and read these lines:
- How long is the term, and does it renew automatically? On what notice can you stop?
- Do unused credits roll over, expire monthly, or expire at the end of the year?
- What does an extra credit cost once you run out?
- Is there a minimum number of seats?
- Are phone numbers priced differently from emails?
- What happens to exported data if you cancel?
Stonebridge wants 120 contacts a month, which is 1,440 a year. If every contact uses one credit for an email and several for a phone number, that's well inside a 30,000-credit allowance. So at that volume credits aren't Stonebridge's constraint. The hours someone spends sending and following up are.
Job by job, as each vendor describes it
| Job | Apollo's pages say | ZoomInfo's pages say |
|---|---|---|
| Find people | Searchable database with filters on every level | Contact and company search, including on the no-cost Lite level |
| Get email and phone | Spent from a yearly credit allowance | Spent as export credits, sized by package |
| Send sequences | 2 sequences at $0, unlimited from Basic | Check which package includes sending; not stated in the pricing summary |
| Call | US dialer from Professional, international on Organization | Direct-dial numbers as data; check dialer by package |
| Answer replies, book the meeting | Replies arrive in a queue for a person | Not described on the pricing page |
| Price visible before a sales call | Yes, per user | No dollar amounts shown |
Where a cell says "check," that's a gap in the pages I read, not a claim that the feature is missing. Ask each vendor.
A third path: find and send in the same place
A third option is a tool where finding the buyer and emailing them aren't two bills. Rocketship is built that way. The AI worker finds buyers by name, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, replies to the responses and books meetings by default. Launch is $24.99 a month and includes 50 leads a month, plus 100 lead-enrichment credits (about 20 fully verified contacts). Adding a person costs 1 credit, and a verified phone and email costs 5, charged only when they're found. Searching a market, counting it, and reading 25 buyers by name cost no credits, which is the point of the next section. Stonebridge would need the 200-lead Frontier plan at $79 a month to cover 120 new names plus slack. The credits explainer shows the arithmetic, and the Apollo comparison covers the per-seat difference. If you are also weighing where deals live once they reply, Pipedrive alternatives compares the pipeline side.
A 25-lead test you can run this week
Marketing pages can't tell you whether the data is right for your buyers. Twenty-five real names can.
- Write down 25 target companies and, for each, the job title you'd email (the owner, the operations manager, the head of purchasing).
- Look each one up in Apollo's no-cost level and ZoomInfo's Lite level, or ask a sales rep to run the same 25.
- For each result, record: right person? Title matches? An email at the company's own domain?
- Check ten of the emails by hand: does the domain match the company site, and does the person still appear on the company page?
- Divide the monthly price by the number of usable contacts.
Keep the results in a sheet with one row per name; the columns in the lead tracking spreadsheet guide work for this. Say Stonebridge finds 18 of 25 usable in one tool (72 percent) and 14 of 25 in another (56 percent). To get 120 usable contacts, the first needs about 167 lookups and the second about 214. That gap gets bigger every month you run it. Our guide on checking lead data before you pay goes through the same test, and lead generation software for small business sorts the four kinds of tool.
Which database is right matters less than whether the names turn into meetings. Rocketship finds the buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and every monthly plan starts with a 7-day free trial, card required.