Apollo

Apollo is the database and the outbound machine in one subscription: more than 240 million contacts, filters to slice them, and sequences, a dialer and an inbox to work them. For a small team, that bundling is the entire pitch. You do not buy data from one vendor and engagement from another.

Its acquisition of Pocus landed in March 2026, dated on both Apollo's and Pocus's own announcements.

The AI story is the weakest here, and that is fine

Apollo ships an AI Assistant, AI call summaries and AI Research. All three are assistive features sitting inside deterministic sequencing: they draft, summarise and suggest, but the sequence logic is still rules you wrote. Nothing here decides on its own to open a new play. Compared with Unify's signal-triggered plays or Clay's Claygent, Apollo is the least agentic product in this set.

The interesting inversion is that its most agentic surface is the one it does not market: the MCP server, which lets your agent drive Apollo rather than Apollo running an agent for you.

Can a Claude user connect it?

Yes. The endpoint is https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp and authentication is OAuth. Apollo's Connectors Directory listing is dated February 2026 and registers 13 tools; Apollo's documentation describes more than 50. Those are different numbers from different sources, and any page quoting one without saying which is guessing — we cite the directory count when we say 13 and Apollo's docs when we say 50-plus. We make no claim about Apollo's verification status. Anthropic's directory does mark some connectors verified, but its own page says Anthropic "does not control which tools developers make available and cannot verify that they will work as intended or that they won't change" — so a badge is not an assurance worth repeating.

One gotcha stops evaluations dead: free accounts registered on a personal email domain cannot use the search or enrichment actions. If you are testing the connector on a Gmail signup, the tools will list and then refuse to do the only work you wanted them for.

Anthropic also ships a partner-built Apollo plugin as part of its knowledge-work plugins, which is a different install path from the connector; the knowledge-work plugins guide explains how those are packaged, and Claude for sales teams covers which one to reach for.

Pricing: two vendor sources, one page

Apollo is the only tool in this set where the vendor contradicts itself, so we print both readings rather than pick a winner.

As of September 2026 the JSON-LD embedded in Apollo's own pricing page lists Free at $0, Basic at $49 and Professional at $99, with a billing increment of "Monthly". As of September 2026 Apollo's comparison page, dated 13 May 2026, quotes annual pricing instead: Free $0, Basic $49 per user per month, Professional $79 and Organization $119, with a three-seat minimum.

The two readings reconcile only if the $49, $79 and $119 figures published as of September 2026 are annual rates and the $99 is Professional billed monthly. Apollo never states that, so the monthly Basic and Organization rates are unverified and we do not publish them. Get them in writing before you sign.

Then read the fair-use text, because "unlimited" has a number attached. As of September 2026 Apollo's fair-use text caps it at the lesser of dollars paid divided by $0.025, or one million credits per account per year. As of September 2026 that makes a $5,000 annual contract a 200,000-credit contract. Credits are a separate currency from seats, which puts Apollo in the same category as Clay and ZoomInfo: the seat price is not the bill.

Where it fits

Apollo is the value pick when one team needs data and execution together and nobody is going to maintain a waterfall. If your enrichment problem is really a routing problem across many vendors, Clay is the better shape, and Clay vs Apollo works through the trade. If procurement wants an incumbent dataset, ZoomInfo is the alternative. As a sales engagement platform Apollo is deliberately mid-market; the best AI sales tools of 2026 roundup places it against the enterprise options.