Prospeo is the sharper email finder per lookup and Apollo is the cheaper credit. Prospeo charges one credit per verified email and 10 per mobile on plans starting at $49 a month. Apollo charges one per email and eight per phone, on a plan that also includes sequencing, a dialer and CRM sync.
Both claim 98% email accuracy, so the headline numbers do not separate them. The differences below come from both vendors' pricing and data pages, read on November 6, 2026.
The short answer
Pick Prospeo if your job is finding verified work emails and the occasional mobile, you want a published match rate, and you already have a sequencer. Pick Apollo if you want one bill for data, sequencing, calling and CRM sync, or need seats for a team on one plan. Pick neither for bulk Sales Navigator imports, where both charge per record and the match rate decides whether the economics work.
Pricing and credits side by side
| Prospeo Starter | Apollo Basic | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $49 ($37 on yearly) | $49 per seat, billed annually |
| Credits included | 2,000 per month | 30,000 per seat per year |
| Cost per credit | $0.018 on yearly billing | $0.020 |
| Cost per email | $0.018 | $0.020 |
| Credits per phone | 10 | 8 |
| Cost per phone | $0.18 | $0.157 |
| Free tier | 100 credits per month | 900 credits per seat per year, granted monthly |
| Rollover | None | Not stated |
Prospeo's yearly Starter costs $441 for 24,000 credits. Apollo's Basic costs $588 per seat per year for 30,000. The gap is small enough that the credit rules decide it: Prospeo credits expire at renewal, Apollo grants its annual credits upfront.
Apollo also meters the US dialer at one credit per 30 seconds and enrichment at one to eight credits. Prospeo charges nothing when a lookup returns no result.
Email accuracy and coverage
Prospeo publishes two numbers that belong together: 98% email accuracy and a 63% average match rate. The first says a returned address is almost always correct. The second says how often it finds one at all, which decides your list size. Its 143M verified emails sit inside 280M verified profiles.
Apollo publishes 98% email accuracy and 240M contacts, with a seven-step verification process and 2M contributors feeding the database. It does not publish a match rate. Instead it sells waterfall enrichment across 20+ vendors, where Apollo's own data fills fields first and partner data fills the gaps.
That difference decides most buying decisions. A single database returns nothing when it misses. Prospeo's pages describe one dataset built from 800M collected records and no waterfall; Apollo's is included from Basic.
Mobile numbers and what they cost
Prospeo has 125M verified mobile numbers and a published 30% average pickup rate. Apollo sells mobile and direct dial numbers at eight credits each, and its pricing page publishes neither a pickup rate nor a count of numbers.
The arithmetic favours Apollo at the entry tier: $0.157 per phone against Prospeo's $0.18. The experience reports point the other way. In r/salestechniques, an eight-person SDR team on Apollo described the mobile data as sparse and the catch-all handling as useless, because Apollo marks catch-all addresses "likely valid". Another buyer on the same subreddit said Apollo mobiles were often disconnected or belonged to someone who had left two years earlier.
Prospeo's own regional table shows where its mobiles are strongest: 70M numbers in North America at a 32% pickup rate, 32M in Europe at 29%, 56M in Asia at 27%. If your list sits outside the US, check that table against your target markets before you buy either tool.
How fresh the data is
Prospeo states its refresh cadence: highest-intent leads every week, the broader dataset about every 30 days. Apollo says records are "regularly refreshed" and that it updates contacts when someone changes jobs or gets a new email, without publishing an interval.
For a list you build once and work for a quarter, job change tracking matters more than the refresh interval. Prospeo puts job change tracking, CRM enrichment and HubSpot or Salesforce sync on the Growth plan at $99 a month. Apollo says it updates records when someone changes jobs, and includes CRM integrations and automated workflows from Basic.
What you get beyond the data
Apollo bundles what most teams otherwise buy separately: unlimited sequences, email warmup, mailbox purchasing, a dialer, call recording and 200+ integrations. A team of eight can run outbound inside one tool.
Prospeo sells data. Starter covers CSV and API enrichment, the Chrome extension and basic integrations. Growth adds search analytics, ICP detection and CRM sync. You still need a sequencer.
What buyers in the threads asked
Three questions came up in the Prospeo and Apollo threads on r/salestechniques:
- Bounce rates. The original poster saw 15-20% on Apollo after a month and wanted that closer to 3-4%.
- API throughput. 500+ enrichments a day was the stated requirement, which rules out tools that throttle at the entry tier.
- Catch-all handling. Apollo returning "likely valid" on every catch-all domain was the specific complaint, and it is the reason several replies recommended a waterfall instead of a single provider.
The replies split along experience rather than data. One user called Apollo the best value in the market, roughly a third as good as ZoomInfo at a tenth of the price. Another said Apollo had been accurate for their team. Nobody claimed to have run both tools side by side on the same list.
Which one to pick
- Choose Prospeo if you want a published match rate, buy mobiles in small volumes, and already pay for a sequencer.
- Choose Apollo if you want data, sending and calling on one bill, or need seats for a team at the lowest cost per credit.
- Choose both if your volume justifies it: Apollo for list building and sequencing, Prospeo for the contacts Apollo misses. That is the waterfall the threads kept recommending, bought as two subscriptions.
Reviews support either choice at a glance. Apollo shows 4.7 out of 5 across 9,600+ G2 reviews and 3.2 on Trustpilot from about 1,000. Prospeo shows 4.6 on Trustpilot from 132. Apollo's larger sample carries more billing and support complaints; Prospeo's skews toward Chrome extension users.
Whichever you pick, the tool decides how many verified addresses you get, not how many meetings you book. If you would rather have the whole sequence built and run for you, an outbound marketing agency takes the list, the copy, the sending setup and the follow-up off your hands.