Lusha vs Apollo (2026): Bundled Seats vs Per-Seat Pricing, Credits, Data Accuracy and Compliance

By Laurel · Updated Oct 22, 2026

You run sales for a team of one to ten reps, and you need verified emails and direct-dial phone numbers on the people you want to call. Lusha and Apollo are two of the first names on that shortlist, and on the surface they look similar: a browser extension, a contact database, a free tier, and a credit meter that counts every reveal. The decision is easier once you see that they are priced on different logic, built around different jobs, and cheaper in opposite situations.

Lusha sells a flat plan with seats bundled in. Starter covers one user, Pro covers two, Premium covers five. Apollo sells per seat, and wraps a database, a sequencer, a dialer and an AI assistant around the same contact lookups. That one difference decides most of the cost comparison, so this page builds a worked cost table for 1, 2, 5 and 10 users, with the billing term stated in every cell. After that it covers credits, data accuracy claims, outreach, and the privacy and call rules that apply once a phone number lands in your CRM.

This isn't the category roundup. For the wider market, start with the best sales intelligence tools hub, and for a ranked look at rivals see the best Lusha alternatives and best Apollo alternatives pages. Here the question is narrower: Lusha or Apollo, for your team size and your way of working.

Key Facts

• Lusha bundles seats into plans: Starter has 1 seat, Pro 2 and Premium 5. Apollo charges per seat, from $49 per seat a month billed annually on Basic.
• A phone number costs 5 credits on Lusha and 8 credits on Apollo. An email costs 1 credit on both.
• Lusha says it holds 515M+ verified contacts and 29M+ companies. Apollo says it holds 240M+ contacts and 30M+ companies. Both are vendor claims.
• Both vendors claim 98% email accuracy on their own pages. Treat that as a starting point, not a guarantee, and test on your own list.
• Reps spend 40% of the workweek selling and 60% on everything else, and almost a full day a week on prospecting, per Salesforce's State of Sales report (4,050 sales professionals, 22 countries).
• US business-to-business calls are outside the national registry: the FTC says the Do Not Call rule "does not apply to business-to-business calls". Mobile numbers and calls into other countries are a different matter.

TL;DR

Who Each Tool Is Built For

The easiest way to separate them is to ask what happens after a rep finds a number.

On Lusha, the rep reveals a contact, usually from a LinkedIn page through the extension, and then works the lead somewhere else: the CRM, a dialer, a sales engagement tool. Lusha's plan table is organized around data actions, which are email, phone, export, de-anonymized IP and call intelligence. That's a data tool that plugs into the stack you already have. It's a clean fit for a founder-led sales team, a small SDR pod, or an account executive who wants direct dials without buying a platform.

On Apollo, finding the contact is the first step of a longer workflow. The same subscription includes sequences, a mailbox connection, a dialer (an add-on at the paid tiers), CRM enrichment and website visitor identification. A team without a sales engagement tool can run outbound from one login. A team that already has one will pay for features it doesn't use, though the data alone is still the draw for many.

Through the lens of the people who sign the invoice, the split looks like this.

A founder asks which tool gets a first sales hire calling prospects this week: Lusha for a one or two person team, Apollo if sequences matter too. A CRO or VP Sales asks which tool scales to ten reps without a pricing cliff: Apollo, because its seat prices are published all the way up. A head of RevOps who wants credit use visible and pooled will prefer Apollo, where credits are shared across the team, over Lusha, where credits come with the plan. A CFO wants the clearest total cost of ownership: Lusha at one to two users, Apollo from three users up, as the cost tables below show.

Capability Comparison

Both tools are contact databases first. The table covers what each plan family offers, using the vendors' own published plan details.

Two details are worth pausing on. First, the phone numbers. Lusha charges 5 credits and Apollo charges 8, which makes Lusha look cheaper per number, until you compare pool sizes (covered below). Second, Apollo's "unlimited" features sit under a Fair Use Policy with no numeric cap published, so ask what that means for your volume before you plan around it.

The Seat Model: Where the Real Cost Difference Lives

Lusha's price is for the plan, not the person. Starter is one seat. Pro includes two seats. Premium includes five. Apollo's price is for each seat, and you can mix tiers. That makes the cost comparison a function of headcount, and the two lines cross somewhere between two and five users.

Here are the published plan ladders side by side.

Source: Lusha pricing and Apollo pricing. Lusha advertises annual billing as 25% off, and Apollo advertises a 24% saving on annual billing. Custom and Enterprise tiers on both sides go through sales.

Now the worked costs. Both tables use only published figures. Lusha above 5 users goes to sales on its Scale plan, so the 10-user row says so rather than inventing a number. Lusha has no published 3 or 4 user plan, so at 3 users you'd be buying Premium (5 seats) or a Pro plan plus one more Starter. Confirm how Lusha would quote that with their sales team.

Annual billing, cost per month (yearly total in brackets)

Monthly billing, cost per month (twelve months of monthly billing in brackets)

Apollo Organization at $119 per seat a month (billed annually, three-seat minimum) would be $595 a month for 5 users ($7,140 a year) and $1,190 a month for 10 users ($14,280 a year). It's annual only, so there's no monthly column for it.

A few things stand out.

At one and two users, Lusha is the cheaper way in on either billing term. A solo rep on Lusha Starter pays $37.45 a month billed annually, against $49 for Apollo Basic. Two users on Lusha Pro pay $52.45 a month billed annually, against $98 for two Apollo Basic seats. Bundling does its job.

At five users the picture flips. Premium costs $299.95 a month billed annually, while five Apollo Basic seats cost $245 a month billed annually. Because Lusha's ladder jumps from 2 seats to 5, a three-person team also lands on Premium, and three Apollo Basic seats cost $147 a month billed annually. If you only need three logins, Lusha's bundling works against you.

At ten users, Lusha stops publishing a number. Apollo's ladder keeps going, and you can mix tiers: Professional seats for the reps who live in the tool, Basic seats for people who only need lookups.

Annual billing is cheaper on both sides at every size, as you'd expect. If procurement offers to move you to annual, the saving is real at every size, but check you'll use the whole year's credits, since annual credits are issued upfront.

Credits: What an Email and a Phone Really Cost

Price per seat only tells half the story. Credit pools decide how many contacts you can actually reveal.

Take a single rep on the entry paid plan and work through the phone math, assuming every credit went to phone numbers. On Lusha Starter, 400 monthly credits at 5 per number is 80 phones a month, or 960 a year on annual billing. On Apollo Basic, 2,500 monthly credits at 8 per number is 312 phones a month, or 3,750 a year on annual billing. Apollo's phone number is more expensive per credit, but Apollo's pool is roughly six times bigger, so one seat reveals about four times as many numbers.

Now a realistic workload. Say a rep wants 60 phones and 200 emails a month. On Lusha that's 60 x 5 + 200 = 500 credits, which is over Starter's 400. On Apollo it's 60 x 8 + 200 = 680 credits, comfortably inside Basic's 2,500. The rep on Lusha needs a bigger plan or has to ration. The rep on Apollo has room left for enrichment and AI research.

Rollover narrows the gap a little, but not much. A lighter month on a monthly Lusha plan builds a cushion for a heavier one, up to twice the monthly cap. Annual Lusha credits are issued upfront and reset at year end, so there's no carry. Apollo credits don't roll over at all, so a team that buys annual on Apollo gets the full year's credits upfront and should plan its pace across the year.

The free plans tell a similar story at small scale. Lusha's free tier gives 40 credits a month with no card, which is at most eight phone numbers or forty emails. Apollo's free plan grants 900 credits per seat a year, released monthly, which is 75 a month: nine phone numbers or seventy-five emails. Apollo's free plan also carries a Gmail-only mailbox, two sequences, a 5-chat AI assistant, 100 CRM enrichments a month and 20 website-visitor companies a month. Apollo's trial is 14 days with 75 credits, after which the account drops to the free plan. Neither free plan will run a real outbound motion, and they're best used to test your own contacts before you pay.

Data Accuracy and Coverage

Neither vendor publishes an audited accuracy figure. What you have are claims, and each is hyperlinked here to the page that makes it.

A few readings of that table. Lusha lists more contacts and fewer companies than Apollo, so the two databases are shaped differently, and the totals alone say nothing about whose records fit your market. Lusha is the only one of the two that publishes a phone accuracy figure, and it's a US-heavy one. Apollo's headline accuracy figure is for email.

Accuracy is also a moving target. People change jobs. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports median tenure with a current employer of 4.1 years in January 2026, and its JOLTS release shows 3.2 percent total separations in August, which is the monthly rate at which people leave jobs of every kind. A contact list starts decaying the day you export it. The Salesforce State of Sales report adds that 46% of sales pros with agents say data quality issues hurt their sales, with manual errors and duplicate data at the top of the list.

So run your own test before you sign anything. Take 200 contacts from the territory you actually sell into, with a mix of seniority and company size. Reveal them on both tools, send the emails through your normal verification step, and have a rep dial 50 of the phone numbers. Count bounces, wrong numbers and "never heard of them" results. The vendor that wins that test in your market is the one with the better data for you, whatever the totals say. If you sell mostly in Europe or Asia-Pacific, test those regions separately, since neither vendor splits its accuracy claims by region.

Apollo's Built-In Sequencer vs Lusha's Data-First Focus

This is the biggest non-pricing difference, and it should shape your shortlist before price does.

Apollo bundles outreach with data. You can build multistep email sequences, connect a mailbox, schedule tasks, call from a dialer (a paid add-on at $119 per team a month billed annually, introductory pricing), and enrich your CRM from the same credit pool. The free plan includes two sequences and a Gmail-only mailbox. Apollo also offers inbound add-ons: Inbound Essentials at $119 a month per team billed annually and Max at $639, aimed at forms and website visitors.

Lusha is positioned as a data tool. Its plans are built around credits, seats and integrations, and the credit table includes call intelligence at 8 credits and de-anonymized IP at 2. Teams usually pair it with a CRM and a sales engagement platform they already own. If you want to know whether Lusha sends sequences natively, ask Lusha directly; don't assume it from this page.

If you already own a sales engagement tool, Lusha is the cleaner buy because you only pay for data, and Apollo's sequencer becomes overlap. If you have no outreach tool yet, Apollo's single purchase covers data and sending, where Lusha means a second purchase. Deliverability control is the other split: with Apollo it's yours to manage inside the product, while with Lusha it stays in whatever tool you pair it with.

One caution on the sequencer. Bulk outbound has rules. Gmail requires senders of more than 5,000 messages a day to keep their spam rate below 0.30%, with DMARC and one-click unsubscribe in place, and those requirements have applied since 1 February 2024. A built-in sequencer makes sending easy. It doesn't make sending safe. Whoever owns Apollo sequences also needs to own domain setup and list hygiene, and if you already have a sales engagement tool with that discipline built in, our Apollo vs Outreach vs Salesloft comparison shows what each one adds beyond data.

Compliance: GDPR, PDPA, CCPA and Do-Not-Call Rules

Buying contact data means taking on legal duties. A badge tells you the vendor has a program. It doesn't make your campaign lawful.

If you sell into Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines or Indonesia, get written answers from both vendors on how their data is sourced and how opt-outs are honored under local data protection law. Put PDPA coverage on the agenda for the sales call.

Phone numbers carry the sharper edge. The rules differ by country and by who you're calling.

• US Do Not Call registry (FTC): civil penalties of up to $53,088 for each violation, and telemarketers must synchronize their lists every 31 days. The registry rule does not apply to business-to-business calls.
• US TCPA (47 U.S.C. 227): a private right of action to recover actual loss or $500 per violation, whichever is greater, and courts can treble that for willful violations.
• UK TPS and CTPS (ICO): the ICO fined Energy Prices Direct £160,000 on 20 May 2026 for over 700,000 unsolicited marketing sales calls to TPS and CTPS numbers, including businesses.

The takeaway for a sales leader: a B2B call to a US office line sits outside the national registry, but a mobile number reached for a personal reason, a call into the UK, or a text message can pull you into the TCPA or into the UK rules. Lusha's plan comparison has a do-not-call row, and Apollo's data page makes no such statement, so ask each vendor what they screen against and what you still have to scrub yourself. Neither vendor can take the legal duty off you. Check lists before dialing, record consent where it's required, and keep a suppression list that follows contacts across tools.

A privacy review also reaches beyond the vendor. A fine in this category shows how it can go wrong: France's data protection authority fined a contact-data vendor EUR 240,000 in December 2024 for collecting LinkedIn members' details in breach of GDPR rules on lawful basis, transparency and access. That decision was about a different company, but your legal team will ask the same questions about whichever vendor you choose: where did the data come from, on what basis, and how does a person get removed.

Implementation and Time to Value

The practical difference is who has to care. A Lusha rollout is a rep decision. An Apollo rollout is a team decision, because the value comes from running outbound in the platform, and that needs conventions on sequences, naming, credit use and who reviews replies. Plan a pilot of two weeks with two or three reps either way.

When Lusha Is the Right Call

Lusha wins in these situations.

You have one or two reps. A solo seller on Starter pays $37.45 a month billed annually, and two users on Pro pay $52.45 a month billed annually. No per-seat tier on Apollo comes close at that headcount, and you aren't buying features you won't use.

You want a predictable bill. A flat plan price doesn't move when a rep joins within the plan's seat count. For a founder-led team that adds one person a quarter, that stability matters.

Phone numbers are the main need. At 5 credits a phone against Apollo's 8, and with a published 85% US and 86% global phone accuracy claim, Lusha puts direct dials at the front of the pitch. Test that on your list, but it's a reasonable place to start.

You already have the rest of the stack. If a sales engagement tool and a CRM are paid for and working, Lusha adds data without overlap.

You want compliance badges on the page. Lusha lists GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27701 and ISO 42001, and its plan comparison names do-not-call handling. If a security questionnaire is coming, that shortens the first pass.

When Apollo Is the Right Call

Apollo wins in these situations.

You have three or more users. On annual billing, three Apollo Basic seats cost $147 a month, and five cost $245 a month, while Lusha's five-seat Premium costs $299.95 a month. At ten users Apollo publishes a price and Lusha sends you to sales.

You want data and outreach in one tool. Sequences, a mailbox connection, AI research and CRM enrichment share one credit pool. A team starting outbound from scratch saves a purchase and an integration.

You need bigger credit pools. Basic grants 2,500 credits per seat a month on monthly billing, and 30,000 per seat a year on annual billing. That's roughly six times Lusha Starter's pool, and it's shared across the team.

You want to mix tiers. Professional seats for heavy users and Basic seats for light users keep spend matched to need. Lusha's bundle sizes are fixed.

You want a free plan with more than lookups. The free tier includes two sequences, CRM enrichment and website-visitor identification, which makes a real two-week test possible.

Decision Framework

What to Do Next

Run a two-week head-to-head with the reps who will use the tool most. Give two or three of them a Lusha free or Starter account and an Apollo free or Basic account. Have each pull the same 200 contacts from your real territory, count email bounces and wrong phone numbers, and log how many credits each tool spent. Then rerun the cost tables above with your real headcount and billing term. If the winner is close, pick the one that fits the stack you already have, and ask the vendor in writing how it handles do-not-call lists and opt-outs.

For related decisions, see how Apollo compares with ZoomInfo if you're sizing up an enterprise data contract, how RocketReach compares with Lusha if a lookup-based model suits you better, the best email finder tools page if email is your only need, and the best B2B data providers page for the full field. Our guide to choosing sales intelligence software walks through the evaluation process in more detail.