Apollo vs LeadIQ in 2026: The House, the Delivery Van, and the Market

A family moving to a new town finds two shops on the high street. One sells you a whole house, kitchen included: the pantry is stocked, the stove is lit, and somebody even answers the phone. The other sells nothing but a delivery van, and it will bring groceries to any kitchen you already own. Apollo vs LeadIQ is a choice between Apollo.io, an all-in-one platform with data, sequences and a dialer, and LeadIQ, a capture tool that sends LinkedIn contacts into the CRM and sequencer you already run. At October 2, 2026 list prices, Apollo’s phone costs half of LeadIQ’s or less. So the first question is never “which data is better.” It is whether you already own a kitchen. The short answer, by who it fits:

• Supered Prospector. Teams whose GTM engineer already builds in Clay. Your Clay tables, and Clay’s waterfall across 200+ providers, as one click in every rep’s LinkedIn tab and CRM record. $45 per rep per month, billed annually.
• Apollo. Five to fifty reps without a sequencer who want data, sequences and a dialer under one published price. From $49 a seat a month, annual.
• LeadIQ. SDR teams that already run Outreach or Salesloft on Salesforce or HubSpot and want the cleanest path from a LinkedIn profile into that stack, with champion tracking. Pro from $15 a month on annual billing for up to 5 users; Enterprise past that.

How do Apollo and LeadIQ compare at a glance?

Prices are the plan that includes the job, opened on apollo.io/pricing and leadiq.com/pricing on October 2, 2026. Grades come from the weighted scoring below, on a lens of a five-to-fifty-rep team.

The scoring, so you can argue with it. Each criterion is scored 1 to 5 and multiplied by its weight, for a maximum of 50. The weights and the scores match the LeadIQ alternatives page, the Apollo alternatives page and Apollo vs Lusha, so the pages read together.

Flip the weights toward bundled outreach and Apollo is first. Flip them toward “fits the Outreach instance we already paid for” and LeadIQ closes most of the gap. Prospector scores 1 on outreach on purpose: it has no sequencer and no dialer, and it drafts nothing. Its coverage score is Clay’s waterfall coverage, and the credit belongs to Clay. LeadIQ scores 1 on visibility because its team analytics dashboard sits on Enterprise only.

Why trust this comparison?

You should not, unless the vendor shows its work, and I am the vendor. Supered is my company. Before it, I started RevPartners, a HubSpot partner that did only sales implementations, sold roughly twice as much Sales Hub as any other partner, and reached Elite tier in 13 months. I have set up the prospecting stack inside a great many other companies’ CRMs and watched which tools reps kept using after week three. Supered is the #1 sales enablement app on the HubSpot marketplace with a 5.0 rating from 122 reviews there, and it holds 4.9 out of 5 from 81 reviews on G2 (checked October 1, 2026). The disclosure that matters: Prospector runs on Clay, and both Apollo and LeadIQ are steps inside Clay, so I have a reason to like both vendors on this page and a reason to sell you a third path. The weights are printed so you can flip them, and the price section favors Apollo because the arithmetic does.

Why do teams switch between Apollo and LeadIQ?

Buyers rarely land on a leadiq vs apollo search from nowhere. They come from one of four situations, and each one is written into a vendor’s own page.

• The second kitchen. A team on Apollo buys Outreach or Salesloft as it grows, and now Apollo’s sequences sit unused beside the real ones. Apollo’s own comparison page, dated August 7, 2026, concedes the point: teams “already invested in Outreach or Salesloft may find this works well” about LeadIQ (Apollo).
• The LeadIQ phone bill. LeadIQ charges “Email = 1 Credit Phone number = 10 Credits” (leadiq.com/pricing). At the entry tier of 200 credits a month, that is 20 phones for a team of up to five. G2’s comparison summary says LeadIQ reviewers cite “expensive credits” (G2).
• The five-user wall. LeadIQ Pro covers “Up to 5 users.” Rep number six moves the team to Enterprise, “Annual plan only,” priced by a sales call.
• The miss. Apollo’s pricing calculator plans for an 88% email match rate and an 81% phone match rate, so its own arithmetic expects 12 of 100 emails and 19 of 100 phones to come back empty (Apollo’s planning assumption from the page’s pricing data, not a measured rate). G2’s summary says Apollo has “a large database” with “variable accuracy, especially outside the US.”

Apollo holds 4.7 out of 5 from 9,780 reviews on G2 and LeadIQ 4.2 from 1,179. They tie on ease of setup at 8.9; Apollo leads on quality of support (8.8 to 8.2) and meets requirements (9.1 to 8.2). Apollo’s largest reviewer segment is small business and LeadIQ’s is mid-market (G2, Apollo.io vs LeadIQ, opened October 2, 2026). In the Chrome Web Store, Apollo’s extension shows 1,000,000 users and 4.7 from 2.2K ratings; LeadIQ’s shows 30,000 users and 4.0 from 57 (checked October 1, 2026).

Apollo vs LeadIQ: which job is each one built for?

Back to the two shops. Apollo sells the house. The pantry claims 240 million contacts and 30 million companies on its pricing page, the stove is a sequencer, the phone is a dialer, and since March 4, 2026 there is a helper in the kitchen too, an AI Assistant. Its pricing FAQ lists integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach and SalesLoft, so you can carry plates next door, but the house is built for you to cook in it.

LeadIQ sells the van. Its Chrome extension rides along on LinkedIn and Sales Navigator, captures the person, finds the email and mobile, and drives them to your kitchen. The reviews LeadIQ chooses to show describe exactly that trip. Alexander H., an SDR: “LeadIQ makes it incredibly easy to go from looking at leads on LinkedIn or any other site to putting them into my CRM and my Dialer for immediate outreach.” Another on its integrations page: “excellent integrations with SalesForce and Outreach, allowing a lot of automation in a single click.”

Fair to both:

• Apollo, the whole house. Data, sequences, a dialer and an AI assistant under one login, with a free tier and published seats. If your job is a five-to-fifty-rep outbound team with no sequencer yet, Apollo is the best pick on this page and you can stop reading here.
• LeadIQ, the delivery and the watchman. Clean capture from LinkedIn into the stack you already pay for, and “Track Job Changes for Champions” on every plan, Free included. A champion who changes jobs is a buyer who already trusts you, at a company that has not met you, and LeadIQ was built around catching that moment (our job change tracking guide explains why it converts). If your job is an SDR team already living in Outreach or Salesloft, LeadIQ is the best pick.

Which is cheaper, Apollo or LeadIQ?

Apollo’s price is easy to read. A Basic seat is $49 a month on annual billing, $588 a year, with 30,000 credits per seat per year granted upfront (apollo.io/pricing, October 2, 2026), about 2 cents a credit. An email costs 1 credit, about 2 cents. A phone costs 8, about 16 cents, and a Basic seat holds 3,750 phones a year.

LeadIQ’s price takes a minute. The Pro card’s static HTML reads “$200 /month,” and at least one 2026 write-up of LeadIQ pricing (RevenueFlow) prints that figure. But the page’s own calculator overwrites that text when it loads: it prices Pro by monthly credits for a team of “5 users included,” and at the default 200 credits a month it shows $20 on monthly billing and $15 on annual billing (25% off). The slider runs to 6,750 credits a month at $290.25 monthly, or $217.69 a month annually (leadiq.com/pricing, calculator run October 2, 2026). Apollo’s own comparison page prints the same $15 and $20. With a phone at 10 credits:

• Entry tier. $15 a month buys 200 credits: about 7.5 cents an email and about 75 cents a phone, 20 phones a month for the whole team.
• Top self-serve tier. About $2,612 a year buys 81,000 credits: about 3 cents an email and about 32 cents a phone, 8,100 phones a year.

Run it for five reps, the most LeadIQ Pro allows, and Apollo’s phone is about half the price, with sequences and a dialer in the seat that LeadIQ leaves to your own kitchen.

Now the part the list price hides. LeadIQ’s posted ladder is the porch of the house: past five users there is no posted price at all. Vendr’s median LeadIQ buyer pays $26,400 a year across 86 deals, saving 21.56% on average, in a range from $5,201 to $66,780 (Vendr, LeadIQ). The median Apollo buyer pays $19,000 across 101 purchases, saving 30.17%, from $4,284 to $45,000 (Vendr, Apollo). Both pages were last updated February 2026. The gap between LeadIQ’s $15 porch and its $26,400 median is the gap between a team trying it and a team running it. The full ladders are on the LeadIQ pricing page and the Apollo pricing page.

One caution: a revealed phone and a phone that connects are different purchases, and neither vendor publishes an independent accuracy audit.

What changed at Apollo and LeadIQ in 2026?

The two shops spent the year building toward the same thing.

• Apollo. It named Matt Curl chief executive on February 3, launched its AI Assistant on March 4, acquired the revenue intelligence startup Pocus on March 19, became the “Flagship Data Partner for Hunter, Salesforce’s New Outbound Sales Agent” on September 15, and on September 30 revealed an “AI GTM System Bringing Data, Intelligence and Execution into a Single Engine” (Apollo newsroom).
• LeadIQ. Its Lando agent went into beta on March 4 (“I read your CRM, understand any website you’re on, and find the right contacts”). On March 24 LeadIQ became a data provider for Outreach’s AI Revenue Agent. On August 24 its official MCP went live in Claude. On September 15 Lando began building “a live, promptable table from LeadIQ, your CRM, or the web” (LeadIQ blog).

Read the two lanes together and a pattern shows. The house added a helper and announced one engine for everything. The van added a driver who builds tables. Both now sell their data into someone else’s agent as well, Apollo to Salesforce and LeadIQ to Outreach. And at the center of each new table sits one database: the vendor’s own shelf, plus whatever the CRM and the web can add. A table you can describe in plain language, sitting beside the rep, pulling from many places, is a good idea. It is also the idea Clay was built on, with 200+ providers in the middle instead of one.

Do you need Apollo or LeadIQ if your team already has Clay?

Walk out of both shops and into the market. Clay is the wholesale market: “Buy data from 200+ providers in one place,” with a waterfall that tries one provider after another until one returns the verified email or phone, and the rule “If an enrichment returns no result, you’re not charged Data Credits or Actions” (clay.com/pricing, October 2, 2026). Apollo and LeadIQ both have stalls in it. LeadIQ joined Clay’s integration directory on September 1, 2024, and both vendors’ Clay steps run on your own account with each vendor. So Clay gets no row in the table at the top: it is the row that contains the other rows. Prospector does not bring its own database. It brings Clay’s waterfall, which is every database, routed. We chose Clay as our only data provider for that reason.

The market has one problem, and Clay says it plainly: “GTM engineers build on Clay.” The tables live in the GTM engineer’s workshop, and the reps live in LinkedIn and the CRM, so the engineer becomes the list desk, fielding Slack requests for lists all day. Clay plus Supered is the best way for a sales team to prospect: GTM engineers build in Clay, reps never open Clay. Prospector runs inside the Supered Chrome extension, on your own Clay account.

What the GTM engineer, the rep and the leader each get:

• Flows built once. The GTM engineer maps each flow to a Clay table or function and a destination, a sequence in your sales engagement tool or the CRM on the account. Reps pick the flow from a Push menu. Your logic stays yours: waterfalls, tiers, tags and sequence variables. Start from the Supered Clay template or bring your own tables.
• A button where the rep sells. On a LinkedIn profile, a company website or a HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive record, the rep runs the table in one click. In Sales Navigator, reps add leads to a prospect list and push the list to a Clay table. Prospector works within LinkedIn’s terms and does not copy search results in bulk; the contact data comes from Clay’s waterfall on the customer’s Clay account.
• No duplicate work. Before pushing, the rep sees who owns the record and whether it was prospected before, so two reps never work the same buyer.
• The plays LeadIQ is known for, on your Clay. Job changers: a past champion moved, push them and their new team into a sequence. Plus research, new logos, expansion, and stalled deals, where the rep adds the economic buyer and two peers before the forecast call.
• Found, worked, closed. The leader sees who is working their list and who is not, and every lead ends the way your process says: Qualified, Recycled or Disqualified. Your VP sees it too, which is how the Clay budget grows.

One naming note, since this search turns it up: LeadIQ’s own menu lists a product called Prospector. It is LeadIQ’s, and it has no relation to Supered Prospector.

The price, done straight. Prospector is $45 per rep per month, billed annually, from one rep, on your own Clay account and credits (Prospector). If RevOps already pays for Clay, ten reps add $5,400 a year. If you are buying Clay for this, Clay Growth at its $495 monthly rate is $5,940 a year, so Clay plus Prospector is $11,340 for ten reps. Ten Apollo Professional seats at list cost $9,480, so on a cold start Apollo is cheaper by $1,860, and its phone is cheaper than Clay’s (our reading of Clay’s calculator, on the Clay pricing page, is roughly six data credits for an email plus a phone). Ten LeadIQ reps means Enterprise, and its median contract is $26,400. The case for the market is coverage, the rep’s own page, and one contract, and it is strongest for the team that already owns the pass: skip the extra seats and get more out of the Clay you already pay for. More on how it works on the sourcing use case and Clay in a Chrome extension.

Choose something else if:

• No Clay, and no plan to buy it. Prospector runs only on Clay. Pick Apollo or LeadIQ from the branches below. If you want Clay built for you, RevPartners, a Clay Elite Studio Partner, builds and tunes the tables (disclosure: I founded RevPartners).
• Outreach in the same tool. Prospector has no sequencer and no dialer. Apollo bundles both.
• A field or phone-first mobile team. Supered runs at the computer and has no mobile product.

LeadIQ vs Apollo: which should you choose?

The numbers above earn each branch.

• Apollo. Choose Apollo if you have no sequencer yet and want the data, sequences and a dialer under one roof. Its phone costs about 16 cents at list against LeadIQ’s 32 to 75, it holds 4.7 on G2 from 9,780 reviews, and its median contract is $19,000. Size the credit pool before the seats.
• LeadIQ. Choose LeadIQ if your SDRs already live in Outreach or Salesloft on Salesforce or HubSpot and you want the cleanest trip from a LinkedIn profile into that stack, with champion tracking on every plan. Budget for Enterprise past five users; the median buyer pays $26,400.
• Neither: Supered Prospector. Choose neither if your GTM engineer already builds in Clay. Apollo and LeadIQ are already stalls in that market, the rep runs your tables from the page they are on with no Clay login, and you see each list become pipeline. $45 per rep per month, billed annually, on your own Clay account.

If you have no Clay, buy the house when you have no kitchen and the van when you do, and size the credits before the seats either way. If you have Clay, a third shop is the one purchase the numbers never support: Apollo and LeadIQ are both stalls in your market already, and the question worth paying for is whether your reps ever walk into it. The LeadIQ alternatives page ranks the rest of the field on the same weights, and the sales prospecting tools guide shows where each one fits in a rep’s day.