Apollo or Lusha for contact data in 2026?

What each one is for

Lusha is a reveal tool. A rep opens a LinkedIn profile or a CRM record, presses a button and gets an email for one credit or a phone number for five. Plans run from free with 40 credits a month to Premium at $399.90 a month for 40,800 credits a year, with monthly credits rolling over up to double. Lusha claims 290 million contacts, 86 percent phone accuracy and 98 percent email accuracy, its own figures. In 2025 it added email sequences, called Engage, plus 24 buying signals such as funding and hiring. There is no dialer.

Apollo is a platform. The database is smaller by Apollo's count, 240 million contacts, but it comes with native sequences, a dialer on Professional and above and a CRM-like workspace. Plans run from free to $119 per user per month on annual billing.

Where each one breaks

Lusha's credits are spent whether the record is fresh or stale. Reviewers say stale records are not refunded. Coverage in continental Europe is reported as weaker than in the US and UK. Capterra reviewers note that phone numbers are not classified as switchboard or direct dial, so you find out by calling. The bigger 2026 story is regulatory: Italy's data protection authority fined Lusha two million euros in July 2026, ordered the deletion of Italian residents' data and banned further processing of it. If you sell into Italy, that is a live constraint.

Apollo's weaknesses are accuracy and support. Reviews put email accuracy around 65 to 70 percent with higher bounce rates outside the United States, phone numbers cost eight credits and draw the most complaints. Its own Capterra profile shows support as the lowest sub-score. Apollo's pricing page is rendered by JavaScript, so we quote its own comparison page for prices.

What changed recently

Lusha bought Novacy in January 2025, cut about eight percent of staff in December 2025 and received the Italian order in July 2026. Apollo acquired Pocus in March 2026 and migrated its credit system, leaving legacy and new accounts on different rules.

How to choose

Choose Lusha if

• Your reps work from LinkedIn and the CRM and mostly need one number or email at a time
• You call US or UK buyers and want the cheaper phone credit
• You want a self-serve monthly plan you can cancel

Choose Apollo if

• You want to build lists in bulk and sequence them without a second tool
• Your buyers are mostly in the United States and email is the main channel
• You have a verifier in the pipeline before anything is sent

Choose neither on its own if

• You sell into Italy, until the Lusha order is resolved
• You have no one to research the accounts. Both tools answer 'who is this person' and neither answers 'why would this person reply this month'

How we use reveal tools

Tools like Lusha and Apollo are one layer in our enrichment waterfall, not the whole of it. The order matters: signal first, account fit second, contact data third, verification fourth. A contact found through a reveal tool is verified again before it enters a sequence. Any address that does not come back clean is dropped rather than sent. That is why our bounce rates stay under 2 to 3 percent while database exports blind-sent routinely run over 15.

The list that survives is short and specific. Every person on it has a reason to answer. That reason is the first line of the email.