Apollo vs hubsell

The difference comes down to two things: where the data comes from, and whether your channels run together.

Apollo is built around a pre-built database, which Apollo describes as roughly 275 million contacts collected from a network of two million contributors, public web crawling, and third-party providers, with monthly checks. You pay per seat, then spend credits every time you unlock, export, or enrich a record, and those credits do not roll over. Whatever the refresh schedule, the data was gathered before you went looking for it, so a share of it has already moved on by the time you send.

hubsell works the other way around. There is no stored database to draw from. When you run a search, hubsell sources the contacts for that search and validates them at that moment. The record is built for your query, not pulled from a list someone compiled months earlier.

The second difference is coordination. In Apollo, email steps run automatically, but LinkedIn steps are task reminders. Apollo's own documentation states that LinkedIn tasks have to be completed manually and that Apollo does not complete them for you, and in January 2026 Apollo removed automated LinkedIn actions from the platform entirely. So a rep runs email on autopilot and works LinkedIn by hand, one contact at a time.

In hubsell, email and LinkedIn run as one sequence. Connection requests, profile visits, DMs, InMail, and follow-ups execute in the same flow as your emails, with conditional steps based on what each contact does. One flow, one set of rules, one place to see what happened.

Every contact database decays. People change jobs every two to three years, companies merge, domains change, and industry estimates put B2B data decay at roughly 25 to 30 percent a year. A database checked monthly is, for most of any given month, working from records that have already started to age.

Apollo advertises a 97 percent email accuracy rate. It is worth knowing how that is measured. It is Apollo's own published figure, and inside the product you can apply a verified emails filter and watch the available pool shrink, which shows how much of the database actually carries a verified email at any moment. The headline number and the pool you can really send to are not the same thing, and you can test that yourself before you rely on it.

hubsell removes the decay problem by not storing data in the first place. Contacts are sourced and validated at the moment you search, so the record is current when you use it, not current as of the last refresh cycle. Accuracy here means the address is live and deliverable at send time, which is the number that protects your sender reputation.

Apollo charges per seat, then per credit. Paid plans run from $49 to $119 per user per month on annual billing, and more month to month. Credits are spent every time you unlock, export, or enrich a contact. They do not roll over, overages are billed automatically, and you cannot reduce seats mid-contract, so the model pushes you to spend the allowance whether or not the contacts are worth sourcing.

hubsell is €120 per user per month, plus data as you use it: €0.10 per LinkedIn contact, and €0.50 per fully enriched and validated contact with a verified email. You pay for the contacts you source, not for a credit allowance you have to burn before it expires.

The structural difference: Apollo's data cost is a credit budget attached to a static database. hubsell's data cost is per contact, sourced live for your search, with nothing to forfeit at renewal.