Conduit vs Apollo
Apollo charges per credit. Conduit enriches from your own data first, then external providers — spending credits only when necessary.
Apollo is a B2B contact database and sales engagement platform with email + dialer + sequences.
TL;DR — Conduit vs Apollo.io
- →Apollo's 270M-contact database is impressive — but the per-credit pricing model bills you whether or not the data is useful.
- →Conduit ships a waterfall enrichment chain: internal 93K California / PNW lead DB → Brave Search → You.com → BYO Apollo / Hunter / Clearbit. Most lookups never hit a paid provider.
- →30-day enrichment cache ensures the same contact is never enriched twice (and never billed twice).
- →If you already pay for Apollo, bring your API key — Conduit pays you back the value by routing only the cache-misses to Apollo.
Feature-by-feature: Conduit vs Apollo.io
Pricing: Conduit vs Apollo.io
What you actually pay at each tier — including hidden per-seat / per-credit costs.
Waterfall enrichment — the cost-effective approach
Apollo's model is: every lookup charges a credit, whether or not the data was useful. Conduit's model is: try cache first (free), try internal DB (free), try Brave Search and You.com (cheap), only then bill an Apollo / Hunter / Clearbit credit if everything else missed. For agencies enriching the same TAM repeatedly, the cache hit-rate climbs to 70%+ after the first month — meaning your Apollo bill drops by 70%.
Internal database focus
Conduit ships with a 93,000-lead California and Pacific Northwest B2B database — tanning studios, restaurants, dental practices, law firms, beauty spas, and SaaS startups. For regional agencies, that's often enough to cover the entire TAM without ever hitting external providers.
BYO credentials, our orchestration
If you already have Apollo, Hunter, or Clearbit accounts, plug them into Conduit's Enrichment providers page. Conduit routes lookups in waterfall order — cache → internal → Brave → You.com → your Apollo → your Hunter — so you only spend external credits on cache-and-search misses. The 30-day cache TTL means the same email is never re-billed.
Sequences and dialer
Apollo bundles a dialer (parallel calling, voicemail drop, click-to-call). Conduit does not ship a dialer today — that's the one feature where Apollo wins outright. If voice cadences are core to your motion, you'll need to keep Apollo or add Aircall. For everything else (email + LinkedIn sequences + inbox + publishing), Conduit is the broader stack.
When Apollo is still right
If you need raw breadth on the database (you're researching companies outside the US, hunting Fortune 500 contacts, or building lists across industries you don't already own data on), Apollo's 270M-record graph is the largest single source. For regional / niche / repeat-enrichment, the waterfall always wins.
Apollo.io alternative — frequently asked questions
- Can I import my Apollo lists?
- Yes. Apollo's CSV export includes name, email, phone, company, title — Conduit's import wizard maps these onto the contact graph and runs them through the enrichment cache to fill any blanks.
- Does Conduit have a Chrome extension like Apollo's?
- Yes — Conduit Lens lets you save LinkedIn profiles, company pages, and Google search results into the contact graph. It also surfaces enriched data (email, phone, company size) on every LinkedIn profile you visit.
- What's the enrichment hit-rate?
- Depends on your TAM. For Pacific Northwest small business B2B, internal DB + Brave covers ~70% of lookups in our experience. For broader enterprise, you'll lean more on Apollo / Hunter via BYO key.
- Can I cap external spend?
- Yes — set per-provider daily and monthly spend caps in Enrichment settings. Conduit pauses the waterfall before exceeding caps, with Slack / email alerts at 80%.
- Does Conduit do company-level enrichment (firmographic)?
- Yes — employee count, revenue band, tech stack (via BuiltWith / Wappalyzer), and funding history. Cache rules apply.
- What about email verification?
- Conduit ships a verifier (catches role addresses, bounces, and SPF lookup failures) on every email pulled. You can also route to ZeroBounce or NeverBounce via BYO key if your sender reputation demands it.
- How do I migrate sequences from Apollo?
- Apollo sequences export as JSON. Conduit's migration helper maps trigger / wait / send nodes onto Conduit sequence steps. Manual personalization tokens may need adjustment.
- Does Conduit have a built-in dialer?
- Not today. Twilio adapter is on the roadmap (Q3 2026). If voice is critical, stay with Apollo or pair Conduit with Aircall / Dialpad in the meantime.
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