Apollo vs ZoomInfo: Who Wins?

Apollo.io vs ZoomInfo: What’s the difference?

It is essential to ensure that you obtain the highest-quality data for your sales, marketing, or RevOps teams, which makes choosing a B2B lead generation tool like ZoomInfo or Apollo a serious decision. 

It’s crucial to look for a compliant tool with accurate contact information. Extra features your team needs are essential, too. 

But these aren’t the only factors to consider. Usability, compliance, and integration capabilities are also important factors. To assist you in making a well-informed choice, we’ve compiled a comparison of Apollo.io and ZoomInfo, with Cognism included for good measure. 😉

Key features of ZoomInfo vs Apollo.io

Apollo vs ZoomInfo: Data quantity and quality

Buyers frequently compare how many email addresses and direct phone numbers ZoomInfo and Apollo.io have.

Here’s a summary of those numbers:

• The ZoomInfo contact database is said to have 220 million active contacts, over 150 million email addresses and 50 million direct dials in its contact database. 
• In comparison, Apollo.io has over 265 million contacts at over 70 million companies, 165 million email addresses and 120 million phone numbers (according to Apollo.io’s homepage).

Both ZoomInfo and Apollo are based in the US, and according to Klue, a market intelligence platform, this is where their data coverage is the best.

According to Apollo.io T&Cs, its extensive database includes user-submitted data. So, by using Apollo, customers agree to give Apollo an irrevocable license to use their data, even after they stop using Apollo’s software. So even if you’re signing up for their free plan, you’re adding to their database.

On the other hand, ZoomInfo has built its platform by acquiring competitors. In recent years, its focus seems to have shifted from providing prospecting data to providing a sales workflow management solution.

Which is more accurate, ZoomInfo or Apollo.io?

Despite their best efforts, no data provider is 100% correct in all areas. A recent survey of Pavilion members who recently evaluated ZoomInfo vs Apollo’s data quality revealed areas where both providers could improve.

Survey participants mentioned Apollo’s weak email verification and missing cell phone numbers, whereas ZoomInfo needed to improve its global data footprint, especially EU coverage and refresh its contact information.

Tired of hit and miss? Try Cognism

Cognism is serious about data quality, compliance and accuracy. It has excellent coverage in the US and is a leader in providing EMEA contact data. 

How does Cognism compare to Apollo.io and ZoomInfo? 

Unlike Apollo.io, Cognism is transparent about the regions its database covers. Moreover, Apollo admits to ”scraping from hundreds and millions of websites.” According to Apollo.io’s T&Cs, users give Apollo a permanent license to use and share any data they submit. This means you’re permitting Apollo to use any data in your CRM in its database. 

When you use Cognism, your customer data stays with you.

Cognism gathers B2B data via its proprietary sources and fills in gaps from third-party data providers, publicly available sources, manual research, and strategic partnerships. The tool processes millions of data points each day to create and update its Person and Company profiles.

Similar to Cognism, ZoomInfo implements thorough data-checking procedures to maintain accuracy and assigns confidence scores to contact profiles in its database.

But the main difference between ZoomInfo, Apollo.io and Cognism is Diamond Data®, Cognism’s exclusive data asset.

Diamond Data® includes phone-verified mobile numbers, increasing the likelihood of connecting with your ideal customer by three times. The team verifies these numbers and incorporates contacts that customers request through the Diamonds-on-Demand® service.

Diamond Data® helps sales teams reach 87% of prospecting lists. Companies are experiencing a 54% rise in mobile coverage, and ROI is improving because 70% of outbound meetings are scheduled using Cognism mobiles.

Here’s what our customers have to say about our data:

Apollo vs ZoomInfo: Who’s best for integrations?

Integration capabilities are important when comparing ZoomInfo and Apollo.io.

Both are end-to-end platforms that aim to consolidate tech solutions. Having more features in one tool means less internal work and a smaller tech stack. However, the downside is that both platforms focus on developing proprietary technology rather than investing developers’ time into improving integrations with other tools. 

That said, ZoomInfo offers integrations with popular CRM systems and marketing tools for smooth workflow integration.

Apollo may not offer as many integration options as ZoomInfo. This may limit its usability for organisations needing extensive connectivity with different tools.

If you already use best-in-class solutions, like Salesforce and Outreach, you may find using all-in-one platforms limiting or buggy.

Looking for a provider that integrates into your tech stack?

Cognism is investing in building robust integrations and workflows to allow your sales team to reduce unnecessary admin and manual work needed to get the data into their systems. 

Cognism's Sales Companion is a game-changer in the SDR world. It works over Outreach, HubSpot, and Salesforce so that you can enrich prospect records without leaving the tools.

Look how easy it is to use on LinkedIn 👇

Intent data: ZoomInfo or Apollo.io?

Another significant difference between Apollo.io vs ZoomInfo is the source of their intent data.

ZoomInfo leverages proprietary machine-learning technology to recognise leads who are ready to buy. It collects intent data from a variety of sources, and it’s believed ZoomInfo relies on bidstream data. 

Apollo Intent, on the other hand, partnered with LeadSift (a Foundry company), which gathers buying intent in several ways, including crawling millions of public web documents, such as social media sites, blogs, forums, research sites, and hiring boards. 

Want access to an exclusive intent data source?

Cognism partners with Bombora’s intent data: 

• Is consent-based and collected from a cooperative of 5,000 B2B sites, where B2B buyers actively research a topic when they’re ready to make a purchase. 
• Considers the historical baseline or typical content consumption when calculating intent.
• Considers the context and the length of each interaction.
• Has a 70% exclusive dataset.
• Tracks 12,000+ intent topics (vs ZoomInfo).

ZoomInfo vs Apollo cost

The main difference between Apollo.io and ZoomInfo’s pricing?

Apollo pricing offers monthly and yearly subscriptions and a self-service signup flow. In contrast, ZoomInfo offers long-term contracts, and its pricing is available after a consultation. 

For this reason, Apollo.io is generally considered to be cheaper than ZoomInfo and other sales prospecting tools.

Despite these differences, Apollo’s and ZoomInfo’s prices are based on a credit system that limits viewing and exporting data. Monthly caps, resets, and expensive ‘add-ons’ often pose some challenges:

• Scarcity mindset among your team — reps are more focused on optimising credit consumption than developing best practices for prospecting.
• Unpredictable spending—e.g. ZoomInfo charges a credit for every company and contact export, which may consume double the credits if the account isn’t already in their CRM. Similarly, Apollo charges one credit for email and another credit for a phone number. Apollo.io reviews on G2 complain about the low credits and high costs.
• Limited opportunities—companies with an international presence or trying to expand to new markets may find the price for ZoomInfo’s Data Passport for prospecting outside the US hard to justify.
• Slow growth — despite relatively cheap plans, Apollo offers very limited access to mobile and export credit (max. 125 and 2000, respectively, in its highest plan). It may become problematic for businesses with ambitious growth goals or companies in highly competitive markets.

Questions B2B revenue teams ask when evaluating ZoomInfo vs Apollo.io

Here are some commonly asked questions about ZoomInfo and Apollo 👇