A lighter, open source Apollo.io alternative

Why do teams look for an Apollo.io alternative?

Teams look for an Apollo.io alternative when seats and credits start to add up. Apollo charges for every user, then meters the data each user reveals. Small teams that mostly need verified emails and a way to send to them often want something lighter, with a simpler bill.

Apollo.io is a sales data platform. It pairs a large B2B contact database with sequences, a dialer and basic deal tracking. Its free plan makes it easy to start. The costs arrive as the team grows:

• Seats. Every rep needs a paid seat, and the top plan needs at least three.
• Credits. Each email you reveal costs a credit. Exports to CSV or a CRM use credits too.
• Extra tools. Most teams keep their records in a CRM, and run newsletters in yet another tool.

Each extra tool also holds a copy of your contacts. Under the GDPR, you answer for every copy, and fines can reach 4% of yearly global turnover. Fewer copies means less to secure.

How much does Apollo.io cost?

Apollo.io costs $49 (Basic), $79 (Professional) or $119 (Organization) per seat per month on yearly billing, according to the Apollo.io pricing page. Monthly billing costs more: $65 for Basic and $99 for Professional. We compared every plan on 26 September 2026.

So a five-person team on Professional pays $395 a month. That is $4,740 a year, before any extra credits. We found that the free plan is tight for real outbound work. It allows two sequences and 250 email sends a day.

MagpieCRM charges for the work, not the headcount. On Magpie Cloud you pay £0.004 per prospect credit (1 for each prospect a search shows you)$0.006 per prospect credit (1 for each prospect a search shows you), 1 prospect credit (£0.004)1 prospect credit ($0.006) per verified email reveal and £0.15 per 1,000$0.25 per 1,000 emails sent. You choose a monthly allowance of each, paid up front, from £10/month$15/month:

• 1,000 prospects found, 600 verified email reveals and 25,000 emails sent a month comes to £10.15 on Magpie Cloud (1,600 prospect credits and the emails)1,000 prospects found, 600 verified email reveals and 25,000 emails sent a month comes to $15.85 on Magpie Cloud (1,600 prospect credits and the emails).
• 2,500 prospects found, 1,500 verified email reveals and 25,000 emails sent a month comes to £19.75 on Magpie Cloud (4,000 prospect credits and the emails)2,500 prospects found, 1,500 verified email reveals and 25,000 emails sent a month comes to $30.25 on Magpie Cloud (4,000 prospect credits and the emails).

Unused allowance does not roll over. If you run out, you can upgrade and pay the difference for the rest of the month. Self-hosted MagpieCRM is free. You pay your data and email providers directly.

MagpieCRM vs Apollo.io: feature comparison

MagpieCRM and Apollo.io both find B2B contacts and their emails, but Apollo.io does far more. MagpieCRM is a smaller, open source tool for prospecting and email campaigns. The table puts the two side by side. Apollo.io details come from the Apollo.io pricing page.

The main difference is scope. Apollo.io is a large data and outreach platform that feeds your CRM. MagpieCRM finds verified contacts, emails them in campaigns or short email sequences, and tracks the deals that follow in a pipeline.

Where is Apollo.io stronger than MagpieCRM?

Apollo.io is stronger on raw data, calling and outreach. The Apollo.io pricing page lists over 240 million contacts and 30 million companies, with mobile numbers. It also has a parallel dialer, call recording, website visitor tracking and multichannel sequences.

Apollo.io is likely the better fit if:

• Your team lives on cold calls to mobile numbers.
• You need sequences that mix email with calls, LinkedIn steps and A/B tests.
• You need a very large database inside the tool, with no setup.

MagpieCRM is early access software, at version 0.9.136. It is built around verified work emails, simple campaigns and email sequences. For a small team that mostly emails, that trade can be worth it. Some teams keep Apollo for calls and multichannel sequences, and use MagpieCRM for email outreach and newsletters.

What do you get with MagpieCRM?

MagpieCRM gives small B2B teams, founders and agencies one open source tool to find verified contacts and email them. We built MagpieCRM to keep that job simple and cheap. Here is what the app includes today, at version 0.9.136:

• Prospect search. Search companies by industry, headcount and country. Search people by title, seniority, industry and country.
• Verified emails. Each email is checked with the company's mail server. Only verified emails are saved by default.
• Contacts and lists. Import from CSV or paste, add custom fields, build lists and personas, and export any time.
• Campaigns. Build emails with drag and drop or a template, schedule them, and track opens and clicks.
• Sequences. Send a few plain-text emails to each person, days apart. A sequence stops for a person when they reply, unsubscribe or bounce.
• Deals and pipelines. Track deals on a drag-and-drop board, with a value, owner and close date. Run more than one pipeline, each with its own stages.
• Forms and surveys. Collect sign-ups through forms or an API, and run surveys with branching.
• AI. Maggy, the copilot, on Cloud (self-hosted, it runs on your own Anthropic or OpenAI key), and an MCP server for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and the OpenAI Codex CLI.

MagpieCRM keeps only a prospect's name, title, seniority, company, domain, country and profile URL. Search results are never stored.

How does MagpieCRM verify emails on Magpie Cloud?

MagpieCRM verifies each email by asking the company's mail server if the address exists. On Magpie Cloud, these checks run from our own pool of verification IPs, with our own verification domain. Your domain and your servers are never used for verification, so your reputation is not at risk.

• Checks are spread across the pool and rate-limited per IP, per mail provider and per company.
• If one IP is refused, the check is retried on another.
• Our IPs and verification domain are checked against blocklists every 6 hours. A listed IP is taken out of use until it is clean.
• Prospect data is included, so you need no SocialFetch account of your own.
• Sending needs only a few DNS records, and bounces and complaints are handled for you.

Self-hosting is free, but verification takes real work. You need outbound port 25, which most cloud providers block. You also need clean proxy IPs, reverse DNS and SPF for a verification domain, blocklist checks and rate-limit tuning. Then add your own SocialFetch and sending accounts. On Cloud, updates are also applied for you.

How do you move from Apollo.io to MagpieCRM?

You move from Apollo.io by exporting your contacts and lists to CSV, then importing them into MagpieCRM. Then set up sending and build your first campaign or sequence. A sequence sends your follow-ups for you and stops when someone replies. Check each email against the FTC's CAN-SPAM guide before you send.

1. Export your contacts and lists from Apollo.io to CSV.
2. Import the CSV into MagpieCRM, and map each column to a field.
3. On Magpie Cloud, add the DKIM record we show you, and DMARC if you don't have it yet. Self-hosted, connect SMTP or your own email provider.
4. Build your email in the drag-and-drop builder, then schedule the campaign, or write a short sequence.
5. Keep Apollo.io seats only for the people who still need calls or multichannel sequences.