Short answer: Apollo and Salesforce are not alternatives to each other. Apollo is where you find prospects and get their emails and phones, and it can send sequences. Salesforce is the CRM where your company keeps accounts, opportunities and the history of every deal. Many teams use both: Apollo for prospecting, Salesforce as the system of record, connected by Apollo's native integration. The real question is whether you need both, and that depends on how many people sell and how much pipeline you have to track.
What each one is for
| Apollo | Salesforce Sales Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Main job | Contact database, prospecting and outreach | CRM: accounts, contacts, opportunities, forecasts, reporting |
| Where the data comes from | Apollo's own records, revealed with credits | What your team and integrations put into it |
| How you pay | Per seat plus credits for emails, mobiles and exports | Per user licence by edition |
| Entry price | Basic, $49 a user a month billed yearly | Starter Suite, $25 a user a month billed yearly |
Sources: Apollo prices as tracked by Zeliq (27 July 2026) and Costbench (26 July 2026); Salesforce list prices as summarised by Redress Compliance, read on 22 October 2026, which also lists Pro Suite at $100 and Enterprise at about $175 a user a month. Check the vendors' own pages before you budget. Our Apollo pricing page covers credits in detail.
How the integration connects them
According to Apollo's help article on the Salesforce integration (updated 2 September 2026), Apollo pulls leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities from Salesforce, so reps can see what is already in the CRM while they prospect. In the other direction it can push contacts, leads, accounts, deals and activities such as emails, calls, tasks and meetings into Salesforce, according to push settings you configure. Most syncs finish within 15 to 30 minutes of a change, and large first syncs take longer. Setup needs Apollo's managed package and a dedicated Salesforce integration user.
Two details catch teams out. Apollo mirrors Salesforce, so duplicates in the CRM show up in Apollo too. And if a person exists in Salesforce as both a lead and a contact, Apollo pulls the contact. Clean duplicates before you connect.
When you need one, the other or both
- Apollo alone fits a founder or a small team still finding its market. Apollo has basic deal tracking, and a spreadsheet covers the rest until the pipeline grows.
- Salesforce alone fits a team whose leads arrive inbound or from partners, so it rarely needs to look up new contacts.
- Both fits outbound teams with several reps, managers who forecast from the CRM and deals that run for months. That is the setup the integration is built for.
If you only need a list of prospects in Salesforce, you do not need Apollo's whole platform for it. A CSV with the right columns can be imported into Salesforce directly.
If your prospects come from a LinkedIn or Sales Navigator search, B2B lead generation tools like Scrupp can export entire searches—even bypassing the 2,500 result limit typically imposed by Sales Navigator—while finding verified email addresses and phone numbers. Since tools of this nature often lack native Salesforce integrations, the standard workflow involves exporting a CSV file and importing those records into Salesforce as leads or contacts. You can follow our step-by-step guide on moving LinkedIn leads to Salesforce. Furthermore, if you are already using Apollo as your primary database, you can review our guide on Apollo to Salesforce to export your search results using a similar CSV workflow.