Apollo vs Breeze: Which Should You Choose?

Apollo and Breeze land on the same shortlist, but they solve different halves of the outbound problem. Apollo is a contact database with sequencing and a dialer built around it. Breeze is HubSpot’s AI agent layer, and it works on the contacts already sitting in your CRM.

Here’s what you need to know about both.

What is Apollo?

Apollo is a B2B contact database with sequencing, enrichment, a native dialer, and Bombora intent data layered on top, sold self-serve at published per-seat prices. Apollo says the database covers 230M+ verified contacts. The mechanism is a credit currency: a verified email costs 1 credit, a phone number 8, an AI research run 1, and US dialer usage 2 credits a minute.

Pros

• Self-serve buying with a free plan that’s usable: You can sign up, upgrade, and pay through the Organization tier without a sales conversation. The free plan gives 900 credits a year granted monthly and 2 active sequences, enough to test database coverage against a real target list.
• Filter depth for net-new list building: Reviewers cite 65+ filters spanning job title, company size, geography, tech stack, funding rounds, leadership changes, and Bombora intent. List-building time drops from half a day to roughly 20 minutes.
• Native dialer with parallel and power dialing: Available from the Professional tier with call recording and AI call insights, so teams combining email and phone don’t need a second tool.
• Chrome extension that works inside LinkedIn: The most-cited quality-of-life feature across Apollo’s reviews is the Chrome extension. It pulls verified contact details straight from a LinkedIn or Sales Navigator profile into a list without leaving the page.

Cons

• Data accuracy is the trade-off for breadth: Inaccurate data appears in 469 G2 reviews and outdated data in 412. One detailed August 2026 enterprise review puts US accuracy near 88% and international accuracy between 60% and 73%, with hard bounce rates of 15% to 35% on unverified lists.
• Credit mechanics make the real bill hard to predict: A phone number costs 8 credits against 1 for an email, and dialer minutes burn 2 credits each. Credits also expire at the end of the billing cycle without rolling over, and reviewers describe monthly spend inflating well above the seat price during heavy prospecting.
• Deliverability infrastructure is thinner than the sending volume invites: Apollo retired its peer-to-peer warmup pool in 2024, and the replacement paces sending rather than building the engagement signals that lift sender reputation. Warmup returned in 2025 through third-party providers, with 1 mailbox free per account and extra mailboxes costing 200 credits a month. Apollo’s own deliverability guidance sets a default of 50 emails per day per mailbox.

Pricing

Apollo publishes 4 tiers: a free plan, Basic at $49 per user per month, Professional at $79, and Organization at $119, all billed annually. Organization enforces a 3-seat minimum, which puts its real entry point near $357 a month. Credits are what move the bill, since paid tiers carry annual allowances of roughly 30,000, 48,000, and 72,000, and anything unused expires at the end of the cycle.

What is Breeze?

Breeze is HubSpot’s AI layer, and the Prospecting Agent is the piece that competes with an AI SDR. It runs as a warm-lead engine inside the CRM.

You configure a selling profile that HubSpot auto-summarizes from your website. From there, the agent researches each enrolled contact against a year of CRM engagement, writes personalized email, paces the follow-up, and stops when someone replies or books a meeting. Email goes out from your team’s own connected inboxes, identified as the contact owner, the company owner, or a single designated user. Since April 2026, the agent charges on outcomes: $1 per lead it recommends for outreach and $0.10 per company research task.

Pros

• Outcome-based pricing is rare in this category: You pay $1 when the agent recommends a qualified lead for outreach rather than paying for enrollment volume or contacts monitored. HubSpot switched to this model in April 2026.
• CRM context is native rather than integrated: The agent reads the same records, engagement history, ownership, and lifecycle stages your team already works in. There’s no sync to configure and no field mapping, and it also respects existing state, declining to auto-enroll a contact already in a sequence or attached to an open deal.
• Email goes out from the person who owns the relationship: Sender identity can be set to contact owner, company owner, or a single user, with fallback senders configurable. Replies land with the person who already has the context.
• Review before sending, with a daily digest: Semi-autonomous mode routes every draft for approval, and a 9 am summary email links straight to pending drafts and company recommendations. Drafts can be edited inline or regenerated before anyone approves them.

Cons

• Cold outreach is capped at 3 emails per contact per 90 days: HubSpot’s own documentation describes the cap as a deliberate safeguard for sender reputation, and notes that re-enrolling a contact won’t override it. Most cold sequences run 6 to 12 touches.
• No cold email infrastructure: The agent sends through your team’s real connected inboxes, with no warmup, no mailbox rotation, and no secondary sending domains. Cold volume through those mailboxes puts your primary domain’s reputation on the line.
• Outreach is email only: The agent doesn’t send LinkedIn messages or place calls. Sequences can include LinkedIn connection and call steps, but a person completes them.

Pricing

Breeze has no standalone price, since the Prospecting Agent runs on top of a HubSpot subscription. The floor is Sales Hub Professional at $90 per seat per month, which comes with a one-time $1,500 onboarding fee and about $10 a month for the smallest credit bundle. On Professional, month one lands near $1,600 and settles around $100 per seat after that, with the agent charging $1 per lead recommended for outreach and $0.10 per company research task, drawn from HubSpot Credits priced at $10 per 1,000.

Apollo or Breeze: Which should you choose?

The Apollo vs Breeze decision usually comes down to where your next 100 conversations are going to come from. If those people don’t exist in your systems yet, you need a way to find them. If they’re already in your CRM going stale, you need a way to work them.

Choose Apollo if…

You’re building an outbound list from scratch

Apollo’s core job is finding people who aren’t in your CRM yet. The filter set spans job title, company size, geography, tech stack, funding rounds, and leadership changes, so a defined ICP turns into a working list in one sitting. The free plan lets you test coverage against a real target account list before you spend anything, and you can upgrade through the Organization tier without booking a demo. For a team that needs pipeline this quarter and has no list to start from, that combination does a lot of work.

Cold calling is a real channel for your team

The native dialer arrives at the Professional tier with parallel and power dialing, call recording, and AI call insights, which takes a separate tool out of the stack. Teams running a phone-heavy motion get the list, the sequence, and the dial from one login. Budget for the credit math before you commit: US dialer usage burns 2 credits a minute. A heavy calling team should model credit consumption alongside the seat price rather than assume the annual allowance covers it.

Choose Breeze if…

HubSpot is already where your sales team works

The Prospecting Agent reads your existing records, engagement history, and ownership without an integration project, which is a structural advantage no bolt-on tool can copy. There’s no sync to configure, no field mapping, and no API work before anyone sees value. Turning it on is a Super Admin toggle in the sales workspace, with a 28-day free trial to see what it drafts. For a team already paying for Sales Hub, adding AI prospecting costs roughly a dollar per recommended lead instead of a new contract.

Your best untapped pipeline is sitting in your CRM

Most HubSpot portals hold MQLs nobody worked, inbound that went cold, event lists, and closed-lost deals that died on timing rather than fit. The agent enrolls those contacts, researches them against a year of engagement history, writes email in your brand voice, paces the follow-up, and stops the moment someone replies. The conservative guardrails suit that job, since a contact who already knows you doesn’t need 12 touches. Up to 85 selling profiles let you split the positioning by product, audience, or tone.

Here’s how the 2 tools compare side by side, with AiSDR as a third reference point.

Skip the demo

We’ll do the work right now

Drop your URL and we’ll send back outbound strategies, a few real target companies, and a pitch written to you as a prospect.

Then reply with questions, pushback, or anything else on your mind. The AI takes it from there.

No call required. The AI handles every reply itself.

Why AiSDR is a smarter third option

Apollo and Breeze each own one half of the work. Apollo supplies the data and the sending. Breeze supplies the context and the follow-up. Both assume you already know which campaign to run and who to run it at. AiSDR is built for teams that want the strategy and the execution from the same place, with first campaigns live 30 minutes from kickoff.

Ami AI Strategist

Neither tool decides what campaign to run. Apollo hands you filters and a sequence builder, Breeze works the list your CRM already holds, and the thinking in between stays on your desk.

Ami, AiSDR’s AI Strategist, closes that gap. It’s trained on the 14,000+ campaigns AiSDR has run, and it reviews your offer, your CRM data, and your past campaigns, and then suggests the specific audiences and niches worth going after.

From there it takes about 20 minutes to analyze your site and build a complete campaign with messaging angles, sequences, and targeting parameters. You review and launch in 2 clicks. Ami is how 80% of AiSDR customers build campaigns rather than doing it by hand. That’s the practical answer to blank-canvas paralysis and the weeks of strategizing that usually sit in front of a first send.

Live AI search

Apollo’s accuracy problem and Breeze’s dependence on contacts you already have are the same constraint from 2 directions: Your list is only as good as the records someone else collected.

AiSDR’s live AI search builds the list on demand instead. You set the targeting criteria in plain language, and AiSDR finds qualified people across the web and verifies their contact data at the point you need it. Ultra-niche ICPs become reachable through a plain-text query rather than a filter stack, and the AI scores accounts against your criteria so outreach only goes to the ones that qualify.

The practical difference for your team is that the list gets built the week the campaign runs. Nobody spends the first month of a new motion cleaning bounces out of records that decayed before they arrived.

Intent & CRM data

Both tools bring real signal. Apollo carries Bombora intent topics, and Breeze reads a year of native HubSpot engagement, which is a strong starting point when your buyers are already in your portal.

AiSDR widens the aperture. It puts website visits, LinkedIn profile views, LinkedIn engagement, and LinkedIn keyword activity together as signals in one place, alongside intent data and trigger events that create urgency. The two-way HubSpot and Salesforce integration then processes, scores, and enriches account data for inbound and outbound leads alike.

You can set an activity threshold so a combination of signals launches a sequence on its own. Someone likes your LinkedIn post, views your CEO’s profile, and hits your pricing page, and the outreach goes out while the signal is still warm.

Campaign Builder with multichannel conditional sequencing

Breeze holds cold outreach to 3 agent-sent emails per contact over 90 days and leaves LinkedIn and calls to a person. That’s the right design for warm follow-up, and a hard ceiling for anything colder.

AiSDR’s sequence builder works differently. You can run email, LinkedIn messages, connection requests, and calls in one flow, and then layer in text, AI voice notes, AI video, and memes where a plain email wouldn’t land. Steps are drag-and-drop with conditional logic when you need it, and touchpoints are unlimited so the sequence matches your sales cycle instead of a fixed cap.

AiSDR also handles the infrastructure agencies charge thousands for. That means lookalike mailboxes procured and configured, continuous warmup, bi-weekly deliverability tests, and inbox health monitoring. The AI works replies, objections, follow-ups, and unsubscribes until the goal is met, which is how one platform ends up replacing 8+ tools.

AiSDR holds a 4.6/5 rating on G2 across 100+ reviews and is SOC 2 certified.

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