Apollo vs ZoomInfo vs Clay

A Practical Guide to B2B Contact Enrichment That Actually Works

Choosing an enrichment platform is not about feature checklists. It is about whether your RevOps and sales teams can consistently find the right people at the right companies and reliably reach them.

At Kuki Strategies, we evaluate enrichment tools based on how they perform in real sales workflows: account research, contact discovery, email and phone accuracy, and global scalability. This article compares Apollo, ZoomInfo, and Clay through that lens.

What “Good Enrichment” Actually Means

Before comparing tools, it is important to define success.

For most B2B teams, enrichment success comes down to two core actions:

1. Finding the right people inside a target company
   Titles, seniority, function, and decision relevance matter more than raw volume.

2. Enriching those people with usable contact data
   Emails that do not bounce and phone numbers that actually connect.

Everything else pricing, UI, automation only matters insofar as it supports those two outcomes.

Finding People Inside a Company

Apollo: Fast and Accessible Prospect Discovery

Apollo offers a large contact database with an intuitive search experience. Teams can quickly filter by company, title, location, and seniority, making it easy to generate prospect lists at speed.

Apollo’s Chrome extension adds significant value for LinkedIn-based workflows, allowing reps to move from LinkedIn profiles directly into Apollo without context switching.

Where Apollo falls short is depth. Company profiles are lightweight, and there is limited visibility into org structure or reporting lines. For most SMB and mid-market use cases, this is acceptable. For complex account mapping, it becomes a limitation.

Best fit: High-volume prospecting, SMB and mid-market teams, email-led outbound.

ZoomInfo: Deep Account Intelligence and Org Structure

ZoomInfo excels at company-level visibility. It provides structured org charts, department views, seniority mapping, and detailed company intelligence.

For teams selling into enterprise accounts or regulated industries, this context is critical. ZoomInfo makes it easier to identify real decision makers rather than guessing based on titles alone.

The tradeoff is cost and complexity. ZoomInfo’s depth is valuable, but it often exceeds what smaller teams actually operationalize.

Best fit: Enterprise sales, account-based motions, phone-heavy outbound teams.

Clay: Custom Discovery Through Data Orchestration

Clay does offer its own contact database, allowing teams to search and discover people, companies, and firmographics directly within the platform. This makes it capable of functioning as a standalone discovery tool in many use cases.

What sets Clay apart is the ability to augment its native data with external sources or custom datasets through integrations and workflow logic. This means you can enrich contact and account records using multiple data providers in one unified system, and tailor search and enrichment logic to match your ICP.

Because Clay blends its own data with external enrichment sources, it often returns broader coverage and richer profiles than standalone tools. The tradeoff is that achieving that depth requires intentional setup and ongoing refinement of enrichment workflows.

Best fit: Teams that want a single system for discovery and enrichment and have the RevOps capability to configure data sources and workflows.

Enriching Contacts With Emails and Phone Numbers

Apollo: Strong Email Accuracy, Limited Phones

Apollo performs well for email enrichment. Emails are verified in real time, which materially reduces bounce rates. In practice, Apollo delivers reliable emails for a large percentage of contacts.

Phone data is less consistent. Most phone numbers are office lines, with limited mobile coverage, particularly outside the US. For email-first strategies, this is usually sufficient. For cold calling, it is a constraint.

ZoomInfo: Best-in-Class Phone and Email Coverage

ZoomInfo is the strongest single source for contact data accuracy, especially in North America. It consistently provides both verified emails and direct dial or mobile numbers.

For teams that rely on calling, or where data accuracy directly impacts revenue outcomes, ZoomInfo remains the benchmark.

That accuracy is reflected in pricing. ZoomInfo is rarely cost-efficient unless data quality is mission critical.

Clay: Maximum Coverage Through Multi-Source Enrichment

Clay’s advantage is not that it has better data. It is that it can combine multiple datasets.

By chaining enrichment providers, Clay can often recover emails or phone numbers that any one database would miss. This makes it uniquely effective for hard-to-reach personas, international markets, or edge cases.

However, data quality depends entirely on the sources configured. Clay amplifies your strategy, good or bad.

Coverage, Geography, and Compliance

• ZoomInfo is strongest in the US and excels in compliance-heavy industries.

• Apollo is cost-effective but more US-centric and less transparent internationally.

• Clay enables global strategies by mixing regional providers, but compliance depends on the underlying sources.

There is no universal winner globally. Multi-region teams often outgrow single-database solutions.

Cost and Operational Reality

Apollo offers the best cost-to-output ratio for most growing teams.
ZoomInfo offers the best raw data quality at a premium.
Clay offers the highest ceiling, with the highest operational responsibility.

So Which One Finds the “Most” Information?

The answer depends on what “most” means.

• Most accurate out of the box: ZoomInfo

• Most efficient for the price: Apollo

• Most complete when configured correctly: Clay

In practice, many mature RevOps teams end up combining tools, often using Clay to orchestrate Apollo, ZoomInfo, and regional providers into a single controlled workflow.

How Kuki Strategies Approaches Enrichment

We do not recommend tools in isolation. We design enrichment systems that match your sales motion, ICP, geography, and operational maturity.

Sometimes Apollo is the right answer.
>Sometimes Clay is the missing layer that makes everything else work together.

The mistake is choosing a tool before defining the strategy.

If you are evaluating enrichment platforms or struggling with inconsistent data quality, that is a RevOps problem, not a tooling problem.