Odyn vs. Apollo: a contact database you run, or an agent that prospects for you?

What Apollo does well

Apollo's homepage claims 240 million contacts, 30 million companies and more than 600,000 customer companies. It is a platform for sales teams of every size: search, email and phone enrichment, automated email sequences, a dialer, and AI assistants that build lists and draft messages.

One feature matters to a recruiting firm. Apollo has a "Job postings" filter that isolates companies with open roles, by job title, location, number of active postings and posting date. Apollo recommends it to recruitment agencies itself, in a guide that quotes the CEO of a recruiting company who found his first hundred customers with the tool. So the need is understood and the feature exists, at an entry price that has little in common with an agent subscription.

Apollo's published prices, per user on annual billing: Free at $0, Basic at $49 a month, Professional at $79, Organization at $119 with a three-user minimum (at least $4,284 a year). Monthly-billing prices are not on the pages we read, and the pricing page does not say which plan includes the job postings filter.

What do 450 decision-makers a month really cost on Apollo?

Each plan comes with a yearly credit allowance per user: 900 on Free, 30,000 on Basic, 48,000 on Professional, 72,000 on Organization. Unused credits do not carry over. Revealing an email costs one credit, and a mobile number up to eight more (Apollo's estimates, not fixed prices).

Do the arithmetic. On Basic you have 2,500 credits a month on average. The email addresses of 450 hiring managers use as many. Add a mobile number for each and you approach 4,000, which is beyond Basic. Money is not the constraint here. Hours are.

Sales-tool guides put a carefully personalized email at five to ten minutes of manual research and writing. AI drafting brings a first draft down to one or two minutes, which the rep still reviews (Leadriver, September 24, 2026). For 450 decision-makers, that is somewhere between 15 and 75 hours a month, before you have picked the companies, set up follow-ups, watched deliverability and read replies. Apollo supplies the parts of a prospecting system. The assembly is yours.

Whatever the tool, your name is on every message. In the US, the FTC's guide says that CAN-SPAM "makes no exception for business-to-business email": accurate sender details, a postal address and a working opt-out are expected. Apollo says it offers compliance support for CAN-SPAM and GDPR; setting it up is still a task for your team.

LinkedIn: who does the work?

According to Apollo's help center, LinkedIn steps in a sequence are tasks. The tool reminds you to send the connection request, you go to LinkedIn, send it yourself, then mark the task done. The same documentation warns that doing too many actions too quickly can get an account restricted.

Odyn sends the invitations and messages itself from the recruiter's own LinkedIn account, paced and during business hours. When a decision-maker accepts, Odyn suggests that the recruiter call.

What Odyn changes: choosing the posting and the person

Odyn starts from published job postings. It finds the companies hiring in the recruiter's target (roles, locations, industry) and sets aside postings of no interest to a recruiting firm. That sorting matters. Apollo lets you filter on the number of active postings but does not tell you which value to choose. Across nearly 5,000 postings Odyn wrote about between June and October 2026 (mostly French ones), an employer with a single posting online over two months produced about three times as many interested replies as other employers. These are trends measured over a few months, and re-measured every night. The detail is in the guide to prospecting companies that are hiring.

The same applies to the person. In Apollo you filter by job function and choose. Odyn finds the hiring decision-maker for each opening and their business contact details, then writes a message based on the posting and on the firm's specialty, in the recruiter's style. For the first three business days the recruiter reviews and approves every message; after that, Odyn sends after the delay the recruiter chose, and does not contact the clients and prospects on the firm's exclusion list.

The subscription is €290 a month per consultant, excluding VAT, with no long-term commitment, for 450 decision-makers contacted a month, by email and LinkedIn, with no success fee and no charge per meeting. See pricing and how an AI prospecting agent works. Odyn started in France and its track record is on French postings, so if your firm works in the US or the UK, ask during the 15-minute demo how it covers your market.

Apollo and Odyn side by side

When Apollo is the better choice

If someone at your firm enjoys building lists and send sequences, Apollo gives that person a lot of material at a very low cost, and you keep control of every detail. If you prospect beyond companies that are hiring, for example owners in a sector with no posting online, a contact database does something Odyn does not, since Odyn always starts from a posting. Apollo also searches for people, not only hiring managers. And if you want to test your own way of prospecting before spending anything, the free plan exists.

When Odyn fits better

Odyn fits when nobody at your firm has half a day a week to give to a prospecting tool, which describes most independents and two- or three-recruiter firms, where one person prospects, meets clients and presents candidates. You describe your target, Odyn handles the sourcing of companies, the writing and the follow-ups, and you spend your time on the replies. It is a decision about your trade as much as your budget: every hour spent configuring sequences is an hour not spent with a client or a candidate. If your hesitation is between a tool and a platform you assemble yourself, Odyn compared with Clay covers the other half of the question, and the comparison index gathers the remaining options.

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