Salesloft vs Outreach vs Apollo: Sales Engagement Pricing Playbook

A sales engagement platform runs the outreach itself: the cadence of emails, calls, and tasks that turns a list of accounts into booked meetings. It is not the CRM — the CRM holds the record while the engagement platform runs the motion — and all three vendors here price the motion differently. The cheapest sticker price can become the most expensive bill once dialer add-ons, credit meters, and annual contracts enter the math.

Figures below come from the vendors' own pricing pages, read 12 November 2026, plus third-party procurement data where vendors publish no price. Every dollar is either printed on a vendor page or labelled as a reported range.

What each platform actually sells

Salesloft is a revenue orchestration platform built around Cadence, its sequencing engine, plus Conversation Intelligence, Deals, Rhythm, Clari Forecast, and AI Agents. It ships no contact database: you bring the accounts, and its pricing page is a "Talk to sales" form with no rate card, no self-serve signup, and no free trial.

Outreach sells an AI Agent Platform for revenue teams in four tiers — Amplify Essentials, Core, Plus, and Pro — priced in two parts: seat-based access plus consumption-based AI credits. The page publishes credit allotments and feature lists — no dollar figures at all.

Apollo combines a B2B contact database with search filters, email sequences, a parallel dialer, a Chrome extension, CRM sync, deal management, and conversation intelligence. It is the only one of the three that publishes per-user prices, and the only one with a free tier that stays free with no time limit.

The published price lists

Apollo's pricing page publishes four tiers in its own structured data: Free $0, Basic $49 per user per month, Professional $99 per user per month, Enterprise by quote. Annual-billing figures from independent guides that read the same page: Basic $49 a month ($65 month-to-month), Professional $79 ($99), top tier $119 ($149) with a three-seat minimum.

Apollo's FAQ adds two rules: all seats sit on the same plan, and credits are pooled, granted upfront each cycle, and expire without rollover. Guides that read the page in October and November 2026 record credit allowances of 30,000 a year on Basic, 48,000 on Professional, and 72,000 on the top tier.

Outreach publishes no dollars, but it does publish the credit meter that drives the second half of its bill. Amplify Essentials includes 10,000 AI credits. Amplify Core includes 25,000. Amplify Plus includes 50,000. Amplify Pro includes 100,000. Credits power research, personalization, sequencing automation, conversation analysis, and forecasting, and extra packs can be bought at any time. Outreach Voice, the integrated dialer, is included in the engagement packages.

Salesloft publishes nothing: its pricing page is a sales-contact form headed "Talk to sales." The numbers come from procurement data: Vendr, aggregating 710 recorded purchases, reports a median annual contract of $30,740. Third-party guides put list pricing at roughly $125–$165 per user per month, with negotiated mid-market deals at $100–$130. Current packaging is two quote-only plans on annual contracts: Advanced reported at $125–$150 per user per month at list, Elite at $165–$200 or more.

Per-rep monthly cost math at 5, 25, and 100 seats

One consistent method below. Apollo uses its published annual-billing prices: Basic $49, Professional $79. Salesloft uses the midpoint of the reported negotiated range, $115 per user per month, plus the reported dialer add-on midpoint of $350 per user per year. Outreach uses the midpoint of the reported Core range, $110 per user per month, plus a reported $3,500-a-year platform fee spread across the seats.

The 25-seat row, reproduced:

Apollo Professional costs less than half of the Salesloft row at every team size, because the dialer is included in Apollo's seat price. The Outreach platform fee adds $58.33 per user per month at 5 seats but only $2.92 at 100 seats.

Monthly billing on Apollo costs $65 against $49 on Basic and $99 against $79 on Professional, so a five-seat Professional team pays $1,200 a year for the flexibility.

Cadence and sequence ceilings

A cadence is a timed multi-step outreach plan. The ceiling that matters is not how many steps it can hold but what stops a rep from running more of them: seat rules, credit burn, and daily send limits.

Apollo puts email sequencing on every paid plan, including Basic. The constraint is the credit meter: credits pay for emails, phone numbers, email warmup, domains and mailboxes, and AI-researched data, and the pool resets every cycle whether used or not.

Outreach puts multi-channel engagement and sequences in Amplify Core and above. Amplify Essentials, the entry package, focuses on conversation intelligence and coaching and does not list sequencing. That is a real ceiling: a team that buys Essentials for the price and then discovers it needs sequences has bought the wrong package. The credit meter is the second ceiling: Core includes 25,000 AI credits for the whole account, and every AI action draws from the same pool.

Salesloft's Cadence is the product's core, available on both Advanced and Elite. There is no published cap on cadences or steps, and no credit meter. The ceiling is contractual instead: annual terms, a reported 10–15 seat minimum, and add-on modules (Conversations, Rhythm, Deals) that carry 15–40% on top of the base seat price according to procurement data. Conversation intelligence is an add-on on Salesloft, in the base package on Outreach from Essentials up, and included with Apollo Professional.

Cold email volume has its own economics in the Lemlist vs Instantly vs Smartlead cold email pricing playbook, the right comparison for email-only teams.

The dialer: where the bill hides

Calling is where the three vendors diverge hardest. Apollo lists a Parallel Dialer as a product feature and includes US dialer access on its paid plans, with call recording on Professional. Salesloft sells the dialer as a separate add-on, reported at $300–$400 per user per year, most commonly quoted at $350. Outreach includes Outreach Voice, its integrated dialer, in the engagement packages.

No vendor here publishes a dialer-minute allowance. A team making 500 calls a month per rep cannot verify from any public page whether minutes are included, metered, or capped. Our editorial analysis found the dialer is the most common reason a Salesloft quote grows after the first call: the add-on is quoted separately, and phone numbers are billed per number per month. Get three numbers in writing before signing: minutes included per seat per month, the per-minute overage rate, and the per-number monthly charge.

A parallel dialer calls several numbers at once and connects the rep to whichever prospect answers first — more connects per hour, and more risk of silent calls and carrier flags when the list is stale. Neither rival publishes a parallel-line count, so get the number in the contract, not in a demo. The SaaS unit economics: CAC payback, LTV, NRR formulas guide shows how to convert connects per hour into a cost per meeting.

AI features and their limits

All three vendors sell AI in 2026 and meter it differently. Apollo's AI sits inside the credit system: AI-researched data and lead scoring draw from the same pooled credits as emails and phone numbers. The limit is countable — 48,000 credits per Professional seat per year — but per-action costs appear only inside the account, not on the public page.

Outreach's AI is the most elaborate and most metered. The Amplify tiers are defined by their agents: Omni, Research, Revenue, Personalization, and Deal Agents, Meeting Prep Agent, and an AI Forecast Projection on Pro. The credit allotments — 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, and 100,000 — are the throttle. Outreach states that usage directly determines credit consumption, and extra packs can be bought. The page does not state the credit cost of a single action, so Core's 25,000 credits cannot be converted into personalized emails without a trial or a quote.

Salesloft's AI Agents automate work across the revenue lifecycle, and Rhythm prioritizes seller actions from signals. No AI usage meter is published and no credit system exists. The limit is the contract: AI Agents are listed as an add-on in third-party packaging guides, so the capability can arrive as a second line item rather than inside the seat price. Get the AI scope in writing on the order form.

The practical rule: if your team sends mostly templated email, Apollo's credit pool is the cheapest AI you will buy. If your team leans on AI research and personalization for every touch, model Outreach's credit pool first: it is the only meter that can double your bill without adding a seat. If your team wants AI workflow automation without a meter, Salesloft is the only option — confirm the add-on price before the signature, not after.

Decision table

Operator boundaries: who should NOT buy each

Apollo is the wrong buy for a team whose reps need different plan levels: the highest-need user sets the price for everyone, so a five-person team with one power user pays Professional for all five. It is also the wrong buy for a team that treats credits as a savings account: unused credits expire every cycle, and top-ups cost $0.20 a credit with a 250-credit minimum.

Salesloft is the wrong buy for a team under 10 seats: the reported seat minimum, annual-only contract, separate dialer add-on, and absence of a trial make it the most expensive way to learn whether a team likes a tool. It is also the wrong buy for a team without a contact database, since Salesloft ships no data and the data vendor is a second contract.

Outreach is the wrong buy for a team that cannot forecast its AI usage: the credit meter is the bill, and turning on every agent in month one can burn through 25,000 credits before the team has a baseline. Outreach is also the wrong buy for a team that wants a published price to put in a budget document this week: there is none, and the quote arrives after a demo and a sales cycle. Check the SLA, the GDPR terms, and the CRM sync API before signing either way.

Pre-signature checklist

• [x] Get the dialer in writing for all three: minutes included per seat, per-minute overage, and per-number monthly charge.
• [x] Get the AI meter in writing: credit cost per personalized email and per research run on Outreach and Apollo.
• [x] Confirm the seat minimum and escalator: Salesloft reports a 10–15 seat minimum and 5–8% annual uplifts.
• [x] Run the pricing calculator against your seat count and dialer minutes before signing, using this playbook's midpoints as the input.

Apollo is the cheapest and most transparent: published prices, a free tier, and the dialer in the seat. Salesloft is the most expensive and most negotiated: quote-only, annual-only, dialer as an add-on, with a median contract of $30,740 a year in procurement data. Outreach sits between them on seat price and adds a second meter — AI credits — that can move the bill more than the seat count does. Pick the meter that matches how your team works.