The honest Apollo alternative
Apollo maps the contacts with a profile. Orbital maps the 13 million US small businesses that have none.
Apollo is the all-in-one rep workstation: 275M+ contacts across 73M companies, a native sequencer and dialer built into every seat, and a free tier to start. For finding a director at a 200-person company and emailing them the same afternoon, few tools are cheaper or faster.
If your buyers sit in companies that show up on LinkedIn, stay with Apollo. If your buyers are the single-shop HVAC contractor or the family-owned restaurant, you need a database built the other way. Those owners are not in a profile graph, so Apollo cannot return a contact it never had a profile to build.
Two different jobs
Apollo is the all-in-one rep seat. Orbital is the SMB row.
Apollo and Orbital both sell contacts, but they answer two different questions. Apollo answers who works at this company and how to reach them today. Orbital answers which 13 million US small businesses exist, who owns each one, and what they look like per account. Read this before the table.
What Apollo is
A rep workstation.
A profile-built contact graph of 275M+ contacts across 73M companies, wrapped in a native sequencer, A/B testing, a dialer, and conversation intelligence, all inside one per-user seat. Apollo's published email-accuracy claim is 97%, though independent tests put US accuracy closer to 85-90%. It rates 4.7/5 across 9,000+ G2 reviews.
Best for: outbound teams selling into mid-market and enterprise who want sourcing and sending in one cheap seat.
What Orbital is
A company-grain map of every US small business.
We start from Google Maps, Yelp, and Yellow Pages to build the company set, then run a 51-source agent (Better Business Bureau, corporate directories, legal filings, Dun & Bradstreet, Secretary of State, the business website, news) to find the owner. We find one about 80% of the time, then attach the custom signals you score on, per account. Emails are validated across providers; phones are validated against Twilio.
Best for: vertical SaaS and SMB sellers whose accounts are the long-tail local business no profile graph maps.
The honest comparison
Eight rows. Apollo wins three. We win four. One tie.
We name a winner in every row, and concede the ones Apollo wins outright, up top. The rows we win sit lower, where the long-tail US SMB decides the deal.
| Dimension | Orbital | Apollo | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Native sequencer + dialer | None. Data only, exported to your tools | Sequencer, A/B, dialer, conversation intelligence in-seat | Apollo |
| Mid-market and enterprise contacts | Thinner above the SMB line | 275M+ contacts across 73M companies | Apollo |
| Entry price | Sample-first, then custom | Free tier; Basic $49/user/mo on annual billing | Apollo |
| Long-tail SMB at company grain | 13,549,104 US small businesses mapped | Limited to businesses with an online profile | Orbital |
| Decision-maker at single-location SMB | Owner found ~80%, even with no LinkedIn | Misses owners with no profile to build from | Orbital |
| Local-business signals | No website, no GBP, no LinkedIn flagged per record | Not a tracked dimension | Orbital |
| Custom per-account research signals | Built per account by the 51-source agent | Standard firmographic fields | Orbital |
| Email accuracy on mid-market | On par at the data layer | 97% published, ~85-90% in independent tests | Tie |
Methodology: Orbital figures from a curated company-grain pull, April 2026, US sourced. Apollo figures from apollo.io and its public pricing page as of 2026-06: 275M+ contacts across 73M companies, native sequencer + dialer, Free/$49/$79/$119 on annual billing. The 97% accuracy is Apollo’s published claim.
When to pick each
Two reads. Pick the job your pipeline depends on.
Pick the tool whose limits you can live with. Several teams run both: Apollo for mid-market outbound, Orbital for the SMB long tail.
Pick Apollo if
- You sell into mid-market and enterprise where every buyer has a LinkedIn profile.
- You want sourcing, sequencing, and dialing in one seat without buying a separate sending tool.
- You want the lowest entry price and a free tier to test on.
Pick Orbital if
- Your accounts are single-location small businesses that never built an online profile.
- You need the owner's name and number, not a generic info@ inbox.
- You score accounts on signals like no website or no Google Business Profile that a standard contact tool does not track.
Where the long-tail row sits
Coverage Apollo thins out on. The numbers, with sources.
companies across 5 live SMB verticals
Aggregate of the dental, HVAC, med spa, restaurant, and roofing pages. A subset of the 13,549,104 total Apollo thins out on.
of US dental practices we track are single-location
54% run without a website. 74% have no decision-maker on LinkedIn. The shape of the long-tail SMB row a profile-built database does not have. See the dental TAM report.
of US restaurants we track are single-location
82% have no LinkedIn company page. Owner-operators reachable through direct sourcing, not the LinkedIn anchor Apollo is built around.
Source: Orbital data, April 2026. The 1,366,523 figure aggregates small-business coverage across the live email-list verticals, a subset of the 13,549,104 total US small businesses Orbital maps. Vertical breakdowns also published in the Dental TAM report and the HVAC TAM report.
The argument
A row that does not exist in their database is not a row you can buy.
Apollo is profile-built. Its 275M+ contacts start from people who have an online footprint, so the graph is dense where footprints are dense: tech, mid-market, enterprise. Point it at a 200-person software company and it works. That is the job it was built for, and it does it well for $49 a seat.
The graph thins where footprints thin. 74% of dental practice owners have no decision-maker on LinkedIn. 82% of restaurants have no company page at all. When the profile was never created, there is no contact to enrich and no seat upgrade that conjures one. A bigger Apollo plan returns more of the same contacts it already had, not the owner who never went online.
Orbital is built from the company instead. We map the business first, then go find the human behind it across 51 sources that do not depend on a LinkedIn profile. We will not pretend to match Apollo on enterprise org charts or replace its dialer. What we have is the 13 million US small businesses that Apollo's profile graph skips, with the owner attached.
Questions
Before you renew with Apollo
Is Orbital an Apollo alternative?
For long-tail SMB sourcing, yes. If your accounts are local small businesses with no online profile, Orbital finds owners Apollo's contact graph never built. For mid-market and enterprise outbound with built-in sequencing, Apollo is the stronger tool and we say so.
Where does Apollo win, honestly?
Workflow and price. Sequencer, A/B, dialer, and conversation intelligence in one seat, a free tier, and paid plans from $49/user/mo on annual billing. On mid-market and enterprise contacts, the 275M+ graph is deep. We do not try to beat that.
Where does Orbital win?
The single-location SMB. We map 13,549,104 US small businesses at the company grain and find the owner about 80% of the time, including the 74% of dental owners and the businesses with no website or LinkedIn that a profile-built graph misses.
How does pricing compare?
Apollo prices per user: Free, then Basic $49, Professional $79, and Organization $119 on annual billing, with a 3-seat minimum on Organization. Orbital prices on the data, not the seat. The fair test is cost per usable SMB record, so we send a free sample first and you check it against your own list before you pay anything.
Can I use both?
Yes, and several teams do. Run Apollo for mid-market and enterprise outbound. Pull the long-tail SMB accounts from Orbital and load them into the same sequences Apollo already runs.
Can I get a sample?
Yes. We send about 100 records in your target vertical and geography so you can check coverage and accuracy against your own data before any commitment.
See the data Apollo does not have.
Send us a vertical and a metro. We will pull about 100 US small businesses with the owner, the validated email, and the verified phone, the long-tail records Apollo's profile graph never built. Check them against your own coverage. No seat, no contract, no commitment.
Get a free sample