Clay vs Apollo vs Explorium vs Crustdata: Don't Pay Until You See This (2026)

Apollo is the all-in-one pick for small sales teams ($49-$119 per seat per month billed annually, free plan). Clay suits GTM engineers mixing 200+ data providers (from $167/mo annual, unlimited seats). Explorium sells prepaid credit packs for agent builders ($29.99 to $7,499.99). Crustdata is one people and company data API + MCP (about 1B people, 60M companies) with job-change and funding watchers; usage-based credits (person search 0.03 credits per result), credits last 12 months, free sandbox key. Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:42 What each tool actually is 2:09 Pricing, side by side 4:10 Data: how much, and how good 5:25 Job-change and funding alerts 6:08 Using them inside Claude and ChatGPT 6:38 Does it send emails? 7:09 Which one is for you? 7:59 Try it Quick answers: How much does Apollo cost per user in 2026? $49 / $79 / $119 per seat per month billed annually, or $65 / $99 / $149 monthly; Organization is annual only with 3 seats minimum. (apollo.io/pricing) How much does Clay cost per month? Launch $167/mo and Growth $446/mo billed annually ($185 / $495 monthly), with unlimited seats. Free plan: 500 actions and 100 data credits a month. (clay.com/pricing) Does Clay send cold emails? Yes: its pricing page says you can use Clay's email sequencer or a sequencing integration. Do Apollo credits roll over? No, unused credits expire at the end of each billing cycle. Clay's actions also reset every cycle. How accurate is Apollo's data? G2 rates Apollo 4.7 from 9,826 reviews (22 Sep 2026 snapshot), but 'Inaccurate Data' (469) and 'Data Inaccuracy' (420) are among its top tagged cons. Is Clay worth it for a small team? Every plan has unlimited seats, so a team shares one plan, but G2 reviewers' top complaint is the learning curve. How does Crustdata pricing work? Usage-based credits per call (person search 0.03 credits per result), credits valid 12 months, and a free sandbox key for the full API and MCP. Which B2B data tools have an MCP server? All four: Crustdata, Clay, Apollo (any plan, including free) and Explorium. Sources (checked 7 Oct 2026): https://www.g2.com/products/apollo-io... (Internet Archive snapshot 2026-09-22) https://www.apollo.io/ https://www.clay.com/ https://www.explorium.ai/mcp/ https://crustdata.com/ https://www.apollo.io/pricing https://www.clay.com/pricing https://www.explorium.ai/pricing https://docs.crustdata.com/general/pr... https://www.g2.com/products/clay-com-... (Internet Archive snapshot 2026-04-02) https://www.g2.com/products/explorium... (Internet Archive snapshot 2026-07-04) https://crustdata.com/apis/watcher https://www.apollo.io/product/mcp https://www.clay.com/mcp https://docs.crustdata.com/for-agents... Get a free Crustdata sandbox key: https://crustdata.com