Best AI Lead Generation Tools in 2026: Apollo, Clay, Origami, Lusha, Instantly and Searchbase Compared
2026-09-08
Quick answer: For a large B2B contact database with sending built in, pick Apollo ($0 to $99 per user per month). For an enrichment workbench that stitches 200 or more data providers together, pick Clay (free, then from $54 a month on annual billing). For an AI prospecting agent aimed at US B2B with verified emails and phones, pick Origami Agents ($0 to $399 a month). For direct dial phone numbers, pick Lusha ($0 to $399.90 a month). For the widest net from a single prompt, pick Searchbase, which searches the same B2B contact databases (Apollo alone: 240M+ people and 30M+ companies, as Apollo states; plus Hunter and more) and the open web together, priced per action rather than per seat (€0 to €199 a month, English and Italian, euro billing). Describe your ideal customer. Searchbase finds them across Europe in one prompt, with the source on every cell. For sending cold email at volume with deliverability as the whole point, pick Instantly ($47 to $358 a month). Most teams end up with two of these, not one.
How we compared
Five criteria, applied the same way to every tool.
- Data coverage. Where the leads come from, and how wide that pool is. Most of these tools are one database, or one marketplace of databases. One of them searches the databases and the open web together.
- Verification. What the tool tells you about how much to trust a value, and whether you can check it yourself.
- Outreach. Whether the tool sends, drafts, or just hands you a list.
- Price. Taken from each vendor's own pricing page on 8 September 2026, with the annual figure noted where it differs.
- Languages. Whether the product works outside English, and what currency it bills in. This matters more than most comparison articles admit if you sell in Europe.
1. Apollo
Best for: B2B sales teams that want the database, the sequences, the dialer and a light CRM in one subscription.
Apollo states 240 million or more contacts and 30 million or more companies with verified emails and phone numbers. You filter by job title, seniority, company size, industry, location and buyer intent signals, then work the result inside Apollo: multichannel sequences, a dialer, an AI assistant that produces pre-meeting insights and call summaries, deal management with pipeline boards and conversation intelligence, plus website visitor identification. It integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, SalesLoft, Marketo, Sendgrid and LinkedIn.
Price: Free plan, Basic at $49 per user per month, Professional at $99 per user per month, Enterprise on request. Trials include 50 credits and 5 mobile credits, and Apollo says the free Starter plan stays available indefinitely.
Limits: Apollo is priced per seat, so a team of five on Professional is a real budget line. It returns values without showing you the page they came from, and like every database it can only give you records it already holds. That is why "agencies in Milan" or "creators in the running niche" go badly in Apollo.
2. Clay
Best for: growth engineers who want to compose their own enrichment pipeline instead of buying one vendor's opinion.
Clay is infrastructure rather than a list. It gives access to more than 200 data providers through a marketplace and lets you run waterfall enrichment, calling providers in sequence until one returns a value. Claygent, its AI research agent, goes and finds things the providers do not have. Around that sit signals and intent tracking for job changes and promotions, Audiences for first and third party data, Workflows, ad sync to LinkedIn, Meta and Google, and a native Sequencer. Clay names OpenAI, Anthropic, Intercom, Rippling, Canva, ElevenLabs, Figma and Hex among its customers and says more than 500,000 go-to-market teams use it.
Price: Free with 500 actions and 100 data credits a month, unlimited seats and up to 200 rows per table. Launch starts at $167 a month, or $54 a month paid annually, with 15,000 actions and 3,000 data credits. Growth starts at $446 a month, or $185 annually, with 40,000 actions and 6,000 credits. Enterprise is custom.
Limits: Clay is the most powerful tool on this list and the one most likely to sit unused. It expects you to design the table, choose the providers and reason about waterfalls. The monthly price without an annual commitment is steep, and you still pay the underlying providers through data credits.
3. Origami Agents
Best for: US B2B teams that want one agent to find the accounts, verify the contacts and run the sequences.
Origami Agents (origami.chat, a Y Combinator company based in San Francisco) takes a description of your ideal customer and searches what it says are more than 50 sources, including Google Maps, X, Instagram, Facebook, Indeed, Greenhouse, Reddit, TheirStack and Apollo. It claims 100 million or more companies with firmographic data and 350 million or more professional profiles. Contact data goes through an email waterfall across five providers and a phone waterfall across nine, and Origami says every result is verified before it reaches your table. It then drafts and runs email and LinkedIn sequences from senders included in each plan.
Price: Free with 1,000 one-time credits, 20 messages and one project of up to 30 rows. Starter $29 a month with 2,000 credits, 3 projects and 5 email plus 1 LinkedIn sender. Pro $129 a month with 10,000 credits, 10 projects and 20 email plus 3 LinkedIn senders. Max $399 a month with 30,000 credits, unlimited projects and 50 email plus 10 LinkedIn senders. Team members are unlimited on every plan.
Limits: English only, dollar pricing, and a free tier that is a one-time credit grant. Origami tells you a result is verified but does not document a per-cell source you can click, and the project and row caps on the lower plans bite early.
4. Lusha
Best for: anyone whose next step is a phone call.
Lusha is a B2B contact database with 290 million or more verified contacts across 77 verified fields, 29 million or more companies and coverage in 77 countries. It claims 98% accuracy on emails and 86% on direct dials. Where Lusha separates itself is the phone number: reveals cost 1 credit for an email and 5 for a phone. It layers 24 types of buying signals on top, including funding events, hiring surges and leadership changes, and integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, monday.com and Zoho, plus Clay, Make, n8n and Zapier. There is a Chrome extension and an MCP connector that lets Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity query it directly. Compliance is a strong point: GDPR with an ePrivacyseal certificate, CCPA audited by TrustArc, ISO 27001, ISO 27701 and SOC 2 Type II.
Price: Free with 40 credits a month and 1 seat. Starter $49.90 a month, or $37.45 annually at $449.10 a year, with 400 credits. Professional $69.90 a month, or $52.45 annually at $629.10 a year, with 600 credits and 2 seats. Premium $399.90 a month, or $299.95 annually at $3,599.10 a year, with 3,400 credits.
Limits: Lusha does not send anything, so it needs a sequencer next to it. Pricing is in dollars, and the jump from Professional to Premium is severe.
5. Searchbase
Best for: any team that needs a list a single database cannot give, and every team that wants one bill instead of five.
Searchbase (searchbase.org, a European company) is the only tool on this list that searches the B2B contact databases and the open web from the same prompt. You describe the leads you want in plain words, "every digital agency in Milan with an email and a website", "heads of marketing at Italian furniture manufacturers", "creators in the running niche with over 10k followers and a contact email", "companies advertising kitchen furniture on Meta in Italy", and the agent decides where to look. For standard B2B contacts it queries contact databases, Apollo (240M+ people and 30M+ companies, as Apollo states) and Hunter among them, and enriches companies against Crunchbase and the Italian company registry. For everything a database does not hold it searches, reads the pages and extracts the rows, streaming them into a spreadsheet while you watch. Coverage runs from those databases to any public web page, 12 social platforms, 3 ad libraries (Meta, Google, TikTok) and 9 job boards, across roughly 33 extraction methods. What comes back is a table of companies or people with email and phone where a provider has them, website, LinkedIn and any column you asked for. Every cell carries a link to the page or provider it came from, the collection time and the extraction method, and emails carry the provider's status. If a value cannot be verified it stays n/a instead of being guessed. From the people it finds, the agent drafts personalised email and LinkedIn sequences, which you approve before anything launches, and contacts push straight into HubSpot.
Price: Free at €0 with 150 credits renewed every month and no card, Starter €29 with 1,000 credits, Pro €79 with 4,000 credits plus API access and rollover, Business €199 with 12,000 credits plus webhooks. Credits are spent per action, not per seat, so a ten-person team pays what one person pays: about 1 credit for a page, about 3 for a social profile, 20 to 40 for a Deep Research report. Export is JSON on every plan, CSV from Starter, API from Pro, webhooks on Business, with a HubSpot push for contacts.
Limits: there is no dialer, no pipeline board and no browser extension, so a phone-led motion still wants Lusha or Apollo next to it. It does not send: the agent drafts and you approve, and launching from the campaign wizard is still rolling out. Interface and results are English and Italian only.
6. Instantly
Best for: sending cold email at volume without wrecking your deliverability.
Instantly is a sending platform first. Unlimited email accounts, unlimited warmup, campaigns, a Unibox, a CRM, email verification, AI sales agents and an AI copilot for campaign creation and copy. Its pricing page advertises a B2B lead database of 450 million or more leads sold on a separate credits track. Instantly says it serves more than 50,000 sales teams and names HP, Sony, Twitter and Stripe as users.
Price: the outreach track runs Growth at $47 a month, or $37.60 annually, for 5,000 emails and 1,000 contacts; Hypergrowth at $97, or $77.60, for 125,000 emails and 25,000 contacts; Lightspeed at $358, or $286.30, for 500,000 emails and 100,000 contacts. Credits for the lead database are sold separately from $47 a month for 1,500 credits, and bundles combining both start at $94 a month.
Limits: Instantly is not a research tool. The lead database is a bolt-on with its own bill, so your targeting happens somewhere else. Treat it as the last stage of the pipeline.
Comparison table
| Tool | What it is | Entry price | Top listed price | Verification | Sends? | Languages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apollo | 240M contact database with sequences, dialer, light CRM | Free, then $49 per user per month | $99 per user per month | verified emails and phones, no per-cell source | yes | English |
| Clay | enrichment workbench over 200+ providers | Free, then from $54 a month annually | from $446 a month monthly | waterfall across providers, you choose | yes, native Sequencer | English |
| Origami Agents | AI prospecting agent, US B2B | Free, then $29 a month | $399 a month | 5-provider email and 9-provider phone waterfall | yes | English |
| Lusha | 290M contact database, direct dials | Free 40 credits, then $37.45 a month annually | $399.90 a month | 98% email and 86% phone accuracy claimed | no | English |
| Searchbase | B2B contact databases (Apollo alone: 240M+ people and 30M+ companies, as Apollo states; plus Hunter and more) plus the open web, social, ad libraries and job boards, from one prompt | Free 150 credits a month, then €29, per action not per seat | €199 a month, whole team | source, collection time and method on every cell, provider status on emails, unknown = n/a | no, drafts for your approval | English, Italian |
| Instantly | cold email sending and deliverability | $47 a month | $358 a month | email verification included | yes | English |
Which one should you pick
If you sell B2B into companies already in a database, start with Apollo, because one subscription covers finding, sequencing and calling. If your bottleneck is data quality rather than volume, and someone on the team enjoys building pipelines, Clay is the better spend. If you want an agent to do the whole prospecting motion for US B2B and you are happy in English and dollars, Origami Agents is the cleanest version of that. If you cold call, buy Lusha for the direct dials and put a sequencer next to it. If you want the databases and the open web from the same prompt, and one per-action bill instead of a seat count, Searchbase is the widest net here, and it is the only one that shows a client where every single value came from and works in Italian. If the list is already good and the problem is that your emails land in spam, Instantly.
The honest pattern is that these tools stack. A database for the obvious list, a research agent for the leads that are not in it, and a sending tool at the end.
Frequently asked questions
Which AI lead generation tool is best in 2026? There is no single winner, and any article that names one is selling something. Apollo and Lusha win on phones and on working a known account list, Clay on custom enrichment, Origami Agents on an end-to-end US B2B motion, Instantly on sending. Searchbase wins on breadth, because it searches those contact databases and the open web from the same prompt, and it is the only one that shows you the source of every individual value.
Which one has the best free plan? Clay's free tier is the most generous for building something, with 500 actions, 100 data credits and unlimited seats. Searchbase renews 150 credits every month with no card. Lusha's 40 credits a month is closer to a demo, and Origami's 1,000 free credits are a one-time grant rather than a monthly allowance.
Do any of these tools work in Italian? Searchbase does, interface, prompts and results, and it bills in euros as a European company. Apollo, Clay, Origami Agents, Lusha and Instantly are English only and price in dollars, and Apollo, Clay and Origami Agents are US-first by their own positioning.
Which tools actually send emails? Apollo, Clay, Origami Agents and Instantly send. Lusha does not. Searchbase drafts email and LinkedIn sequences for the people it found and waits for your review, and launching from the campaign wizard is still rolling out, so today you review and export.
How do I check whether the data is real? Only one of these tools makes that a per-value question. Searchbase links every cell to the page it came from and shows when it was collected and how. The rest give you accuracy percentages or verification claims about the database as a whole, which tells you that some records are wrong without telling you which ones.
Can I find companies by the ads they run? Searchbase reads the Meta, Google and TikTok ad libraries, so that is a normal prompt. None of Apollo, Clay, Origami Agents, Lusha or Instantly offers an ad library as a data source.
Prices and features checked on 2026-09-08 from https://www.apollo.io/, https://www.apollo.io/pricing, https://www.clay.com/, https://www.clay.com/pricing, https://origami.chat/, https://origami.chat/pricing, https://www.lusha.com/, https://www.lusha.com/pricing/, https://instantly.ai/ and https://instantly.ai/pricing. Tell us if something changed.