Most comparison posts are written by the vendors themselves, or by someone trying to sell you a fourth option. This one is too, in a way. But before we get there, let us do the thing the other comparison posts keep avoiding: actually answer the question.
If you run sales at a Dutch or UK company of 10 to 100 people, you have probably looked at Apollo, Cognism, and Lusha. You have probably come away confused about which one to pick. That is because none of them were built for you, and the industry knows it but prices the tools as if they were.
We have watched SME sales teams burn six months and four-figure budgets picking between these three. This is the post we wish they had read first.
The short answer
Pick Apollo if: your team is email-heavy, you sell into multiple markets including the US, and your reps know how to work around a 15 to 25 percent bounce rate.
Pick Cognism if: phone calling is your primary channel, you sell into EMEA, and you have a real data budget. Real means €15,000 to €25,000 per year minimum, before seats.
Pick Lusha if: one or two reps need to spot-check contacts before outreach, and you do not need bulk workflows, intent signals, or anything beyond a Chrome extension.
If you have read this far and none of that describes you, there is a fourth option at the end of this post.
The three databases, at a glance
| Apollo | Cognism | Lusha | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (annual) | €49 per user per month (Basic) | €15,000 platform fee + €1,500 per user per year (Grow) | €22.45 per user per month (Pro) |
| Pricing transparency | Public | Quote only | Public |
| Contract | Monthly or annual | Annual only | Monthly or annual |
| Best for geography | US primarily, EMEA secondary | UK and EMEA | Global, shallow |
| Claimed database size | 275M+ contacts | 400M+ contacts | 100M+ contacts |
| Reported email accuracy | Email bounce 15 to 25 percent | 90+ percent for EMEA | 81 percent overall |
| GDPR-first compliance | Standard | Yes, differentiated | Standard |
| Phone-verified mobiles | No | Yes (Diamond Data, Elevate tier) | No |
| Intent data | Basic, lower tiers | Bombora, Elevate tier only | Scale plan only |
| Built-in outreach | Yes | No | No |
| Chrome extension | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Prices correct as of April 2026. Cognism pricing is triangulated from Salesmotion, Factors, and Coldreach reports since Cognism does not publish.
All three will tell you their database is the biggest, most accurate, and most compliant. Ignore that. Every B2B database has roughly the same raw coverage for a well-defined European ICP. What differs is what they do with it, who they built the tool for, and what you have to assemble around them.
Apollo: great at email, rough at everything else
Apollo is the cheapest way to get started. It publishes pricing, lets you self-serve, and includes an email sequencer in every paid plan. For a solo rep or a two-person team testing outbound for the first time, that is genuinely useful. You can be sending emails the same afternoon you sign up.
The problem is what happens next.
Email bounce rates. Users regularly report Apollo’s verified-email bounce rate landing in the 15 to 25 percent range. Independent teardowns from practitioners on Salesmotion and Amplemarket have described similar numbers. For a new domain, that is a sender reputation killer. Two weeks of hard bouncing and your deliverability sits in spam purgatory for months. Teams that do best on Apollo already have mature warmup infrastructure around it.
Credit system expires monthly. Every paid tier runs on credits. Phone number reveals cost 5 to 8 credits each. Email reveals cost 1 credit each. Unused credits expire at the end of each billing cycle. If your team’s prospecting is uneven, you either waste credits or run short and pay €0.20 each for top-ups. Budget predictability suffers.
Real cost is not the advertised cost. Apollo lists at €49 per user per month on Basic. For a serious SDR, you end up on Professional (€79) or Organization (€119, minimum three seats, so €357 per month entry). Add phone reveals, add export credits for CRM syncing, add a separate deliverability tool to cover Apollo’s bounce rate, and independent analyses from Amplemarket and Salesmotion put the effective cost at €120 to €340 per user per month.
US bias. Apollo’s data is strongest in North America. European coverage is real, but less consistent than Cognism’s. For a Dutch reseller selling into Benelux and DACH, you will see gaps.
Apollo is the right choice if:
- You are testing outbound for the first time and need to ship tomorrow
- Your primary channel is email, you are ready to use a deliverability tool on top, and you know how to manage warmup
- You sell into multiple markets, at least one of which is the US
- You want a sequencer built in and do not want to pay for Outreach or Salesloft separately
Apollo is the wrong choice if:
- You cold call more than you email
- Your entire pipeline is EMEA, and you need GDPR to be a feature, not a footnote
- You hate credit-based pricing and want predictable flat costs
- You are about to hire your first SDR and cannot afford a domain reputation blow-up in month two
Cognism: premium data, premium price, limited to what it does
Cognism is what you buy when phone data quality is the constraint that matters most. Their Diamond Data program has a dedicated team manually calling and verifying mobile numbers, which produces connect rates two to three times higher than anything else in the category. For a UK SDR team whose entire motion depends on dials, this is measurable productivity.
Cognism also takes GDPR seriously. The platform screens against do-not-call lists in 15-plus countries, runs Privacy Impact Assessments on data sources, and holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II. If your legal team cares about the lawful basis for B2B contact processing under GDPR, Cognism gives you a defensible answer.
The cost reality, though, is where it falls apart for SME budgets.
Platform fee before seats. Cognism charges a €15,000 base platform fee on the Grow plan, or €25,000 on the Elevate plan (formerly Platinum and Diamond). That is before a single user seat. Per-seat pricing adds roughly €1,500 per user per year on Grow and €2,500 on Elevate. A five-person team on Grow is €22,500 per year. On Elevate, €37,500.
Annual contracts only. No monthly option. No true free trial. Instead, you get 25 sample leads after a sales call. Expect the evaluation process to take one to two weeks with demo scheduling and follow-ups.
Data only, no execution. Cognism gives you verified contacts and signals. It does not send emails, run sequences, or dial phones. You still need Outreach, Salesloft, Instantly, or Lemlist on top. Add €60 to €150 per user per month for that layer.
Renewal increases. Users report 10 to 15 percent annual renewal increases unless you negotiate a multi-year price lock upfront. Auto-renewal clauses are standard, sometimes with 30 to 60 day notice windows.
Fair use caps. The “unlimited data access” marketing comes with a fair-use ceiling of roughly 2,000 records per user per month. Most teams never hit it, but heavy prospectors can.
Cognism is the right choice if:
- You have a UK or EMEA SDR team that lives on the phone
- You have €40,000 to €80,000 per year of real data budget
- Your compliance team actively cares about GDPR lawful basis
- You already have an outreach execution stack you like
Cognism is the wrong choice if:
- You are under 50 employees and the platform fee alone is more than a junior rep’s monthly salary
- You are primarily email and LinkedIn driven
- You sell into the US and expect parity of coverage
- You want to try a tool before committing to an annual contract
For a 15-person B2B SME in the Netherlands, Cognism’s pricing makes it functionally inaccessible. Which is fine. It was not built for you.
Lusha: the Chrome extension that thinks it is a sales platform
Lusha is the easiest tool on this list to understand. It is a Chrome extension that reveals contact information on LinkedIn profiles. Click a name, reveal the email, move on. The Pro plan at €22.45 per user per month makes it the cheapest entry point for a team that just needs to spot-check contacts.
The honest limits show up quickly.
Coverage is the real issue. Lusha publishes strong headline accuracy numbers, but that is accuracy on the emails it returns, not on the contacts you look up. User reports and third-party comparisons suggest hit rate on European B2B lists is materially lower than the headline number. The contacts that return nothing still consume your time, even if not your credits.
Credit math punishes phone reveals. Phone numbers cost 5 to 10 credits each depending on how the plan is configured. The Pro plan’s 3,000 credits per year sounds like a lot until you realise it is 600 phone numbers per year per user, or about 50 per month. For any team doing serious dial volume, that runs out fast.
Bulk enrichment capped at 25. Pro plan bulk operations cap at 25 contacts per batch. For teams enriching CSV lists of several hundred contacts, this means running 20+ batch operations manually.
CRM integrations locked behind Scale. Salesforce and HubSpot integration only live on the Scale plan, which is custom-priced and quote-only. For a three-person team wanting a basic Pipedrive or HubSpot sync, Lusha’s mid-tier leaves you without it.
Credits expire on annual plans. Any credits you do not use in your annual cycle reset to zero. There is no rollover. Unlike monthly plans where unused credits roll forward up to 2x the plan limit.
Lusha is the right choice if:
- You have one or two people who occasionally need to find a verified email before outreach
- You do not need bulk operations, intent data, or deep CRM integration
- Your workflow lives in LinkedIn and a Chrome extension is genuinely enough
Lusha is the wrong choice if:
- Your team runs real outbound campaigns with volume
- You rely on phone numbers, because the credit math collapses
- You need intent signals, job change alerts, or any intelligence beyond a contact card
- Multiple people on your team need to collaborate on lists or enrich CRM records at scale
Lusha is a tool, not a platform. That is fine, as long as you use it like a tool.
What none of them do
The three databases solve one problem well: they hand you contact information. What they do not do, and what a 10 to 100 person B2B SME actually needs, is everything that happens between “I have a list of 400 companies” and “my rep just sent 40 personalised, well-timed emails”.
Specifically, none of them do this:
Rank companies by fit against your actual ICP. You can filter by firmographics (country, headcount, industry code). You cannot say “a Dutch industrial OEM moving toward servitisation” and get back a ranked list. Semantic search against real company content is absent.
Tell you the right moment to reach out. Apollo has basic intent data on higher tiers. Cognism has Bombora intent on Elevate. Neither of them scores signals bilaterally. That is, “this matters to them” AND “this matters to what you sell”. You get noise, not signal.
Draft the first outreach. Apollo includes an email sequencer. It is a templating tool, not a writer. You still write the message. Cognism and Lusha do not touch outreach.
Verify the claim before a meeting. Meeting prep happens in your own head, or in a Notion document your rep keeps private. None of these tools research a prospect properly before the call.
This is the gap that hit us when we tried to do outbound at our own 15-person company. We had good data, but the research layer between “list of names” and “ready to send” was a rep’s manual labour. Six hours of research for one serious email.
The fourth option, briefly
We built Hooklyne to close that research gap. A semantic ICP search that ranks companies against your description, not your filters. Signals scored both ways. Meeting briefs with every claim traced to a URL. First outreach drafted in your rep’s voice. See how it works.
It is not a database. If you primarily need 50 million verified mobile numbers, Cognism still wins. Hooklyne is the layer between a database and the actual outreach.
Pricing is flat, from €39 per month. No platform fees. EU-native, GDPR-compliant. Built in the Netherlands for Dutch and UK SMEs.
Before you pay, you can run it on ten of your own prospects for free. Fully built packages with verified contacts, real signals, drafted messages. In exchange for 20 minutes of honest feedback. Start your free pilot
What to do this week
If you are still evaluating and genuinely stuck between Apollo, Cognism, and Lusha, try this:
- Write down, in one sentence, how your reps actually spend their prospecting hour. Is it finding names, writing messages, or researching the company? That sentence tells you what tool fits.
- Calculate the real annual cost for each tool. Base price times 12, times your team size, plus one realistic outreach tool on top. Apollo: €12,000 to €25,000. Cognism: €40,000 to €80,000. Lusha: €3,000 to €10,000.
- Pilot the cheapest tool that matches your primary workflow before you commit.
The worst mistake we see SME sales teams make is buying the premium tool and then only using the Chrome extension. If that is all you are going to use, pay €22.45 for Lusha and put the other €35,000 into a dedicated researcher. Or a research workflow that does what the researcher would do.
Last updated April 2026. Pricing changes quarterly. If anything here is out of date, email contact@hooklyne.com and we will fix it.
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