Sales Navigator vs Apollo, for one person working by hand

If you need the rows in a file, this is settled before you compare anything else. LinkedIn's own help page says it plainly: "LinkedIn currently doesn't offer the option to export account and lead information from Sales Navigator into a CSV or XLS file." The only alternative it names is CRM Sync, on Advanced Plus, whose price LinkedIn does not publish.

Apollo's entire model is handing you the rows.

So the question is not which one has better data. It is whether your work happens inside LinkedIn's interface or inside a file, and after that, which meter you would rather be constrained by: one that publishes its numbers, or one that refuses to.

What a seat costs

Sales Navigator prices read on business.linkedin.com on 4 September 2026, US list.

Advanced Plus has no list price anywhere on the page. LinkedIn says pricing "is customized based on your sales team's size, CRM integration, and onboarding/training needs." Any figure you see quoted for it came from somewhere other than LinkedIn.

Apollo, per seat per month on annual billing: Free $0, Basic $49, Professional $79, Organization $119 with a three-seat minimum. One caveat rather than a hidden asterisk: those are annual-billing figures taken from Apollo's own pages, and Apollo's month-to-month prices could not be verified, so check them before committing to a monthly plan.

For one person, then, the entry points are $49 a month against $89.99, and the free tier only exists on one side. If you are buying a single seat for a few hours of outbound a week, that pairing is the whole decision, and the rest of this article is the reason it goes the way it does.

What each product actually counts

This is the table that decides the purchase, and the interesting column is the one with holes in it.

Both cells sourced on either side, all read on 4 September 2026 on the vendors' own pages.

Read down the Sales Navigator column and the pattern is that everything numeric is identical across the three tiers. Fifty InMails on Core, fifty on Advanced, fifty on Advanced Plus. Ten thousand saved leads on all three. The same 2,500-result search ceiling. Paying more does not buy more of the things that run out. It buys team features: shared lists, buyer intent, TeamLink, CRM sync.

The limit that matters is the one LinkedIn will not quantify

Sales Navigator's real constraint on finding people is the commercial use limit, and LinkedIn's help page is unusually direct about what it will not tell you: "We are not able to display the exact number of searches or views you have left and we also cannot lift the limit upon request."

The same page says an upgrade will "increase the number of profile searches and views." Increase, not remove. It never says removed anywhere, and it notes that its own Premium DACH Essentials plans still include the limit. The counter resets at midnight Pacific on the first of the month, and if you cancel, your limit does not reset on the way out.

What spends it: searching profiles on LinkedIn and mobile, browsing profiles through People Also Viewed, and viewing member profiles on the People tab of a company page. What does not: searching someone by name from the top search box, searching the Jobs page, and browsing your own first-degree connections from the Connections page. That last exemption is why working your existing network costs nothing, which we covered in what actually happens when you hit the commercial use limit.

Apollo's equivalent constraint is a number you can read. One credit reveals a contact. Eight credits get a verified phone number. Enrichment runs one to nine credits and is charged only when new data comes back. You can count what a month costs before you spend it, which is the whole argument for the disclosed meter, and we broke down how Apollo's credit types work separately.

Neither approach is generous. Only one of them is legible.

Fifty InMails, and how you get them back

If you are buying Sales Navigator to message people you are not connected to, fifty a month is the budget. It is the same on every tier, you cannot buy more, and LinkedIn says so directly: "At this time, you can't purchase additional InMail credits."

Unused credits roll over and expire after 90 days, accumulating to a ceiling of 150. You get a credit back for every InMail that receives a response within 90 days, and none back for the ones that do not. Send a second InMail to the same person before they answer and that costs another credit.

One line on that page is worth more than the rest of it: "Auto replies to InMail messages count as a response." An out-of-office refunds your credit. Which is convenient, and also a small demonstration of why reply counts in this whole category need reading carefully, because the same automatic message that hands you a credit back here inflates a reply-rate benchmark somewhere else.

Where Apollo has no meter at all

Apollo does not charge for sending. Sequences are unlimited from the Basic plan upward, and the only stated ceilings are the number of mailboxes you can connect, five on Professional and fifteen on Organization.

One thing this research could not establish: whether unused Apollo credits roll over or expire at the end of a period. LinkedIn publishes its answer for InMail, 90 days and a ceiling of 150. Apollo's equivalent was not on the pages read for this article, so budget as though credits do not carry over until Apollo confirms otherwise.

Unlimited sending sounds like the better deal, and it is worth being clear about what replaces the meter. Nothing about Apollo's pricing stops you sending badly. The constraint moves off the invoice and onto your domain reputation, where the cost of getting it wrong is not measured in credits. The ceiling that actually applies to a single domain is a deliverability question, not a plan question, and it does not appear on anybody's pricing page.

Which bottleneck do you actually have

Three cases cover most single-seat buyers.

You cannot find enough of the right people. Sales Navigator's filters are the better instrument, and its data is maintained by the people it describes, which is a genuine advantage no aggregator can claim. Accept that you will work inside LinkedIn, message through InMail fifty times a month, and never get a file.

You can find them and cannot reach them. Apollo, and the credits go on reveals rather than on searching. Budget it as a per-contact cost and remember that a phone number is eight times an email.

Or you need the list somewhere else: a CRM, a spreadsheet, a sequencing tool, anything that is not LinkedIn. Then the export line settles it, and Advanced Plus with CRM Sync is the only version of Sales Navigator that answers, at a price LinkedIn will quote you privately.

The pair is also not exclusive, which is the honest reason so many desks run both: one to decide who is worth contacting, the other to get the contact details. That is two subscriptions to solve one problem, and it is the arrangement the comparison pages tend to arrive at without saying what it costs.

Prices, allowances and quotations in this article were read at source on 4 September 2026, on business.linkedin.com, LinkedIn's Help Center and apollo.io. Where a price is not published, this article says so instead of quoting a third party's estimate.