Same search, 5,000 contacts or 900: Apollo vs Instantly for a leads database

Sunny Ray · Apr 21, 2026 · 6 min read

Same search. Same personas. Same country. About 5,000 contacts in Apollo. About 900 in Instantly.

That was the number on a client call on April 21, while we were building a list of transport buyers in Australia for a traffic-tech founder: traffic engineers, transport managers, department of transport officials. The advice on the call was short. Launch campaigns on the bigger list as soon as you can validate it.

Short answer to the search: for niche, technical or public-sector lists, Apollo found far more people in our test, and Instantly's built-in finder was the smaller pool. But the real lesson is bigger than which tool won. Your list tool quietly decides the size of your market before you write a word of copy.

One search, two tools, a 5x gap

Think about what a 900-contact list does to a campaign. You write your sequence, warm your mailboxes, and send. Reply rate looks fine. Meetings come in. Then the list runs dry in a couple of weeks and you conclude the market is small.

The market was not small. Your database was.

A 5x gap means four out of five contacts you could have reached never got an email. Not because they said no. Because a filter in a tool you picked for convenience never showed them to you. That is the most expensive kind of miss in outbound, because it is invisible. Nobody reports on the people who were never on the list.

Why niche and government lists break smaller databases

Most lead databases are built for the center of the B2B market: software companies, sales leaders, marketing teams. They are deepest where the most customers search.

Traffic engineers in Australian state transport departments are nowhere near that center. Titles vary by agency. Many work for public bodies whose staff pages and profiles are thin. A database that is excellent for "VP Sales at a SaaS company" can be thin for "transport planning manager, regional council".

The published comparisons say roughly what we found. Reviews describe Apollo as the deeper database and Instantly's SuperSearch as a lower-cost add-on to a sending tool. The database size claims you will read online conflict with each other, so do not trust any headline number. Trust your own search.

Run the same query in two tools before you commit

This is the habit that came out of April 21, and it costs an hour.

Before you buy credits or launch anything, run the identical search in at least two databases. Same titles, same seniority, same geography, same company filters. Write down the count from each. If the counts are within 20 or 30 percent, pick the cheaper tool. If one is five times the other, you have just learned something important about your market and about the smaller tool.

Then sample the overlap. Pull twenty names from the bigger list and check them by hand against the real world. Are they still in those roles? Are they the buyer, or a junior title the filter caught by accident? A bigger list full of the wrong people is worse than a small accurate one.

Validate before you launch

"Launch ASAP" came with a condition on that call: once you can validate it. Speed and verification are not opposites. Verification is what makes the speed safe.

A fresh niche list carries the same risks as any purchased data: stale roles, catch-all domains, and generic inboxes. Government domains add their own quirks. Run the list through email verification, drop anything that does not come back valid, and send the first batch small. If the bounce rate holds, open the tap.

The client in this case had a second track running alongside email: weekly roundtables with city councils on transport topics, the slow, relationship-heavy path. The bigger list feeds that too. More named officials means more people to invite to the room, not only more people to email.

The cost question: pay for coverage or pay in missed buyers

The meeting notes put the bigger pull at roughly $200 for about 3,000 contacts. Founders flinch at that and stick with the database bundled into their sending tool because it is cheaper or already paid for.

Do the other math. If a single public-sector contract is worth more than the data bill, and the bigger list holds several times as many potential buyers, the data line is a rounding error. The expensive choice is the cheap list, because its cost shows up as deals you never knew existed.

My rule: pay for coverage where your market is narrow and deals are large. Save money where your market is broad and every database already has it. For a list of SaaS heads of growth in the US, the bundled finder may be fine. For traffic engineers in Australia, it came back with a fraction of them.

Search by the job, not the title

One more thing the April 21 search taught us. We were not searching one title. We were searching three kinds of people who touch the same decision: the traffic engineer who knows the problem, the transport manager who owns the budget line, and the department of transport official who signs off. Each title gets written ten different ways across agencies.

So build the search around the job. List every variant you can find on real profiles, run them all, and dedupe. A list that only catches the one spelling your filter guessed is another way the tool shrinks your market without telling you.

What this means for your next campaign

Before you blame the copy, the subject line or the offer for a thin pipeline, check the denominator. How many people did you actually reach, out of how many who exist? If you do not know the second number, you do not know whether your campaign failed or your list did.

We build verified lists this way before any campaign goes out, then turn the best names into show invitations instead of pitches. See how the lists get built.

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