Apollo.io vs Klenty: Which Sales Engagement Platform Is Right for You?

In the world of sales engagement, choosing the right platform can be a game-changer.

Apollo.io and Klenty are 2 prominent players, each offering unique features and capabilities. In this comprehensive analysis, we'll delve into what Apollo.io and Klenty are, their uses, and features, and weigh the pros and cons of each platform.

Our goal is to help you make an informed decision on which platform suits your sales team's needs.

What Is Klenty? 

Klenty is a robust sales engagement platform tailored to simplify outreach efforts. With Klenty, sales teams can automate tasks like sending personalized emails, automated follow-ups, and tracking engagement metrics, allowing for a more focused approach on building relationships and closing deals.

What is Klenty Best for?

Klenty is the choice for those who want to:

• Streamline prospect communication across multiple channels.
• Achieve individualized outreach at scale.
• Ensure emails land in the prospect’s primary tab.
• Set and track sales team goals.
• Integrate seamlessly with leading CRM platforms.

Features of Klenty:

Multichannel Outreach:

Klenty offers an array of communication channels, including Phone, Email, LinkedIn, SMS, and WhatsApp. These channels come with one-click automation, allowing you to reach prospects easily and manage multi-channel communications in one place. No more juggling between tabs – Klenty streamlines your outreach efforts for maximum efficiency.

Personalization:

Klenty provides advanced email customization, tailoring content for each prospect with features like Merge Fields. The Liquid Templates dynamically adjust email content based on when it's opened. Plus, Klenty's AI Cadence Writer, Kai scans prospect profiles to add hyper-personalized openers, impactful content, and compelling calls to action. Your outreach is consistently engaging and individualized.

Cadence and Playbooks:

Klenty’s Cadence Playbooks helps you detect intent in prospects, establish the right next steps for every prospect, and prioritize prospects based on their intent. You gain visibility into where prospects are in their buying journey, move prospects from cadence to cadence based on intent, and execute precisely those activities which take each prospect towards a meeting. No more blind follow-ups.

Email Deliverability:

Klenty goes the extra mile when it comes to email deliverability and ensures all your emails land on prospect’s Primary tab. With Klenty, you will know exactly how many emails that land in the Primary Tab across different email providers. 

You can limit the number of emails you send per day and stagger email sending in an irregular manner to escape spam filters.

Goals and Reports:

With Klenty's Goals and Reports, sales managers establish daily, weekly, and monthly targets for the sales team. Managers can get reps to commit towards targets for activity, prospect coverage and conversion, and spot gaps in real time to ensure timely interventions. 

CRM Integration:

In the modern sales landscape, CRM integration is vital. Klenty seamlessly connects with leading CRM platforms, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Zoho CRM. This integration ensures your data remains consistent and up-to-date, providing your sales team with a unified view of your sales pipeline.

Pros and Cons of Klenty 

Pros of Klenty:

• Easy-to-use interface with no bloatware. Klenty’s intuitive and clutter-free interface makes reps take to the platform almost instantly and see results rapidly.
• Transparent pricing. Klenty’s pricing is available for everyone to see to help you know exactly what you’re paying for.
• 14-day free trial. You’ll get a 14-day free trial to explore all of Klenty’s features with a dedicated account manager, so that you can make a well-informed decision. 
• Affordability. With its basic plan starting at just $50 per user per month, Klenty remains a powerful yet affordable sales engagement platform for growing sales teams.
  Pay for what you need. Klenty has tailored pricing plans for email-only sales teams and multi-channel teams. You don't have to pay for features you don't use.
• Parallel Dialer for cold calling. Klenty’s powerful Sales Dialer enables parallel dialing, where you can place up to 5 calls simultaneously in one click to help you place 5x more calls. The dialer also logs all notes to your CRM, allows you to send voicemails in a click, and batch prospects according to their time zone.
• Intent detection. Klenty’s Cadence Playbooks helps you detect intent in prospects, establish the right next steps for every prospect, and prioritize prospects based on their intent. You gain visibility into where prospects are in their buying journey, move prospects from cadence to cadence based on intent, and execute precisely those activities that take each prospect towards a meeting. No more blind follow-ups.
• Set clear goals for reps. With Klenty’s Goals and Reports, managers can set daily, weekly, and monthly targets for the sales team, get them to commit towards targets for activity, prospect coverage, and conversion, and spot gaps as they happen (not after) to ensure timely interventions.
• Advanced email personalization. At Klenty, email personalization doesn’t stop with just placeholders. The ‘Liquid Templates’ feature uses dynamic formulas to change the content of your emails based on when the prospect receives and opens the email. 
• Tight integrations that ensure updated CRMs. Klenty smoothly integrates with 5 CRMs—Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Hubspot, Zoho, and Pipedrive. The advanced integration capabilities include triggers to automatically update contacts from Klenty to CRM and auto-syncing of metrics like opens, clicks and replies along with email conversation history to the CRM. The tight integration ensures an up-to-date CRM, which saves hours per day by eliminating manual activities and allows you to focus on selling.

• Helps sales teams consolidate their tech stack. Apart from its sales engagement platform, Klenty also offers platforms to source accurate contact data of ideal buyers (Prospect IQ), schedule meetings automatically with prospects (Schedule IQ), and analyze your calls using AI (Call IQ). With Klenty, you can effortlessly consolidate your tech stack to work with a unified data foundation for all the stages of the sales cycle.

Cons of Klenty:

• User interface. Klenty’s UI can take a few minutes to get used to.
• Pricing. Due to advanced capabilities, the product’s pricing can be a little out of reach for small businesses.
• Not suitable for spray-and-pray. Getting the most out of Klenty requires you to set up a well-planned sales strategy, which can be a bit daunting for teams that use a spray-and-pray approach to outbound.

What Is Apollo.io?

Apollo.io is a cloud-based sales automation tool. It serves as a tool for lead generation, contact database management, and email outreach. Founded in 2015, Apollo.io is a lead intelligence and sales engagement platform trusted by nearly 9,000 customers, including some of the largest global enterprises.

What Is Apollo.io Best For?

You should use Apollo.io if you’re looking to: 

• Equip yourself with a good database of emails 
• Send heavy volumes of emails to prospects 
• Craft personalized emails 
• Demand capture using external triggers 

Features of Apollo.io: 

• Sequences: Create automated, multi-step touchpoints for your sales outreach, including emails, calls, LinkedIn tasks, and more.
• Dialer: Make, receive, and record calls, join active calls, and log calls to your CRM, straight from Apollo.
• Task Manager: Stay on top of all of your tasks, including calls, emails, LinkedIn connections, and other important action items.
• Apollo's AI writing assistant: Craft hyper-personalized emails based on relevant buyer signals for every prospect.
• Plays - 21+ template library: Choose from a library of Plays to deploy game-changing automation in seconds.
• Get alerts on lead signals: Create alerts sent to your Slack, email, or Apollo’s control center to manually take action on new leads.
• Engage at the right time: Create automation to engage leads and customers at the perfect moment and never miss an opportunity again.

Pros and Cons of Apollo.io 

Pros of Apollo.io:

• No Email Send Limit: Apollo.io doesn't restrict your email sends, giving you the flexibility to reach out to as many prospects as you need. 
• Pricing: Although Apollo has limited features available for the lower pricing plans, Apollo.io is said to be offering competitive pricing plans, catering to a larger audience.
• Good Database of Emails: Apollo.io provides access to a substantial database of over 270 million records of emails, enhancing your prospecting capabilities.

Cons of Apollo.io: 

• Data Security: Apollo.io's approach to data privacy has been a source of concern for many businesses. Their terms state that they will have access to all the contact, prospect, or customer databases you upload, using this data to enhance their datasets and then selling it to other customers in a cyclical data-selling model. While this system can offer discounts to customers, it raises privacy concerns, particularly for mid-sized and enterprise companies. This might be one of the biggest red flags while considering Apollo.io. 
• Zoho Integration: Apollo.io lacks a native integration with Zoho. Thus Users have to connect their Zoho CRM to Apollo using Zapier. This causes the users to face challenges when integrating Apollo.io with Zoho, affecting workflow efficiency.
• Limited Customer Support: Reports of less-than-ideal experiences with Apollo’s customer support have been raised by a huge number of Apollo users. Timely customer support is a critical component of any software service, as it ensures that users receive timely assistance and guidance. 
• Underdeveloped Onboarding: One critical drawback of Apollo.io is the absence of structured onboarding processes. This deficiency can significantly hinder users' ability to swiftly adapt to the platform, potentially leading to a steeper learning curve and underutilization of its features.
• Playbooks: Users are limited to pre-existing automation templates and may not create custom triggers, reducing customization options. This is a big disadvantage for users adapting to the platform, as they have been in the market, looking for a sales engagement platform, for the very same reason - To be able to customize and automate their sales outreach. The absence of behavior-triggered playbook automations, makes it even more challenging for users to adapt their strategies based on customer interactions and responses.
• No Parallel Dialer: Apollo.io's standard dialer, while functional, lacks the advanced capabilities of a parallel dialer. This limitation can significantly impact the efficiency of sales teams, especially those heavily reliant on calling activities. The absence of parallel dialing features hinders the ability to engage with prospects at scale, potentially slowing down the outreach process and affecting productivity.
• Non-Intuitive Reports: Apollo.io's reporting system, while functional, may not fully meet some users' preferences for intuitiveness. This could lead to occasional challenges in extracting actionable insights from the data, resulting in minor delays in the decision-making process for sales teams. 

Explore the best 10 Apollo.io alternatives here.

Pricing of Klenty & Apollo.io

Klenty Pricing:

Here are the pricing details for the different plans that Klenty offers:

• Startup plan: $50/user/month (billed annually) and $60/user/month (billed quarterly). Comes with email deliverability, email personalization, sales ops, reply optimization, and task management features. 
• Growth plan: $70/user/month (billed annually) and $85/user/month (billed quarterly). Everything in Startup + multichannel outreach, CRM integrations, intent-based follow-ups (cadence playbooks), and sales management features.
• Pro plan: $100/user/month (billed annually) and $125/user/month (billed quarterly). Everything in Growth + Goals and Reports, 200 credits (Phone+Email), account-based prospecting, and website tracking.
• Enterprise plan: Customized plans available. Everything in Pro + IP-based login restrictions, quarterly customer success review, and advanced deliverability insights.

Apollo Pricing:

• The first one being the Free $0 plan with limited features. 
• The Basic plan comes at $39 per user per month. This plan additionally includes features such as Email open & Click tracking, a 250k words monthly limit, and AI-assisted Email Writing. 
• The Professional plan comes at $79 per user per month. This plan includes Plays as an addition. 
• Finally, the Organization plan comes at $99 per user per month. Customizable reports and Advanced API access are the additions to this plan. 

What Are Users Saying About Apollo.io & Klenty?

A sales engagement platform is a significant investment for your organization, and a wrong decision can prove to be costly. 

So, checking reviews on G2 from users who have used the solution you’re evaluating will give you valuable insights about its pros and cons, helping you make a well-informed decision. 

That said, let’s see some of the reviews on G2 for Apollo.io and Klenty.

Apollo’s G2 Reviews:

Klenty’s G2 Reviews:

Klenty: The Best Alternative to Apollo.io for Growing Sales Teams

Apollo.io is a well-known sales engagement platform, often chosen by sales teams for its extensive set of features. But it's important to think about other options that can provide more specialized solutions for expanding sales teams.

Let’s explore one such alternative to Apollo, Klenty.

Klenty is a robust sales engagement platform designed to empower sales teams and streamline their outreach efforts. 

Klenty: The Alternative Addressing Apollo.io's Drawbacks for Mature Sales Teams:

Equipped with an impressive array of capabilities, Klenty takes the stage as the best substitute for Apollo.io.

Klenty offers strong solutions that are customized to meet the demands of mature sales teams. These solutions include Playbooks, Goals, deeper CRM integrations, and variable cadences.

On the contrary, Apollo.io may be of interest to you as a startup looking for a reasonably priced Sales Engagement Platform (SEP). Klenty is committed to providing excellent customer service and a user-focused approach, making sure that the outreach efforts of your sales team are successful and optimized.

Klenty emerges as the alternative to Apollo.io that effectively addresses and resolves the primary drawbacks of Apollo.io. With a strong focus on Goals, playbooks, deeper CRM integration, and more flexible Cadences, Klenty proves to be a stronger alternative for mature sales teams seeking to maximize their outreach efforts and drive success. Whereas, Apollo is good for startups looking for an affordable SEP looking to send out bulk emails.

Let's delve into why Klenty might be a more appealing choice for your growing sales team.

1. Seamless CRM Integration: 

Klenty boasts a seamless integration with the top 5 CRMs—Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, MS Dynamics, and Zoho. This ensures automated workflows and seamless data synchronization across the board, allowing your sales team to focus on building valuable relationships. Apollo users have often reported concerns regarding its integration with Zoho being unsatisfactory. On the other hand, Klenty has been the best choice for Zoho CRM users. 

2. Email Deliverability:

Klenty offers a robust solution for email deliverability that eliminates the random intervals commonly associated with some platforms. Unlike Apollo.io, which might support a "spam and pray" approach, Klenty excels in ensuring your emails reach their intended recipients effectively.

Klenty's approach to email deliverability includes:

• Email Validation: Klenty automatically validates email addresses for both new and existing prospects, significantly reducing bounce rates.
• Email Sending Control: Klenty allows you to limit the number of emails you send per day and stagger email sending in an irregular manner, ensuring a more natural and reliable email outreach.
• Deliverability Insights: Klenty provides valuable insights, such as the percentage of emails that land in the Primary Tab across different email service providers. It scores your emails based on spam factors and offers suggestions for improving deliverability. This comprehensive approach to email deliverability sets Klenty apart as a more effective option for sales teams.

3. Multi-Mode Dialer: 

Unlike Apollo.io, Klenty equips sales teams with a robust dialer. This multi-mode dialer helps you say goodbye to the tedious task of manual dialing. The dialer automatically calls 5 prospects at once, saving time and allowing you to make 5x more calls. Country Code Integration, Session Reporting, Local dialing, and Pause and Resume are some of the additional features of the dialer that significantly cut down on dial time. In a nutshell, Klenty's dialer lets you spend more time engaging with prospects and less time on the dialing process, making Klenty the best solution for calling heavy sales teams.

4. Goal-driven Outreach: 

Klenty supports sales teams to have Goal-driven outreach. With Klenty, sales leaders can set up milestones for sales reps to hit on a weekly and monthly basis. This means reps stay accountable to targets and adapt their approach to hit goals.

For every rep in their team, managers can track KPIs like:

• Activity Targets
• Prospect Coverage Targets
• Conversion Targets

They also get full visibility into rep efforts across emails, calls, LinkedIn tasks, text, and WhatsApp.

5. Intuitive Reports: 

Klenty sets a high standard with its user-friendly reporting system, significantly improving the ease of extracting actionable insights from your data.

Unlike Apollo.io, which may leave users grappling with a less intuitive reporting system, Klenty ensures that your sales team can effortlessly access and understand critical data. With Klenty's reports, you can gain a clearer understanding of your sales processes, track performance, and make informed decisions to drive success with a comprehensive dashboard with various types of reports such as cadence reports, list reports, email reports, call reports, and activity reports. 

6. Free Onboarding:

Klenty’s extensive onboarding process is free of cost to all of its customers. The support is customized depending on your sales team’s size and goals. What’s more, the support team will have as many onboarding calls as you need till every member of your team becomes comfortable using the platform.

7. Free 24x5 Customer Support:

Klenty’s customer support is impressively responsive—with a response time of only 2.5 minutes—and remains free of cost for the entirety of your customer lifespan.

8. Free Deliverability Consultancy:

Despite Klenty’s features that ensure good email deliverability, If sales teams who use Klenty encounter any email deliverability issues (like emails going to spam or having a high bounce rate), the customer support team will analyze their deliverability and provide actionable suggestions to ensure their emails land on prospect’s primary inbox. This, too, is free of cost. 

9. Free Quarterly Reviews:

Klenty takes a proactive approach in improving its customers’ performances. Every quarter, the customer support team analyzes how customers use the platform and prepares a deck that includes customized insights like overall performance reviews, recommendations, and product roadmap.

10. Intent-Driven Outreach:

Klenty lets you segment prospects and run the right next steps for them based on their intent. Through this customized outreach and follow-up efforts based on the prospect’s buying journey, you can execute the right activities at the right time for every prospect.

High Intent Detector allows you to assign points and isolate those prospects who are closer to buying than others.

11. Truly Multichannel: 

Unlike Apollo, Klenty is truly Multichannel. Apollo allows you to engage via emails, calls, and LinkedIn. In addition to emails, calls, and LinkedIn, Klenty lets you execute SMS and WhatsApp follow-ups.

Klenty empowers sales reps to make complete use of 5 different channels: 

• Phone: Place calls and voicemails in one click without the distraction of dialing.
• Email: Personalize email text and videos with prospect data at scale.
• LinkedIn: Complete tasks like InMails and connect requests in a click with personalization.
• SMS: Use text messaging to complement your cold calls and boost your chances of striking a conversation.
• WhatsApp: Schedule and send personalized WhatsApp messages in one click. 

Through a full-fledged and automated multichannel outreach, reps can reach prospects wherever they are and book more meetings—all at scale.

Plus, Klenty’s multi-channel inbox collates all prospect communication across all channels in one place, so you can manage prospect interactions without the pain of switching tabs.

12. Helps Sales Teams Consolidate Their Tech Stack:

Apart from its sales engagement platform, Klenty also offers platforms to source accurate contact data of ideal buyers (Prospect IQ), schedule meetings automatically with prospects (Schedule IQ), and analyze your calls using AI (Call IQ). With Klenty, you can effortlessly consolidate your tech stack to work with a unified data foundation for all the stages of the sales cycle.

With Klenty, build a high-performance sales team experience premium customer service, and never compromise on your privacy. 

Want to see in action why Klenty is the best Apollo.io alternative? Schedule a demo today!