Keap vs Apollo.io: Which is a better fit?

Eli B.: Hey. I'm Eli. I'm a CEO of an SMMA, and we have less than 10 employees. And I give Keap a five out of five. So I was using HubSpot originally, and I use Keap for a lot of my other clients as well. I like Keap because the lead nurturing capabilities and automation are superior to HubSpot for a couple different reasons, one of which includes the Zapier integration. It's a lot more intuitive and easy to set up on Keap's side than it is in HubSpot, and the pricing definitely plays a role. So we chose Keap, and we implement Keap for a lot of our new clients and existing clients who already use it. We like to use Keap to nurture our leads that come in, as well as prioritize them based on where they are in the sales pipeline. Getting started with Keap was extremely easy. It's just the click of a button. There's some integrations you need to do if you want to integrate it with WordPress, or other marketing software that you use. The good news is it does have a pretty easy to use Zapier integration if you're familiar with that platform. So you could connect it to virtually any other marketing app you use. If you are looking for a CRM for your business, or just a way to automate your marketing efforts, I definitely recommend Keap. Not only does it have the capabilities to do everything, if you aren't able to figure something out on your own, their support team is fantastic, and can pretty much walk you through any step of what you're trying to accomplish.

Steve: My name is Steve, I'm the owner of Ellis Taylor Marketing, and I gave Apollo four stars. Really I mainly used Sales Navigator. I tried everything from Snov.io, FindThatLead. I think Scrap was one of them, like LinkedIn scrapers essentially, and stuff like that. But Sales Navigator was the primary one that I used, and that was bringing in the best leads that I could find. They also had some of the best search tools in terms of prospecting and filters for finding new leads and stuff like that. Really, the two big things that drew me to Apollo were the much more detailed targeting, or I guess it's filtering, for the lead, the prospecting. Then also, the campaigns, the sequences that you could build, and how you could AB test different sequences, the metrics that they gave you on those sequences. But really, to date, the thing that's been the best has been the prospecting tools and just how much you can filter searches out and the different options that they provide for those searches. It was pretty easy to set up and get started with, but there was definitely a big learning curve when it came to learning the platform. I wouldn't say it was really that intuitive because there's such a big platform, it's, I think, hard to make this kind of platform intuitive. It's taken months really to get used to the platform and get used to all the features that it has and really understand it. And honestly, I'm still learning it, and I've been using it for over a year now I believe. So, that's been the biggest thing, is just learning the platform itself. But in terms of getting it up and running, I'd say it was relatively easy. I would definitely say check it out. I think, for me, Apollo has been very useful in prospecting. I haven't had a tool, at least for the price that comes anywhere near it. Everything else seems to be a lot more expensive from my experience at least. When it comes to the other tools they offer, like the actual sending of the emails, the campaigns and stuff like that, I've noticed that for whatever reason, the open rates have just dropped significantly. And since I switched to a different platform for sending my emails, the exact same list and everything else, my open rates shop back up. So, I think there's still a lot of bugs to work out within Apollo. I think that's something to consider if somebody's considering Apollo. But in terms of a prospecting tool, I haven't been able to find anything that beats it, and I've been looking a lot for something to beat it, and I haven't been able to find anything beat to beat it. So, I think for the price, in terms of the prospecting, you can't beat Apollo. But when it comes to the other features, maybe look little more closely into it I would say.