Bold Agent Kit vs Apollo is a question of where you start. Apollo starts with a B2B contact database; Bold Agent Kit starts with the list you already have, and one AI agent that sends the cold email, answers the reply from your own material, books the meeting and follows the silent ones with a text and a call. It costs $25 a month, on your own AI key.
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Apollo's sequences are automated, multi-step touchpoints that include emails, calls, LinkedIn tasks and more, and its dialer offers power and parallel dialling, local presence, voicemail drops and AI call summaries, placing calls on credits. A campaign in Bold Agent Kit is narrower: email, text and call steps, each with its own delay and send condition. There are no LinkedIn tasks, and no queue of calls for a rep to work through.
The call is different in kind. It is placed on your own Twilio number and the agent itself speaks, in real time, from the script you saved, answering questions from your material, using the fastest model your provider offers so it does not leave silences, and keeping the recording and the transcript. The text before it goes from your own number through one of nine SMS carriers, with the sending window, the texts per hour and the Reply STOP line on the step. A reply, a booking or an opt-out on any channel ends the sequence on every channel.
Apollo's deliverability tools cover warm-up, SPF, DKIM and DMARC set-up, health score alerts and mailbox rotation, and it lets you buy sending domains and mailboxes through Apollo, at a cost. Bold Agent Kit does not sell domains or mailboxes. You connect the ones you already have, as many as you like per agent, Gmail and Outlook with an app password and anything else as an SMTP and IMAP host, and mail goes out through your own server rather than a shared relay.
Each mailbox that opts in warms on a ramp from five a day and carries a health score out of 100, built from SPF, DKIM and DMARC, seven days of real sends and bounces, and where its warm-up mail is landing, with the reasons listed. A campaign rotates across the healthy addresses inside an hourly cap per mailbox and a daily cap per sender, and an address whose bounce rate or spam placement crosses a threshold is pulled out of rotation on its own.
Apollo offers automated scheduling so that buyers can book demos and follow-up meetings, and AI to help write and personalise emails. Bold Agent Kit puts the whole reply in the agent's hands, on the mailboxes you switch auto-reply on for. The reply comes back over IMAP and the agent answers from the same address, from your Q&A pairs, documents, prices and the pages of your site it may link to, once per thread, ignoring bounces, out-of-office replies and no-reply addresses.
When the person is interested, it offers real open slots from your connected calendar in the reply and writes in the one they pick. It cannot book a time that was not free. Every thread lands in one inbox, tagged with the mailbox it came in on, and you can reply in any of them yourself; the agent stands down on that conversation until you hand it back. The replies you want to handle yourself come to you by rule.
Every send, open, click, reply, text, call and booking is recorded against a person. The dashboard counts people rather than activity: how many the campaign reached, how many replied, how many visited your site and how many converted, with the value won against goals you set with a dollar figure and the median time from first contact to the booking.
A channel table shows where each person first responded and which channel they were on when they converted, so you can see whether the email, the text or the agent's call moved them. One row per person shows the whole history in order, across outbound and inbound, and visit triggers follow up when a known person returns to a page you named.
Apollo is built around data. Its database lists more than 240 million contacts and 30 million companies, and around that data it puts sequences across email, calls and LinkedIn tasks, a dialer, meeting scheduling, deliverability tools and AI for writing and call summaries, connected to CRMs such as Salesforce and HubSpot. It is aimed at sales leaders, account executives, SDRs, RevOps teams, marketers and founders. For a B2B team that needs to find people before it can do anything else, that combination is the point, and nothing on this page replaces the database.
But plenty of the businesses that sign up for a sales platform already know who they want to reach. A local services firm with a list of property managers. An agency with a client's past customers sitting in HubSpot. A founder with a spreadsheet from a trade show. For them the hard part comes after the send: the reply that needs answering tonight, the follow-up that needs to go on day four, the meeting that needs to land in the calendar, and the inbound enquiries arriving through the website and the DMs at the same time. That is the part people weigh when they compare the two, and the part where they differ most.
Bold Agent Kit is one AI agent for that part. It sends cold email from as many mailboxes as you connect, warmed and health-scored, and follows the people who did not open with a text on your own number and a call the agent places itself. When somebody replies, it answers from your documents, Q&A pairs and prices, from the address the reply arrived at, and books the meeting into your calendar. The same agent answers your website chat, the calls and texts to your number, and DMs on eleven platforms, and it merges the email address, phone number and social handle belonging to one person into one contact.
The price model is different too. Apollo publishes a free plan and paid plans priced per user, with credits that its own pages say are used for things such as exporting contacts and placing dialer calls, and add-on credits when you need more. Bold Agent Kit is $25 a month or $200 a year for the whole account: unlimited agents, mailboxes, contacts and lists, no seats and no credits, with the AI on your own key billed by your provider at cost. There is no contact database here and no LinkedIn step, and if you need either, Apollo, or Apollo alongside this, is the better choice.
They are rarely about the data itself. They are about whether a data platform is the right shape for the job the business actually has.
Apollo's plans are built around its database, and credits are spent as you use it. A business whose contacts already live in a spreadsheet, a CRM or a client's customer list is choosing a plan organised around a part it may not need, while the work it does need, answering the replies and booking the meetings, is still waiting for a person.
Apollo prices its paid plans per user. For a sales team, that follows how the work is divided. For an owner and an assistant, or an agency running outbound for several clients who each want to see their own results, it means deciding who gets a seat, and paying again as the list of people who need a login grows.
Apollo gives a sales team sequences, a dialer, a scheduler and AI help with the writing. A business without reps wants a different thing: an agent that answers the reply itself, from its own material, at the hour it arrives, and books the slot into the calendar, so that a sequence that worked does not stall in an inbox until Monday.
Website chat, calls to the business number and DMs on Instagram and WhatsApp arrive whether or not a sequence is running, and they need answering as fast as a cold reply does. Buyers who want those answered by the same agent that runs the outbound, with one history per person across all of it, look for a tool built for both sides.
You bring the contacts and build the agent once. From then on it sends, follows up, answers and books on its own, on the campaign and on everything that arrives without one.
Load a CSV, a segment from HubSpot, GoHighLevel or Jobber, or contacts from the Chrome side panel. A campaign rotates across your warmed, health-scored mailboxes inside hourly and daily caps, on the days and hours you set, and each step waits for opened, not opened, clicked or not clicked. The silent ones get a text on your number, then a call from the agent.
A reply over IMAP is answered from the same address. A question in the website chat, a text to your number, an inbound call and a DM on any of eleven platforms are answered by the same agent from the same Q&A pairs, documents, prices and pages. Every answer is stored with the material it was generated from, so you can read back why it said what it said.
When the person is ready, the agent offers real open slots from Google, Microsoft 365, Calendly, Cal.com, Acuity, Zoho, Square or HubSpot Meetings and writes in the one they pick. The email, phone number and social handle belonging to one person are merged into one contact, and a reply, booking or opt-out on any channel ends the sequence on all of them.
The single biggest difference between the two is where each one starts. Apollo starts with finding people: a database of contacts and companies, and the tools to reach them. Bold Agent Kit starts with answering people: one agent, one knowledge base, and every conversation, outbound and inbound, in one inbox. A cold reply, a chat on the website, a text to your number, a call and an Instagram DM sit in the same list, newest first, tagged with where they arrived, and the agent has already answered each from your material.
That is why the two can sit side by side without overlapping much, and why a business with its own list may not need the first half at all. Reply in any thread yourself and the agent stands down on that conversation; hand it back and it picks up where you left it. A rule in its instructions sends the conversations you want to take, a pricing negotiation, a complaint, a referral from a partner, straight to you.
Each one answers a reason above, and each one runs without anybody remembering to do it.
Warmed mailboxes, rotated, then a text on your own number for the ones who did not open and a call from the agent for the ones who are still silent.
"What does it cost?" at 9pm is answered at 9pm, from your material, from the address it was sent to, before the interest cools.
Real open slots offered, and only a slot it offered can be booked. Not a scheduling link in the hope that they click it.
$25 a month for the account, with client logins onto one agent included. No seats, no credits, and the model on your own key.
Every send, open, reply, text, call, visit and booking is recorded against a person and reported as a funnel, per agent and across all agents. This is the part that tells you whether a list is worth working again.
The funnel counts people rather than activity: how many the campaign reached, how many replied, how many went on to visit your site and how many converted, with the total value won and the median time from first contact to conversion. Opens and clicks are recorded per campaign and written to each person's history, so the conditions on each step have real data. Set a goal with a dollar value and a campaign reports what it made, which is the number that tells you whether a list was worth the time.
Below the funnel, a channel table shows where each person first responded and which channel they were on when they converted, so you can see whether the cold email, the text or the agent's call did the work, and whether people who were emailed later booked through the website chat. One row per person shows every event in order, and with a one-line snippet on your site, a known person who returns to your pricing page is followed up after a delay on the channel they last used.
Built from the cookie, email address and phone number attached to that contact, so activity months apart on different channels appears on one row.
Page goals and visit triggers require a one-line snippet on your website. Conversations, bookings and manually marking a deal won work without it.
What each tool does for the jobs a buyer of sales software weighs. The Apollo column is taken from Apollo's own website on the date shown under the table.
| The job | Apollo | Bold Agent Kit |
|---|---|---|
| Finding contacts | A database of 240M+ contacts and 30M+ companies | No database. A CSV, a CRM segment, or the Chrome side panel |
| How it is priced | A free plan, and paid plans priced per user with credits; add-on credits available | $25 a month or $200 a year for the account. No seats, no credits |
| Sequences | Multi-step sequences with emails, calls, LinkedIn tasks and more | Email, text and call steps with send conditions. No LinkedIn |
| Calls | A power and parallel dialer with local presence and voicemail drops, using credits to place calls | Placed and answered by the agent on your own Twilio number, recorded |
| Mailboxes and deliverability | Warm-up, SPF, DKIM and DMARC set-up, health alerts, rotation; domains and mailboxes can be bought through Apollo at a cost | Your own mailboxes, unlimited, warmed, scored with reasons, rested automatically |
| Meetings | Automated scheduling so buyers can book demos and follow-ups | The agent offers real open slots in the reply and books the one picked |
| The AI | AI for writing and personalising emails and summarising calls, inside its plans | Your own key, sixteen providers, billed by your provider at cost |
| CRM | Integrations with CRMs such as Salesforce and HubSpot | HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, Jobber and more. No Salesforce |
In fairness to both: Apollo is a sales platform built around a large B2B contact database, with a dialer for reps, LinkedIn tasks in its sequences and Salesforce integration, none of which Bold Agent Kit offers. Bold Agent Kit is an AI agent for the work after the list exists: it sends, answers the replies, books the meetings and covers website chat, inbound calls, texts and eleven DM platforms with the same agent, for $25 a month or $200 a year on your own AI key.
We checked Apollo’s public website on 11 September 2026 for this comparison. Plans and features change, so check apollo.io for the current detail. Apollo is a trademark of its owner, and Bold Agent Kit is not affiliated with or endorsed by it.
Three honest cases. Which one you are depends mostly on whether you need Apollo to find the people in the first place.
A business that uses Apollo mainly to send sequences to contacts it already had, and pays for data and seats it rarely touches. You connect your mailboxes to an agent, load the list as a CSV or a CRM segment, rebuild the sequence as email, text and call steps, and let the agent answer the replies and book the meetings.
A team that keeps Apollo for finding people and uses Bold Agent Kit for working them. Build the list in Apollo, bring it across as a CSV or through HubSpot, which both connect to, and let the agent send, answer and book. Apollo's pricing FAQ says exporting a contact outside Apollo uses export credits, so check your plan's allowance before moving a large list.
If your main need is a B2B contact database, Apollo is the better fit, and we would rather say so than sell you the wrong thing. It is built to find people and companies, it gives reps a power and parallel dialer, it puts LinkedIn tasks in its sequences and it integrates with Salesforce. Bold Agent Kit does none of those. It fits better when you already know who to contact and want the conversations handled.
Connect the tools you already run and the agent works them like an assistant would: it takes appointments straight into your calendar, writes notes and outcomes back to the CRM, and reads your store to see what somebody has bought before it answers them.
Bookings are real, not guesses. It is only ever given slots that are genuinely free, and it can only take one it actually offered — so it cannot invent a time or double-book you. The same connection pulls a segment of past customers into a list when you want to run a campaign at them.
HubSpot
GoHighLevel
Housecall Pro
ServiceTitan
Jobber
Google Calendar
Microsoft 365
Calendly
HubSpot Meetings
Zoho Bookings
Acuity
Cal.com
Square
Stripe
Shopify
WooCommerce
Wix
SquarespaceEach agent uses a model on your own API key, in the same way it sends from your own mailbox and your own phone number. Sixteen providers are supported: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI and Mistral; DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Qwen and MiniMax; Groq, Together, Fireworks and OpenRouter; and Ollama or any other OpenAI-compatible endpoint you host yourself.
Bring your own credentials and you own the whole stack: your model provider, your mailboxes, your carrier, your CRM. We charge for the software and nothing else — no token markup, no metering, no credit packs — so your provider bills you direct at their rates, usually a few dollars a month per agent.
OpenAI
Anthropic
Gemini
xAI
Mistral
DeepSeek
GLM
Kimi
Qwen
MiniMax
Groq
Together
Fireworks
OpenRouter
Ollama
Any OpenAI APIA new address sending forty cold emails a day gets filtered, and takes the domain with it. Mailboxes that opt into warm-up send each other ordinary mail on a ramp, starting at five a day. The receiving mailbox finds each message, moves it out of spam if it landed there, marks it read and replies to a share of them.
Each mailbox carries a health score out of 100 — SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the sending domain, seven days of real sends and bounces, and where its own warm-up mail is landing — with the reasons listed. A mailbox whose bounce rate or spam placement passes a threshold is pulled out of campaign rotation automatically, before it damages the domain.
Three steps. Nothing is imported from Apollo automatically: you build the agent, connect your mailboxes and load the list, and a campaign is a draft that shows the whole plan before it sends anything.
Name the agent, choose a model and paste your API key. Then give it what it needs to answer a reply from somebody who has never heard of you: your Q&A pairs for "what do you do?", "how much is it?" and "send me something", your prices, hours and lead times as data points, your documents, and the pages of your own site it may link to. Copy the email steps from your Apollo sequence into saved templates, and write a text and a call script if you want those steps.
Write the instructions last: how it should talk, what it may offer, and the replies it should hand to you rather than answer. A request for a proposal, a question about a contract and "who gave you my address?" are the usual three.
Add every mailbox the agent may send from. Gmail and Outlook take an app password; anything else is an SMTP and IMAP host. Switch warm-up on for each and let the ramp run while you build the rest, check the health score, and fix any SPF, DKIM or DMARC record it names.
Then add a number for the text and call steps, the calendar the agent will book into, and the CRM it should read before it writes. Load the list: a CSV, a segment pulled from HubSpot or another connected CRM, or contacts from the Chrome side panel.
Build the sequence: the email on day 0, the second email to openers, the text on day 2 to the rest, the call on day 5. Set the days, hours and time zone anything may go out, the hourly cap per mailbox and the condition on each step, and read the whole plan on the review screen. Nothing sends until you press Start. Take the same contacts out of any live Apollo sequence first, so nobody hears from you twice.
Then watch the inbox. Replies are answered by the agent from the address they arrived at, the ones you named come to you, bookings land in the calendar and unsubscribes are honoured on the queue. A mailbox that slips rests itself and the campaign carries on through the others. Pause at any point and resume later.
One account runs unlimited agents, one per client, and nothing is shared between them. A knowledge base belongs to a single agent, and content from one agent is never used to generate replies for another.
Invite a client by email address and they get their own login, which opens onto the one agent you gave them: its conversations, its numbers, its analytics and a reply box. They cannot see your other clients, your API keys, your settings or your billing. Access is deny-by-default.
No seat tiers, no credit packs, no per-agent or per-channel pricing, and nothing held back behind an enterprise call.
| Agents | |
|---|---|
| How many | Unlimited — one per business, brand or job |
| Shared brain | The same identity, instructions and knowledge on every channel |
| Knowledge base | Documents, Q&A pairs, data points and pages of your own site |
| Isolation | One agent's content is never used to reply for another |
| Client seats | Invite a client into one agent, with their own login |
| Channels | |
| As many mailboxes per agent as you connect, rotated by campaigns | |
| Text messages | Nine providers — Twilio, Telnyx, SimpleTexting, Plivo, Vonage, Sinch, Bandwidth, MessageBird, ClickSend |
| Phone calls | Answering and dialling, with recordings and transcripts |
| Transcription | Google, or Deepgram nova-3 on your own key |
| Voices | Google, Amazon Polly and ElevenLabs, or your own ElevenLabs / Fish Audio account |
| Voice cloning | Record a voice in the browser and clone it on your ElevenLabs or Fish Audio key |
| Website chat | A widget on your site with your colour, image and greeting |
| Social DMs | Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, Viber, Slack, Discord, Bluesky, Reddit, X |
| Inbox | |
| One list | Every channel's conversations together, newest first, tagged by channel |
| Filters | By channel, by mailbox or number, or by agent |
| Takeover | Reply yourself and the agent stands down on that thread |
| Hand back | Return the thread to the agent when you are done |
| Campaigns | |
| Multichannel sequences | Email, text and call steps in one campaign, each with its own timing |
| Send conditions | Send a step only if they opened, did not open, clicked or did not click |
| Schedule | The days, hours and time zone anything may be sent |
| Stop rules | A reply, a booking or an opt-out on any channel ends the sequence |
| Pacing | Per-mailbox and per-number hourly limits, pausable and resumable |
| Review before start | The full plan is shown; a campaign sends nothing until you start it |
| Templates | Email, text and call scripts, saved once and reused |
| Analytics | |
| Funnel | Reached, replied, visited, converted, plus value won and time to convert |
| By channel | Where each person started, and the channel they converted on |
| Pages | Which pages known people read, and how many of them converted |
| Journeys | One row per person: every message, visit, call and booking in order |
| Goals | A page rule or a manual "won", each with a dollar value |
| Triggers | A known person returns to a page — notify you, or send a follow-up |
| Open and click tracking | Recorded per campaign and added to that person's history |
| Integrations | |
| Calendars | Google, Microsoft 365, Calendly, Cal.com, Acuity, Zoho, Square, HubSpot Meetings |
| CRMs and commerce | HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, Jobber, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace |
| Booking | Real open slots offered, and only an offered slot can be booked |
| CRM import | Import a segment of customers into a contact list |
| Deliverability and compliance | |
| Mailbox warm-up | Ramped sending across the network, with spam rescue and replies |
| Health score | SPF, DKIM, DMARC, bounce rate and inbox placement, with reasons |
| Auto-rest | A failing address is removed from rotation automatically |
| Unsubscribes | One click, honoured automatically, including on queued mail |
| Reply limits | One reply per thread, per-sender daily and per-channel hourly caps |
| Filtering | Bounces, out-of-office and no-reply addresses ignored |
| List building | |
| Contact extraction | Emails, phone numbers and social profiles, on any site. Unlimited. |
| Deep scan | Follows the pages of a domain most likely to carry contact details |
| Domain queue | Load a CSV of sites and work through them one at a time |
| Contacts and lists | Unlimited, by email or phone, with CSV import and export |
| AI | |
| Your own key | Sixteen providers, including any OpenAI-compatible endpoint you host |
| What we charge for AI | Nothing — no markup, no metering, no credit packs |
| On calls | Uses your provider's fastest model automatically |
| Account | |
| Platforms | Chrome side panel and web dashboard on one login |
| Members' forum | Six boards, visible only once you are signed in |
| Referral program | $50 a year per referral ($5 a month), recurring for the life of the account |
| Support | support@boldagents.co |
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$16.67 a month, billed once a year. No add-ons, no seat tiers. Cancel anytime.
For some buyers, and not for others. A B2B sales team that needs to search a large contact database, gives its reps a power dialer, and runs LinkedIn tasks and Salesforce will be better served by Apollo, which is built for exactly that. A business that already knows who it wants to reach, and needs the sending, the replies, the follow-up and the booking handled without adding reps, will likely be better served by Bold Agent Kit: one agent that works the list, answers from your material, books the meetings and covers inbound chat, calls and DMs, for $25 a month on your own AI key.
Apollo is a sales platform built around a database of more than 240 million contacts and 30 million companies, with sequences, a dialer, meeting scheduling, deliverability tools and AI help for sales teams, connected to CRMs such as Salesforce and HubSpot. Bold Agent Kit is one AI agent that answers, from your own documents, Q&A pairs and prices, on email, text, phone, website chat and eleven DM platforms. It runs cold email with warm-up and health scoring, answers the replies and books the meetings itself. You bring the list, and the AI runs on your own key.
The models differ. Apollo publishes a free plan and paid plans priced per user, with credits used for things such as exporting contacts and placing dialer calls, and add-on credits when you need more; check Apollo's pricing page for the current figures. Bold Agent Kit is $25 a month or $200 a year for the whole account, with a 7-day free trial, unlimited agents, mailboxes and contacts, and no seats or credits. Your AI provider bills you directly for the model at cost, usually a few dollars a month, and your carrier bills any texts and calls you add.
By rebuilding rather than importing; there is no automatic migration. Connect the mailboxes you send from, Gmail and Outlook with an app password and anything else as SMTP and IMAP, and switch warm-up on. Bring your contacts across as a CSV, or pull a segment from HubSpot if both tools read it. Copy your sequence's email steps into saved templates, add a text and call step if you want them, and write the Q&A pairs the agent will answer from. Apollo's pricing FAQ says exporting contacts uses export credits, so check your allowance. The campaign is a draft until you press Start.
When your main need is a B2B contact database. Apollo is built to find people and companies, and it adds a power and parallel dialer for reps, LinkedIn tasks inside its sequences, and integration with Salesforce. Bold Agent Kit offers none of those, and it would be the wrong tool for a team that spends its day researching and prospecting new accounts. It fits better when the list already exists, and the job is sending, answering the replies, booking the meetings and covering inbound chat, calls and DMs with the same agent, at one account price.
No. There is no contact database, no company data and no email or phone lookup on credits. Lists come from a CSV you upload, a segment pulled from a connected CRM such as HubSpot, GoHighLevel or Jobber, or the Chrome side panel. The side panel extracts email addresses, phone numbers and social profile links from the page you have open, deep-scans a domain for the pages most likely to carry contact details, and works through a CSV of sites one at a time. If you need to search a database for new contacts by title and company, you will need a data tool such as Apollo alongside.
Yes, and some teams will want to: Apollo to find the people, Bold Agent Kit to work them. The two do not connect to each other directly. Build a list in Apollo and bring it across as a CSV, or, if both read the same HubSpot account, pull the segment from HubSpot into a contact list. From there the agent sends from your warmed mailboxes, follows up by text and call, answers the replies and books the meetings. Apollo's own pricing FAQ says exporting contacts outside Apollo uses export credits, so it is worth checking your plan before a large move.
Not in the same sense. Apollo's dialer offers power and parallel dialling, local presence and voicemail drops, which suit a team of people making calls. In Bold Agent Kit, a call is a step in a campaign, placed on your own Twilio number, and the agent itself speaks in real time from the script you saved, answers questions from your material, and keeps the recording and transcript. It can also answer calls to that number, with separate switches for answering and dialling. There is no queue of numbers for a person to work through, and no per-minute fee from us: you pay Twilio.
How Bold Agent Kit compares with the other tools people shortlist for the same job.
Connect the mailboxes, load the list, write the sequence, read the plan, press Start. The agent sends, follows up by text and call, answers the replies and books the meetings.
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