TL;DR: If you want an Apollo alternative because your European mobiles run dry, keep Apollo for emails and search. Add European phone providers in a waterfall for the countries you call. Then check every number before the team dials, because a found number is often a wrong or personal one.
You run out.
That is what happened to us with Apollo. We used it, and ZoomInfo, on European campaigns. "They had good databases but limited for Europe, and after calling 200 good prospects, you run out." The list still looks full on screen. The mobiles behind it do not.
So you search "Apollo alternative" and get US listicles that rank email tools. None of them talks about a Belgian mobile, a Swiss CFO or a French head of IT who answers "this is my private phone."
We run cold calling campaigns across Europe through Profitbl, the company behind Answrd. Here is what we do instead of switching tools.
Do you need an Apollo alternative, or a second source for European mobiles?
For most European teams, you need a second source for mobiles, and you should keep Apollo. It is a good database, with strong email data and easy filters. The gap is European mobile numbers. Replacing the whole platform to fix one field costs you sequences and habits your team already has.
Apollo says its platform holds "240M+ contacts and 30M+ accounts" (as of October 2026). Size stops helping once you filter for one country, one persona and a mobile number, then start to dial.
Here is the split we use:
- Keep Apollo for: account search, email finding, sequences, and the contacts it does have mobiles for.
- Add European providers for: mobiles in the countries you call, run one after another until each contact has a number.
- Add a check for: every number, from every source, before the first dial.
Why do Apollo phone numbers run thin in Europe?
Apollo phone numbers run thin in Europe because European mobiles are harder to collect, and many of the ones that exist are private. A senior buyer in Brussels or Zurich rarely puts a mobile in a public profile. So any global database ends up with fewer good European mobiles than US ones.
Apollo is open about where its data comes from. Its data overview page lists four inputs: users who share their business contacts, its own email tools, public web crawling, and third-party providers (as of October 2026). The same page says direct-dial numbers "run through automated real-time checks against Apollo's dataset."
That last line matters. A match with a database says nothing about who picks up when your rep dials.
Cost adds up too. Its credit usage guide says email and mobile data "use separate credit balances" (updated 15 October 2026). Spend mobile credits where the data is thin and you pay for numbers your team cannot use.
One buyer on Trustpilot found that 4 in 5 of the mobiles they asked for, 80%, came back empty.
How do you build a phone waterfall for the countries you call?
A waterfall sends each contact to one provider, then the next, until one returns a mobile. You stop paying once you have a number. Clay and FullEnrich sell this as a product. You can also build your own in Claude Code with each provider's API. The goal is simple: get the most coverage in the countries you actually call.
Here is how we set one up:
- Start with what you have. Pull Apollo's mobiles first. You already pay for them.
- Order the rest by country. The provider that does best on your French contacts goes first for France. Test this on your own list.
- Pass only the misses. Each provider sees only the contacts the last one missed.
- Throw out foreign mobiles. A Luxembourg contact with a Belgian or French mobile is a cross-border worker's private phone. We take those out.
- Track cost per usable number. Billed hits can mislead you. Count only own-country mobiles that reach the right person.
A good waterfall gets you far. In our own campaigns, a waterfall of eight providers on 461 senior IT and security contacts in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg found a usable mobile for 85% of them (392 of 461). Twenty of the misses only had a mobile from a neighbouring country, which means a personal phone, so we took them out.
Cheap providers do not get you there. A tier of five low-cost providers found usable numbers for 3 of 71 senior security contacts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, about 4%. Most of what they returned were US numbers for US-based people. We cover the full setup in our guide to waterfall enrichment for phone numbers.
Apollo's homepage says it offers waterfall enrichment too (as of October 2026). If it covers your countries, use it. The two warnings below still apply.
Which providers should you add to the stack?
These are the providers we would test first for European mobiles, in no order:
- Kaspr: a LinkedIn extension for B2B contact data.
- Eficia: a phone number enrichment platform.
- FullEnrich: a waterfall service that runs many providers for you.
- Tomba: finds and checks B2B emails and phone numbers.
- Forager: a contact data provider focused on mobile numbers.
- Wiza: a B2B prospecting tool.
- Lusha: a B2B data and prospecting platform.
Test each one on the same 100 contacts from your own target countries. Pick on usable numbers per euro, and ignore the vendor's coverage claim.
Why does more coverage still leave you with wrong numbers?
More coverage means more numbers, and many of them still reach the wrong person or no one. Two things cause this. Providers share sources, so the extra numbers repeat. And a found number can still be wrong. Coverage measures what you found. Pickup measures what you reached.
Start with the wholesalers. Several providers can hold the same numbers from their wholesaler. Your fifth provider may return the mobile your first one already gave you, and you pay twice. If that number was wrong at source, it is wrong in all five tools. Stop adding providers once a new one only repeats what you have.
Then there is the gap between found and reached. The figures below come from our own campaigns, and we do not name the providers behind them. Of 2,626 mobiles from one provider in our CRM, 75.6% passed our basic checks: right country, a mobile, not a known bad number. Of the ones our teams dialled, 38.9% were answered. Only 17.8% reached the person we wanted. Most failures were wrong-country numbers and landlines. The weakest countries were Belgium (40% passed), Ireland (45%) and Switzerland (51%).
Buyers who count their own dials see the same gap. One UK buyer on Trustpilot tracked their first 8 calls from Apollo: 5 of the numbers "were incorrect and did not work." A buyer on Reddit who sells into DACH pulled 200 contacts and found that "maybe 40% of the phone numbers actually worked." Every provider has gaps like these. Keep the one you use, and check its numbers.
Billed hits hide this. One provider on a Benelux list gave us 27 billed hits. One of them was a usable own-country mobile. That came to about $20 per usable number. Most of the hits were foreign mobiles and direct lines.
Here is what wrong numbers sound like. We have reached a spa instead of an executive. We have reached the wife of a head of department. We have called people who retired 10 or 15 years ago. And we have had people angry about GDPR, most of all in France and Switzerland.
Wrong numbers are a legal risk as well as a bad call. The ICO's guide to the accuracy principle says personal data must be "accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date." A number that rings the wrong person does not meet that bar. And personal numbers are the biggest problem in Europe right now.
What should you check before your team dials?
Check every mobile, from every source, before it reaches the dialler. Apollo, your waterfall and your old CRM records all age the same way. A number can be live and still belong to someone else. Your team should only dial numbers that reach the person on the record. Check again before you retarget an old list.
That check is what Answrd does. You upload the numbers you already have. You get back numbers that pick up, with the wrong and dead ones flagged. You pay €0.75 per verified number, with credits that never expire. We never sell data, so we do not compete with your providers. A line-status check alone will not catch a wrong person, which we explain in our post on the limits of HLR lookups.
The results on our own campaigns:
- Engineering services campaign: real pickup went from 6% to 17% after verified numbers.
- Security software campaign: 12.8% real pickup, against a history of 2% to 5%.
- One recent list: of 131 numbers checked, 13 were bad. Of the good ones, most reached the right person and the rest a named voicemail.
Compare that with our worst days. One day, 110 dials got 3 real pitches, and the rest were bad numbers, personal numbers or no engagement. On another day it took 200+ dials to get about 3 people on the phone. If you want to see what your own numbers cost per conversation, run them through the pickup rate calculator.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a better alternative to Apollo for Europe?
No single tool covers every European country well. The better setup keeps Apollo for search and emails, adds European mobile providers in a waterfall, and checks every number before dialling.
Is Lusha better than Apollo?
It depends on the countries you call, and no public test settles it for Europe. Run both on the same 100 contacts from your target countries. Count numbers that reach the right person, and ignore billed hits.
Does Apollo have European mobile numbers?
Yes, Apollo has some European mobiles. In our campaigns, we ran out of mobiles to call after about 200 good prospects.
Do Apollo phone numbers cost credits?
Apollo's credit usage guide lists phone numbers as a credit-consuming feature and says email and mobile data use separate balances (as of October 2026). Its pricing page does not list a per-number price, so check your plan in the app.
Is it legal to cold call European mobiles from Apollo?
Rules differ by country, so check the local rules before you call. GDPR also asks you to keep personal data accurate. Apollo's data page says it emails contacts it adds in the EU, the UK and Switzerland to explain how it uses their data, so some prospects already know they are in a database.
Keep Apollo. Add a waterfall. Check the numbers.
The best Apollo alternative for European phone numbers is a stack around Apollo. Keep it, add European providers in a waterfall, and check every number before your team dials.
Start with your own list. Test 100 numbers free and see how many of your current mobiles reach the right person. If you would rather talk it through, book a 15-minute call.