Pocus and Koala were the two product-led sales (PLS) signal tools every PLG RevOps team shortlisted between 2022 and 2025. If you are weighing them today, start with the fact that decides the rest: neither is a clean buy in 2026. Koala shut down on September 30, 2025 after Cursor (Anysphere) acqui-hired its team in July 2025, and the CRM product was not folded into Cursor. Pocus is still running, but Apollo.io acquired it in March 2026 — so you no longer buy Pocus on its own, you buy it as a layer inside Apollo’s platform. A “Pocus vs Koala” shortlist is a 2024 shortlist.
That does not make the comparison dead — it makes it a routing question. The two tools sat at opposite ends of the PLS-signal spectrum, and that spectrum still exists with live tools at each end. Koala was the fast, cheap, self-serve end: a JavaScript snippet plus a Segment connection put product-and-website signals into Slack within hours, at $200/month. Pocus was the workflow-depth end: a data-warehouse connection, a scored rep inbox, encoded playbooks, and one-click push into Outreach or Salesloft, at mid-five-figures a year. Decide which end you actually need, and the live answer follows.
What happened to each
Koala is gone. The team was acqui-hired by Cursor in July 2025 to build Cursor’s enterprise offering, and the Koala product went dark on September 30, 2025 — no new sign-ups, no continued use. Common Room was named the official migration partner and matched Koala’s pricing tiers for equivalent packages, so most former Koala customers landed there.
Pocus still exists, but only inside Apollo. The March 2026 acquisition means there is no standalone Pocus contract to sign anymore; the intelligence layer now ships as part of Apollo’s platform, and packaging is subject to Apollo’s roadmap. If you evaluate “Pocus” in 2026, you are really evaluating Apollo with the Pocus scoring and rep-inbox layer attached. Confirm current packaging with Apollo directly before you assume any specific Pocus feature survives intact.
Where Koala won
Time-to-signal measured in hours, not weeks. Setup was a JavaScript snippet and a Segment connection — a non-technical RevOps admin could be live the same day. Pocus required a warehouse connection and 4–8 weeks of playbook configuration before reps saw a first inbox.
Combined product-plus-website signal without a warehouse. Koala joined product event streams (Segment, Amplitude, Mixpanel) with website-visitor identification in one view, the combination most rivals split across two tools or demanded a data warehouse to assemble.
Transparent, self-serve pricing. Koala published its tiers — rare in this category — and ran a free plan, so teams proved value before paying. Pocus was demo-gated and annual.
Champion job-change tracking. Koala surfaced job-change events for known contacts at target accounts, alerting reps when a champion who had evaluated the product moved on — a signal bucket Pocus did not emphasize.
Where Pocus wins
A scored rep inbox, not a Slack alert. Pocus builds a structured, prioritized rep-facing queue — scored accounts, recommended contacts, suggested messaging — so reps start the day with a worklist rather than a pile of notifications to interpret. Koala leaned on Slack alerts plus its “Plays” triggers.
Playbook depth and warehouse breadth. Pocus connects to Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift and lets RevOps encode PQL criteria into reusable playbooks. For teams with real telemetry and a mixed self-serve plus sales-assist motion, that depth is the reason to pay the higher price.
Explainable AI scoring and direct SEP push. Each account carries an explainable score (“hit 3 of 5 PQL criteria; champion active 2 days ago”) and enrolls into Outreach or Salesloft cadences in one click, with usage context pre-loaded. Reps cite the explainability as the reason they trust the rank enough to act.
Pricing reality
The price gap was the philosophy, not a markup. Koala published Free (100 credits, 2 seats), Starter at $200/month (1,000 credits), and Growth at $1,000/month (5,000 credits), with Business custom. Pocus never published pricing; third-party estimates put typical mid-market contracts at $30,000–$60,000/year (roughly $100–$300/seat/month), demo-gated, annual, with 4–8 weeks of implementation before value. At comparable scale that is a 15–25x difference. You were paying Pocus for the warehouse depth, the rep inbox, and the playbook engine — not for better signal access. If the workflow layer is not the thing you need, the Koala-end price was the honest one.
Verdict
Both poles now route to live tools — pick the end of the spectrum that fits, then take its current carrier.
Pick the Koala end — fast, cheap, self-serve, PLG team in the $3M–$30M ARR range that wants product-and-website signals in Slack this week — and buy Common Room (Koala’s official migration partner; Starter at $1,700/month, with community signals Koala never tracked). If you only need the website-visitor-identification slice and not product usage, RB2B covers that at a lower entry cost.
Pick the Pocus end — workflow depth, scored rep inbox, encoded playbooks, $10M–$100M ARR with a mixed self-serve and sales-assist motion — and either take Pocus inside Apollo if you want it bundled with Apollo’s prospecting, sequencing, and contact database, or stay vendor-independent on Common Room. MadKudu (~$24,000/year) is the pick when you want the ML scoring model without the rep-facing workflow.
The default when you can’t decide: Common Room. It is the one tool that carries the Koala lineage (it was the migration partner) and covers most of the Pocus workflow, so it is the safe center for a team that does not want to bet the shelf on Apollo’s packaging.
Pick neither if you do not run a self-serve or trial product. The entire PLS-signal category reads first-party product usage; with no product to instrument, there are no signals to surface. Go to 6sense or Demandbase for third-party ABM intent instead — a different motion, and the right one for outbound-only teams.
For the full reasoning on each, see Pocus and Koala on their own.
Pocus and Koala were the two product-led sales (PLS) signal tools every PLG RevOps team shortlisted between 2022 and 2025. If you are weighing them today, start with the fact that decides the rest: neither is a clean buy in 2026. Koala shut down on September 30, 2025 after Cursor (Anysphere) acqui-hired its team in July 2025, and the CRM product was not folded into Cursor. Pocus is still running, but Apollo.io acquired it in March 2026 — so you no longer buy Pocus on its own, you buy it as a layer inside Apollo’s platform. A “Pocus vs Koala” shortlist is a 2024 shortlist.
That does not make the comparison dead — it makes it a routing question. The two tools sat at opposite ends of the PLS-signal spectrum, and that spectrum still exists with live tools at each end. Koala was the fast, cheap, self-serve end: a JavaScript snippet plus a Segment connection put product-and-website signals into Slack within hours, at $200/month. Pocus was the workflow-depth end: a data-warehouse connection, a scored rep inbox, encoded playbooks, and one-click push into Outreach or Salesloft, at mid-five-figures a year. Decide which end you actually need, and the live answer follows.
What happened to each
Koala is gone. The team was acqui-hired by Cursor in July 2025 to build Cursor’s enterprise offering, and the Koala product went dark on September 30, 2025 — no new sign-ups, no continued use. Common Room was named the official migration partner and matched Koala’s pricing tiers for equivalent packages, so most former Koala customers landed there.
Pocus still exists, but only inside Apollo. The March 2026 acquisition means there is no standalone Pocus contract to sign anymore; the intelligence layer now ships as part of Apollo’s platform, and packaging is subject to Apollo’s roadmap. If you evaluate “Pocus” in 2026, you are really evaluating Apollo with the Pocus scoring and rep-inbox layer attached. Confirm current packaging with Apollo directly before you assume any specific Pocus feature survives intact.
Where Koala won
Where Pocus wins
Pricing reality
The price gap was the philosophy, not a markup. Koala published Free (100 credits, 2 seats), Starter at $200/month (1,000 credits), and Growth at $1,000/month (5,000 credits), with Business custom. Pocus never published pricing; third-party estimates put typical mid-market contracts at $30,000–$60,000/year (roughly $100–$300/seat/month), demo-gated, annual, with 4–8 weeks of implementation before value. At comparable scale that is a 15–25x difference. You were paying Pocus for the warehouse depth, the rep inbox, and the playbook engine — not for better signal access. If the workflow layer is not the thing you need, the Koala-end price was the honest one.
Verdict
Both poles now route to live tools — pick the end of the spectrum that fits, then take its current carrier.
For the full reasoning on each, see Pocus and Koala on their own.