Last updated: 2026-06-14
Clay is an AI go-to-market platform with waterfall enrichment across 150+ data providers and Claygent AI agents. Plans run $0-$495/mo, SOC 2 certified.
Clay is an AI-powered go-to-market platform that enriches leads by chaining over 150 data providers in a waterfall, raising contact match rates from about 40% to 80%. Its Claygent AI agent researches companies and people automatically. Plans range from a free tier (100 Data Credits/month) to Growth at $495/month, with Enterprise pricing from $30,000 to $154,000 per year.
Clay is an AI-powered go-to-market platform founded in 2017 by Kareem Amin, with Varun Anand joining as co-founder in 2021. It is built around a programmable, spreadsheet-style table where sales, marketing, and RevOps teams import lists of companies or people and enrich every row with data pulled from a unified marketplace of more than 150 third-party providers. The platform's signature mechanism is waterfall enrichment: for each row, Clay queries multiple data providers in sequence until one returns a match, which independent reviews say lifts contact match rates from roughly 40% to 80% compared with single-source tools. On top of that data layer sits Claygent, an AI research agent that browses company websites, LinkedIn activity, and news sources to extract structured facts, plus Sculptor, a natural-language copilot that builds and edits Clay table workflows from plain English instructions. Clay is used most by RevOps managers building enrichment pipelines, SDR teams running AI-personalized outbound campaigns, and growth marketers scoring leads with intent signals. GTM engineers also build custom Claygent agents through Clay's HTTP API and its 2026 Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which exposes people search, company search, and table operations to MCP-compatible AI assistants. Pricing runs on a dual-credit, freemium model. A permanent Free plan includes 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions per month with unlimited seats and tables. New customers choose Launch at $185/month (2,500 Data Credits, 15,000 Actions) or Growth at $495/month (unlimited credits and actions), both billed annually; legacy customers can stay on Starter ($149/mo), Explorer ($349/mo), or Pro ($800/mo). Enterprise plans are custom, typically $30,000 to $154,000 per year for 200,000 to 500,000 monthly credits. In August 2025 Clay raised a $100 million Series C led by CapitalG at a $3.1 billion valuation, bringing total funding to $204 million, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Meritech Capital, First Round Capital, BoxGroup, Boldstart, and Sapphire Ventures. Clay is SOC 2 Type II certified with a public Trust Center at trust.clay.com, and integrates natively with HubSpot, Salesforce, Outreach, Smartlead, Slack, Zapier, and Make.
Free plan: 100 Data Credits + 500 Actions/mo, unlimited seats and tables (200-row table limit). New customers: Launch $185/mo (2,500 Data Credits, 15,000 Actions, annual) or Growth $495/mo (unlimited credits and actions, annual). Legacy plans still active: Starter $149/mo, Explorer $349/mo, Pro $800/mo (new sign-ups closed April 2026). Enterprise is custom-quoted, typically $30,000-$154,000/year for 200,000-500,000 monthly credits. Data Credits are consumed per enrichment step: 14 credits for basic contact, 34 for full contact, 41 for company, 75 for full contact + company.
Clay is an AI-powered go-to-market platform founded in 2017 by Kareem Amin, with Varun Anand joining as co-founder in 2021. It is built around a programmable, spreadsheet-style table where teams import lists of companies or people and then enrich each row with data pulled from over 150 third-party providers. Its signature feature is waterfall enrichment, which queries multiple data sources in sequence for each row until a match is found, lifting contact match rates from roughly 40% to 80% according to independent reviews. Clay also ships Claygent, an AI research agent that can browse websites, read LinkedIn activity, and summarize company news to support personalized outreach. As of August 2025, Clay had raised $204 million total, including a $100 million Series C at a $3.1 billion valuation led by CapitalG with participation from Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital. The platform is used primarily by RevOps, sales, and growth teams to build outbound and inbound prospecting pipelines.
Clay runs on a freemium, credit-based pricing model split across two credit types: Data Credits for third-party lookups and Action Credits for workflow steps. The Free plan includes 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions per month, unlimited seats and tables, and access to waterfall enrichment and Claygent on tables up to 200 rows. New customers on the current 2026 pricing structure choose between Launch at $185/month, which includes 2,500 Data Credits and 15,000 Actions, and Growth at $495/month, which includes unlimited credits and actions, both billed annually. Existing customers can remain on legacy plans: Starter at $149/month, Explorer at $349/month, or Pro at $800/month, though new sign-ups to those tiers closed in April 2026. Enterprise plans are custom-quoted and typically range from $30,000 to $154,000 per year, covering 200,000 to 500,000 monthly credits, unlimited seats, and dedicated support. A common hidden cost is that credits are consumed even when an enrichment lookup fails to return data, and several of the underlying data providers require their own separate paid accounts.
Clay's core feature is waterfall enrichment, which chains over 150 data providers, including Apollo, Hunter, Lusha, and PeopleDataLabs, so a single lookup automatically retries across providers until it finds usable data. Claygent is Clay's AI research agent, capable of navigating company websites, LinkedIn pages, and news sources to extract structured facts like recent funding rounds, hiring trends, or technology stack changes. Sculptor is an AI copilot that lets users describe a workflow in natural language and have Clay build or edit the corresponding table automatically. The platform organizes enrichment into categories covering firmographics, contact details, technographics, intent signals, and social activity. Clay also provides browser extensions, Clay for Chrome and Clip to Clay, that work across Chrome, Brave, Edge, Safari, and Firefox to capture leads directly from the web into Clay tables. Finally, Clay pushes enriched data downstream into CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, ad platforms, and email sequencers such as Outreach and Smartlead.
Yes, Clay offers a permanent Free plan rather than only a time-limited trial. The Free plan provides 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions every month, unlimited seats and tables, multi-provider waterfall enrichment, Claygent enrichment, and the Clay Sequencer for email, though tables are capped at 200 rows. Clay also offers a separate 14-day free trial of the Pro plan that requires no credit card, includes 1,000 credits, and unlocks Pro-tier features such as webhooks, CRM integrations, email sequencer connections, and HTTP API access, though trial tables are limited to 50 rows. Because Data Credits are consumed per enrichment step rather than per contact, free-tier users typically run out of credits quickly if they enrich both contact and company data on every row. For ongoing use beyond light testing, most teams move to a paid plan starting at $185/month for Launch.
Apollo.io is the most commonly cited alternative; it bundles prospecting, enrichment, and email sequencing into one platform, so choose Apollo if you want an all-in-one tool rather than Clay's enrichment-plus-integration approach. HubSpot's Breeze Intelligence, the product that absorbed Clearbit after HubSpot's roughly $140 million acquisition, works passively in the background to enrich CRM records and is a better fit for teams that want enrichment to happen automatically inside HubSpot without building Clay tables. ZoomInfo is the closest competitor for large enterprises that need deep firmographic and intent data at scale, with a centralized database rather than Clay's multi-provider waterfall. Teams that want a self-hosted, open-source alternative sometimes look at workflow engines like n8n combined with their own data provider API keys, which can cost roughly 85% less per lead but require more engineering effort. Clay's advantage over all of these is its single interface for querying 150+ providers in a waterfall, which most competitors do not offer.
Clay is best for RevOps managers, outbound SDR teams, and growth marketers who need to build large, accurately enriched prospect lists and are comfortable working in a spreadsheet-like interface. A typical use case is a B2B sales team importing a list of target companies, using waterfall enrichment to find verified emails and phone numbers, then running Claygent to pull recent funding news for each company before generating personalized first-line outreach copy. GTM engineers and growth hackers who want to build custom Claygent agents through the MCP server or HTTP API also get significant value from Clay's extensibility. Clay is not ideal for non-technical marketers or small teams without a dedicated data or operations person, since reviewers consistently describe a steep learning curve and compare effective use of Clay to needing spreadsheet-expert skills. It is also a poor fit for teams on a strict, predictable monthly budget, since the dual-credit consumption model can produce unexpectedly high bills.
Yes, Clay provides an HTTP API available starting on its Pro-tier plans and during the 14-day Pro trial, allowing developers to push data into Clay tables and pull enriched results back out programmatically. In 2026, Clay also launched an official MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which exposes people search and enrichment, company search and enrichment, and Clay Tables operations to any MCP-compatible AI assistant or agent using a Clay API key. This MCP support means AI assistants can query Clay's waterfall enrichment and Claygent capabilities directly as part of an agentic workflow. Clay also integrates natively with Zapier and Make for no-code automation, and supports webhooks for triggering table updates from external events. Enterprise customers can run Clay in a Headless CRM mode where no enrichment data is stored in Clay itself and customers supply their own API keys for the underlying AI models.
The core difference is breadth versus depth: Apollo maintains its own centralized prospecting database and bundles enrichment, email sequencing, and dialing into one platform, while Clay focuses on enrichment quality by waterfalling across more than 150 external providers, including Apollo's own data. Reviewers note that because Apollo's database is shared across all its customers, sales teams often end up contacting the same prospects as competitors, whereas Clay's waterfall approach can surface less commonly used data sources. On pricing, Apollo's plans are generally cheaper and more predictable per seat, while Clay's credit-based model can produce higher and less predictable bills, especially for full contact-plus-company enrichment, which costs 75 credits per lead. Apollo wins for teams that want prospecting and outreach in a single tool without building custom workflows. Clay wins for teams that need maximum data coverage and are willing to invest time building enrichment and Claygent workflows. Many teams in 2026 actually use both: Apollo as a data source within Clay's waterfall, and Apollo's sequencer for outreach.