Clay Review: A Comprehensive Look at Pricing, Features, and More

Clay is an AI-driven data enrichment and automation platform. By integrating data from over 150 external sources, Clay helps sales teams enrich your contact data and provides a unified view of potential customers. This gives sales teams the ammunition they need to target the right audience with precision. 

Clay is ideal for sales development representatives (SDRs), growth teams, and enterprises looking to streamline their lead prospecting efforts. Its robust data enrichment capabilities and AI-powered automation allows teams to focus on what really matters: closing deals. 

Key features of Clay

Clay’s suite of tools were designed to enhance your sales outreach, simplifying lead prospecting, data enrichment, and engagement. Here are some of the standout features that make Clay an essential platform for modern sales teams.

Waterfall data enrichment

With Clay’s data enrichment feature, you get access to accurate, real-time contact details by connecting to multiple data sources—over 100 sources in fact. This basically eliminates the need to switch between different data providers, lessens the time and effort used in manually inputting variables, and the hassle of switching to different browser tabs. The platform even tracks real-time intent data, such as job changes and company promotions, so your team can engage with prospects at the optimal moment.

While this is a really great feature, it’s essential information that the data enrichment runs on credits as the primary currency. Each subscription tier can further be customized according to the number of credits per year.

Sales engagement with AI-powered messaging

The Clay Sequencer helps teams engage the identified leads effectively. It builds campaigns that are personalized at scale: sent at the right time, with the right messaging, with lead data included. This personalized outreach boosts sales teams’ operational efficiency, guiding prospects to move to the next funnel stages seamlessly. 

AI-driven lead scoring 

Clay’s AI helps sales teams prioritize leads more efficiently by assigning scores based on specific criteria that matter to you, such as demographic information, company size, social engagement, and online behavior. This feature helps your sales team focus on high-priority leads.

How does this work exactly? Users can create unique lead scores from any source in your lead scoring formulas. The scoring table can also be added to lead forms so that new leads are scored automatically. Scores are updated regularly based on their actions, so you are assured that the data is always fine-tuned.

Integration with popular tools

Clay seamlessly integrates with a number of tools including CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, prospecting databases like Apollo and Clearbit. and even form builders like Typeform. The platform automatically syncs your leads with your CRM, scores them, and updates their status, ensuring that no lead falls through the cracks. This reduces manual data entry and helps your sales team stay on top of important tasks.

These integrations allow you to keep your sales workflow organized, sync your lead data across platforms, and automate actions like sending emails or updating your CRM. In essence, Clay brings your different tools together, not takes away from it. 

Where can Clay improve?

While Clay stands out as an AI-powered sales intelligence platform, no tool is perfect. Let’s explore some of the areas where Clay could enhance its offerings and address user challenges.

• Clay is not a contact data provider. Instead, the platform connects with external tools and other data providers. Users are still responsible for ensuring the data sources you connect to are reliable. It is not something you can simply leave to work on its own.
• There is a steep learning curve if you want to maximize its capabilities. At first glance, Clay’s spreadsheet-like interface seems simple enough. However, building the workflows can get tricky. It may end up taking too much time before you reap the benefits. Power users will appreciate its flexibility, but newcomers may struggle at first.
• It is not a CRM. Clay is excellent for lead research, enrichment, and building engagement campaigns. However, it is not a substitute for your CRM. It doesn’t track deals or stages, and it doesn’t manage pipelines. It can integrate with various CRMs, but it is still not capable of managing the full sales cycle.
• Pricing could be a concern for smaller businesses. The pricing strategy is flexible, but may not suit smaller teams or individuals. The platform uses a credit-based system, and depending on how many leads you’re managing, it can get costly for budget-conscious teams, especially when you’re scaling up with more data and workflows.

Clay reviews: What users are saying

On various review platforms, Clay has mixed reviews. Actually, it has polarizing ratings on G2 and Trustpilot:

• G2: 4.8/5
• Trustpilot: 2.2/5

Positive ratings specifically mention the convenience to do a lot of things within one tool, ease of use and the significant increase in prospects.

• “The fact that it combines the function of a spreadsheet with AI enrichment is what I would tell people when recommending. It’s super easy to use and I use it pretty much daily.”

• “Thanks to Clay, our sales team is much more productive, and we have significantly increased our prospecting limit. The versatility and integration with tools are a great help.”

• “The level of detail and ability to utilize so many different tools and integrations without needing to get 100 different subscriptions is worth its weight in gold!

Meanwhile, glaring and negative reviews mention the consistent occurrence of bugs and workflow errors. Interestingly, while ‘ease of use’ receives many positive affirmations, there are also reviews that mention its complexity. 

• “It’s not always bug-free or as smooth as I’d like it to be.”
• “It’s so complex, so much so that I am put off using it. It takes so much time to get anywhere, and I still haven’t gotten any benefit from the tool. It is incredibly frustrating to have a prospecting tool that wastes so much of my time trying to use it.”

• “It is not user friendly at all. It takes me so long to set up my tables in order to get the information I need.”

• “It’s not always very user-friendly. I have needed help on actions that should, simply put, be a lot easier to navigate and implement. In short, it feels like you need to be a spreadsheet expert to get the full worth of your investment, and it shouldn’t be that way.”

• “Bugs and flows you can’t predict and understand…”

• “Constant bugs, broken workflows and useless support are not worth the money.”

• “Tried Clay for prospecting and everything fell apart… Workflows froze, data was wrong, and credits vanished fast,”

• “Tried Clay to improve lead gen and ended up wasting hours on broken workflows and clunky UI credits just straight up disappeared and support is useless. Nothing worked without constant fixing; underdelivered on everything.”

Clay pricing details

Clay has five major subscription tiers, with each having a number of options for credit usage per month, which changes the prices. In a summary, here are the pricing options for Clay.

To streamline this, we’ll focus on the monthly cost if paid annually.. While it is an option to pay monthly, there is still significant savings users will get when they pay based on annual fees.

All plans can be used by unlimited users. Additionally, as the subscription tier gets more expensive, the number of searches allowed increases. 

So, is Clay the right tool for your business?

Clay can be a powerful asset. But like any tool, it shines best in specific scenarios and for certain types of users. Let’s break down who Clay is ideal for, when it’s a particularly good fit, and when you might want to explore alternative tools.

Clay is best suited for teams and professionals who:

• Rely heavily on outbound outreach such as SDRs, sales teams, and growth marketers looking to consistently fill pipelines.
• Want automation + personalization such as teams that need AI-driven personalization at scale without spending hours on manual research.
• Handle prospecting at scale as Clay’s enrichment and data workflows are excellent for teams with large lists of prospects to qualify and engage.
• Have multiple data sources like Apollo, Clearbit, etc., and want to unify them

Clay becomes especially valuable when:

• Your sales process depends on enriched contact information for large lists.
• You want to reduce time spent on manual research, enrichment, and list building.
• You already use a CRM (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot) and want to feed it higher‑quality, enriched data.
• You’re automating pre‑email tasks such as enrichment, scoring, and first-message crafting, and then pushing that data into your outbound tools or CRM.
• You want a flexible way to define complex workflows (filters, enrichment, scoring, AI messaging) without writing code.