Clay CRM vs Clay: The Ultimate Comparison & Review for Your Business

If you're in the market for a CRM, you're likely considering options like Clay CRM and Clay, two standout platforms known for enhancing customer engagement and driving sales growth. Each offers unique features tailored to different business needs. This blog post will compare their key features, pricing, and benefits to help you determine which is the best fit for your organization. We'll also introduce folk as a compelling alternative, offering a flexible solution as a CRM system.

Clay CRM vs Clay: Comparison Overview (+ folk CRM)

👉 Try folk CRM for free

What is Clay CRM?

Clay CRM is a customer relationship management tool designed to help users organize and manage contact information and interactions, with a focus on automation and contact enrichment.

Key features of Clay CRM

• Contact management: The platform allows users to organize and manage contacts by consolidating information in one place. Users can add custom fields, notes, and tags to categorize and track interactions with each contact, making it easier to manage customer relationships.
• Automation: Clay CRM includes automation tools that handle repetitive tasks like contact updates and reminders, helping users streamline their communication and workflow processes.
• Search and filtering: The platform provides advanced search and filtering functionality, allowing users to segment their contact database based on various criteria such as engagement history, tags, or custom fields.
• Real-time updates: The platform provides real-time updates for contact records and tasks, ensuring that users have the latest information on their contacts and projects at all times.
  

What is Clay?

Clay is an outreach and lead generation tool designed to help businesses streamline prospecting and customer outreach. It automates data enrichment by gathering information from multiple sources, such as LinkedIn and other social platforms, to build detailed contact profiles. Clay enables users to create targeted lists, personalize outreach efforts, and manage communication workflows, focusing on improving efficiency in lead generation and outreach campaigns.

Key features of Clay

• Automated data enrichment: Clay pulls data from multiple sources, such as LinkedIn and public databases, to build comprehensive profiles on prospects, reducing the need for manual data entry.
• Prospecting and list building: Users can create targeted lists of leads by filtering and segmenting prospects based on specific criteria like location, industry, or role.
• Personalized outreach: Clay enables tailored outreach by allowing users to customize messages and emails based on the enriched profile data of each lead.
• Email sequencing: Users can set up automated email sequences for follow-ups, ensuring consistent communication without manual scheduling.
• Template management: The platform offers tools for creating and saving message templates, which helps maintain consistency in outreach efforts.
• LinkedIn integration: Clay connects with LinkedIn, allowing users to gather data directly from profiles and track LinkedIn interactions as part of their outreach strategy.

Clay CRM vs. Clay: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of the two Clays and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, and contact management.

1. Sales pipeline management

Clay CRM does not include a built-in sales pipeline management tool. Users can organize contacts and tasks, but there’s no system to track deals through different stages.

Clay doesn’t offer a standard pipeline dashboard either, but it can generate one based on inbound lead form data, allowing for a more customized approach.

For advanced pipeline management, businesses may need additional tools or integrations. The best choice between Clay CRM and Clay depends on how important pipeline tracking is to your sales process.

2. Ease of use

Clay CRM offers a user-friendly interface designed for simplicity and ease of navigation, making it accessible for users of all experience levels. Its intuitive design ensures that users can quickly learn to manage their contacts and workflows without extensive training. As a dedicated outreach tool, Clay has some complicated features that might take some time to learn as its not a traditional CRM system.

3. Contact enrichment

Clay CRM's contact enrichment feature automatically gathers additional data from sources like social media and public databases to build more comprehensive contact profiles, enhancing the quality of information available for each contact. Similarly, Clay’s enrichment feature automatically gathers detailed lead information from various sources, creating comprehensive contact profiles that can also be integrated with your existing CRM.

4. Outreach

Clay’s outreach feature is designed for efficient prospecting and personalized communication. It allows users to create targeted lists, pull in enriched data from multiple sources, and send automated, customized emails. Users can set up email sequences to ensure consistent follow-ups and track engagement metrics, such as open and response rates, to refine outreach efforts.

5. Automation

Clay’s automation features are geared toward simplifying outreach tasks, allowing users to set up automated workflows for data gathering, personalized email sequencing, and follow-up reminders. These automations enable consistent communication by triggering actions like follow-up emails at scheduled intervals, based on engagement or specific conditions. However, the automation capabilities are largely focused on email outreach, lacking more advanced automation options for multichannel engagement or complex workflow management that some traditional CRM tools may offer.

6. Integration

Clay CRM supports integrations with various third-party tools, allowing users to connect external applications for enhanced functionality. Clay.com’s outreach tool supports integrations with various CRMs, email platforms, and data sources, allowing users to sync enriched contact information with existing tools. These integrations help streamline data flow and ensure that contact profiles and outreach activities are updated across platforms.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Clay CRM does not currently have an AI integration. Clay's AI integration is research-focused. Through Claygent, you can automate your research and visit domains, find info and report back. You can use this to see whether or not companies are SOC-II compliant, and more.

Price and plans comparison

Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Clay CRM and Clay.

Clay CRM prices

Clay CRM has a free plan for personal use, for up to 1,000 contacts. After that premium plans are as follows on an annual subscription.

• Pro: $10 per user, per month.
• Team: $40 per user, per month.
• Enterprise: Undisclosed.

Clay prices

Besides a free plan, Clay has a few premium plans to choose from depending on the features you need, credits, and number of people/company searches you want to make. Below is a high level overview of their annual subscription.

• Starter: Starting from $134 per month for 24k credits per year.
• Explorer: Starting from $314 per month, for 120k credits per year.
• Pro: Starting from $720 per month, for 600k credits per year.
• Enterprise: Price undisclosed. Custom credits option.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Clay CRM and Clay

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. A multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system.

Key features

• Contact management: Bring all your contacts into one place seamlessly, from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram and X to multiple inboxes including Gmail and Outlook.
• Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile in folk, and access them on the go. And assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow-up.
• Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
• Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk’s Google Chrome extension.
• Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
• Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
• Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don’t reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.
• Sales pipeline dashboard: Manage your entire sales cycle and leads with a highly customizable sales pipeline dashboard that can be used in Kanban-board view or listicle.

Price and plans

folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $20 per user, per month.
• Premium: $40 per user, per month.
• Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.

Clay CRM vs. Clay: What's the verdict?

Between both Clay CRM and Clay, there's no doubt that both platforms offer robust features for managing customer relationships and outreach. Clay CRM excels in automation and real-time updates, making it ideal for businesses seeking to streamline operations. On the other hand, Clay offers a more versatile approach for outreach. However, for companies that need a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk provides a flexible alternative to these traditional CRM options, blending ease of use with customization. Try folk today, free