Clay vs HIghLevel

Clay and HighLevel are two platforms designed to support businesses in managing customer relationships and outreach, each with a unique focus. Clay emphasizes data enrichment and automated prospecting, helping teams streamline lead generation and personalize outreach efforts. HighLevel, on the other hand, specializes in digital marketing automation and client management, making it a popular choice among agencies. In this blog post, we'll compare their key features to help you decide which platform best fits your needs. Or if folk might just offer a more flexible alternative with user-friendly contact management and versatility.

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.
  

What is HighLevel?

HighLevel is a comprehensive platform designed to streamline digital marketing efforts for agencies and businesses. It offers features such as lead capture, automated booking, customer nurturing, and membership site creation. The platform provides tools to help agencies build their digital marketing engine, automate workflows, and drive business growth. It also includes a white-label option for agencies.

Key features of HighLevel

• Lead capture tools: HighLevel provides customizable forms, surveys, and landing pages to help businesses effectively capture and manage leads.
• Automated workflows: Automate tasks like follow-ups, appointment scheduling, and reminders, saving time and ensuring consistent communication.
• Customer nurturing tools: Engage with leads through email campaigns, text messages, and automated drip sequences to convert them into loyal customers.
• Membership site creation: Build and manage membership sites directly within the platform, offering valuable resources or courses to clients.
• White-label platform: Agencies can fully brand HighLevel as their own, delivering a seamless experience to their clients.

Clay vs. HighLevel: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of Clay and HighLevel and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, user experience and more.

1. Sales Pipeline Management

Clay offers a unique approach by allowing users to connect with inbound lead forms to create a customized dashboard, although it lacks a traditional sales pipeline view. This feature is beneficial for businesses that prefer a more flexible and data-driven approach to managing leads. On the other hand, HighLevel CRM provides a robust sales pipeline management feature that allows businesses to create customized pipelines tailored to their sales processes. It offers tools to track leads, monitor deal progress, and view opportunities through a comprehensive dashboard. This feature is designed to help organize sales workflows and provide visibility into the sales cycle, making it a suitable choice for businesses looking for a structured approach to pipeline management. Both platforms offer unique advantages, with Clay focusing on flexibility and HighLevel emphasizing structured organization. Ultimately, the choice between the two will depend on your business's specific needs and how you prefer to manage your sales process.

2. Ease of use

Clay offers a user-friendly interface designed for simplicity and efficiency, making it easy for users to navigate and manage tasks. HighLevel, while feature-rich, may require a steeper learning curve due to its extensive customization options, which can be overwhelming for new users.

3. Contact enrichment

Clay's enrichment feature automatically gathers detailed lead information from various sources, creating comprehensive contact profiles that can be integrated with your existing CRM. HighLevel CRM does not appear to offer dedicated contact enrichment features.

4. Outreach

Clay's outreach feature is designed for efficient prospecting with personalized communication, offering automated, customized emails and engagement tracking. HighLevel provides diverse outreach tools, including email and SMS campaigns, but may require more setup time to optimize for specific strategies.

5. Automation

Clay focuses on simplifying email outreach with automated workflows, while HighLevel offers broader automation capabilities for lead follow-ups and multichannel campaigns, though setting up complex workflows may take additional time.

6. Integration

Clay offers integrations with various CRMs, email marketing platforms, and data sources, allowing users to sync enriched contact profiles and streamline outreach workflows across tools. HighLevel also offers integrations designed to streamline operations by enabling users to connect HighLevel with their existing systems and tools. However, the range of integrations may require additional setup and configuration to align with specific business needs.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Clay's AI, through Claygent, automates research tasks like SOC-II compliance checks. HighLevel lacks prominent AI features, focusing more on manual configuration and automation.

Price and plans comparison

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

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.

HighLevel prices

High Levels has two price tiers for you to choose from.

• Starter: $97/seat/month.
• Unlimited: $297/seat/month.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Clay and HighLevel

Looking for an affordable alternative? Check out folk. A multi-award-winning CRM platform known for its simple, plug-and-play setup. Folk is highly versatile, designed to support teams across sales, marketing, recruitment, and more with its customizable features. Built to grow with your business, it's suitable for solopreneurs, small to mid-size teams, and even large enterprises.

Key features

• Notes and reminders: Add notes directly to a contact's profile in Folk and access them anytime, anywhere. Set reminders to stay on top of follow-ups and never miss important tasks.
• Contact management: Centralize all your contacts effortlessly, importing from social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and X, as well as email services such as Gmail and Outlook.
• Sales pipeline dashboard: Track your entire sales cycle and leads with a customizable pipeline dashboard, available in both Kanban board and list views to suit your workflow.
• 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.

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 vs. HighLevel: What's the verdict?

When comparing Clay and HighLevel, it's apparent how both offer robust CRM functionalities tailored to different business needs. Clay excels in automated data enrichment and personalized outreach, making it ideal for lead generation. HighLevel, on the other hand, provides comprehensive marketing tools with a focus on digital marketing agencies. However, for companies seeking a more personalized and flexible approach to relationship management, folk emerges as a compelling alternative. With its user-friendly interface and customizable features, folk blends ease of use with powerful customization, making it a standout choice. Try folk today, free

FAQ

What is Clay software used for?

Clay is used for prospecting and outreach. It enriches contacts from sources like LinkedIn, builds targeted lead lists, personalizes email sequences, and automates follow-ups to streamline lead generation.

How do Clay and HighLevel differ?

Clay centers on data enrichment, targeted lists, and personalized email sequences with flexible dashboards. HighLevel targets agencies, adding lead capture, workflow automation, SMS/email campaigns, membership sites, and robust sales pipelines.

Does Clay have a sales pipeline?

Clay does not provide a traditional stage-based pipeline. It lets teams connect inbound forms and create custom dashboards to track leads, but it lacks a kanban-style deals board.

What is a good alternative to Clay and HighLevel?

Consider folk CRM. It offers a customizable pipeline, contact enrichment, email sequences, and fast setup. Annual plans: Standard $20/user/mo, Premium $40, Custom from $80. 14-day free trial.