Clay Review: Data, Outreach & Limitations

On the hunt for a new data enrichment tool?

If you’ve heard of Clay but you’re uncertain if it’s right for you, don’t worry. 

Whether or not it’s a fit depends on your company’s go-to-market data needs, required features, budget, and technical expertise. 

Let’s look at all these factors and more. 

Clay Review: What You Get (and What You Don’t)

Clay is an AI-powered sales intelligence platform designed to help B2B sales and marketing teams research leads, enrich data, and streamline the personalized cold outreach process. 

So, what does Clay actually offer? Let’s cover its five most important features. 

Workflow Automation & Personalization

Clay offers a modular, spreadsheet-style user interface that provides tools to automate cold outreach. Users can find businesses that fit their ICP, or upload a contact list from their CRM and use AI to generate outreach emails. 

The platform also comes with lead scoring tools, an AI formula builder, and conditional logic, which enables you to create advanced workflow automations that trigger based on specific conditions. For instance, you could create an automation that applies discounts based on the prospect’s region—if region = “US”, return a 15% discount.  

It’s worth noting that some of the more advanced workflows come with a steep learning curve for B2B sales reps.   

LinkedIn and Email Outreach Features

Clay offers AI tools and templates to automate the creation of outreach messages. That includes email content, follow-ups, and content used for LinkedIn outreach, such as connection request messages. 

However, it lacks multi-channel sequencing. You’ll have to use external sales engagement platforms to run automated sequences and schedule and track your cold emails.

Clay also doesn’t have any built-in email warm-up or deliverability tools, which means your outreach messages may end up in leads’ spam folders.   

Data Enrichment Engine

One of Clay’s best features is its data enrichment engine. The tool collects data from over 130 data providers.

Clay covers the following data points:

• 

  Job titles

  
  
• 

  Demographics

  
  
• 

  Firmographics

  
  
• 

  Technographics

  
  
• 

  Contact details

  
  
• 

  Intent signals 

  
  
• 

  Trigger events (like a new promotion) 

  
  

The platform’s speed and data coverage are worth noting, but so is its credit cost per action, which might frustrate some users who want more predictable, flat-rate pricing. 

CRM Integrations and API Access

Clay offers integrations with popular CRMs and sales tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, and Slack. You can easily push data between Clay and these tools. Clay also has a CRM sync feature, which automatically keeps CRM data fresh and up to date.  

Clay’s HTTP API also allows users to send and retrieve data from other tools that have an API endpoint. 

AI Features and Personalization

Clay offers an AI research agent named Claygent that researches professionals and companies by crawling the web for publicly available data. 

Reps can ask Claygent highly specific questions, like “Which companies have below a 4.0 rating on Glassdoor?” or “How often is this person posting on social media?” This provides reps with useful information they can use to personalize cold outreach.

Sellers can also use Clay to generate tailored cold emails and LinkedIn intros. But they have to send these messages themselves. 

One big drawback is that some of Clay’s more advanced workflows cost an indefinite number of credits, and users unfamiliar with the credit system can accidentally burn through credits on accidental operations. That said, there is an option to set a budget limit for AI runs. 

Clay Pricing Breakdown

Clay offers five pricing tiers. The higher the monthly price, the more credits and features you’ll have access to. 

Plan Structure & Credits (Monthly)

Clay offers five different plans:  

• 

  Free: 100 credits per month (no phone number enrichments)

  
  
• 

  Starter ($149/mo): 2,000 credits per month (unlocks phone numbers and Signals)

  
  
• 

  Explorer ($349/mo): 10,000 credits per month (unlocks sequencing integrations)

  
  
• 

  Pro (~$800/mo): 50,000 credits per month (unlocks CRM integrations)

  
  
• 

  Custom: Custom credits 

  
  

As you go up in tiers, you unlock new features. For example, the Starter plan gives you phone number data and Signals (tracks web visits, job changes, etc.). But you’ll need the Explorer plan to access webhooks and CRM integration. 

Clay also uses a credit system. Credits are essentially currency you can spend on the platform. Most actions are free or cost one to two credits—validating an email, for reference, is one credit. 

However, some actions are more expensive, the total cost depending on the complexity of the request. For example, finding mobile phone numbers or scraping a LinkedIn profile costs more. 

Clay’s AI actions also consume credits. How much? It depends on your prompt. The same goes for CRM and email integrations, unless you’re on the Pro plan or above.

Fortunately, Clay does tell you how many credits a specific action costs. But there are still credit overage risks, especially when a rep inexperienced with the credit system is running complex, multi-step workflows. 

What You’re Really Paying For

Clay’s per-lead cost for enrichment and automation is pretty steep, especially when you consider that failed lookups still cost you credits, and that multi-step AI workflows can burn through credits incredibly fast, with some actions costing up to 25 credits. 

At scale, costs can significantly spike. The same goes for if your lead criteria are off and you accidentally use credits to research or enrich leads that aren’t a good fit. 

In other words, if you’re not careful, the extra credit costs (those on top of the base price) can put you out of pocket fast. 

Automate your outbound with an AI BDR

Meet Ava—your AI BDR who handles prospecting, outreach, and follow-ups, so your team can focus on closing.

Book a Demo

What Are the Downsides of Using Clay?

While Clay has proven itself to be a valuable cold outreach assistant, it does have a few problems that might bother outbound SDRs, account executives, and RevOps professionals.  

Not a Full Outreach System

One glaring issue with Clay is that it’s not a full-scale outreach automation tool. It has neither a built-in CRM nor a sales engagement suite. You have to connect it with your current tools, which will drive up your company’s overall technology costs as your tech stack expands. 

While it does have the ability to generate outreach messages, you’re going to have to use another tool to schedule, send, and sequence them, not to mention track and manage prospects. 

All this can make Clay feel like a tech stack add-on rather than a standalone solution. 

Complex for Beginners

Clay’s UI and automations are highly flexible but require a lot of logic-minded thinking. In fact, on G2, many users say it has a steep learning curve. 

As a spreadsheet-style interface, it’s likely going to be more intuitive to your sales ops professionals and data specialists than sales reps, who might not want to live in a tool with such a high level of complexity. 

As a result, many users assign one team member to manage Clay workflows. Adoption among full sales teams is less common. 

Credit Anxiety & Cost Concerns

Companies, especially startups and smaller businesses, often have a strict budget and want to know what they’re paying for and how much it will cost them. Unfortunately, Clay’s usage-based pricing system makes cost prediction rather difficult. 

Clay’s credit system can also punish experimentation or mistakes in logic, because even if the workflow fails or doesn’t give you what you were hoping for, you still have to “pay.” This isn’t great for users who like to play around with a tool to test out hypothetical use cases. 

On G2, the number one complaint among users is that Clay is expensive. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad tool. It's powerful, but that power can cost you. 

Is Clay Right for Your Sales Team?

Clay is great for mid-size B2B sales teams that have a RevOps department and are running sophisticated workflows for enrichment, lead research, and prospecting. 

On the other hand, it’s probably not the best option for smaller sales teams, beginners, or companies seeking an end-to-end cold outreach solution. 

Also, if your use case is simple—for example, finding a list of 100 cafes in my area or enriching a contact list with mobile phone data—Clay might feel like overkill.  

Meet Artisan: Built for Real Automation

Artisan is an AI-native sales automation platform. Unlike Clay, Artisan allows users to build end-to-end workflows, so you won’t need to buy and stitch together separate tools for email warm deliverability, outreach automation, and lead discovery.

Artisan is built around an AI BDR called Ava. She handles everything involved in outbound lead generation, from finding and researching leads to creating and running multi-channel sequences (on LinkedIn and email). 

Ava also personalizes these messages based on data like technographics, company intel, buyer intent signals, social media activity, and more. Lead profiles in Artisan’s 300 million-strong database are regularly enriched and hygiene-monitored. 

In contrast to Clay’s complex usage-based model, Artisan’s pricing is far simpler, with no credit system. Costs are transparent, straightforward, and predictable. Plus, the platform works out-of-the-box with CRM sync, automated lead scoring, and even reply handling. That means you can start to see ROI and booked sales meetings in days, not weeks. 

Clay vs. Artisan: Feature Comparison

Here’s a rundown of how Artisan and Clay compare across features, ease of use, pricing, AI tools, and data enrichment. 

The Verdict: Is Clay Worth It?

So, is Clay right for your prospecting needs? 

For mid-sized sales teams looking for a highly flexible lead discovery and research tool, Clay can be a great option, provided you have the budget and technical know-how to use it. 

The problem, of course, is that although Clay offers AI and automated workflows, the AI functions more as an assistant than an autonomous employee. This can lead to issues when you try to scale your outreach. 

Many sales teams are choosing smarter systems that act, not just help. AI SDR tools, for example, are becoming popular because they handle the entire cold outbound process.

Why You Should Consider an AI-First Sales Platform 

With an AI-enabled platform like Clay, your sales team can reach out to more leads in a personalized manner than they could before. And that efficiency has a direct impact on revenue. 

The tricky thing is—AI is a broad term. Some AI platforms are less autonomous than others. Clay, while extremely versatile and helpful for automating sales tasks, does require human input to function properly. 

With Artisan, you’re hiring a workflow—and that workflow is the entire outbound sales process. Artisan’s AI BDR finds leads, researches and segments them, creates sequences, and sends emails and LinkedIn messages—all on autopilot. 

As a result, your sales reps can use their talent where it’s most needed—that is, deep conversations with engaged prospects.

Automate your outbound with an AI BDR

Meet Ava—your AI BDR who handles prospecting, outreach, and follow-ups, so your team can focus on closing.

Book a Demo