Clay Review in 2025: The Right Sales Tool for Your Business?

Vlad Oleksiienko 18 Dec 2024

Sales tools have drastically evolved in 2025, with artificial intelligence (AI) driving most of the innovation. What goes hand in hand with AI is data, and given the growing importance of creating personalized sales journeys and making data-driven decisions, sales intelligence tools have secured a spot in most businesses’ tool stacks.

One tool that steadily rose on the radar of many businesses in 2025 is Clay, an AI-driven sales intelligence platform that provides accurate data-driven insights and prospecting automation for sales teams.

Given the recent trend of sales tools consolidating with additional features to cover numerous sales processes, it’s no surprise that Clay has also incorporated pretty impressive inbound and outbound sales features into its platform.

But as more sales tools become available, each with unique pros and cons, it’s become increasingly challenging for businesses to identify the right software for their sales operations.

In this review, we’ll explore Clay’s main features, various pricing plans, top user reviews, and the top alternatives, with the ultimate goal of helping you determine if it’s the right tool for your business.

What is Clay? Product overview

Clay is a bit of a chameleon when it comes to sales software categories—it’s primarily positioned as a sales intelligence platform but it can also be a lead enrichment tool, an AI prospecting tool, and even a sales outreach tool, depending on your business needs.

The most standout part of Clay is its AI capabilities designed to enhance sales prospecting efforts with accurate and actionable data. Finding the most relevant prospects, prioritizing leads based on real-time buyer signals, and enriching existing customer profiles with concrete data are the primary goals of this tool.

Clay achieves this thanks to its access to 100+ external data sources, including public databases and social media platforms, with the help of impressive AI algorithms.

Moreover, Clay comes with several inbound and outbound sales automations, making it a versatile sales automation solution. Compared to dedicated inbound software and outbound sales platforms like Reply.io, Clay doesn’t quite reach that level of specialized automation.

When it comes to their primary goal, however, which is sales intelligence and data enrichment, Clay is one of the best in the game, suitable for teams of all sizes looking to harness AI for their lead generation efforts.

Getting started with Clay

Much like with most modern sales tools, getting started with Clay is fairly straightforward, and given its freemium plan (more on that later) and free trials available, everyone can give it a go.

Simply enter your work email, answer a few simple questions about your business and what you’ll be primarily using Clay for, and you’re good to go!

Once your account is ready and you’ve logged in, you’re greeted with a clean and intuitive interface that differs from most other B2B software dashboards. And that’s because…it’s a bit overly clean, it’s basically a blank canvas:

Now, this blank canvas may seem a bit intimidating at first glance, but after a bit of exploring it’s clear that they make it fairly easy to get acquainted with the platform. To take it a step further, they have an introductory video for all new users with a short yet informative product demo.

Right away, users can create their first table, reminding an Excel-like workflow, to start gathering their prospects and relevant prospect data.

Afterward, you’re ready to start using Clay’s main features, which we will cover right away. But first…

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What are the main Clay features?

As previously mentioned, Clay is a versatile tool with features covering multiple sales processes, even though most users use it for building enriched prospect lists with top-quality sales intelligence, which they then leverage with an outreach tool like Reply.io to act upon.

In fact, we’ve recently announced a joint integration to empower sales teams with the powers of AI-driven sales intelligence and AI-powered sales outreach.

Back to our main topic, here are Clay’s 5 main features to streamline your sales workflow:

Multi-provider data

One of Clay’s most noteworthy features is its ability to source various prospect and company data from over 100 providers, including LinkedIn and ZoomInfo, as well as job boards, public databases, and news outlets, empowering sales teams to be more accurate and relevant in their sales strategies.

With its extensive search filters, rest assured that you can be extra precise in your targeting, sorting your leads by location, company size, experience, social network connections, and so on.

This multi-provider approach ensures that sales teams have access to the most up-to-date and relevant information when building prospect lists or launching their outreach.

Besides prospecting data, Clay offers real-time intent data by tracking job changes, new hires, promotions, company updates, etc. of your prospects, helping you engage them at the most relevant time. It also empowers sales reps to prioritize leads who show signs of interest.

Last but not least, Clay has a pretty unique AI research agent named Claygent that acts as a virtual scout, sourcing the web to find all the necessary prospect and company information you may need. Simply instruct what you’re looking for and it will return with answers, virtually eliminating all manual data searching and enrichment.

Account & lead scoring

Creating a steady flow of prospects is half the battle in lead generation, the other half is ensuring they are qualified to be potential buyers, whether it’s now or in the future.

Clay offers an AI-powered lead scoring tool that automates the lead qualification process on autopilot. Every business can set up its own criteria for what qualifies or disqualifies prospects, for example—a recent AI product or feature announcement = +10 points, a recent sales team expansion = +15 points, and so on.

Once all set up, Clay’s AI will put each unique lead through the ringer to determine how likely they are to make a purchase, and it will keep updating scores of existing prospects in real-time, should they take any actions that either add or subtract from their score.

Once again, this empowers sales teams to maximize their efficiency and resource allocation by focusing their time on prospects likely to convert, while simultaneously removing another manual, time-consuming activity of their shoulders.

AI formula generator

Another AI feature, and this time it’s Clay’s AI Formula Generator which allows users to create customized data sourcing and enrichment workflows that fit their specific needs. Besides saving an incredible amount of time, this AI engine ensures precision and facilitates scalability:

The way it works is fairly simple, much like with ChatGPT users simply describe their desired workflow in plain English, spanning from finding relevant prospects and creating that lead scoring system to data enrichment criteria and beyond.

You can imagine just how much this AI formula generator can free up your sales team’s time to focus on higher-value tasks, such as personalized outreach and relationship-building.

Automated outbound

Once you build your targeted and qualified prospect lists, the next step is to not waste any time and begin your sales engagement efforts. Clay offers simple outbound features with automated emails, follow-ups, and LinkedIn touches, as well as AI personalization based on the sales intelligence it has for each prospect.

Users can turn to the Clay AI sales email generator that runs on ChatGPT to save time on their outreach efforts right through the platform, but when it comes to sales engagement, that’s about it.

The good news is that Clay seamlessly integrates with dedicated sales engagement tools like Reply.io that have superpowers when it comes to outreach. With Reply, users can create conditional multichannel sequences for each unique lead, leveraging emails, calls, LinkedIn messages, SMS, and WhatsApp.

Reply’s AI sales agent will leverage the sales intelligence provided by Clay to hyper-personalize each message and determine which channel and timing is most appropriate for each lead. To take it a step further, it will also respond to your prospects, handle objections, and book meetings on your behalf.

With Clay’s AI data researching and Reply’s AI outreach features, businesses can create a fully automated and powerful sales engine, from finding targeted leads all the way to closing deals.

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Automated inbound

When it comes to inbound lead generation, Clay doesn’t technically have any features designed to capture and nurture inbound leads, but it does have the ability to integrate with several inbound tools. Afterward, Clay will qualify those inbound leads using your custom lead scoring system and enrich their customer profiles with additional data points.

Clay seamlessly integrates with Hubspot, Marketo, or Salesforce, but hopefully, more integrations will come along shortly.

Clay fills all the gaps when it comes to getting to know your inbound leads that come through your website, lead magnets, or social media, ensuring all data is accurate and up-to-date.

If you’ve integrated Clay with an outreach tool like Reply.io, it will also categorize your inbound leads and assign them to the most appropriate sales sequences you’re running.

Last but not least, Clay has the ability to automatically send AI-personalized emails based on your created workflows, ensuring that your leads are continuously nurtured with relevant information until they’re ready to convert.

What are the Clay pricing plans?

There are a whopping 5 separate Clay pricing tiers and they are all flexible to some extent, which makes it a viable option for small startups, large enterprises, and everyone in between.

Below, we’ll break down all the available plans and explore what you can expect with each one.

Freemium plan

Clay’s ‘Freemium’ plan is a great starting point for sales teams exploring sales prospecting tools and wishing to try out the platform before committing to a paid plan. It’s also an ideal choice for small sales teams that need the most basic automations with a low volume of prospecting needs.

You’ll still get access to some of Clay’s basic AI features like Claygent, but your prospect & company searches will be capped at 1.2k search credits per year.

To enjoy intent data, AI lead scoring, and inbound/outbound functionalities, you’ll have to upgrade to one of the paid plans.

Starter plan

Next in line is the ‘Starter’ plan, designed for small to mid-sized sales teams looking to scale their sales operations and require some of the more advanced functionality that the freemium plan doesn’t offer.

The starting price for this plan is $134/month, which gives you 24k search credits per year, and the price increases should you need more.

Compared to the freemium plan, users will also enjoy more advanced data enrichments and individual API keys for easier stack integrations. All in all, this is still a pretty limited plan compared to the more premium ones we’ll discuss below.

Explorer plan

The ‘Explorer’ plan is the most popular pricing tier among Clay users, priced at $314/month.

Sales teams get access to 120k annual search credits (and more upon request for extra cost), as well as additional features including the AI formula generator, email outreach capabilities, and ‘exclusion’ filters to make prospecting much more targeted and precise.

This plan is where users get complete access to Clay’s multi-provider data with even more data points and intent signals to really take prospecting to the next level.

Pro plan

Further down the ladder, we have Clay’s ‘Pro’ plan, said to be the best value for money among users. This is where the Clay AI pricing starts getting a bit steep, with the starting price of $720/month.

Truth be told, this plan isn’t that much different from the ‘Explorer’ plan, besides a staggering 600k search credits per year, unlimited access to the AI research assistant, and the ability to integrate Clay with other tools like CRMs.

Therefore, these are the only 3 reasons one would choose the much more expensive ‘Pro’ plan over the ‘Explorer’.

Custom plan

Finally, we have the ultimate premium Clay pricing tier, which is their ‘Custom’ plan—the most customizable and feature-rich of them all.

With this plan, Clay users get unlimited rows, 40 action columns per table, advanced AI models and AI prompting support, dedicated Slack support, and SSO.

In simple terms, this is the plan designed for larger sales teams looking for an unlimited sales intelligence platform with a partner-like relationship with Clay for any customized additions they may require.

All in all, to answer how much is Clay worth, it truly depends on your sales prospecting needs, which features you need, and how many credits you’re planning on using.

What are Clay reviews by real users?

There’s no better way to determine how good a product truly is than to see what the users are saying about it. We’ve skimmed through the main review sites and it’s safe to say that Clay has built an excellent reputation:

G2 → 4.9 ⭐️/ 5
Product Hunt → 4.9 ⭐️/ 5

After looking through hundreds of Clay reviews from real users, the most often-mentioned pros and cons include:

✅Many users appreciate Clay’s adaptability to various workflows, allowing them to create custom lead scoring and enrichment systems;
✅Users love Clay’s ability to source data from multiple providers into a single, intuitive interface;
✅Reviewers really appreciate Clay’s intuitive interface that’s super easy to navigate.

❎On the contrary, some users feel that the interface resembles a spreadsheet, which isn’t visually appealing to all;
❎There are numerous mentions that certain features, like Clay’s search credits, are a bit overpriced compared to direct API usage;
❎Users have noted the absence of bulk selection or sorting options on most plans, which hinders efficiency.

Now, here are some real-world Clay review examples:

“I love how Clay takes the busywork out of my outreach, pulling all the data I need into one place so I can move faster and focus on what actually matters.”

“Provides the most accurate data by using multiple providers so it has improved our reachability a great deal. Has the feel of a spreadsheet so it’s quite easy to get up and running.”

“We were able to reduce the time of prospect list creation by a few times thanks to AI based company scoring that we’ve set-up based on our needs.”

What is the best Clay alternative?

Choosing which tools to equip your sales team with is a serious business decision that has the potential to directly impact your revenue. Therefore, it’s always best to do your research and weigh up your options before committing to a purchase.

When it comes to sales intelligence, Clay is truly one of the top solutions out there.

However, if you’re primarily looking for a sales outreach tool, then it’s definitely worth considering some of the more specialized tools available, and then integrating them with Clay to leverage the best of both worlds.

One of the leading sales outreach platforms is Reply.io, which we kindly invite you to check out and explore its advanced AI features to see if we would be a good fit.

So even though Clay and Reply.io are slightly different in nature, the key differences include:

Reply.io comes with a native AI SDR agent that hyper-personalizes your outreach AND handles responses on your behalf (including booking meetings);
With Reply.io, you get more channels for your outreach campaigns (including email, cloud calls, LinkedIn, SMS, and WhatsApp);
Reply.io provides businesses with an awesome AI Chatbot that captures, qualifies, and nurtures inbound leads to generate more warm leads;
With Reply’s Google Postmaster and MailToaster integrations, and a dedicated deliverability team at their disposal, users can enjoy enhanced email deliverability for their outreach campaigns;
Last but not least, Reply.io provides powerful team management features to keep better track of sales reps’ performance, tasks, KPIs, etc.

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Verdict—how much is Clay worth?

Hopefully, our Clay CRM review was informative and helped you on your journey of finding the right sales tool(s) for your business.

Keep in mind that there are numerous AI sales software out there, each with its own unique standout features, integration capabilities, and prices.

Clay is undoubtedly a powerful tool for B2B sales teams with its AI-driven features, multi-source data integration, and customizable workflows. So if your primary focus is data-driven prospecting and lead scoring, Clay AI tool is definitely a viable option.

However, if you’re seeking a solution to supercharge your sales outreach with AI sales agents, Reply.io will undoubtedly offer more specialized features to meet those needs.

That being said, if you want the best of both worlds, the integration between Clay and Reply.io allows you to enjoy the fusion of Clay’s AI-driven data with Reply.io’s advanced sales outreach capabilities.