Let’s be real about Clay for a second.
Clay rocks. The platform is powerful, the community is great, and when you know what you’re doing, it can absolutely transform your outbound motion.
But here’s the problem: Clay’s pricing is not very good.
In less than two weeks, I burned through over $700 on phone credits. And roughly a quarter of them were completely wrong. That’s close to $200 just… gone. Bad data, bad numbers, bad ROI. I’m sure I’m not alone.
Now, Clay fans are probably already yelling at me telling me I need to use APIs from other data tools to save money. They’ll tell me to subscribe to Findymail, Builtwith, and Apollo, then run waterfalls through Clay to optimize costs.
Not happening. I’m not buying 5-6 separate subscriptions just to make Clay affordable. That defeats the entire purpose of having an all-in-one platform.
What’s even worse? The learning curve is steep (although getting better with each release), and mistakes are expensive. That trial-and-error phase can cost you hundreds of dollars before you even run your first successful campaign.
So I tried several alternatives to see what else is out there. I focused especially on workflow automation and data enrichment tools, which is really what the heart of Clay is, *not* data sources (like Apollo, Builtwith, and ZoomInfo).
Some alternatives were good, average and even a bit worse than Clay. But here was what I tried and my experiences with all of them (with screenshots)
1. Freckle.io – Best Overall for Ease of Use, Pricing and Features
Freckle.io is a relatively new Clay competitor (they recently raised $5M in funding), and like Clay, they have a spreadsheet-style interface. You can manipulate records in rows and columns, run enrichments on the fly, and push clean, complete data back to your CRM when you’re ready.
It’s very similar to Clay’s spreadsheet interface as you can see in the screenshot, but I found it a bit more cleaner, faster, intuitive, and robust (though this is probably a matter of preferences)
Their AI research agent goes far beyond basic firmographics, tapping into the web and over 40 data providers to uncover really specific, niche data like ISO certifications, active job openings, etc. You can add a column and use natural language to describe how you want the column to be populated. It might take awhile if you have 100 rows, but Freckle eventually goes out and finds the data to populate all of them.
During my trial, I was tried adding a custom column to indicate whether a company had a security trust center. This is probably not something Freckle had in its database for every company prefilled, but Freckle was able to crawl their websites to see if they could detect a security trust center. It took just a few minutes for it to finish for my table of 100 rows and it was very accurate for all of them.
Freckle also offers custom ICP and lead scoring that’s actually practical. You can describe your ideal customer profile in plain English, and their AI scores every lead accordingly – no more rigid firmographic rules that only work for a fraction of your database.
A brief note on their onboarding: As soon as I signed up, I was very impressed with Freckle’s onboarding process. A lot of tools just leave some onboarding video or docs and expect you to learn everything yourself. With Freckle, they have a nice, simple check list. And they even incentivize you with credits for completing each step (smart!)
Pricing: Freckle offers a generous free tier with 500 credits to get started, which includes unlimited users, agent columns, exporting, web search and scraping, email enrichments, waterfall enrichments, webhooks, integrations with Zapier and HeyReach, and HubSpot CRM integration.
Syncing the data back with your CRM is always free as well, and one of the selling points they emphasize. Remember, this isn’t always free for many other tools.
In terms of transparency, I always hate it when companies hide their pricing behind a “Call for a Demo”, and Freckle thankfully doesn’t do that. Their pricing breakdown is clear as day, so you can make a decision on whether the cost is worth it for you.
What I dislike about Freckle: I find find their technology detection lacking in a few examples. For instance, when I added a custom column to ask it to detect the HRIS used for each company, it couldn’t detect any for most companies (even though I checked to see that some did in fact had a HRIS).
I imagine some types of enrichment simply are beyond their scale, so I recommend doing some manually checking to make sure you’re not just getting an AI-hallucinated answer.
2. Airscale – Best for Outbound List Building
Airscale is built specifically for scaling outbound campaigns. It’s all about building highly-targeted lists and aggregating the best data about your leads. And it does this at a fraction of what you’d pay elsewhere.
What I liked: When I first signed up for a trial, I liked how simple and easy it was to navigate around. Now, it wasn’t the prettiest UI by any means (definitely not easy on the eyes like Clay/Freckle), but I appreciate simple UIs!
Right away, after I signed up, I see 3 tabs: Find people, Find Companies, and Monitor. Probably the 3 major use cases I want.
The platform really shines when it comes to list building sources. You can extract Sales Navigator search results directly, and scrape LinkedIn post likers and commenters (perfect for social signal-based targeting).
I tried scraping all the people who liked one of my recent posts, as a test, and it was able to do so fine. It returned the first and last name, the company they were from, and other details (though I had to pay to enrich all of them, as I couldn’t so during the trial)
Airscale also has a Google Maps scraper, that works great for finding local businesses, and the Apollo integration lets you import leads directly from Apollo searches. Both seemed to work very effectively, as I was able to find ‘financial advisors in the US’, and it returned a list of relevant companies back from Google Maps.
Airscale uses waterfall enrichment with 15+ providers for both phone numbers and emails. This means they hit multiple data sources simultaneously to maximize your coverage. You only pay when they actually find valid contact information – phone numbers run as low as $0.20 each.
Speaking of pricing, this is where Airscale shines. You really do get your bang for your buck here. Let’s compare the pricing between Airscale and Clay:
At $49 per month for 4,000 credits, Airscale’s cost per credit comes to just $0.01225, whereas Clay charges $149 monthly for only 2,000 credits – a much steeper $0.0745 per credit.
This means that for every $100 spent, users get approximately 8,163 credits with Airscale compared to only 1,342 credits with Clay. In practical terms, Airscale delivers over six times more credits per dollar than Clay. Extremely good value.
What I didn’t like:
Some features like finding companies with specific job posting did not seem to work at all when I tried it. For instance, when I tried to search for “GTM Engineer”, it showed results like “Market Place Manager” and other seemingly unrelated jobs. I don’t know exactly what Airscale was searching for, but it definitely wasn’t GTM Engineers!
In addition, they only give you a limited number of credits during their free trial. For instance, enriching just 1 contact required a paid subscription. And some of their features require a paid subscription before you could even try it. For example, trying their Company Lookalike feature required a paid subscription.
If there’s one thing I wish they could improve was I wish they could just let trial users try each feature, even if it was just 1 credit. Otherwise, there’s no way to know if enriching contact’s emails, or finding lookalikes even worked without paying. That’s the 1 thing I disliked about Airscale, and if you can’t afford to pay for 1 month to try it out, then Airscale probably isn’t the best choice for you.
3. Persana – Best for Signal-Based Prospecting
Persana, like Clay lets you build your ICP list by telling it upfront what you’re looking for using filters and natural language ie. “Show me Series B SaaS companies in California with 50-200 employees.” The platform automatically builds the table based on your criteria.
However, what makes Persana unique is they have 75+ signals (job changes, hiring trends, funding, website visits) already baked into the platform. You don’t need to manually add columns for each signal. Persana automatically tracks them in the background. When someone in your target list changes jobs or their company starts hiring, Persana alerts you automatically.
In addition, instead of manually monitoring signals, you can turn on Autopilot, which watches for these triggers and automatically enriches prospects, scores them, and even sends personalized outreach when the timing is right. This is purely optional though, so if you’re not comfortable with automating outreach you can safely ignore this.
Persana has 4 main signals. The first one is a job change tracker, which tracks job changes in real-time. With it, you can keep tabs on your most valuable customers and prospects, so you know the second a champion moves to a new company. It’s fairly standard and very similar to UserGems, if you’ve used it.
The 2nd signal they have is a technographics feature gives you deep visibility into what tech stack your target companies are using (ie which ecommerce platform, or what payment provider). This is great for competitive intelligence and lead segmentation – you can build lists of companies using specific technologies and tailor your pitch accordingly.
They also have a hiring trends analyzer that monitors hiring activities across industries. So you can find companies that are scaling up or hiring for roles that indicate they need your solution. For instance, if a company is hiring more SDRs, it might indicate a need for a sales platform. This feature is rather unique because most platforms I see only have a simple job postings search, but no way to find companies that have hiring more for certain roles.
Persana AI also takes a slightly different approach to enrichment – instead of just filling in basic firmographic data, it uses AI to generate actual sales intelligence about your prospects.
One of their unique features is the “Enrich Full Person Profile” enrichment on a list of LinkedIn prospects. The results were surprisingly useful for personalization.
The setup is simple: import LinkedIn URLs, names, or existing contacts, then click “Enrich Profile” to activate their AI enrichment. What makes Persana interesting is the type of data it generates.
Rather than just job title and company size, you get columns like “Highlights” (key career achievements), “Intro Lines” (AI-generated conversation starters), “How To Use Their Personality For Sales” (tactical selling tips), “Icebreakers,” “Recommended Messaging Style,” and even “Big 5 Personality Assessment” and “DISC Personality Profile.” It’s essentially trying to give you a psychological profile and talking points for each prospect.
In my test with about 14 prospects, each enrichment pulled 5-9 data points per person. The “Person Details” column aggregated basic info, while the AI-generated insights felt more hit-or-miss—some were genuinely helpful for crafting personalized outreach, while others felt generic.
The “Sales Call Tips” column, for instance, suggested conversation approaches based on the prospect’s background and personality indicators. It’s definitely more focused on quality of outreach than quantity of data points, which is a refreshing change from traditional enrichment tools that just dump 40 fields of firmographic data on you.
As a simple analogy to illustration the difference between Clay and Persana. With Clay, you’re building a custom car from parts. You choose the engine (data provider), the transmission (enrichment logic), the dashboard (what columns to show). Super powerful if you know what you’re doing, but requires technical knowledge.
With Persana, you’re buying a pre-configured car with smart features already installed. Lane departure warnings (job change alerts) and adaptive cruise control (Autopilot) come standard. You just tell it where you want to go.
So if you prefer a tool where a lot of things are configured for you, Persana might be a better tool for you.
What I disliked: If there’s 1 thing I disliked about Persana is that credits burn faster than you’d think. Finding one phone number = 10 credits, so you need to be strategic about what you’re enriching. That and you need to go on a demo to actually get a chance to try the platform – there isn’t a self serve option.
Pricing:
- Free: $0/month (50 credits, 50 emails, 5 phones, unlimited users)
- Starter: $68/month billed annually (24k credits/year, credit rollover)
- Growth: $151/month billed annually (60k credits/year)
4. FullEnrich – Best for Pure Waterfall Enrichment
If you’re laser-focused on one thing – getting the most accurate emails and phone numbers possible – FullEnrich is hard to beat. Unlike Clay’s sprawling feature set, FullEnrich does one thing exceptionally well: waterfall enrichment across 15+ data providers.
The platform aggregates contact data from providers like Apollo, DropContact, Hunter, Lusha, and more, running them sequentially until it finds a match. This “waterfall” approach means you’re not limited to a single data source’s coverage gaps. When I tested it, the email match rates were noticeably higher than using any single provider alone.
The interface is refreshingly simple. You upload a CSV with names and companies, FullEnrich does its magic, and you download an enriched list. No complex workflows to build, no spreadsheet formulas to debug. Just upload, enrich, export.
As you can see in the screenshot above, FullEnrich systematically works through multiple data sources—LinkedIn Enrich, various email providers (Wiza, Hunter, People Data Labs), and phone providers (ContactOut, Anymailfinder)—until it finds valid contact information. The visual workflow makes it crystal clear which sources were checked and which ones returned results.
The results speak for themselves. In my test of 4 contacts, FullEnrich successfully found and verified emails for 3 out of 4 (75% match rate), with clear verification indicators next to each email address. The “Finished” status for completed enrichments and real-time progress tracking (like “Wiza 5/13” for Bailey Darling) gives you visibility into exactly what’s happening.
Pricing: FullEnrich offers transparent, credit-based pricing:
- Starter Plan: $29/month for 500 credits
- Pro Plan: $55/month for 1,000 credits
- Scale Plan: $400-$50k/month with custom credits for larger teams
One major advantage: landline numbers are free, and you only pay credits for mobile numbers. Plus, they triple-verify every contact, so you’re not burning credits on bad data.
What I didn’t like: FullEnrich is solely an enrichment tool—it won’t help you build lists, create workflows, or automate outreach. If you need those capabilities, you’ll need to pair it with other tools. I also found that while email accuracy was excellent, phone number coverage (especially mobile numbers) was hit-or-miss for certain industries and regions. Some users report occasional outdated phone numbers slipping through, though the email data remained consistently reliable.
The lack of native CRM integrations is another limitation. You’re working with CSV uploads and downloads, which means manual work if you want to sync data back to Salesforce or HubSpot. For teams that already have their prospecting and workflow automation figured out and just need better contact data, FullEnrich is perfect. But if you’re looking for an all-in-one solution, you’ll outgrow it quickly.
5. Tapistro – Best for Full GTM Orchestration
At Tapistro, they’re building what they call the “GPU of GTM tech” – and honestly, that’s not a bad way to put it. It’s purpose-built for sales and marketing teams, with inbuilt storage, a smart data model, and living, breathing prospect profiles that actually evolve with your GTM motion.
No more duct-taping tools together. No more siloed workflows. Just one powerful system designed to help you sell and market smarter.
Tapistro positions itself as an AI GTM Autopilot – it unifies intent data from multiple sources, enriches accounts in real-time, and orchestrates personalized multi-channel journeys. Very similar to competitors like UnifyGTM. This isn’t just a data tool, it’s a full orchestration layer for your entire go-to-market motion.
Tapistro has pre-built connectors to a massive number of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party intent sources. We’re talking LinkedIn Ads, G2, News, Clearbit, Factors, RB2B, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more. The platform detects buying signals in real-time and unifies them into a single prioritized account view.
They also have a *ton* of integrations. Some of them include your CRM and paid media platforms, as well as your chat platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
AI-native buying group journeys: This is where Tapistro gets interesting. You can add AI steps anywhere in your journey using their TapAI agents. These agents research specific details about target accounts using publicly available data, and you can fine-tune the models for your specific use case. Think of it as having an AI SDR that can do deep research on accounts before your human SDRs touch them.
What I disliked: Tapistro is a platform, not a point solution. There’s definitely a learning curve, and you need to be ready to actually build and optimize journeys. This isn’t a plug-and-play tool. If you pay for this, I would expect to dedicate at least the first month getting your feet wet and figuring out how to make it work for your specific motion.
Pricing: Not publicly listed – likely custom based on team size and use case.
6. Cognism – Ideal for European companies
If you’re looking for a Clay alternative that specializes in European markets, Cognism is worth considering. This B2B data platform has built a strong reputation for its international coverage, particularly across Europe and the UK, where compliance with GDPR is baked into everything they do.
Their database includes over 400 million contacts with direct mobile numbers and verified email addresses, which is pretty impressive if you’re targeting decision-makers abroad.
What makes Cognism stand out is their phone-verified mobile numbers – they actually have real people calling to verify contact information, which means higher accuracy rates than most providers.
This human verification process helps ensure you’re not wasting time on outdated or incorrect numbers, which can be a game-changer for outbound sales teams. Their Chrome extension integrates smoothly with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, letting you pull contact data directly while you’re prospecting.
They also offer intent data to help you prioritize prospects who are actively researching solutions like yours, which can significantly improve your conversion rates. The platform plays nicely with popular CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, along with various sales engagement tools, so your data flows seamlessly into your existing workflows. Plus, their Diamond Data feature provides extra verification for email addresses, giving you an additional layer of confidence before you hit send.
What I don’t like: Cognism’s pricing isn’t transparent, so you’ll need to request a custom quote, which can be frustrating if you’re trying to budget or compare options quickly. The platform also tends to be on the pricier side, making it less accessible for smaller teams or startups.
While their European data is excellent, their North American coverage isn’t quite as comprehensive, so if the US is your primary market, you might find gaps in their database.
7. Databar – Best for Data Integration Power Users
Databar is a data workbench that connects to 1,000+ data sources and lets you enrich with 100+ providers. If you’re a data nerd who wants maximum control over your GTM data workflows, this is your playground.
If you’re not an expert user in these tools though, Databar can be rather unintuitive to use. For instance, when I logged in, I expected to find a simple way to find companies or contacts. Instead I had to create a new empty table.
I first tried to use their feature to find companies based on job postings. Again, I tried to find companies that posted a GTM Engineer job posting, but it showed me 0 rows for some reason, as show in the screenshot below.
Now I’m fairly sure there are not 0 GTM Engineer job postings, so I’m not sure what went wrong.
I then tried to use an enrichment to find the email address of a contact, given their full name, and company. But this required me to sign up for a paid subscription (even though it was literally just one contact). This was rather frustrating because I wasn’t expecting to enrich 1000 contacts, just a single one to see what the reliability and experience was like.
Honestly, though I heard people say good things about Databar on Linkedin, the user experience wasn’t to my liking. I consider myself fairly technical but I still had problems figuring out how the entire flow worked. They did have an onboarding video, and if you’re patient you might be able to figure out how everything works, so maybe you might have better luck than me.
Pricing: Not publicly listed
8. Olostep – Best for Budget-Conscious Teams
What it does: Olostep is a web search, scraping, and crawling API used by some of the leading startups in the world. But here’s the kicker – they just made it accessible to everyone with the Olostep Agent, which lets you automate research workflows with no code, just natural language prompts.
The API powerhouse: If you’re technical or have dev resources, the Olostep API is incredibly powerful. Here are some example endpoints:
- /scrapes – Extract LLM-friendly Markdown, HTML, text, or structured JSON from any URL in real-time
- /crawls – Recursively search through a URL’s subdomains and gather content
- /maps – Get all URLs on a website
The no-code interface: For non-technical teams, the Olostep Agent automatically enriches spreadsheets by searching the web for structured, relevant data. You just describe what you want in natural language, and it goes and gets it.
Why the pricing is insane: Paid plans start at $9 to enrich hundreds of data points. The founder claims results are more reliable and up to 70% more cost-effective than Clay Agent or Exa. That’s a massive difference when you’re enriching at scale.
Real use cases:
- Recruiting teams finding candidate information across the web
- Finance teams gathering company data and metrics
- Sales teams enriching leads with publicly available info
- Research teams processing thousands of URLs to extract specific data points
- Anyone who needs to turn messy web data into clean, structured information
Who should use it: Recruiting, Finance, and Sales teams who need web scraping and data enrichment but don’t want to blow their budget. It’s now accessible beyond just engineering teams, but the API is still there if you want to build custom integrations.
The catch: It’s much newer than some alternatives, so the ecosystem isn’t as built out. You won’t find as many templates or pre-built workflows as you would with more established players. If you’re extremely short on budget, this tool might be worth a try. But if you have a huge budget, the other 4 are probably better, more established bets.
Pricing: Free trial available. Paid plans start at $9/month.
Which One Should You Choose?
- Overall ease of use, transparent pricing and ability to try almost everything beore paying? Freckle.io
- Building outbound lists all day? Airscale
- Need real-time buying signals? Persana
- Need just contact enrichment? FullEnrich
- Want full GTM orchestration? Tapistro
- Need European data? Cognism
- Feeling frisky and experimental? Olostep and Databar
The truth is, Clay isn’t going anywhere. But these alternatives prove there’s real competition out there, often at better price points or with more specialized features for specific use cases.
Try a few, see what clicks with your workflow, and don’t be afraid to switch if something’s not working. The GTM tech stack is too important to settle for “good enough.”
Or you could always stick with Clay!
