Clay is easy to buy and hard to keep running. You can open an account this afternoon, connect a stack of data providers, and have five hundred companies enriched by tonight.
Six months later, the only questions that matter are whether anyone is still maintaining it, whether any of it reached your CRM, and whether a single real conversation came out of it.
This guide covers the Clay agencies worth knowing in 2026, what each one is genuinely good at, what they cost, and how to separate teams that deliver real results from those that simply hand you a spreadsheet and an invoice.
Key Takeaways
If you read nothing else on this page, these are the five things that decide whether a Clay engagement works.
- Clay is a data engine, not a revenue team. It finds the right companies and people, fills in what you are missing, and keeps records current. It does not contact anyone, decide anything, or notice when the data goes stale.
- There are three types of Clay agency, and they produce three different outcomes. One builds inside your account and trains your team, one runs campaigns from its own workspace, and one connects outreach, ads, content, and reporting into a single system.
- Where the build lives decides what you own at the end. If the tables, the enrichment logic, and the scoring sit in the agency workspace, they leave when the contract does. Settle this on day one rather than in month eleven.
- Judge agencies on named results, not badges or data source counts. A client you can look up, a specific number, and a clear statement of what that number counts is worth more than any partner tier.
- Someone on your side has to own the system after handover. An unowned Clay setup goes stale no matter how well it was built, which is where most internal and agency builds quietly stop.
Quick Answer: Best Clay Agencies
The right agency depends on which of three jobs you are hiring for, so here is the short version before the detail.
Frontal is the strongest fit for companies that want outreach, advertising, content, and reporting running off one foundation, built inside their own tools, with client results published by name. Nebor is the better answer in Europe if you simply want appointments booked for you. Every other agency below occupies a narrower slice of the same work, and each one is explained further down the page.
| Agency | What Kind of Agency It Is | Where the Work Lives | Clients You Can Look Up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frontal, US, and one of four Clay Elite Studio Partners worldwide | Runs outbound, paid ads, content, and CRM work as one connected system for companies that are already past product-market fit. Formerly ColdIQ Agency. | Your CRM and your own tools. The account map, the scoring, and the enriched records stay with you. | AirOps, Aircall, Design Pickle, Teikametrics and Playbook, each written up with a figure attached. 275 companies served to date. |
| Understory, US, Clay Enterprise Partner | Runs paid media, outbound, LinkedIn content, and revenue operations as one pod, so every channel works off the same data. | Their Clay workspace, not yours. They say plainly on their own site that you do not need a Clay license because they run it on their table. | Zapier, Clay, Expensify, HockeyStack, RB2B, Nylas and Remofirst are all named on the site. What is thin is a number attached to any one of them. |
| Workflows.io, New York, Clay Advanced Artisan Partner | A small studio running four lines of work: LinkedIn content, outbound, AI agents for revenue operations, and account-based ads. | Your stack. They sell the playbooks and workflows as something you keep rather than something you rent for the length of a contract. | Proton, Cluely, Cargo, Medrio, Meister, Landbase and Seam AI. Freckle is written up in full at 42% month-over-month growth over six months and 640 tier-one signups. |
| Nebor, formerly Utmost, Amsterdam, Clay Solutions Partner | Books meetings for you, built on Clay and n8n. | Your accounts. The workflows, sequences, signal monitors and dashboards are all left running in your own tools when the engagement ends. | Fulhaus, Groeileaders and Aerodymax, though these were published under the Utmost name. Ask which of them are recent enough to reflect the team you would actually get. |
| The GTM Engineering Company, US, Clay Artisan Partner | A fractional go-to-market engineer rather than a campaign team: part revenue operations strategist, part data engineer, part builder. | Your stack. Builds are deliberately tool-agnostic with no lock-in, and you get a written guide for keeping the thing running once they step back. | No client names published. What they do publish is price: from $5,000 a month on a three-month minimum, listed openly on Clay's directory. |
| Sculpted, US, Clay Solutions Partner | Clay for CRM data, and nothing else. | Your HubSpot or Salesforce. Every workflow, connection and dataset is documented, recorded on video and handed over. | Sendoso, ConnectWise, Nooks, Tracksuit, Order and Keen. |
| LeadGem, Amsterdam, Clay-certified partner | A deliberately small team building outbound and revenue operations systems, and among the first Clay-certified agencies in the Netherlands. | Your CRM and sales tools. Their stated promise is that the senior people on your first call are the ones who build it, with no handoff to juniors afterward. | Spacewell, Float, Aquablu, Budgetly and Search X Recruitment. |
| Growth Today, Clay Enterprise Partner | Builds signal-based outbound and revenue operations systems and runs them for you, with training included so your team can take the controls later. | Your stack, with enablement built into the engagement. | ActiveCampaign, Cabify and Aftersell, drawn from a stated 30 or more B2B software clients. |
What Does Clay Actually Do on Its Own?
Clay finds companies and people who match the kind of customer you sell to, fills in the details you are missing about them, and keeps that information current.
What it does not do is act. It does not contact anyone, it does not decide anything, and it does not notice when your data goes stale six months from now, which is the exact moment most internal Clay projects quietly stop.
Where Does a Clay Agency Come In?
An agency covers the gap between what Clay produces and what your revenue team can actually use. Instead of buying a static list, you build one from live sources and keep it current.
That can make a big difference in practice. Aircall, for example, ended up with 3,655 accounts organized into a self-refreshing view of their market, which we break down in full in the Aircall account enrichment case study.
From there, Clay can pull data from multiple providers to fill in missing information, giving your team a better chance of finding a working email or phone number. It can also track buying signals, update old records, fill in missing data, and remove duplicates, so your team is always working with cleaner, more useful data.
Once that data is in place, accounts can be ranked by fit and routed to the right person, helping your sales team focus on the prospects most likely to convert. Our go-to-market system build explains how that works.
What Are the Three Types of Clay Agency?
There are three main types of Clay agencies, but what they actually deliver can vary significantly.
The first builds the system inside your own account, documents it, and trains your team to run it. You own the setup, but you are responsible for using it.
The second runs campaigns for you and focuses on delivering results quickly. The trade-off is that the system may remain with the agency rather than becoming an internal asset.
The third builds a broader go-to-market system by connecting your data across sales, marketing, outreach, and reporting.
This is a better fit when the problem goes beyond a single channel and involves disconnected teams and systems.
How We Chose the Best Clay Agencies for This List
Four filters, applied in this order, and applied to us the same way as to everyone else.
- Results published with the client named. Not a claim about millions in pipeline, but a company anyone can look up, a specific number, and a clear statement of what that number counts.
- Where the work ends up living. In your account, or in theirs. This one detail decides whether you own anything at the end.
- Honesty about scope. Whether the agency tells you what it does not do before you sign, rather than six weeks afterward.
- Who does the work day to day. Experienced operators, or a junior following a template library written for somebody else's business.
The Best Clay Automation Agencies in 2026, Reviewed One by One
1. Frontal, Best for a Full Go-to-Market System
Best suited to: companies past product-market fit that want their outreach, advertising, content, and reporting run together rather than as four separate projects.
We're one of four Clay Elite Studio Partners in the world, built out of years of real, messy deployments inside actual companies.
We used to be ColdIQ Agency, and most comparison pages haven't caught up with that yet. So if you've come across that name and assumed it was a different company, it isn't. Same team, same operators, now working with companies that already have a product people want and a sales team ready to talk to leads.
Everything we run works off the same picture of your market. Outreach goes out through your own tools to accounts actually showing buying signs. Ads follow those same accounts, so your emails don't land cold. Content turns readers into conversations, and outreach picks them up from there.
Underneath it all is the CRM work, which keeps the reporting honest and stops the channels from contradicting each other.
We also have a version called the Revenue Engine, where we build it with your team and you keep it.
If you want to see how the same thinking applies on the software side, our guides on how to use Claude for lead generation and the best AI lead generation services go further into it.
| Client | Published Result |
|---|---|
| AirOps | $7.83M in qualified pipeline plus $1.52M closed won over 10 months, with no new sales hires |
| Aircall | 3,655 accounts enriched into a self-refreshing list of their whole market in 6 months |
| Design Pickle | From roughly 10 demos a week to 58 demos in 14 days |
| Teikametrics | More than $300K in pipeline over 9 months |
| Playbook | From no outbound at all to 20 opportunities in the first 20 days |
Two hundred and seventy-five companies have been through this work. Palico, Keragon, Hemlane and Airpost are published alongside the five above in the full Frontal Clay build case studies, where each engagement is explained from the beginning rather than reduced to a single figure.
What it costs: mid four figures to mid five figures a month depending on how much you want run, billed month to month. Nothing is published, and scope gets set on a 30-minute call so the number reflects your situation rather than an average.
What we do commit to: your first play live within 30 days, or your first month is free. It is a promise about delivery rather than about outcomes, which is the only kind of promise an agency can honestly make in this category.
If you would rather verify all of this somewhere that is not our own website, Frontal's entry in Clay's official Solutions Partner directory describes the same work.
2. Understory
Best suited to: teams that want a clear story about how everything fits together, backed by references they can call.
Understory is the closest thing we have to a direct competitor, and they are genuinely good at what they do. Their service pages are more developed than most of the field, and their explanation of running channels together rather than separately is easy to follow.
The trade-off: the Clay build lives on their table, not yours. Their own site says you do not need a Clay license because they run it in their account. That is a deliberate choice, and it makes onboarding faster, but the enrichment logic, the waterfalls and the scoring leave when the contract does. They will train your team and hand over if you ask, so put that in the scope on day one rather than discovering it in month eleven.
3. Workflows.io
Best suited to: buyers who want to judge expertise for themselves before booking anything.
Founded by people who previously worked at ColdIQ, Workflows.io has built one of the most visible founder presences in this space. If you spend any time reading about this work online, you have come across their material already, and it is good material.
The trade-off: the reputation sits largely with the founder rather than a bench of operators, so ask early who will actually run your account each week, and whether that person has shipped builds of their own.
4. Nebor, Previously Called Utmost
Best suited to: European companies that want appointments booked for them on a single retainer without building anything in-house.
They are based in Amsterdam and work through a clear four-step process covering who you sell to, how you reach them, how you spot interest, and what happens when someone comes to you. They rebranded from Utmost during 2026, so check which company name appears on the contract.
The trade-off: their centre of gravity is appointment setting, which they do well and inside your own accounts. If you also need advertising and content pulling in the same direction as outreach, that is a wider engagement than a single appointment-setting retainer is built to cover.
5. The GTM Engineering Company
Best suited to: companies that need engineering help and better internal processes rather than someone running campaigns.
They approach this the way a software team approaches its own code, with proper version history, error handling, and custom connections between tools.
That mindset genuinely helps if your setup has grown complicated enough that nobody is sure what breaks when they change something. They also publish their entry pricing, which almost nobody else in this category does.
The trade-off: they publish the same kind of roundup you are reading now, with themselves at the top, so apply the same skepticism to their comparisons that we are asking you to apply to ours.
6. Sculpted
Best suited to: B2B software teams whose HubSpot or Salesforce records have quietly stopped being trustworthy, and who want that fixed in weeks rather than quarters.
Jacob Tuwiner started Sculpted in 2022 and spent the first year on outbound before narrowing the whole business to a single job: making CRM records something your team will actually trust.
Enrichment flows are built against your own HubSpot or Salesforce schema and checked by hand on sample records before anything is rolled out, then handed over with recorded walkthroughs and ownership documentation so your people can run them without calling anyone. Sendoso, ConnectWise, Nooks, Tracksuit and Keen are named as clients.
The trade-off: they will not send anything for you. If what you want is campaigns going out and somebody watching the replies come in, Sculpted is the wrong shape, and their narrow focus is exactly why the data work is as good as it is. Clean records also do not create demand on their own, so this works best alongside a team or an agency that is already running outreach.
7. LeadGem
Best suited to: European companies that would rather have a small senior team build the system than a large agency staff it.
LeadGem is a boutique Amsterdam team and among the first Clay-certified agencies in the Netherlands, working with companies across the Benelux, the Nordics, the United States and Australia. The founding idea was a reaction to something most buyers recognize: a brilliant first call with senior people, then a project quietly handed to juniors.
So they stayed small on purpose, and the experts you meet are the ones who build the enrichment architecture, the routing rules and the scoring. Spacewell, Float, Aquablu, Budgetly and Search X Recruitment are named as clients.
The trade-off: a deliberately small team is an advantage right up until you need volume, or coverage across several time zones at once. Ask what happens to your build when two of their people are already committed elsewhere, and name the person on your side who owns the system after handover, because an unowned Clay setup goes stale no matter how well it was built.
8. Growth Today
Best suited to: teams that want the work run for them but do not want to be dependent on an agency forever.
Growth Today sits in the small group of Clay Enterprise partners and builds signal-based outbound and revenue operations systems, run for you, with training folded into the engagement so the work does not turn into a black box on handover day.
ActiveCampaign, Cabify and Aftersell are named among a stated thirty or more B2B software clients, and the team publishes a great deal of its method in the open, including a newsletter every other Thursday.
The trade-off: a great deal of their method is published openly, which is a real sign of confidence, but it also makes it fair to ask what the paid engagement adds on top of what you could read for free over a weekend. Ask them to point at the parts of the system that are genuinely hard to copy.
What Are the Best Clay Agencies for HubSpot?
If you run HubSpot, the question changes slightly. It stops being about lists and becomes about what actually reaches your CRM, and in what condition.
Plenty of agencies treat HubSpot as the place they drop finished lists at the end of the month. That leaves your team with records nobody trusts and reporting that quietly disagrees with the sales pipeline.
What you want instead is enriched records written back into HubSpot itself, so your team works from one source rather than a spreadsheet somebody keeps on the side.
You also want the scoring visible inside the CRM, so a rep can see why an account was flagged without asking anyone, and reply data flowing back in so the reporting reflects what actually happened rather than what was sent.
Agree ownership rules and routing before any of it goes live, because that is where most CRM integrations quietly come apart about two months in.
This is how the AirOps engagement was built, inside their own HubSpot, and it produced $7.83M in qualified pipeline plus $1.52M closed won over ten months without a single new sales hire. The full write-up sits in the AirOps HubSpot case study.
What Do Buyers Actually Say About Clay Agencies?
In practitioner communities on Reddit, such as the r/gtmengineering subreddit and its thread on whether Clay is worth its price, the recurring question is not which agency is best. It is whether Clay is worth what it costs at all, particularly for smaller companies.
The answer usually comes down to whether you know who you want to reach and have someone responsible for the system. Without that, Clay can quickly become an expensive database that nobody uses.
Two comments from prospects capture the problem:
- "11,000 emails in a week for 44 replies."
- "Five guys building lead lists off Google Maps."
More leads and more outreach do not necessarily mean better results. A good Clay setup should make targeting easier, reduce manual work, and help your team focus on the right accounts.
How Do You Choose the Right Clay Agency?
Three questions can help you decide.
First, identify what's actually broken. If one channel is underperforming, a specialist may be enough. If your teams and data are disconnected, you may need a broader solution.
Next, decide whether you want to own what gets built. Choose an agency that works in your existing tools if you want to manage it internally or a managed provider if you'd rather hand it off.
Finally, make sure someone on your team owns the system. Without clear ownership, even the right solution can struggle to deliver results.
| If This Sounds Like Your Company | The Agency Worth Starting With |
|---|---|
| You are past product-market fit and your outreach, ads, content, and reporting all run separately | Frontal, because all four draw on the same foundation |
| You are in Europe and want appointments booked for you without building anything in-house | Nebor, on a single retainer |
| Your Clay account already exists and has quietly become a mess | The GTM Engineering Company, for the cleanup and the discipline |
| Your HubSpot or Salesforce records have stopped being something anyone trusts | Sculpted, whose entire business is CRM data |
| You need a defined project with a clear end date | LeadGem, provided someone internal owns it afterward |
| You mainly need someone to teach your team | Growth Today, whose method is largely published already |
Frequently Asked Questions
Who Are the Best Clay Experts?
The strongest Clay experts are the ones who can name a client, give you a checkable number, and explain what that number counts, rather than the ones who list the most data sources. Judge a Clay expert on published results and on where the work ends up living, not on badges or the length of a features list.
How Much Does a Clay Agency Cost?
A defined project usually runs between four and fifteen thousand dollars once. Ongoing retainers start around four to six thousand dollars a month, and full go-to-market engagements sit in the mid-four to mid-five figures monthly depending on how much is being run for you.
Do We Need an Agency at All, or Can Our Team Run Clay?
Your team can absolutely run it. The real question is whether anybody has the hours and the inclination to maintain it on top of the job they were hired for, because maintenance is where most internal projects stop. Plenty of teams build a good first version and never return to it.
What Makes a Clay Agency Different From a General Automation Agency?
A general automation agency wires tools together so a process runs without a person in it. A Clay agency starts from a lead generation question instead: who should you be talking to, why them, and what has to be true in your data before anyone reaches out.
How Quickly Can a Clay Agency Implement New Workflows?
A first working play usually takes weeks rather than months, and changes to an existing build land in days once the foundations are in place. Frontal commits to your first play live within 30 days, or your first month is free. Ask any agency you speak with what its first deliverable is and when it goes live, because a vague answer here usually means a slow start.
What Should You Expect During Clay Agency Onboarding?
The first weeks should cover who you sell to, what data you already hold, and which systems the work has to write back into. Expect an account map, agreed scoring rules, and a decision about whose workspace the build lives in before anything goes out. Onboarding that skips straight to sending is the most common reason a build stops working a few months later.
Can a Clay Agency Help With CRM Integration?
Yes, and for most teams that is the part that matters most. Enriched records, scoring, and reply data should be written back into HubSpot or Salesforce so your reps and your reporting work from the same source rather than from a spreadsheet somebody keeps on the side.
See What This Looks Like Against Your Own Numbers
The quickest way to judge any of this is against your own pipeline rather than somebody else's case study.
Book a 30-minute Clay strategy call, and we will walk through where your current setup is quietly costing you conversations, what it would take to fix, and whether we are the right people to do it. If we are not, we will tell you who is.
