Clay alternatives, sorted by why you are leaving
Clay bills two meters on every row it finds, actions and data credits. That, and paying for a workbench nobody opens, is why teams look elsewhere. 4 replacements below, each one matched to a specific reason rather than ranked on a score nobody can audit.
Prices and limits for every option below are read off the vendor's own page. These are the Clay competitors that answer a named problem, not a field of logos.
The 3 reasons people actually leave
If none of these is your situation, the honest answer is that you should probably stay, and the Clay API review covers what you already have. The 26 providers these replacements are drawn from are in the Enrichment APIs listing.
1 · Two meters are harder to forecast
A found contact costs an action for Clay's work and data credits for the data, and the credits a lookup costs depend on which provider answered. Clay does not charge for a miss, but a waterfall's spend still depends on which step finds each row, so the bill is harder to predict before the work than a single credit price is.
2 · You are paying for a table nobody opens
Clay's real product is the workbench: branching logic, research steps and a permissions model that non-engineers can use. If an engineer owns the logic and it changes twice a year, most of what you are paying for sits idle.
3 · Provenance is hard to answer
A Clay row inherits the terms of whichever of its 150 providers answered, and you often cannot tell which one did. Internally that never matters. In a product it is a question you eventually have to answer.
4 replacements, and what each one fixes
Ordered by how often they turn out to be the right answer, not by price.
| Provider | Entry price | Unit cost | Free tier | Fixes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clay | $167/mo | $0.0452 per data credit | Free plan, 500 actions and 100 data credits per month | Baseline |
| FullEnrich | $55/mo | $0.055 per credit | 50-credit trial, no card. Then 1,000 credits a month at $0.055 each. | Best waterfall without Clay |
| Apollo API | $49/seat/mo | $0.0196 per credit | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | Best all-in-one GTM API |
| LeadMagic | $99/mo | $0.0198 per credit | No free tier. Essential starts at $99 for 5,000 credits, and failed lookups cost nothing. | Best priced per operation |
| People Data Labs | $98/mo | $0.28 per record | Free plan, up to 100 credits per month with contact data obfuscated | Best for building on top of |
Read from each vendor's own pricing page between 8 and 19 October 2026.
The case for each one
Each one below is matched to a reason rather than scored, and each one names what you give up by taking it. A replacement with no downside is a replacement nobody has actually run.
FullEnrich
The same multi-source waterfall as a single API call with a single credit price per result. The direct swap if you want the coverage without the workbench.
FullEnrich prices the thing you asked for. A work email is 1 credit, a personal email 3 and a mobile 10, so your bill moves with what you found rather than with which source found it. Landline results cost nothing at all, which matters more than it sounds: a phone waterfall that returns a desk number has done no work you can use and charges you for none of it.
Verification is free when it comes bundled with enrichment, and 0.25 credits on its own. That removes the step most teams bolt on afterwards with a second vendor, and it removes the second invoice with it. Credits roll over three months on monthly billing and twelve on annual, which is the arrangement that suits agency volume: lumpy months stop being wasted months.
The limits are where you plan rather than where you get surprised. Sixty API calls a minute, 100 contacts per bulk request and 100 concurrent jobs per workspace. That is slower than Apollo on paper and the difference rarely matters, because a waterfall is latency-bound on the providers underneath rather than on the front door.
What you give up
The table. Clay's branching logic, research steps and the permissions model that lets a non-engineer change the rules have no equivalent here. FullEnrich is an endpoint, so whoever owned the logic in Clay now owns it in your codebase, and the person who decides what a good lead looks like needs an engineer again.
When it is the wrong answer
Teams whose enrichment rules change weekly, and anyone running research steps rather than lookups. If what you actually bought Clay for was the ability to ask a provider an arbitrary question and keep the answer in a column, moving to a lookup API is a downgrade dressed as a saving.
Entry $55/mo. 50-credit trial, no card. Then 1,000 credits a month at $0.055 each.. FullEnrich runs the same waterfall logic Clay does, but as a single API call with a single bill. Read the review · Clay vs FullEnrich
Apollo API
One credit at $0.0196 for a found email, with a built-in waterfall of its own. Clay bills the same row as an action plus data credits.
The two headline rates measure different things. An Apollo credit is $0.0196 and buys the email. A Clay action is $0.0036 on annual Launch, but it pays for Clay's work, not the data: the data is billed again in data credits at $0.0452 each, unless you bring your own provider keys. Neither charges for a lookup that finds nothing.
It is also one of the few providers in this directory that covers sourcing, enrichment, sending and CRM sync behind one key, and it ships an MCP server at mcp.apollo.io/mcp. If the thing calling the API is going to be an agent, that is a configuration line here and a build somewhere else.
The catch is structural rather than incidental. Credits and seats are coupled, so a headless pipeline with no human user still pays $49 a month for a seat nobody logs into. The daily cap is the other one: 200 requests a minute but only 2,000 a day on Basic, and people size their backfill against the minute figure.
What you give up
Coverage on the hard half of your list, and the breadth of fields. Apollo is selling you its own database, so where that database is thin there is no second provider behind it to try. It returns neither personal emails nor job-change signals, both of which Clay carries, so a reactivation play built on people who moved jobs has no input here at all.
When it is the wrong answer
European lists and any segment Apollo covers badly, because a single-source provider has nowhere to fall back to. Run 500 of your own rows through the free plan and compare the match rate against what Clay is returning today before you move anything.
Entry $49/seat/mo. Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month. One of the few providers here that covers sourcing, enrichment and sending behind a single key, which is why it is usually the first API a GTM team wires up and the last one they rip out. Read the review · Clay vs Apollo
LeadMagic
A published cost for every operation and credits deducted only on success. The answer when finance wants a number rather than a range.
This is the record that reads like a price list rather than a pricing page. An email finder call is 1 credit, a mobile 5, a validation 0.25 and a job-change check 3, at $0.0198 a credit on the $99 Essential plan. You can work out the cost of a month's pipeline on paper before you sign, which is harder on Clay, where the data credits a lookup costs depend on which provider answers.
Credits come off on valid results only and never on a miss, and one credit price covers both the work and the data. Your cost per found contact is the rate, so a hard segment costs you the same per useful row as an easy one. People, company and jobs search spend no credits at all from Essential upward.
An MCP server is bundled with every plan, and the rate limits are account-wide rather than per key: 5 requests a second on Professional and 10 on Ultimate. Account-wide is the detail to design around, because two pipelines sharing a key share the ceiling.
What you give up
The free tier, and with it the ability to measure your own match rate before paying anything. LeadMagic starts at $99 and has no free allowance, which is the clearest gap in an otherwise unusually clear rate card. You also give up the waterfall breadth: this is a provider, not a router.
When it is the wrong answer
Anyone who needs to prove the match rate to somebody else before there is a budget. The honest sequence is to run your test on a provider with a free tier, then move the volume here once you know the number is good.
Entry $99/mo. No free tier. Essential starts at $99 for 5,000 credits, and failed lookups cost nothing.. The clearest rate card in this directory. Read the review
People Data Labs
The one to move to if the rows are going inside a product, because its terms are written for redistribution.
Everything else on this page is priced and shaped for a sales team. People Data Labs is a dataset vendor, and the difference shows up in the contract rather than in the endpoint: its own terms state a redistribution position, which is the question your legal team asks the moment enriched rows appear in something your customers can log into.
The free plan gives 100 credits a month with emails and phones obfuscated, which is enough to check the shape of the data and not enough to use it. Self-Serve starts at $98 a month from 350 credits, so the per-record price is far above everything else here, at $0.28 a record against $0.0452 for a Clay data credit. You are buying a license as much as a lookup.
The bulk and search endpoints are built for warehouse loads rather than for row-by-row enrichment, and the limits are reported in the response headers per key and per endpoint rather than published as one number. Design for a batch and read the headers; do not design for a tight loop.
What you give up
Price, and the GTM shape of the product. At $0.28 a record this is about six times a Clay data credit, and there is no sequencer, no sourcing UI and no MCP server. Nobody moves here to save money.
When it is the wrong answer
An outbound team enriching lists for its own reps. If the rows never leave your CRM, you are paying a licensing premium for a permission you will never exercise, and one of the three cheaper picks above is the better answer.
Entry $98/mo. Free plan, up to 100 credits per month with contact data obfuscated. PDL sells the dataset rather than the workflow, and it is one of the few here whose license is written for you to redistribute enriched records inside a product you sell. Read the review · Clay vs People Data Labs
What you would actually pay, on each one
Every provider on this page publishes a rate card, so the real numbers can sit next to each other rather than behind a summary. The plan you want is the one whose included volume covers a normal month for you, not the cheapest one on the page.
Clay
Clay publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $167 to Custom.
Free
- 100 data credits a month, 1,200 a year
- Unlimited seats and tables, up to 200 rows per table
- Multi-provider waterfalls and Claygent
- Bring your own API key
Launch
- 2,500 data credits a month, 30,000 a year, unused ones roll over up to 2x
- Phone number enrichment
- Job change and other signals, unlimited Audiences search
- Send through the Clay Sequencer or an integration
Growth
- 6,000 data credits a month, 72,000 a year, unused ones roll over up to 2x
- Integrate with any HTTP API. This is the tier that unlocks it
- Auto-sync and enrich CRM, warehouse sync
- Web intent signals, webhook-driven automation
Enterprise
- Custom action and data credit volume, and Clay API access for calling Clay from your own code
- Auto-delete, so one webhook takes unlimited submissions
FullEnrich
FullEnrich publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $55 to 12 months.
Free trial
- No credit card required
- Earn more credits by inviting team members
- Enough to measure your own match rate
Entry
- $0.055 a credit
- 1,000 work emails, or 100 mobiles, or 333 personal emails
- Credits roll over 3 months on monthly billing
Higher volume
- The per-credit price falls as volume rises
- A calculator on the pricing page sizes it
- Renew early or move up a plan to get the better rate
Annual
- Rollover extends from 3 months to 12
- The option that suits lumpy agency volume
Apollo API
Apollo API publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $119.
Free
- Full API access, not a trial of it
- Granted monthly, so 75 credits a month in practice
- 2 sequences and basic filters
Basic
- US$588 a seat a year, credits granted upfront and pooled across the team
- 2,500 credits a month, at $0.0196 each
- Annual billing saves 24% against paying monthly
Professional
- 4,000 credits a month, at $0.0198 each
- AI lead scoring and multi-touch outreach
Organization
- 72,000 credits a seat a year, so 6,000 a month
- $0.0198 a credit, so the rate is flat across every paid tier
- The three-seat minimum makes US$357 a month the real floor
LeadMagic
LeadMagic publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $99 to Higher.
Essential
- $83/mo billed annually, $990 a year, saving $198
- $0.0198 a credit, or $0.0165 on the annual 60,000
- 3 seats sharing one credit pool
- Rollover up to 2 months
Growth
- $208/mo billed annually
- $0.0124 a credit, or $0.0104 on the annual 240,000
- 5 seats, one shared pool
Professional
- $0.0100 a credit, or $0.0083 on the annual 600,000
- The published floor is $0.007 a credit at volume
Free tier
- No way to measure your own match rate before paying
- The clearest gap in an otherwise clear rate card
People Data Labs
People Data Labs publishes 3 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from From $98 to Custom.
Free
- Full access to the Person APIs for testing
- Contact data is obfuscated, so emails and phones are masked
- No commitment, sign up and go
Self-Serve
- Contact data included and unmasked
- Access to premium fields
- Monthly or annual subscription
- CSV enrichment and email support
Enterprise
- Custom volumes and annual contracts
- Access to all APIs, plus Data License Feeds
- Formal data testing before you commit
- Additional field bundles
Read the included volume before the headline price. A plan that costs twice as much and carries five times the credits is the cheaper plan, and on this page that is the usual case rather than the exception.
What each one costs at your volume
Clay first, then every replacement. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers your volume on each one, which is the comparison a row of entry prices cannot make.
Clay
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
FullEnrich
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Apollo API
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
LeadMagic
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
People Data Labs
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices before any discount you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for. Every column moves with volume, because all of these meter usage rather than seats.
| A year at | Clay | FullEnrich | Apollo API | LeadMagic | People Data Labs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $5,352 Growth | $660 Entry | $588 Basic | $1,188 Essential | Quoted |
| 10,000 a month | $5,352 Growth | Quoted | $2,352 Basic | $2,988 Growth | Quoted |
| 50,000 a month | Quoted | Quoted | $11,760 Basic | Quoted | Quoted |
4 of the 5 providers here publish enough to be put in this table. These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, so they are the number before you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount by between a fifth and a half.
Which replacement is yours
Answer what matters most and the lean appears below. Every option is read from the records on this page, and staying on Clay is one of the possible answers.
Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two.
A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your segment, and the one test that does is the bake-off further down: real rows, cheapest entry on each side, spend divided by survivors.
Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is not how good the data is, it is who is allowed to hold it. A migration is the moment to check it, because you are signing a new contract anyway.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clay | Work email, Personal email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Job postings, Job changes, Intent and news, LinkedIn profile | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
| FullEnrich | Work email, Personal email, Mobile phone, LinkedIn profile | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
| Apollo API | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Job postings, Intent and news, LinkedIn profile, CRM records | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | Not stated |
| LeadMagic | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Job postings, Job changes, LinkedIn profile | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
| People Data Labs | Work email, Personal email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, LinkedIn profile | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor, not your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving off Clay
Written against FullEnrich, the first pick above, because the steps are the same whichever one you take and the specifics are what make them useful. Swap the name and the order still holds.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Run 500 rows you already have through Clay and record the match rate, the fields that came back populated and the cost. Without that number a migration cannot be judged, because every provider looks cheaper per unit than the one you are paying for today.
Check the fields, not the field count
FullEnrich does not return Firmographics, Technographics, Job postings, Job changes and Intent and news, which Clay does. If anything downstream reads firmographics, that is a change to your pipeline and not just to your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Clay authenticates with optional token on a webhook source. The HTTP API column uses the other service's key. FullEnrich uses bearer token.
The limits are the part that bites later. Clay rate: Concurrency governed by plan, not a published per-minute cap.
FullEnrich rate: 60 API calls a minute, 100 contacts per bulk, 100 concurrent per workspace. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date, not before
Credits on most of these plans do not survive a downgrade. Check what happens to the balance you have already paid for, and time the switch so you are not buying the same records twice.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new match rate against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your segment looks like a provider that is fine.
What practitioners say about Clay
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. These are people describing Clay in their own words, transcribed as written and linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above.
Use it as a filter, not as a bulk provider
One thing I've seen with Clay is that it feels expensive when you use it like a bulk data provider, but much more reasonable when you use it as a filter first. I rarely enrich everything. I narrow the list with cheap signals and firmographics, then only run waterfall email/phone on leads that actually look worth it. That shift alone cut my credit usage a lot, and the outreach quality went up because fewer bad leads made it through. At that point you're paying for decisions, not just data.
r/gtmengineering · January 2026 · 16 points
This is the argument the pricing section makes, arrived at from the other direction. The lever that moves a Clay bill is not the rate, it is how many rows ever reach the expensive step. Narrowing on firmographics first costs almost nothing and keeps the paid enrichments for rows worth contacting.
It also explains why a team that thinks it wants to leave Clay often does not need to. The complaint is usually the spend, and the fix is usually an ordering change rather than a migration.
Bringing your own keys is a real line item, not a hack
Working in tech sales at a large 8 figure SaaS, our current setup for the team is as follows: [...] We do still have Clay but we bring our own API keys to keep the cost down
r/gtmengineering · January 2026 · 32 points
Clay lets you connect your own provider keys instead of spending its credits on that provider. The team above keeps the workbench and pays the underlying vendors directly, which is the arrangement that makes Clay a router rather than a reseller.
Worth knowing before you compare rate cards, because it changes what you are comparing. A Clay bill with your own keys attached is a subscription for the logic; a Clay bill without them is a subscription plus a margin on every lookup. Clay's own documentation is the authority on which integrations accept your key.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
What practitioners say about Apollo
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. The comment below makes its point in crude words, so we summarize it in our own words and link the thread. A Reddit claim is a signal rather than a fact, so nothing here is the only source for a figure on this page.
The rate limit, not the credit price, is what people actually hit
In our words: A practitioner building on the API says the rate limits are what their team hit, that they got past them by routing requests across three Apollo accounts, and that Apollo charges per request even when a lookup returns nothing.
r/gtmengineering · May 2026 · summarized rather than quoted
Two halves worth separating. The limit is real and it is on this page: 200 requests a minute and 2,000 a day on Basic, with enrichment on a separate 1,000 a minute and no daily cap, which is why a bulk job and a per-row loop feel like different products.
The charge-on-no-output half needs care, because Apollo publishes 0 credits when nothing is found and that matches what we read. What a miss does spend is a request against the rate limit, and when the limit is the binding constraint that is the cost you feel. Pooling accounts to get round a published limit is a terms question before it is an engineering one.
11 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
What practitioners say about People Data Labs
Transcribed as written and linked to the thread. A Reddit claim is a signal rather than a fact, so nothing here is the only source for any figure on this page.
The accuracy spread between vendors is smaller than the one inside your own list
it's nearly all the same at the end of the day... there's a marginal 5-10% difference between the vendors but overall 55-65% data accuracy / validity overall. [...] have a team of 20+ (or however many) outsourced data integrity workers through fiver or whatnot... it's what the rich tech companies like AirBnB and Uber do to have the most up to date data...
r/SalesOperations · November 2024 · 3 points
The range here lands on the assumption the waterfall stack on this site is modeled with, which is a 55% first pass. That figure is labeled as modeled on every page that uses it, because no provider in this category publishes a match rate you can hold it to, so an independent practitioner arriving at 55 to 65% is the closest thing to corroboration available. It also makes the case for the waterfall itself: if the best single source clears about 60%, the second provider is not a luxury.
The 5 to 10% spread between vendors is this commenter's estimate and nothing here verifies it, and the thread it comes from is a request for benchmarks that were never published. Read it as a reason to run your own test on your own rows rather than as a reason to skip one, and note that it argues against paying a premium for coverage claims, which is a different question from paying a premium for a redistribution license.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Should you actually switch?
Most teams that want to leave Clay actually want a smaller bill, and the fix is usually to put a cheap provider in front of it rather than to replace it. Apollo underneath and Clay over the top on the residue keeps the coverage and limits Clay's spend to the rows Apollo missed.
No provider in this category publishes a match rate you can hold them to, so run the same 500 rows through one free tier and one trial, verify every result set, and divide spend by survivors. Your own list is the only evidence worth acting on, it takes half a day, and it changes the decision often enough to be worth it.
Head to head, and in a stack
Apollo API vs Clay
CompareOne key for the whole motion against a router sitting in front of 150 vendors.
Compare them →Clay vs FullEnrich
CompareTwo ways to buy a waterfall: a spreadsheet you configure, or one endpoint you call.
Compare them →Clay vs People Data Labs
CompareCoverage borrowed from 150 vendors against one dataset you are licensed to redistribute.
Compare them →All alternatives
29Every provider in the directory that teams regularly try to replace, with the reasons and the replacements for each.
Browse the hub →Switching costs more than the rate card says. Usually.
Three times out of four the fix is a second provider behind the first and a credit ceiling in front of it, not a migration. We will tell you which case you are in before you sign anything.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
Switching from Clay, answered
What is the best Clay alternative?
It depends on why you are leaving, which is how this page is organized rather than ranked. The replacement most teams land on is FullEnrich, which this directory lists as the best waterfall without Clay, at $55/mo. The case for it, and what you give up, is in the section above.
Is there a free alternative to Clay?
Apollo (Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month) and People Data Labs (Free plan, up to 100 credits per month with contact data obfuscated).
What is the cheapest Clay alternative?
On the entry plan, Apollo: $49/seat/mo, against Clay at $167/mo. Entry price is not the same as cost per result, so check the unit figure on each review before deciding.
How were these alternatives chosen?
By the reason teams leave, not by a score. The page opens with the reasons teams leave and matches a replacement to each one.