Clay alternatives in 2026: what to use instead, by use case

Why do people look for Clay alternatives?

Clay rebuilt its pricing on 11 March 2026. Plans now bill two meters, Actions for platform work and Data Credits for marketplace data, and the old Starter, Explorer and Pro tiers were replaced by Launch ($185 a month) and Growth ($495 a month). CRM integrations and HTTP API calls now sit on Growth, so teams that relied on them on a cheaper legacy tier face a higher bill or a choice to leave. The other common triggers are the learning curve of tables, waterfalls and credit maths, and cost at volume once every enrichment, AI step and push draws on a meter.

The options side by side

	Clay	Apollo.io	Prospeo	FullEnrich	n8n	Claude Code
Entry paid price (checked 17 Oct 2026)	Launch: $185/mo monthly, $167/mo annual	Basic: $65/seat/mo monthly, $49/seat/mo annual	Starter: $49/user/mo monthly, $37/user/mo annual	Pro: $55/mo for 1,000 credits	Starter: €20/mo billed annually (2,500 executions)	Claude Pro: $20/mo monthly, $17/mo annual
Free option	Free plan: 100 data credits, 500 actions/mo, 200 rows per table	Free plan: 900 credits per seat per year	Free plan: 100 credits/mo	Free trial: 50 credits	Self-hosted Community Edition on GitHub	None: Claude Code is included in paid plans
Cost of one verified work email	Varies by provider; data credits start at $0.05	1 credit	1 credit (0 if no email found)	1 credit ($0.055 on the 1,000-credit plan)	Whatever your data provider charges	Whatever your data provider charges
Cost of one mobile number	Launch plan and up; varies by provider	8 credits	10 credits	10 credits	Whatever your data provider charges	Whatever your data provider charges
Unused credits	Data credits roll over, actions reset each cycle	Expire at the end of each billing cycle	Roll over (pricing page; help centre says they reset)	Roll over 3 months on monthly, 12 months on yearly	Not credit-based: billed per workflow execution	Not credit-based: plan usage limits
What it replaces in a Clay workflow	Subject of comparison	Database search, enrichment and sequencing	Search plus email and mobile finding	Multi-provider waterfall for contact data	Tables, triggers and HTTP API orchestration	Custom enrichment scripts and agents you own

Why do people look for Clay alternatives in 2026?

People look for Clay alternatives in 2026 mainly because Clay changed how it charges. Clay's internal pricing memo, published 11 March 2026, split every plan into Actions (enrichments, AI tasks, HTTP API calls and pushes to other tools) and Data Credits (data bought from Clay's marketplace of 150+ providers).

The memo says marketplace data got 50 to 90% cheaper and that 90% of customers will never hit their Actions limit. The catch is feature placement. On the live pricing page, CRM integrations, HTTP API integrations and webhook signals are Growth features, and Growth starts at $495 a month billed monthly. Launch, at $185 a month, does not include them.

Existing customers could keep a legacy plan, but the memo gave them 30 days to choose one before legacy plans closed to changes. Anyone who needs to move tiers now lands on the new model, which is often the moment a team re-checks the market.

How much does Clay cost now, and where does the bill grow?

Clay costs $185 a month for Launch and $495 a month for Growth on monthly billing, or $167 and $446 a month on annual billing, as of 17 October 2026. The pricing page shows each plan as two sliders: Launch is 15,000 actions ($60) plus 2,500 data credits ($125), and Growth is 40,000 actions ($205) plus 6,000 data credits ($290).

Data credits start at $0.05 each and roll over; actions reset every billing cycle. Top-ups carry a 30% premium on Launch and Growth. Reasoning-heavy AI models are billed on actual token use rather than a fixed price, so heavy Claygent or GPT-style columns are the least predictable line.

If you bring your own API key, Clay counts the run as one action and uses no data credits. That makes Clay cheaper for teams that already pay providers directly, but it also shows that a large part of the bill is data you could buy elsewhere.

Which Clay alternative fits an all-in-one prospecting team?

Apollo is the closest all-in-one alternative because it owns a database (Apollo says 240M contacts and 30M companies) and includes sequencing, so you do not need a separate sender to start. Basic costs $49 per seat per month billed annually ($65 monthly) with 30,000 credits per seat per year.

Apollo charges 1 credit per email and 8 credits per phone number, and unused credits expire at the end of each cycle. Basic allows 250 email sends a day and one mailbox per user; Professional ($79 annual, $99 monthly) lifts that to unlimited daily sends and unlimited Google and Microsoft mailboxes.

The trade-off is depth. Apollo searches one database, while Clay can chain many providers and AI steps. Teams whose lists come out well from Apollo filters often find the simpler tool is enough.

Which Clay alternatives replace contact finding and waterfall enrichment?

Prospeo and FullEnrich replace the part of Clay most teams use most: turning a name and company into a verified email or mobile. Prospeo Starter costs $49 per user per month ($37 annual) for 2,000 credits a month; an email costs 1 credit and a mobile 10. Every Prospeo plan connects to Clay, Zapier, Outreach and lemlist, and Growth ($99) adds native HubSpot and Salesforce sync.

FullEnrich runs a waterfall across 25+ sources and charges $0.055 per credit on its 1,000-credit Pro plan: 1 credit for a work email, 3 for a personal email and 10 for a mobile. Credits roll over for 3 months on monthly plans.

Databar is a table-based option outside our directory that looks most like Clay: Build costs $99 a month for 5,000 credits and Scale $495 a month for 50,000, with 100+ data providers and bring-your-own keys. If you want a spreadsheet interface without Clay, it is worth a trial.

Can you build your own Clay with n8n or Claude Code?

You can rebuild Clay's orchestration with n8n or Claude Code, but you take on the maintenance. n8n bills per workflow execution regardless of how many steps it has: Starter is €20 a month billed annually for 2,500 executions and Pro €50 for 10,000. A self-hosted version is available on GitHub.

Claude Code is included in Claude's paid plans, starting with Pro at $20 a month ($17 a month annual). It writes and runs scripts that call provider APIs such as Prospeo or FullEnrich with your own keys, so you pay the provider directly with no platform markup.

Both routes suit a team with a GTM engineer. Neither gives you Clay's ready-made provider catalogue, so expect to sign separate contracts and handle rate limits, retries and deduplication yourself.

Which Clay alternatives should you choose?

The right Clay alternatives come down to which job you are replacing. Pick Apollo for one tool that finds and sends, Prospeo or FullEnrich for cheaper contact data, and n8n or Claude Code if you want to own the workflow. Keep Clay if you use its provider range, AI columns and CRM sync together, because rebuilding all three costs time.

Before you move to any of these Clay alternatives, export a month of usage and price it against the table above. If you want help designing the replacement stack, Tentt builds these systems for B2B teams, and the free GTM stack page on the newsletter lists open-source repos you can start from.

Which should you choose?

• Pick Apollo.io if you want one tool for search, contact data and sequencing, and per-seat pricing ($49 per seat per month annual) is cheaper for your team than a Clay plan plus a separate sender.
• Pick Prospeo if you mainly used Clay to find verified emails and mobiles for lists you already know, and 2,000 credits a month on Starter covers your volume.
• Pick FullEnrich if you valued Clay's waterfall but not its tables, and want a single tool that queries 25+ sources and only charges for data it finds.
• Pick n8n if you have someone technical, you want triggers, webhooks and HTTP calls without per-action pricing, and you are happy to self-host or pay per execution.
• Pick Claude Code if you want to own the enrichment logic as code, call provider APIs directly with your own keys, and have the time to maintain scripts.
• Pick Clay if you need many providers, AI research and CRM sync in one interface, and the Growth plan's CRM and HTTP API features justify $495 a month.

Questions people ask

Tool pages

• Clay: pricing and featuresGTM data platform that combines 150+ data providers, AI research agents and workflow automation in spreadsheet-style tables.
• Apollo.io: pricing and featuresB2B contact database with built-in sequencing, dialler, CRM enrichment and AI research, priced per seat with pooled credits.
• Prospeo: pricing and featuresB2B contact data provider for verified work emails and mobile numbers, with people search, CSV and API enrichment and CRM sync.
• FullEnrich: pricing and featuresWaterfall contact enrichment across 25+ data sources for verified work emails, personal emails and mobile numbers, pay per result.
• n8n: pricing and featuresWorkflow automation platform with AI agent nodes, available as n8n Cloud or as a free self-hosted Community edition.
• Claude Code: pricing and featuresAnthropic's agentic coding tool that reads files, runs commands and connects to tools via MCP, in the terminal, IDE, desktop and web.

Related guides

• Clay integrations: how the tools fit into a GTM engineering system
• Clay pricing in 2026: every plan, credit and worked cost example
• Clay tutorial for beginners: build your first outbound table step by step
• Cold email deliverability in 2026: domains, authentication, warm-up and monitoring