ActiveCampaign vs Clay

Exploring options for a new CRM? ActiveCampaign and Clay stand out with their distinct features and capabilities. Both platforms aim to optimize business processes, enhance customer interactions, and boost sales performance, but they address varying organizational needs and strategic goals. This blog post offers an in-depth comparison of their primary features, pricing structures, and advantages, assisting you in selecting the most suitable CRM for your business. We'll also explore folk – a popular alternative.

What is ActiveCampaign?

Active Campaign is a marketing automation platform designed to help businesses of all sizes manage customer interactions and drive growth through personalized and automated communication.

Key features of ActiveCampaign

• Email marketing: Create personalized email campaigns with drag-and-drop templates, advanced segmentation, and automated sequences to engage your audience effectively.
• Marketing automation: Automate workflows for email, SMS, and site messages, based on user behavior and custom triggers, enhancing customer engagement and retention.
• Sales automation: Integrates a CRM with automation tools to streamline the sales process, track leads, manage deals, and automate follow-ups.
• CRM feature: Sales focused CRM to track and manage processes using automation.
  

What is Clay?

Clay is an outreach and lead generation tool designed to help businesses streamline prospecting and customer outreach. It automates data enrichment by gathering information from multiple sources, such as LinkedIn and other social platforms, to build detailed contact profiles. Clay enables users to create targeted lists, personalize outreach efforts, and manage communication workflows, focusing on improving efficiency in lead generation and outreach campaigns.

Key features of Clay

• Automated data enrichment: Clay pulls data from multiple sources, such as LinkedIn and public databases, to build comprehensive profiles on prospects, reducing the need for manual data entry.
• Prospecting and list building: Users can create targeted lists of leads by filtering and segmenting prospects based on specific criteria like location, industry, or role.
• Personalized outreach: Clay enables tailored outreach by allowing users to customize messages and emails based on the enriched profile data of each lead.
• Email sequencing: Users can set up automated email sequences for follow-ups, ensuring consistent communication without manual scheduling.
• Template management: The platform offers tools for creating and saving message templates, which helps maintain consistency in outreach efforts.
• LinkedIn integration: Clay connects with LinkedIn, allowing users to gather data directly from profiles and track LinkedIn interactions as part of their outreach strategy.

ActiveCampaign vs. Clay: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of two CRM software solutions and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, and contact management.

1. Sales pipeline management

ActiveCampaign's sales pipeline management feature is integrated with its CRM, enabling businesses to streamline their sales processes. It allows users to visually manage deals through customizable pipelines, automate tasks like follow-ups, and track every stage of the sales journey.
Clay doesn't have a pipeline dashboard per se, but it allows you to connect with your inbound lead form and then creates a dashboard based off this data. This approach provides a more tailored view of your leads and opportunities, though it may require more initial setup compared to ActiveCampaign's out-of-the-box solution.

2. Ease of use

ActiveCampaign is user-friendly with its intuitive interface and drag-and-drop features, making it accessible for users with varying technical skills. Clay is user-friendly for data enrichment and outreach but lacks the in-depth contact management and deal tracking found in traditional CRMs.

3. Contact enrichment

ActiveCampaign does not appear to have a contact enrichment feature. Clay, however, excels in this area by pulling enriched data from multiple sources, enhancing contact profiles with valuable insights that aid in personalizing communication and improving outreach strategies.

4. Outreach

ActiveCampaign’s outreach capabilities are functional, offering email, SMS, and some social media tools for multi-channel communication. It allows businesses to segment their audiences and send personalized messages, while automations help manage follow-ups across different channels. However, the SMS functionality is quite basic.
Clay’s outreach feature is designed for efficient prospecting and personalized communication. It allows users to create targeted lists, pull in enriched data from multiple sources, and send automated, customized emails. Users can set up email sequences to ensure consistent follow-ups and track engagement metrics, such as open and response rates, to refine outreach efforts.

5. Automation

ActiveCampaign's automation features allow users to create workflows that automate tasks like sending emails, updating contact records, and triggering follow-up actions based on predefined conditions. These workflows can be set up using a visual drag-and-drop builder, and they support a range of triggers, such as contact behavior, form submissions, or sales pipeline changes.
Clay’s automation features are geared toward simplifying outreach tasks, allowing users to set up automated workflows for data gathering, personalized email sequencing, and follow-up reminders. These automations enable consistent communication by triggering actions like follow-up emails at scheduled intervals, based on engagement or specific conditions. But the automation capabilities are largely focused on email outreach, lacking more advanced automation options for multichannel engagement or complex workflow management that some traditional CRM tools may offer.

6. Integration

ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of integrations with over 900 third-party applications, allowing users to connect the platform with tools like Shopify, WordPress, Salesforce, and Google Analytics. Clay offers integrations with various CRMs, email marketing platforms, and data sources, allowing users to sync enriched contact profiles and streamline outreach workflows across tools.

7. Artificial Intelligence

ActiveCampaign integrates AI features to enhance various aspects of its platform, such as email marketing and automation. The AI-powered tools include predictive sending, which analyzes contact behavior to suggest the best time to send emails, and predictive content, which helps in optimizing subject lines and messaging.
Clay's AI integration is research-focused. Through Claygent, you can automate your research and visit domains, find info and report back. You can use this to see whether or not companies are SOC-II compliant, and more.

Price and plans comparison

Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both ActiveCampaign and Clay.

ActiveCampaign prices

ActiveCampaign's price plans are based on the number of contacts you have. The following is based on a plan for 1,000 contacts.

• Starter: Starting from $15/month.
• Plus: Starting from $49/month.
• Pro: Starting from $79/month.
• Enterprise: Starting from $145/month.

Clay prices

Besides a free plan, Clay has a few premium plans to choose from depending on the features you need, credits, and number of people/company searches you want to make. Below is a high level overview of their annual subscription.

• Starter: Starting from $134 per month for 24k credits per year.
• Explorer: Starting from $314 per month, for 120k credits per year.
• Pro: Starting from $720 per month, for 600k credits per year.
• Enterprise: Price undisclosed. Custom credits option.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to ActiveCampaign and Clay

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. A multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system.

Key features

• Contact management: Bring all your contacts into one place seamlessly, from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram and X to multiple inboxes including Gmail and Outlook.
• Sales pipeline dashboard: Manage your entire sales cycle and leads with a highly customizable sales pipeline dashboard that can be used in Kanban-board view or listicle.
• Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile in folk, and access them on the go. And assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow-up.
• Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
• Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk’s Google Chrome extension.
• Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
• Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
• Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don’t reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.

Price and plans

folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $20 per user, per month.
• Premium: $40 per user, per month.
• Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.

ActiveCampaign vs. Clay: What's the verdict?

When comparing ActiveCampaign and Clay, it's clear that both platforms offer robust CRM solutions tailored for different business needs. ActiveCampaign excels in marketing automation and sales processes, making it ideal for businesses focused on customer engagement through automated workflows. On the other hand, Clay offers a more streamlined approach, suitable for companies looking for simplicity and efficiency. However, for companies that need a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk provides a flexible alternative to these traditional CRM options, blending ease of use with customization. Try folk today, free