Clay vs Brevo

Looking for a CRM? Clay and Brevo are two popular platforms designed for improving customer engagement and relationship management. Clay is tailored for outreach, making it ideal for teams that need in-depth insights and targeted communication. Brevo, on the other hand, is an outreach and CRM tool, providing a broader suite of tools, including email marketing, SMS, and CRM features. Not sure which one to go for?. In this blog post post, we’ll review their key features, ease of use, pricing, and more. We also have another alternative if you’re looking for a well-rounded solution that balances user-friendly features with enhanced contact management.

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.
  

What is Brevo?

Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing platform tailored for small to mid-sized businesses. Brevo also offers a wide range of tools, including email and SMS marketing, chat, CRM, and marketing automation to help businesses effectively engage with their audience across multiple channels.

Key features of Brevo

• Marketing platform: Provides tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns, as well as marketing automation to improve multi-channel campaign engagement and streamline marketing efforts.
• Sales platform: Helps manage pipelines and track sales activities with tools like automated deal tracking, meeting scheduling, and call recording, making it easier for teams to follow leads and close deals.
• Conversations platform: Allows businesses to offer customer support through live chat, a shared inbox, and multi-channel communication solutions, ensuring seamless customer interaction.
• Customer data platform: Enables businesses to unify, manage, and analyze customer data across platforms with a multi-table data model, sourcing library, and customer analytics, improving data-driven decisions.
• Messaging API: Provides APIs for sending emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages, with features for transactional emails, inbound parsing, and integrations with other applications for customized communication.

Clay vs. Brevo: 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

Ultimately, Clay focuses on simplicity and integration with lead forms, while Brevo offers a more structured and customizable pipeline management experience.
Clay offers a unique approach by integrating with your inbound lead forms and generating a custom dashboard from this data. While it doesn't have a traditional pipeline dashboard, it provides a streamlined way to visualize and manage your leads. It's also not a traditional CRM.
Brevo's oipeline feature is tailored for comprehensive sales process management. It offers custom deal pipelines, enabling teams to track deals through various stages and organize tasks effectively. Users can customize deal stages to align with their sales cycles and automate repetitive tasks, enhancing efficiency. Brevo also supports bulk contact import, linking contacts and deals for seamless organization. While it provides basic analytics for data insights, some customization might be necessary to fully meet specific business needs.

2. Ease of use

Clay offers a user-friendly interface tailored for efficient prospecting and outreach, making it accessible even for those new to CRM tools. Brevo, with its intuitive design, provides a seamless experience across its marketing and sales platforms, ensuring ease of navigation and setup for campaigns.

3. Contact enrichment

Clay’s enrichment feature automatically gathers detailed lead information from various sources, creating comprehensive contact profiles that can be integrated with your existing CRM. This ensures users have access to enriched data for more targeted outreach. Brevo includes contact enrichment capabilities as part of its Customer Data Platform. This feature allows businesses to unify, manage, and sync customer data, making it easier to create a more complete customer profile.

4. Outreach

Clay’s outreach feature is designed for efficient prospecting and personalized communication, allowing users to create targeted lists and send automated, customized emails. Brevo's outreach capabilities focus on multichannel marketing, offering tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp, with automation options for campaigns based on customer behavior.

5. Automation

Clay’s automation features streamline email outreach tasks, focusing on personalized sequencing and follow-up reminders. Brevo offers broader automation across its platforms, including email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns, enhancing engagement through behavior-based triggers and AI-driven personalization.

6. Integration

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. Brevo offers extensive integration options, connecting with over 150 digital tools, including CRM, CMS, e-commerce, and analytics platforms. This allows businesses to easily sync data across systems, streamlining workflows and enhancing the functionality of their existing tech stack.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Clay's AI integration is research-focused, using Claygent for tasks like verifying SOC-II compliance. Brevo incorporates AI within its Marketing Platform to enhance email marketing, optimizing content through AI-driven personalization for increased engagement.

Price and plans comparison

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

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.

Brevo  prices

Brevo has a limited free version that gives you access to 300 emails. After that, the price plans provide you with the number of emails you can send per month. As well as other features. You then also have the option of customizing your plan, so that it can be based on the number of emails you send a month. And, the number of contacts. The following is an overview of their annual plan.

• Starter: Starting from $8.08/month.
• Business: Starting from $16.17/month.
• Enterprise: Undisclosed.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Clay and Brevo

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. folk is extremely versatile thanks to its highly customizable dashboards, allowing it to support your marketing, sales, recruitment and investment relations needs. You can also use folk as a solopreneur, small to mid-size team, and large enterprise.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Clay vs. Brevo: What's the Verdict?

In the comparison between Clay and Brevo, it's apparent how each platform offers distinct advantages tailored to specific business needs. Clay excels in automated data enrichment and personalized outreach, making it ideal for businesses focused on lead generation. Brevo, on the other hand, provides comprehensive CRM solutions with robust email marketing capabilities, catering to a broader range of customer engagement strategies. 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