Instantly vs Clay

Choosing the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform is crucial for any organization looking to enhance customer engagement and streamline operations. Instantly and Clay are two prominent CRM platforms, each offering unique features tailored to different business needs. Instantly excels in automation and email outreach, making it ideal for outbound sales teams, while Clay focuses on providing a comprehensive CRM experience for managing customer interactions. In this blog post we will compare their key features, pricing, and benefits to help you determine which CRM best aligns with your business goals. We'll also explore folk as a viable alternative.

What is Instantly?

Instantly is a newer player in the market that focuses on automation and email outreach, helping teams send high-volume personalized emails and track responses. Instantly CRM is geared more toward businesses looking to maximize lead generation and email outreach campaigns, often used by outbound sales teams and marketers.

Key features of Instantly

• Email outreach automation: One of Instantly’s standout features is the ability to automate and send thousands of personalized cold emails at scale.
• Advanced email warm-up: Instantly ensures that your emails land in inboxes rather than spam by providing email warming and reputation management tools.
• AI-based insights: Use AI-powered analytics to gain insights into the success of your outreach and optimize future campaigns.
• Multi-account management: Run multiple email accounts and campaigns seamlessly from one dashboard.
• Performance tracking: Track open rates, click rates, and other key metrics to measure campaign performance in real time.
• Integrations: Instantly CRM integrates with tools like Zapier, Google Sheets, and other productivity apps to help streamline workflows.
  

What is Clay?

ClayNAME 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.

Instantly 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

Instantly doesn't have a clear Kanban view of all your deals. You can view your leads' status with the email campaigns, but there isn't a clear pipeline management view. On the other hand, 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 on this data. This gives Clay a slight edge in terms of flexibility and integration, making it easier to visualize and manage your sales process.
While both platforms offer some level of sales pipeline management, Clay's ability to integrate data from lead forms into a customizable dashboard provides a more comprehensive overview of the sales process. This feature can be particularly beneficial for businesses looking to streamline their sales operations and improve lead tracking. Ultimately, the choice between Instantly and Clay will depend on your specific needs and how you prefer to visualize and manage your sales pipeline.

2. Ease of use

Instantly is designed for quick setup and straightforward navigation, making it accessible for users with varying levels of CRM experience. Clay may require a steep learning curve for those not familiar with outreach.

3. Contact enrichment

Instantly CRM offers contact enrichment by leveraging a large database of verified information, automatically adding details like company names and job titles. Clay’s enrichment feature automatically gathers additional information on leads by pulling data from multiple sources. This feature builds detailed profiles for each contact, including information like job titles, company details, and social links, providing a comprehensive view without manual data entry. You can connect Clay's enrichment feature with your existing CRM.

4. Outreach

Instantly provides robust cold outreach capabilities, allowing unlimited email connections and rotation for optimal deliverability, ideal for large-scale campaigns. Clay’s outreach is tailored for efficient prospecting, offering automated, personalized emails and detailed engagement tracking to refine outreach efforts.

5. Automation

Instantly CRM automates email outreach and follow-ups, adjusting campaigns based on engagement metrics for improved results. Clay simplifies outreach tasks with automated workflows for data gathering and email sequencing, focusing on email outreach without advanced multichannel automation.

6. Integration

Instantly CRM integrates with third-party apps through Zapier, connecting with tools like Google Workspace and Salesforce, available from the Hypergrowth plan. Clay offers integrations to enhance its data enrichment and outreach capabilities.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Instantly CRM uses AI to optimize email personalization and follow-up sequencing, dynamically adjusting campaigns for better engagement. Clay's AI focuses on research automation through Claygent, providing insights like SOC-II compliance for informed decision-making.

Price and plans comparison

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

Instantly prices

Instantly offers a few types of plans depending on whether or not you're after its CRM product, leads generator, or outreach campaign product. Their CRM price plan comes as either a monthly or annual subscription. Their yearly subscription plan is as follows.

• Growth CRM: Starts from $37.90 per user, per month.
• Hyper CRM: Starts from $77.60 per user, per 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 Instantly 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.

Instantly vs. Clay: What's the verdict?

While it's clear that both Instantly and Clay offer robust CRM solutions, the choice largely depends on your business needs. Instantly excels in email outreach and automation, making it ideal for outbound sales and marketing teams. On the other hand, Clay provides a comprehensive CRM experience with a strong focus on integration and user-friendly design. 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