Monday CRM vs Clay

Time to upgrade your tech stack? Choosing the right CRM platform can significantly impact your business's success. Monday CRM and Clay stand out as two well known options. Each offering distinct features tailored to different business needs. Monday CRM is renowned for its robust sales management capabilities, while Clay is an outreach tool that can connect to your CRM. This blog post will delve into a comprehensive comparison of their key features, pricing structures, and overall benefits. We'll also introduce folk – a popular alternative.

What is Monday CRM?

Monday CRM is a sales focussed customer relationship management platform built by the team behind Monday.com, designed to help sales teams manage contacts, sales pipelines, and workflows.

Key features of Monday CRM

• Contact management: Provides a central place to store and organize contact details, track communications, and maintain records of interactions with clients and leads.
• Deal management: Allows users to track the progress of deals across stages, helping teams monitor the sales pipeline and update deal statuses as they progress.
• Task management: Users can create tasks related to deals or contacts, assign them to team members, and track their completion to ensure follow-up actions are taken.
• Lead tracking: Features tools for capturing and managing leads, assigning them to team members, and tracking their progress through different stages of the sales funnel.
• Pipeline customization: Enables users to customize their sales pipelines to align with specific business processes, allowing different stages and workflows based on deal progression.
  

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.

Monday CRM vs. Clay: Feature Comparison

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

1. Sales pipeline management

Monday CRM’s pipeline feature allows users to track the progress of deals and opportunities through customizable stages. The pipeline can be configured to match specific sales processes, with stages representing different phases of a deal. 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 approach offers flexibility in how you visualize and manage your sales leads, albeit with less structured visualization compared to Monday CRM's dedicated pipeline feature.

2. Ease of use

Both Monday CRM and Clay prioritize user-friendly interfaces. Monday CRM offers an intuitive design with customizable dashboards, making it easy for teams to navigate. Clay, on the other hand, is not a traditional CRM system ad emphasizes simplicity in prospecting and outreach, providing streamlined workflows that are particularly beneficial for sales teams focused on efficiency.

3. Contact enrichment

Monday CRM does not offer a built-in contact enrichment feature. This means users may need to rely on third-party integrations for detailed contact insights. In contrast, Clay excels in contact enrichment by pulling in enriched data from multiple sources, providing users with a comprehensive view of their prospects.

4. Outreach

Monday CRM supports outreach campaigns with a template library and AI-assisted support, enhancing email composition. Clay’s outreach is more robust, enabling targeted list creation, automated, personalized emails, and detailed engagement tracking. This allows for efficient prospecting and refined communication strategies, making Clay a strong choice for focused outreach efforts.

5. Automation

Monday CRM automates basic tasks like updating deal statuses and sending notifications, streamlining repetitive processes. However, its automation scope is limited. Clay offers automation focused on outreach, with workflows for personalized email sequencing and follow-up reminders, though it lacks advanced multichannel engagement automation found in some CRMs.

6. Integration

Both Monday CRM and Clay offer integration capabilities, allowing users to connect with various third-party applications. This flexibility enhances their functionality, enabling seamless data flow and process optimization across platforms, though specific integration options may vary between the two.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Monday CRM utilizes AI for composing sales emails, helping you crafting effective campaigns. Clay's AI, through Claygent, is research-focused, automating domain visits and information gathering to verify company compliance and more, offering a unique edge in prospect research.

Price and plans comparison

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

Monday CRM prices

Monday CRM offers both a monthly and annual subscription plan. All their plans depend on the size of your team and starts with a 3 seat option.

• Basic: Starts from $12 per seat, per month.
• Standard: Starts from $17 per seat, per month.
• Pro: Starts from $28 per seat, per month.
• Enterprise: Undisclosed.

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 Monday CRM 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.

Monday CRM vs. Clay: What's the verdict?

It's clear that both Monday CRM and Clay offer robust CRM solutions tailored to different business needs. Monday CRM excels with its sales-focused features and pipeline customization, making it ideal for structured sales teams. On the other hand, Clay stands out with its intuitive design and seamless integration capabilities, perfect for businesses seeking flexibility. 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