Pipedrive vs Clay

If you're exploring CRM solutions for outreach, Pipedrive and Clay are two well known platforms worth considering. Each offers distinct features aimed at enhancing customer relationships and boosting sales efficiency. While Pipedrive is renowned for its intuitive sales pipeline management, Clay stands out with its innovative approach to outreach. This blog post will explore the specifics of both platforms, comparing their functionalities, pricing structures, and overall benefits. Additionally, we'll introduce folk which is a popular alternative.

What is Pipedrive?

Pipedrive is a web-based CRM for small businesses, offering lead management, automation, email integration, and customizable pipelines to optimize sales.

Key features of Pipedrive

• Lead and deal management: Centralized tools to manage customer data, interactions, and sales pipelines, helping teams act quickly on opportunities.
• Sales automation: Workflow automation to handle repetitive tasks, such as lead routing, follow-ups, and email sequences, allowing sales teams to focus on closing deals.
• Email integration: Full email sync, templates, and tracking features, enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
• Advanced reporting and analytics: Real-time data analytics and custom reporting tools to track sales performance, forecast revenue, and gain actionable insights.
• Customization and security: Options to customize pipelines, fields, and user permissions, with robust security measures to protect data.
  

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.

Pipedrive 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

Pipedrive offers a user-friendly Kanban-board interface that aligns closely with traditional sales pipeline management processes. This visual approach allows sales teams to easily track deals, set up custom stages, and move prospects through the pipeline with a simple drag-and-drop functionality. On the other hand, Clay does not feature a traditional pipeline dashboard. Instead, it allows you to connect with your inbound lead form and dynamically creates a dashboard based on this data. This approach can be beneficial for businesses looking for a more automated and data-driven way to visualize and manage their sales process, albeit with less manual control over the pipeline structure. Ultimately, the choice between Pipedrive and Clay for sales pipeline management depends on whether you prefer a more hands-on, traditional approach or a more automated, data-centric solution.

2. Ease of use

Pipedrive is known for its intuitive interface, making it easy for teams to navigate and manage sales processes efficiently. Clay, while also user-friendly, focuses on simplifying outreach tasks, offering a streamlined experience for managing prospecting and communication efforts – but lacks traditional CRM features. So some users may find it hard to use.

3. Contact enrichment

Pipedrive's contact enrichment integrates with tools like to automatically populate fields with data such as job titles, company information, and social media profiles, enhancing the accuracy and depth of contact information. Clay’s enrichment feature automatically gathers detailed lead information from various sources, creating comprehensive contact profiles that can be integrated with your existing CRM.

4. Outreach

Pipedrive's email builder supports campaigns like newsletters, while Clay excels in personalized communication, allowing users to create targeted lists, send automated emails, and track engagement metrics, refining outreach efforts effectively.

5. Automation

Pipedrive automates repetitive sales tasks like data entry and follow-ups, whereas Clay focuses on automating outreach workflows, enabling personalized email sequences and follow-up reminders, though it lacks advanced multichannel automation capabilities.

6. Integration

Pipedrive offers over 300 integrations, connecting with various third-party tools across categories like marketing automation and email platforms, enhancing its CRM functionality. Clay's outreach tool supports integrations with various CRMs, email platforms, and data sources, allowing users to sync enriched contact information with existing tools. These integrations help streamline data flow and ensure that contact profiles and outreach activities are updated across platforms.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Pipedrive's AI, via Sales Assistant, provides insights and recommendations for sales optimization, while Clay's AI, through Claygent, automates research tasks, offering detailed company information and compliance checks.

Price and plans comparison

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

Pipedrive prices

Pipedrive offers two types of plans, both for their CRM product. It comes as either a monthly or an annual subscription basis. Their annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Essential plan: Starts from $24 per user, per month.
• Advanced plan: Starts from $44 per user, per month.
• Professional plan: Starts from $64 per user, per month.
• Power plan: Starts from $79 per user, per month.
• Enterprise plan: Starts from $129 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 Pipedrive 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.

Pipedrive vs. Clay: What's the Verdict?

There's no doubt that both Pipedrive and Clay offer robust CRM solutions tailored for different business needs. Pipedrive excels in sales automation and analytics, while Clay provides comprehensive relationship management features. However, for companies seeking a more personalized approach to CRM, folk presents a compelling alternative. Its blend of customization, ease of use, and affordability makes it a standout choice for businesses looking to streamline their operations. Try folk today, free.