Clay CRM vs Brevo

Searching for a CRM? Clay and Brevo are two popular platforms designed to enhance customer engagement and relationship management. Clay CRM stands out for its simplicity as an advanced super address book. Brevo, offers a more diverse toolkit, including email marketing, SMS, and CRM features, geared towards multi-channel engagement and communication. In this post, we’ll examine key features, ease of use, pricing, and more. But, if you’re looking for a balanced solution that combines user-friendly functionality with strong contact management, we'll show you why folk CRM might just be the better alternative.

What is Clay CRM?

Clay CRM is a customer relationship management tool designed to help users organize and manage contact information and interactions, with a focus on automation and contact enrichment.

Key features of Clay CRM

• Contact management: The platform allows users to organize and manage contacts by consolidating information in one place. Users can add custom fields, notes, and tags to categorize and track interactions with each contact, making it easier to manage customer relationships.
• Automation: Clay CRM includes automation tools that handle repetitive tasks like contact updates and reminders, helping users streamline their communication and workflow processes.
• Search and filtering: The platform provides advanced search and filtering functionality, allowing users to segment their contact database based on various criteria such as engagement history, tags, or custom fields.
• Real-time updates: The platform provides real-time updates for contact records and tasks, ensuring that users have the latest information on their contacts and projects at all times.

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 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 CRM 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

Clay CRM does not offer a dedicated pipeline management feature as part of its core functionality. While users can organize contacts and tasks, the platform lacks specific tools for tracking deals or leads through stages in a sales pipeline.
Brevo's Pipeline feature is designed to help manage the sales process by offering custom deal pipelines. It enables teams to track deals across various stages and organize tasks for follow-ups and meetings. Users can customize deal stages to match their sales cycle and automate some repetitive tasks.

2. Ease of use

Clay CRM offers a user-friendly interface with straightforward navigation, making it accessible for users with varying technical skills. Brevo provides a more integrated experience across its platforms, which may require a learning curve but offers extensive features for comprehensive customer engagement.

3. Contact enrichment

Clay CRM's contact enrichment feature automatically gathers additional data from sources like LinkedIn to build more comprehensive contact profiles. This allows users to have a deeper understanding of their contacts without manual data entry. 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 CRM does not have a dedicated outreach feature, focusing instead on tracking interactions and setting reminders for individual follow-ups. Brevo excels in outreach with its Marketing Platform, offering tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing, along with automation options for a cohesive multi-channel strategy.

5. Automation

Clay CRM includes automation to streamline tasks like updating contact info and sending follow-up reminders. Brevo offers extensive automation across its platforms, including marketing automation for campaigns and AI-powered personalization, enhancing both marketing and sales processes.

6. Integration

Clay CRM supports integrations with various third-party tools, allowing users to connect external applications for enhanced functionality. This flexibility helps users tailor their CRM experience to specific business needs. 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 CRM does not currently offer dedicated AI integration. Brevo, however, integrates AI into its Marketing Platform, focusing on enhancing email marketing with AI-driven personalization and optimization to boost engagement.

Price and plans comparison

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

Clay CRM prices

Clay has a free plan for personal use, for up to 1,000 contacts. After that premium plans are as follows on an annual subscription.

• Pro: $10 per user, per month.
• Team: $40 per user, per month.
• Enterprise: Undisclosed.

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 CRM 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 can support multiple business functions including sales, marketing, recruitment and more. 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 CRM vs. Brevo: What's the verdict?

When choosing between Clay CRM and Brevo, it's apparent that the decision ultimately depends on your business's specific needs. Clay CRM excels with automation and real-time updates, ideal for those prioritizing contact management and streamlined workflows. Meanwhile, Brevo offers a robust marketing platform with multi-channel communication, perfect for businesses focused on comprehensive customer engagement. However, for companies seeking 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.