Clay vs Freshsales

Clay and Freshsales are two platforms designed to support sales and customer relationship management, each catering to different needs. Clay focuses on data enrichment and automated prospecting, helping teams streamline lead generation and personalize outreach. Freshsales, on the other hand, integrates AI-powered insights, sales automation, and communication tools, making it ideal for teams looking for a data-driven approach to managing the sales process. In this blog post, we’ll compare their key features to help you decide which platform best fits your needs—or if Folk might offer a more flexible alternative with user-friendly contact management and customization options.

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 Freshsales?

Freshsales is a CRM platform by Freshworks designed to help businesses streamline their sales processes with AI-powered tools and automation. It provides features like lead scoring, deal tracking, email and call management, and workflow automation to enhance efficiency and drive conversions. Freshsales also integrates communication and sales in one place, offering tools for personalized outreach and detailed insights to improve sales strategies. With its focus on reducing manual tasks and delivering actionable insights, Freshsales caters to teams looking for a smarter way to manage customer relationships and close deals faster.

Key features of Freshsales

• AI-powered insights: Freshsales leverages AI to provide recommendations, predict deal outcomes, and offer actionable insights to improve sales strategies.
• Lead scoring: Automatically prioritizes leads based on their engagement and likelihood to convert, helping sales teams focus on high-value opportunities.
• Deal tracking: Provides a visual sales pipeline to track deals through various stages and monitor progress in real time.
• Email and call management: Integrates email and phone communication, allowing users to manage interactions directly from the platform.
• Workflow automation: Automates repetitive tasks like sending follow-up emails or updating deal statuses, reducing manual work and improving efficiency.

Clay vs. Freshsales: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of Clay and Freshsales and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, and contact management.

1. Sales pipeline management

Clay doesn’t offer a traditional pipeline dashboard but enables integration with inbound lead forms to create a customized dashboard based on the data collected. This approach provides a tailored view of your sales process, though it may require additional setup to fully visualize the pipeline stages.
Freshsales offers a robust visual sales pipeline that tracks deals through various stages in real time. Its intuitive drag-and-drop functionality allows for easy movement of deals between stages, giving a clear and organized overview of your sales progress. Freshsales also includes integrated tools like lead scoring and AI insights, which enhance deal management by identifying priorities and predicting outcomes.

2. Ease of use

Clay offers a user-friendly interface tailored for intuitive navigation, making it accessible for users of varying technical expertise. Freshsales provides a similarly straightforward experience, with a clean design and guided setup, though it may require some initial familiarization to fully leverage its extensive features.

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 streamlines the process of building rich, actionable data sets for more informed decision-making. Freshsales offers a contact enrichment feature that automatically gathers additional information about leads and customers from public sources and integrated tools.

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. Freshsales includes outreach tools for managing communication via email, phone, and chat, offering a centralized sales-focused approach with integrated tracking and logging capabilities.

5. Automation

Clay’s automation focuses on email outreach, with workflows for data gathering and follow-up reminders. Freshsales offers broader automation for lead assignment and sales process management, though setting up complex workflows may require more time and familiarity with its system.

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. Freshsales integrates with tools like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Mailchimp, as well as Freshworks products such as Freshdesk and Freshchat, to streamline workflows. These integrations support email, calendar, marketing, and customer support, enhancing the platform’s functionality.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Clay's AI integration is research-focused, automating domain visits and reporting. Freshsales' Freddy AI provides predictive analytics and lead scoring, offering insights to prioritize opportunities and recommend follow-up actions, enhancing decision-making and efficiency with AI-driven workflows.

Price and plans comparison

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

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.

Freshsales prices

There are two separate plans for Freshsales, and something else called Freshsales Suite where you can get sales-only, or sales and marketing features respectively. The following is an overview of Freshsales' annual price plans.

• Growth: Starts from $9/user/month.
• Pro: Starts from $39/user/month.
• Enterprise: Starts from $49/user/month.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Clay and Freshsales

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 use folk as a solopreneur, small to mid-size team, or 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. Freshsales: What's the verdict?

In comparing Clay and Freshsales, it's apparent how both platforms offer robust features catering to different business needs. Clay excels in automated data enrichment and personalized outreach, making it ideal for lead generation. Freshsales, on the other hand, provides comprehensive CRM capabilities with a focus on sales automation. 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