Instantly vs Clay

In the market for a new CRM? Instantly and Clay are two popular solutions, each offering distinct features tailored to different business needs. Instantly excels in automation and email outreach, making it ideal for outbound sales teams, while Clay focuses on contact management and enrichment. In this blog post, we'll compare their key features, pricing, and benefits. We'll also explore folk, a popular alternative to these platforms.

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?

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

• 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 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.

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

When it comes to sales pipeline management, both Instantly and Clay have their limitations. Instantly lacks a clear Kanban view of all your deals, which can make it challenging to track the progress of leads through various stages. Users have to rely on viewing lead statuses within email campaigns, which doesn't provide a comprehensive pipeline management experience.
Clay CRM also doesn't offer a dedicated pipeline management feature as part of its core functionality. While it allows users to organize contacts and tasks, it falls short in providing specific tools for tracking deals or leads through different stages in a sales pipeline. This means that users looking for robust sales pipeline management might need to explore additional tools or integrations to complement the capabilities of both Instantly and Clay.

2. Easy of use

Instantly offers a user-friendly interface that simplifies navigation and task management, making it accessible for users without extensive technical expertise. Clay also has a user-friendly interface. Both are reminiscent of a super-charged address book.

3. Contact enrichment

Instantly provides comprehensive contact enrichment by utilizing a vast database of verified information, automatically enhancing records with details like company names and job titles. This feature ensures users have up-to-date and detailed contact profiles, facilitating more personalized and effective communication strategies. Clay CRM offers a similar contact enrichment feature that automatically gathers additional information about contacts from various sources, such as social media profiles, public databases, and professional networks. This feature helps users build more comprehensive profiles by pulling in data like job titles, company information, and social links.

4. Outreach

Instantly excels in cold outreach, allowing users to connect unlimited email addresses, rotate them for optimal deliverability, and manage large-scale campaigns. It offers detailed campaign statistics for performance tracking. Clay also lacks a dedicated outreach feature, focusing instead on tracking interactions and setting follow-up tasks.

5. Automation

Instantly automates email outreach and follow-ups, sending personalized bulk emails and adjusting campaigns based on engagement metrics like opens and replies. Clay automates repetitive tasks such as contact updates and follow-up reminders, with triggers based on specific conditions to streamline workflow management.

6. Integration

Instantly integrates with third-party apps via Zapier, connecting with tools like Google Workspace, Slack, and Salesforce, but this feature is available only on their Hypergrowth plan. Clay supports integrations with various third-party tools, allowing users to connect external applications for enhanced functionality.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Instantly CRM incorporates AI to enhance email outreach, automating personalization, scheduling, and follow-ups based on engagement patterns. It dynamically adjusts campaigns for improved targeting and engagement. Clay CRM does not currently provide AI integration.

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

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.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Instantly and Clay

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. There is a reason why folk is a multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system.

Key features

• 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?

Between Instantly and Clay, each platform offers unique strengths tailored to different business needs. Instantly excels in automating email outreach, making it ideal for teams focused on lead generation and marketing campaigns. On the other hand, Clay provides robust contact management and automation features, perfect for organizing and enriching customer interactions. 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