Conduit vs Clay
Clay is a powerful spreadsheet for enrichment. Conduit is the same enrichment waterfall plus the full sequences, inbox, publishing, and CRM around it.
Clay is a data enrichment and workflow tool that combines spreadsheets, scraping, and AI to build prospect lists.
TL;DR — Conduit vs Clay
- →Clay is a category-defining enrichment workbench — but it's a spreadsheet, not a CRM. You still need outbound and inbox tools downstream.
- →Conduit ships the same waterfall enrichment (50+ providers via BYO key + internal DB) plus the sequencer and inbox to actually run campaigns on the enriched data.
- →Conduit's Growth tier is $397/mo flat. Clay's Pro plan is $349/mo and tops out at 100K credits — power users routinely pay $700–$2,500/mo on Enterprise.
- →Clay's strength is the cell-by-cell workbench UI. Conduit's strength is the end-to-end loop: enrich → sequence → reply → segment → re-enrich.
Feature-by-feature: Conduit vs Clay
Pricing: Conduit vs Clay
What you actually pay at each tier — including hidden per-seat / per-credit costs.
Two different products, overlapping value
Clay is a workbench: rows are leads, columns are enrichment steps, and you can chain spreadsheet formulas across AI cells, web scrapers, and 50+ data providers. It's the most powerful enrichment editor on the market.
Conduit isn't trying to be that workbench. Conduit ships the same waterfall under the hood (cache → internal → Brave → You.com → BYO Apollo / Hunter / Clearbit) but exposes it as part of a broader CRM loop: enriched contacts feed sequences, sequences trigger inbox conversations, conversations re-segment the contact, re-segmentation re-enriches.
When Clay wins
If you're a data-ops specialist who wants spreadsheet control over every cell — custom prompt per row, multi-step web scrapes, branching enrichment trees — Clay is the right tool. The UI is unmatched for that workflow.
When Conduit wins
If you're an agency or operator who wants enrichment to feed cold outreach immediately, with no glue work between "the spreadsheet" and "the sequencer", Conduit collapses the loop. Enrich a list in the Contacts page, click "Add to Sequence", watch replies land in Inbox.
AI cost economics
Clay's AI formulas run on OpenAI and bill per token via Clay credits. At enterprise volume, AI cell usage commonly tops $1,000/mo. Conduit's equivalent — rewrite intros, classify titles, score fit — runs on local Ollama at zero token cost. Same quality (Mistral 7B and Llama 3.2 are very capable), zero variable spend.
BYO Clay (yes, really)
If you love Clay's workbench, keep it. Conduit's Webhooks API accepts enriched rows from Clay and ingests them as contacts with custom fields. Use Clay for enrichment, Conduit for the downstream sequences + inbox.
Clay alternative — frequently asked questions
- Is Conduit a true Clay alternative?
- For the enrichment + outreach loop, yes — Conduit ships the same waterfall providers and runs the sequencer / inbox Clay leaves to integration partners. For the spreadsheet workbench UX, no — Clay's grid editor is unique.
- Can I use Clay and Conduit together?
- Yes — many teams do. Use Clay's workbench for novel list-building, then push rows to Conduit via webhook to run sequences and own the contact graph.
- Does Conduit have AI formulas like Clay?
- Conduit has AI enrichment fields on contacts — "classify title", "rewrite intro", "score fit" — but they're field-level, not cell-level. Less flexible than Clay, but cheaper to run and ergonomically simpler.
- What providers does Conduit's waterfall include?
- Cache → internal 93K DB → Brave Search → You.com → BYO Apollo, Hunter, Clearbit, ZoomInfo, FullContact, LeadIQ, RocketReach. New providers added quarterly based on customer demand.
- Pricing comparison?
- Clay Pro is $349/mo for 100K credits. Conduit Growth is $397/mo with unlimited cache hits + BYO external. At enterprise (1M+ credits), Clay quotes $2k+/mo; Conduit Atelier is $997/mo flat.
- Does Conduit have a Chrome extension like Clay's?
- Yes — Conduit Lens enriches LinkedIn profiles in-browser, pulls company data on any URL, and one-click adds to a contact list.
- How do I migrate from Clay?
- Export your Clay tables as CSV (or pipe via the webhook node) into Conduit Contacts. Custom columns become Conduit custom fields. Enrichment rules need to be rebuilt as Conduit Flows — generally takes a few hours.
- Does Conduit support web scraping like Clay?
- Conduit ships a Playwright-based scraper node in Flows, which handles most page-scrape use cases. Clay's scraper is more visual and has better selector picking; Conduit's is code-adjacent.
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