BuiltWith vs Clay
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
Still shortlisting? Browse the best in Buying Signals & Intent and the best in B2B Data Providers for every option we track, with award winners called out.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentBuiltWith compared with Clay
Clay is the orchestration layer that BuiltWith deliberately is not, running waterfalls across dozens of data providers and pushing results into sequences. Clay can call technographic providers as one input among many. If you already run Clay, buy BuiltWith for the depth of its history and feed it in; if you do not, understand that BuiltWith hands you a CSV and stops there.
Choose BuiltWith if
Companies whose product is installed on a website and who sell against a named competitor: Shopify and WooCommerce app vendors, martech and analytics tools, payment and checkout products, agencies pitching replatforming work, and anyone doing genuine market sizing on technology adoption.
Choose Clay if
GTM engineers and data-savvy teams building automated, multi-provider enrichment and personalization pipelines.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | BuiltWith | Clay |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Signals | Data |
| Starting price | $0 for individual site lookups, then $295 per month for Basic | Free plan; paid from $167/mo billed annually (Launch) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly or annual subscription by plan, with no per-row export credits; the lookup API is a separate metered product. | Two metered allowances per plan, actions (running workflows, including waterfall steps and Claygent) and data credits (data bought from providers), each set on its own slider, with a free plan, two self-serve tiers, and custom Enterprise. CRM auto-sync, webhooks, and the HTTP API integration are gated at Growth. |
| Free plan | Individual site lookups through the website and browser extensions are free forever and unlimited; list building, exports, alerts, and API access are not included. | 500 actions and 100 data credits per month, unlimited seats and tables, up to 200 rows per table. |
| Free trial | No published free trial on paid plans | 14 days |
| Best for | Companies whose product is installed on a website and who sell against a named competitor: Shopify and WooCommerce app vendors, martech and analytics tools, payment and checkout products, agencies pitching replatforming work, and anyone doing genuine market sizing on technology adoption. | GTM engineers and data-savvy teams building automated, multi-provider enrichment and personalization pipelines. |
| Setup time | An hour to build a first list, longer to trust it. Sign up, pick your tracked technologies, and run a query; the work is in learning which filter combinations produce a list that is actually addressable rather than 40,000 rows of noise. | First enriched table in an hour via templates; a production pipeline (sources, then waterfalls, then scoring, then delivery) typically takes 2-4 weeks to harden. |
| Learning curve | Moderate and front-loaded. The interface offers little guidance and the filter grammar rewards experimentation. Most of the skill is knowing which technology combinations imply a real buying situation, and that is domain knowledge rather than software knowledge. | The steepest in this report, genuinely a skill. Templates, the academy, and a large creator ecosystem (courses, agencies) flatten it substantially. |
| Platforms | Web application, Chrome extension, Firefox extension, REST API, Bulk datasets | Web app, Chrome extension, REST API |
| Compliance | GDPR obligations apply to the contact data appended to exports, No publicly advertised SOC 2 attestation | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR program |
| Founded | 2007 | 2017 |
| Headquarters | Sydney, Australia | New York City, US |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped | Venture-backed (private) |
Strengths and limitations
BuiltWith
Strengths
- The deepest technographic history available anywhere: dated install and removal records per domain going back to 2007, which no competitor can retroactively manufacture.
- Removal alerts are a genuinely differentiated buying signal, because a company that just uninstalled a tool is shopping right now rather than someday.
- Exports are unmetered on paid plans, so the cost per record collapses at volume instead of climbing the way credit-based vendors do.
- CRM integrations to six systems are included on every paid tier rather than reserved for an enterprise plan.
Limitations
- The $295 entry price with a two-technology cap is a hard wall for small teams, and there is no published trial to de-risk it.
- The interface is dated and dense, and there is effectively no onboarding, so the first week is spent learning a filter grammar by trial and error.
- Support is thin by design in a company with a handful of staff; expect email responses, not a customer success manager.
- Detection is fingerprint-based, so a technology loaded through a tag manager, a server-side proxy, or a reverse-proxied subdomain can be missed entirely, and a leftover script from a tool nobody uses any more will read as an active install. Both directions of error are common.
Clay
Strengths
- Waterfall coverage decisively beats any single data provider.
- Claygent turns open-web research into a scalable, auditable pipeline step.
- Deep native integrations across the modern outbound stack (sequencers, CRMs, signals).
- Template/creator ecosystem compounds, proven workflows are one click away.
Limitations
- Real learning curve, tables, waterfalls, and prompt design reward (effectively require) a technical operator.
- Credit economics are powerful but unforgiving without active management.
- Not a proprietary data source; quality ceilings are its providers'.
- Enterprise governance (SSO, roles, audit) only matures at top tiers.
Pricing compared
BuiltWith
Flat monthly or annual subscription by plan, with no per-row export credits; the lookup API is a separate metered product.
- Free lookups$0
- Basic$295
- Pro$495
- Team$995
Model it at two volumes. A niche app vendor tracking one competitor and exporting 2,000 rows a month pays $295 on Basic, which works out to roughly 15 cents per record, and that is expensive against a general contact database until you remember no contact database can tell you who installed a specific tag last week. A serious agency on Pro at $495 pulling 40,000 rows across a dozen technologies pays about a cent a record, which is cheap by any comparison. The value curve is steeply in favour of heavy users, and the $295 floor with a two-technology cap is the worst deal in the table. If you cannot see yourself running more than one query a month, use the free lookups and buy something else.
Clay
Two metered allowances per plan, actions (running workflows, including waterfall steps and Claygent) and data credits (data bought from providers), each set on its own slider, with a free plan, two self-serve tiers, and custom Enterprise. CRM auto-sync, webhooks, and the HTTP API integration are gated at Growth.
- Free$0
- Launch$167
- Growth$446
- EnterpriseCustom
Clay's effective price is workflow-dependent: well-designed tables deliver coverage and personalization no single vendor matches at any price, while naive configurations burn credits alarmingly. Teams treating credit design as part of the craft consistently report it as the stack's highest-ROI line item.
Editorial verdict on each
BuiltWith
BuiltWith is the definitive technographic dataset and it prices like a tool that knows it has no real substitute. The install and removal history is the asset: knowing that 300 companies dropped your competitor's tag last month is a better prospecting list than any general contact database can produce, and no vendor can go back and manufacture eighteen years of dated records. Buy Pro at $495 if technology installs are the literal trigger for your sale and you will pull thousands of rows a month, because unmetered exports make the cost per record trivial at that volume. Do not buy Basic at $295 hoping to test the idea cheaply, because two tracked technologies is not a test, it is a constraint; use the free lookups or start with Wappalyzer instead. And go in understanding that you are buying a list, not a motion: BuiltWith hands you the names and expects you to already know what to do with them.
Read the full BuiltWith profileClay
Clay is the most consequential product in this report: it moved the center of outbound gravity from databases and sequencers to the orchestration layer between them, and its valuation sprint reflects substance, not froth. The costs are honest, a real learning curve and credit economics that punish sloppiness, but teams that invest in the craft get coverage, research, and personalization nothing else assembles. If your outbound has an engineer, this is their instrument.
Read the full Clay profileBuiltWith profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Clay last reviewed 2026-09-26. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
The best in Buying Signals & Intent
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The best in B2B Data Providers
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The largest self-serve contact database in the category, fused with sequencing, data and execution in one product.
Accurate direct dials and a genuinely usable free tier make Lusha the lowest-friction entry point into paid B2B data.
Founded in 2022 and already at 40,000 users, Prospeo shipped AI Search, lookalikes, and an MCP server in 2025 as its database passed 280M leads.
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Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between BuiltWith and Clay?
Clay is the orchestration layer that BuiltWith deliberately is not, running waterfalls across dozens of data providers and pushing results into sequences. Clay can call technographic providers as one input among many. If you already run Clay, buy BuiltWith for the depth of its history and feed it in; if you do not, understand that BuiltWith hands you a CSV and stops there.
Is BuiltWith or Clay cheaper?
BuiltWith starts at $0 for individual site lookups, then $295 per month for Basic. Clay starts at Free plan; paid from $167/mo billed annually (Launch). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. BuiltWith pricing model: Flat monthly or annual subscription by plan, with no per-row export credits; the lookup API is a separate metered product. Clay pricing model: Two metered allowances per plan, actions (running workflows, including waterfall steps and Claygent) and data credits (data bought from providers), each set on its own slider, with a free plan, two self-serve tiers, and custom Enterprise.
Does BuiltWith or Clay have a free plan?
BuiltWith has a free plan. Individual site lookups through the website and browser extensions are free forever and unlimited; list building, exports, alerts, and API access are not included. Trial terms: No published free trial on paid plans. Clay has a free plan. 500 actions and 100 data credits per month, unlimited seats and tables, up to 200 rows per table. Trial terms: 14 days.
Who should choose BuiltWith?
Companies whose product is installed on a website and who sell against a named competitor: Shopify and WooCommerce app vendors, martech and analytics tools, payment and checkout products, agencies pitching replatforming work, and anyone doing genuine market sizing on technology adoption.
Who should choose Clay?
GTM engineers and data-savvy teams building automated, multi-provider enrichment and personalization pipelines.
What are the best alternatives to BuiltWith and Clay?
SaaSTracker profiles 17 products in Buying Signals & Intent. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Crunchbase (Category Leader), Trigify (Best Value), Unify (Momentum). SaaSTracker profiles 26 products in B2B Data Providers. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Apollo.io (Category Leader), Lusha (Best Value), Prospeo (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
