Is Clay or Octoparse cheaper?

Clay starts at Free plan; paid from $149/mo (free plan available). Octoparse starts at Free for 10 tasks and 50,000 exported rows per month; paid plans from $58 per month billed annually ($69 monthly) (free plan available).

Clay vs Octoparse

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Editorial assessment

Octoparse compared with Clay

Clay is an enrichment and orchestration layer, not a scraper: it takes a list and runs it through dozens of data providers and AI steps to fill columns. Octoparse builds the list in the first place, from sources no provider covers. The common pattern is Octoparse for acquisition and Clay for enrichment, and the mistake is expecting Clay's scraping steps to replace a purpose-built extraction workflow on a complicated site.

Choose Clay if

GTM engineers and data-savvy teams building automated, multi-provider enrichment and personalization pipelines.

Choose Octoparse if

Small go-to-market, research, and ecommerce teams that need recurring structured data from websites with no scraping API, have nobody to write and babysit a Python crawler, and want the extraction to run on someone else's infrastructure on a schedule.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Clay	Octoparse
Category	Data	GTM Engineering
Starting price	Free plan; paid from $149/mo (free plan available)	Free for 10 tasks and 50,000 exported rows per month; paid plans from $58 per month billed annually ($69 monthly) (free plan available)
Pricing model	Credit-based monthly tiers; provider calls and Claygent runs consume credits (only on successful hits for waterfalls). Feature gates (CRM write-back, webhooks) sit at tier boundaries.	Per-account subscription priced by number of tasks (saved scrapers) and concurrent cloud runs, not by rows or requests. A permanent free plan covers local extraction only; cloud runs, scheduling, IP rotation, and CAPTCHA solving all sit behind the first paid tier. Annual billing carries roughly a 16 percent discount, and an Enterprise tier is quote-only.
Free plan	100 credits/month, core table features.	10 tasks, 1 user, 1 device, 2 concurrent local runs, 50,000 rows exported per month with a 10,000-row cap per export, last 5 run histories, no cloud extraction
Free trial	14 days (Pro features)	No standalone trial; the free plan serves as the evaluation path, and paid plans carry a 5-day money-back guarantee
Best for	GTM engineers and data-savvy teams building automated, multi-provider enrichment and personalization pipelines.	Small go-to-market, research, and ecommerce teams that need recurring structured data from websites with no scraping API, have nobody to write and babysit a Python crawler, and want the extraction to run on someone else's infrastructure on a schedule.
Setup time	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.	Under an hour from download to a first working scraper on a straightforward listing page, largely because auto-detect does the initial configuration. A complex multi-level workflow with logins and conditional branches is a half-day exercise the first time and much faster afterwards.
Learning curve	The steepest in this report, genuinely a skill. Templates, the academy, and a large creator ecosystem (courses, agencies) flatten it substantially.	Low to start, moderate to master. The clicking layer is genuinely accessible. What takes longer is learning the failure modes: when to override auto-detect, how long to set waits on JavaScript-heavy pages, when a loop is matching too many elements, and how to read a run that returned 40 rows instead of 400.
Platforms	Web app, Chrome extension, REST API	Windows desktop app (Windows 10 64-bit or higher), macOS desktop app, Web dashboard for cloud task management, Browser-based free web tools
Compliance	SOC 2 Type II, GDPR program	GDPR-aligned data handling, CCPA, Standard cloud infrastructure security controls
Founded	2017	2016
Headquarters	New York City, US	Walnut, California, United States
Ownership	Venture-backed (private)	Independent, privately held (Octopus Data Inc.)

Strengths and limitations

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.

Octoparse

Strengths

One of the most capable point-and-click builders in the category: loops, branches, detail-page drill-down, and login handling without writing a selector.
Auto-detect produces a working scraper from a bare URL on most listing pages, which collapses the first hour of work to a minute.
Cloud extraction with IP rotation, residential proxies, and CAPTCHA solving is bundled into the subscription rather than billed as separate infrastructure.
Concurrency is a purchasable dial: 20 parallel cloud runs on Professional turns multi-day crawls into overnight ones.

Limitations

No custom JavaScript injection and no Playwright or Puppeteer style control, so interaction patterns the visual actions cannot express are simply out of reach.
Workflows live inside the application and are not text you can version, review, or deploy through CI, which is a hard blocker for engineering-led teams.
The free plan has no cloud runs, no scheduling, and no IP rotation, making it an evaluation sandbox rather than a small working pipeline.
Support is email and ticket based with no live chat, and response priority is tied to plan tier, which is slow when a scraper breaks on a deadline.

Pricing compared

Clay

Credit-based monthly tiers; provider calls and Claygent runs consume credits (only on successful hits for waterfalls). Feature gates (CRM write-back, webhooks) sit at tier boundaries.

Free$0
Starter$149
Explorer$349
Pro$800
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.

Octoparse

Per-account subscription priced by number of tasks (saved scrapers) and concurrent cloud runs, not by rows or requests. A permanent free plan covers local extraction only; cloud runs, scheduling, IP rotation, and CAPTCHA solving all sit behind the first paid tier. Annual billing carries roughly a 16 percent discount, and an Enterprise tier is quote-only.

Free$0
Standard$58
Professional$209
EnterpriseCustom

At $58 per month annually, Standard is priced roughly where a mid-tier scraping API or a single seat of a sales database sits, and for a team running a handful of recurring extractions it is straightforwardly cheaper than the engineering time it replaces. The value case weakens in two directions. Downward, the free plan's lack of cloud runs means many small users get nothing usable without paying, unlike tools whose free tier is a working, if small, pipeline. Upward, the $209 Professional tier is a large step for what is mostly concurrency, and a team comfortable with code can rent the same throughput from a request-level API for less. Octoparse is worth its price precisely when nobody on the team wants to write or maintain a scraper, and it stops being worth it the moment someone does.

Editorial verdict on each

Clay

Momentum

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 profile

Octoparse

Octoparse is the mature answer for a team that needs recurring web data and has nobody to write a scraper. The visual builder is genuinely more capable than the browser extensions it competes with at the low end, auto-detect removes most of the setup friction, and the cloud tier bundles proxies, CAPTCHA solving, scheduling, and concurrency into one predictable subscription rather than four separate infrastructure bills. The May 2026 MCP server is a real addition rather than a press release, because it lets an agent call the tool instead of a person opening it. The honest caveats are that the free plan is an evaluation sandbox and not a working pipeline, that workflows are trapped in the app with no version control or custom JavaScript, that support is email-only when a scraper breaks on a deadline, and that the hardest anti-bot targets still defeat it. Buy it at Standard when the alternative is a spreadsheet and a copy-paste habit; look at an API-first tool the moment an engineer is available to use one.

Read the full Octoparse profile

Clay profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Octoparse last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.