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.
Still shortlisting? Browse the best in B2B Data Providers and the best in GTM Engineering for every option we track, with award winners called out.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentOctoparse 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 $167/mo billed annually (Launch) | Free for 10 tasks and 50,000 exported rows per month; paid plans from $58 per month billed annually ($69 monthly) |
| 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. CRM auto-sync, webhooks, and the HTTP API integration are gated at Growth. | 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 | 500 actions and 100 data credits per month, unlimited seats and tables, up to 200 rows per table. | 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 | 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
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.
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
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 profileOctoparse
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 profileClay profile last reviewed 2026-09-26; Octoparse last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
The best in B2B Data Providers
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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.
Semantic search over the live web with contact data attached made prospecting a language problem rather than a database subscription.
Signup to verified emails in five minutes with zero configuration, and failed searches cost nothing, so nobody needs training to get value from Anymailfinder.
The best in GTM Engineering
17 trackedGTM engineering tools are the build-it-yourself layer of the go-to-market stack: the workflow automation engines and search APIs that small teams wire into custom prospecting, enrichment, and reporting pipelines instead of buying another point solution.
Roughly eight thousand app connectors and fifteen years of reliability make it the assumed answer whenever two tools need to talk; the catalog is the moat and the verb.
Routers, iterators, and error handlers on a $9 tier: the logic features rivals gate behind higher plans, at the category's lowest per-operation price.
Per-execution pricing, native AI agent nodes, and a free self-hosted edition made it the engine of the DIY enrichment stack, and a reported $2.5B valuation says the market noticed.
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Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Clay and Octoparse?
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.
Is Clay or Octoparse cheaper?
Clay starts at Free plan; paid from $167/mo billed annually (Launch). Octoparse starts at Free for 10 tasks and 50,000 exported rows per month; paid plans from $58 per month billed annually ($69 monthly). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. 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. Octoparse pricing model: Per-account subscription priced by number of tasks (saved scrapers) and concurrent cloud runs, not by rows or requests.
Does Clay or Octoparse have a free plan?
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. Octoparse has a free plan. 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. Trial terms: No standalone trial; the free plan serves as the evaluation path, and paid plans carry a 5-day money-back guarantee.
Who should choose Clay?
GTM engineers and data-savvy teams building automated, multi-provider enrichment and personalization pipelines.
Who should choose Octoparse?
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.
What are the best alternatives to Clay and Octoparse?
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). SaaSTracker profiles 17 products in GTM Engineering. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Zapier (Category Leader), Make (Best Value), n8n (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
