Clay vs PredictLeads
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 Buying Signals & Intent for every option we track, with award winners called out.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentPredictLeads compared with Clay
Clay is the orchestration layer that chains data providers into tables and workflows, and PredictLeads is one of the providers available inside it. They are complements rather than competitors. Buy Clay if you need a place to build the logic and blend many sources; call PredictLeads directly if you have your own engine and want the raw dated signals without paying for orchestration you will not use.
Choose Clay if
GTM engineers and data-savvy teams building automated, multi-provider enrichment and personalization pipelines.
Choose PredictLeads if
Technical go-to-market teams and developers building their own signal engine, Clay users who want dated source-linked signals inside their tables, and product teams embedding company intelligence into their own application, all of whom want data rather than another dashboard.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Clay | PredictLeads |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Data | Signals |
| Starting price | Free plan; paid from $167/mo billed annually (Launch) | $0 for the first 100 API calls per month, then a $40 monthly minimum |
| 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. | Self-serve pay as you go metered by API call, with volume-tiered per-credit rates and a monthly minimum, plus a quoted Enterprise flat-file plan. |
| Free plan | 500 actions and 100 data credits per month, unlimited seats and tables, up to 200 rows per table. | Up to 100 free API calls per month, self-serve, with no card required to start building against the API. |
| Free trial | 14 days | A free tier rather than a time-limited trial, available at sign-up |
| Best for | GTM engineers and data-savvy teams building automated, multi-provider enrichment and personalization pipelines. | Technical go-to-market teams and developers building their own signal engine, Clay users who want dated source-linked signals inside their tables, and product teams embedding company intelligence into their own application, all of whom want data rather than another dashboard. |
| 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. | An hour to a first API response, since the free tier requires no card and the endpoints are conventional REST. Getting to a production motion where signals create tasks is a genuine engineering project of one to three weeks, or an afternoon if you are consuming it inside Clay. |
| Learning curve | The steepest in this report, genuinely a skill. Templates, the academy, and a large creator ecosystem (courses, agencies) flatten it substantially. | Low for a developer and high for everyone else. The API is straightforward and the documentation covers the datasets clearly, but the hard part is not technical: deciding which combinations of signals actually mean something for your business is judgement work that the product deliberately leaves to you. |
| Platforms | Web app, Chrome extension, REST API | REST API, Real-time webhooks, Flat files via AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, and SFTP, MCP endpoint for AI agents |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR program | Data is sourced from public company web pages, news, and filings rather than personal data brokers, European operating base subject to GDPR |
| Founded | 2017 | 2015 |
| Headquarters | New York City, US | Ljubljana, Slovenia |
| Ownership | Venture-backed (private) | Venture-backed, lightly funded |
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.
PredictLeads
Strengths
- Every record carries a primary source URL, which is the single most useful quality property in signal data and something most vendors cannot offer.
- Published crawl cadences rather than vague freshness claims: news as often as every eight minutes, job data at least every 36 hours, company sites daily on average.
- Coverage genuinely at scale, including 120 million companies, 270 million historical job records since 2016, and 1.4 billion technology detections.
- Data is crawled first-party rather than licensed from brokers, so errors are fixable at source and the provenance chain is short.
Limitations
- There is no application. No dashboard, no alerts, no inbox, and nothing that tells a salesperson what to do this morning without you building it.
- Company-level only. Nothing about individual people, so champion job changes and person-level intent are outside the product entirely.
- No first-party signals at all: PredictLeads cannot see your website traffic, your product usage, or your email engagement.
- No scoring or prioritisation. Deciding that a funding round plus five engineering hires means an account is in market is logic you write and maintain.
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.
PredictLeads
Self-serve pay as you go metered by API call, with volume-tiered per-credit rates and a monthly minimum, plus a quoted Enterprise flat-file plan.
- Free$0
- Pay as you go, 101 to 5,000 calls$40 minimum plus $0.04 per credit
- Pay as you go, 5,001 to 100,000 calls$0.02 falling to $0.01 per credit
- Pay as you go, above 100,000 calls$0.004 falling to $0.002 per credit
- EnterpriseCustom
For a team that can write code or drive a Clay table, PredictLeads is the cheapest credible signal data on the market by a wide margin. A hundred free calls a month to prototype, a $40 floor to go live, and per-call rates that fall to fractions of a cent at scale, against a category where packaged platforms start at thousands of dollars a month for signals they source from providers like this one. The value collapses entirely if you cannot build: there is no interface, no alerting, and no scoring, so a non-technical buyer will spend $40 and get nothing. Judged as a data purchase rather than a software purchase, the coverage numbers, the published crawl cadences, and the source URL on every record make this unusually good value.
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 profilePredictLeads
PredictLeads is what you buy when you have decided to build the signal engine yourself. The coverage is real, the crawl cadences are published rather than implied, and the primary source URL on every record is a quality property almost nobody else in this category offers. Pricing starts free, floors at $40 a month, and falls to fractions of a cent per call, which makes it dramatically cheaper than any packaged platform running on comparable data. The catch is unambiguous and you should not talk yourself past it: there is no dashboard, no alert, and no scoring, so the value only exists if you or your Clay table can turn API responses into something a person acts on. Technical go-to-market teams should treat this as a default component of their stack. Everyone else should buy a tool with an interface and let it worry about where the data came from.
Read the full PredictLeads profileClay profile last reviewed 2026-09-26; PredictLeads last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
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Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Clay and PredictLeads?
Clay is the orchestration layer that chains data providers into tables and workflows, and PredictLeads is one of the providers available inside it. They are complements rather than competitors. Buy Clay if you need a place to build the logic and blend many sources; call PredictLeads directly if you have your own engine and want the raw dated signals without paying for orchestration you will not use.
Is Clay or PredictLeads cheaper?
Clay starts at Free plan; paid from $167/mo billed annually (Launch). PredictLeads starts at $0 for the first 100 API calls per month, then a $40 monthly minimum. 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. PredictLeads pricing model: Self-serve pay as you go metered by API call, with volume-tiered per-credit rates and a monthly minimum, plus a quoted Enterprise flat-file plan.
Does Clay or PredictLeads 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. PredictLeads has a free plan. Up to 100 free API calls per month, self-serve, with no card required to start building against the API. Trial terms: A free tier rather than a time-limited trial, available at sign-up.
Who should choose Clay?
GTM engineers and data-savvy teams building automated, multi-provider enrichment and personalization pipelines.
Who should choose PredictLeads?
Technical go-to-market teams and developers building their own signal engine, Clay users who want dated source-linked signals inside their tables, and product teams embedding company intelligence into their own application, all of whom want data rather than another dashboard.
What are the best alternatives to Clay and PredictLeads?
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 Buying Signals & Intent. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Crunchbase (Category Leader), Trigify (Best Value), Unify (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
