Clay vs Trigger.dev
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Clay and Trigger.dev.
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Verdict: Trigger.dev wins
Trigger.dev scores 4.4/5, edging out Clay at 3.9/5. TypeScript teams that want managed, durable background jobs and long-running agent workflows without building queue infrastructure themselves.
Clay AI-powered data enrichment and outreach | Trigger.dev Open-source workflow automation platform for AI agents and integrations | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 3.9 (1 review) | 4.4 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting Price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best For | GTM engineers and outbound teams who will pay for data quality and want one workbench for enrichment, signals, research, and campaign prep. | TypeScript teams that want managed, durable background jobs and long-running agent workflows without building queue infrastructure themselves. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | free tierteam features | free tieropen sourceapi access |
| Visit Clay → | Visit Trigger.dev → |
Clay
Pros
- + Waterfall enrichment cut my blended per-contact cost roughly in half versus single-provider lookup (71% email coverage on 500 companies across three providers)
- + Two-meter pricing (Data Credits + Actions) is clearer than the old unified credit; Clay claims marketplace data prices dropped 50–90% in the redesign
- + 200+ data providers in one contract replaces a stack of separate enrichment subscriptions
- + Claygent research answered structured questions with source URLs on most rows in my test — useful when staged behind cheaper filters
- + Financially credible and shipping fast: $115M Series D at $7.1B valuation (clay.com/blog/series-d), 17k+ customers claimed
Cons
- - Real entry price is $185/mo (Launch) plus credit burn — the legacy $149 Starter figure floating around aggregators is outdated
- - Waterfall ordering is unforgiving: putting an expensive provider first tripled my credit burn for 5% more coverage in one test
- - Generalist automation is out of scope — no arbitrary SaaS triggers, no self-hosting; GTM data motions only
- - Some Series D "self-learning revenue engine" claims are roadmap, not what ships today; treat the agent story as vendor vision
- - Email accuracy still depends on underlying providers — I saw mid-single-digit bounce rates on best-effort results and ran downstream validation
Trigger.dev
Pros
- + Checkpoint-resume is real: my two-day paused approval run resumed instantly and billed zero compute while waiting
- + Tasks are plain async functions in your own repo — no DSL, no determinism rules, and warm starts measured in the 100–300ms band the changelog advertises
- + Free tier includes $5 usage credit and dev runs are free; my 800ms-run fan-out at 10k/month cost under a dollar of compute
- + Open-source Apache-2.0 with the same codebase on Cloud and self-hosted, and an unusually active release line (v4.5.12 as of August 2026)
- + Full workflow surface built in: retries, queues, scheduling, idempotency, priority, lifecycle hooks, wait tokens and AI-SDK tool integration
Cons
- - TypeScript/JavaScript only — Python and Go teams are simply not served
- - Production self-hosting means Postgres, Redis, webapp and worker containers plus a build tunnel; the docs get thin exactly where ops gets hard
- - The plan fee is a usage credit, not a ceiling — LLM-heavy agent runs can outrun the included allowance without cost modelling
- - v3 is shut down on Cloud (old triggers and deploys no longer run), and the v3→v4 migration has sharp edges for busy projects
- - Concurrency and log-retention limits bite early (1-day logs on Free), and the 'AI agents' marketing outruns what is fundamentally an execution platform
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Clay or Trigger.dev?▼
Trigger.dev scores higher at 4.4/5 vs 3.9/5 for Clay, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Clay and Trigger.dev?▼
Clay: Clay is a sales and marketing data platform that pulls contact and company data from 200+ providers, enriches it with AI agents, and powers targeted outreach for go-to-market teams. Trigger.dev: Trigger.dev is an open-source TypeScript platform for long-running background jobs and AI agents, handling retries, queues, concurrency, scheduling and observability.
Is Clay or Trigger.dev more affordable?▼
Clay starts at €0/mo, Trigger.dev starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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