Grain vs Clay
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Grain and Clay.
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Verdict: Grain wins
Grain scores 4.0/5, edging out Clay at 3.9/5. Sales and customer-facing teams of roughly 5-50 seats that want meeting capture, CRM-ready notes, and call coaching at published per-seat prices.
Grain AI meeting recording and insights for sales | Clay AI-powered data enrichment and outreach | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 4.0 (1 review) | 3.9 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting Price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best For | Sales and customer-facing teams of roughly 5-50 seats that want meeting capture, CRM-ready notes, and call coaching at published per-seat prices. | GTM engineers and outbound teams who will pay for data quality and want one workbench for enrichment, signals, research, and campaign prep. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | free tierteam features | free tierteam features |
| Visit Grain → | Visit Clay → |
Grain
Pros
- + Bot-free desktop capture meant no notetaker robot to explain at the start of customer calls — the transcripts and AI notes held up in my checks
- + Transparent per-seat pricing from $15/mo (annual) with a usable free tier, against quote-only enterprise incumbents
- + Custom AI prompts let me steer summary shape to match our CRM hygiene process instead of accepting a generic template
- + MCP server on the platform (basic on Free, advanced on Business) let Claude query workspace meeting data directly
- + Trackers, deal boards, and AI coaching bring Gong-style call intelligence to a five-to-fifty-seat team at a fraction of the price
Cons
- - Recorder-seat rules on Free are contradictory in Grain's own docs (pricing page: unlimited notetaker seats; support article: one, plus a 20-bot-recording cap for personal emails)
- - Free tier walls are hard: 45-minute meetings, short history (30 days per the pricing page), and no uploads, CRM, or coaching
- - Starter caps uploads at 10/month and its 10-upload limit bites teams importing external recordings
- - All paid seats in a workspace must be on the same plan tier — no mixing Starter and Business to control costs
- - Thinner revenue intelligence than Gong-class tools: no predictive deal scoring or deep forecasting
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
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Grain or Clay?▼
Grain scores higher at 4.0/5 vs 3.9/5 for Clay, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Grain and Clay?▼
Grain: Grain records, transcribes and summarises meetings, and clips the moments worth sharing into the CRM or a message. 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.
Is Grain or Clay more affordable?▼
Grain starts at €0/mo, Clay starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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