Functionality | 7 <p>Clay is not your typical lead generation tool. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Instead of using one proprietary database, Clay integrates with dozens of underlying providers (such as Apollo, Hunter, RocketReach etc.) to allow you to pick and choose the best data from almost anywhere. Its spreadsheets and tables focused interface shines when it comes to list building and enrichment tasks in particular. Additionally, when tested, we find its AI features to be well executed and sprinkled in all the right places.</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">However, Clay does not provide any kind of outbound or CRM style functionality meaning you'll still need to pay for dedicated tooling in these spaces separately. </span></p> | 9 <p>Amplemarket is not a standalone lead generation database. Instead it's an all-in-one lead generation platform that bundles a comprehensive database (300M contacts), an email/LinkedIn sequencing tool and rich signal tracking capabilities. It's AI sales co-pilot, Duo, is worth calling out as when tested, we found its capabilities to be particularly comprehensive. Despite requiring some initial setup to define personas and tracking signals, Duo can find leads, craft custom outbound sequences and execute on them, all autonomously.</p> | 7 <p>Reply.io is a well-rounded lead generation platform. It covers most standard filtering features and has a large contact database, strong email verification for the B2B database and allows granular prospecting through custom fields and advanced search/smart filtering.</p><p><br></p><p>It also incorporates an AI SDR Agent which unlocks automating workflows and lead scoring capabilities, along with personalising emails and creating an email sequencing flow.</p><p><br></p><p>It just lacks some features which we think would enhance the tool even further such as being able to track company news and context and allowing explicit filtering looking at company intent signals/company org charts.</p> |
Ease of Use | 7 <p>Clay's web app is superbly designed and intuitive to use. If you're use to working with Excel and Google Sheets for your prospecting work, you'll feel right at home. That being said, the sheer depth of features may initially feel daunting and take some time to make the most of. It would take an average SMB employee an hour to master the platforms use.</p> | 6 <p>Amplemarket's interfaces are well designed and intuitive. It's core prospecting experience is familiar and easy to use. Additionally, its email sequencing tool is also well laid out and easy to grasp. However, importing contacts into sequences - a key workflow - is extremely clunky.</p> | 5 <p>Reply can be challenging to use effectively. The core prospecting workflow feels unnecessarily complicated at times. The system lacks saved filters and there's no option to bulk select and add contacts to a list seamlessly - instead, you're forced to launch a lengthy "live search" process each time. While the onboarding experience includes a helpful chatbot for questions, the sheer volume of features creates a steep learning curve.</p> |
Look and feel | 8 <p>Clay's web app is modern, minimalist and well designed. When tested, we find its pages are very fast to load and whenever there are tasks that take some time to complete (e.g. AI agents doing web scraping), Clay's interface is clear and handles these scenarios well.</p> | 9 <p>When tested, we find Amplemarket to one of the best designed sales tools on the market. It's interfaces are minimalist, sleek and modern. We especially appreciated the keyboard shortcut options presented. When tested, its search pages were snappy and quick to load (often <1 second) and any AI interfaces which required time were well presented with beautiful loading animations.</p> | 6 <p>Reply's UI is mostly easy to navigate but there's simply a lot of content to go through within each tab at times due to it being so feature rich. When we tested the web app we noticed moderately fast search results and page load times. The only exception is that it takes very long to return results for prospecting data, since Reply does the search in real time.</p> |
Customisability | 10 <p>Clay is deeply customisable on a number of fronts. The primary channel is via its primary enrichment interface. The ability to add custom columns to tables to enrich lead lists with almost any datapoint you can imagine, is immensely powerful. Additionally, if a datapoint you're looking for is not natively integrated with Clay or cannot be scraped by its web agent, you can also take advantage of any external APIs with ease.</p> | 8 <p>Amplemarket offers a wide array of channels to customise your experience. Most of these related to Duo, its AI sales copilot. To get the most out of the product, you're able to customise which buying/market signals are relevant to you, define personas & ICPs and also provide clear definitions of you and your competitors (and where your edge lies).</p> | 7 <p>There's a great deal of customisability on offer here, you can make custom filters, workflows and lists and save and share lists in the company.</p> |
Ease of Setup | 6 <p>Clay offers a self-serve free trial for their platform. Initial set up can be a little confusing though, given the novelty of their spreadsheets style user interface (taking >15 minutes). However, their help centre and 'university' guidance centre is particularly well crafted which eases the burden in terms of getting the most out of the platform.</p> | 3 <p>Frustratingly, Amplemarket does not offer a self-serve option to try out the platform. Instead, you’ll need to trudge through two sales demos before you are able to access their trial. Once access was granted, we found the platform very simple to set up initially, however, there are a lot of details you’ll want to customise (such as personas, competitors etc. for their Duo AI system) that can take several days to complete.</p> | 6 <p>Reply offers a simple, self-serve free trial for their platform. When tested, we found the initial setup to be simple (taking <10 mins). Additionally, connecting email addresses to their outbound platform was relatively trivial too - with a one click connect feature for popular providers like Google. However, given the sheer breadth of functionality that Reply offers, there are a lot of features you'll want to customize to get the most out of the platform which can take several days to configure.</p> |
Customer Support | 9 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The primary channel for support in Clay is via a chat widget inside their web app. The initial chat will be with an AI chatbot instead of a real agent. When tested, we find this AI chatbot to be one of the most helpful on the market, being able to answer most questions we had. When it failed, it readily handed off to a real agent in less than one hour who was able to handle more complex queries via email. Additionally, we find Clay's resources and help centre to be one of the richest and easiest to consume on the market.</span></p> | 4 <p>You can contact Amplemarket's customer support via a chat widget inside its web app. When tested, we found the initial AI chatbot to be unhelpful, and reluctant to pass over to a human agent. Multiple users also report dissatisfaction with the speed and helpfulness of Amplemarket's human agents. However, its help centre documentation and 'university' guides are very rich and well laid out, answering most questions we had about the product.</p> | 4 <p>Reply has decent customer support, with an in-built chatbot supported by an extensive knowledge base which you can search through. However, its AI chatbot gives contradictory answers when tested, and it takes slightly longer to connect with their team compared to competitors e.g. around a few business hours.</p> |
Integratability | 10 <p>Clay natively integrates with dozens of products and lead generation databases to give users a broad array of data to enrich their leads with. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Additionally, if a datapoint you're looking for is not natively integrated with Clay or cannot be scraped by its web agent, you can also take advantage of any external APIs with ease.</span></p><p>Additionally, Clay integrates natively with most popular CRMs and sales engagement platforms too.</p> | 4 <p>Amplemarkets array of integrations covers the basics. It offers integrations with major CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot) as well as automation platforms like Zapier. We were also pleased to see an API that allows businesses to interact with Amplemarket's leads database directly. However, we would also liked to have seen integrations with external sales engagement platforms such as Salesloft or Outreach.</p> | 6 <p>Integrates natively with a majority of important software.</p> |
Ease of Migration | 8 <p>Clay provides self-serve export functionality within its web app. It's particularly well suited to exporting data into the CSV format given the native tablular format of data in Clay itself. Clay allows you to export all kinds of tables, including custom columns and web scraped enrichment data too.</p> | 6 <p>Amplemarket provides self-serve export functionality within its web app. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We were also pleased to see an API that allows businesses to interact with Amplemarket's leads database directly.</span></p> | 6 <p>Allows you to export contacts, reports and replies in your inbox on the platform. However there are some limitations on how many contacts you can export on different pricing tiers (100,000 contacts on the free tier)</p> |