| Functionality | 9 <p>As a lead generation platform, Apollo is mature, rounded and feature rich. It covers the basics well - including a large contact database, strong email verification and granular prospecting and lead scoring tooling.</p><p>Additionally, its adjacent functionalities are also well executed. For example, its outbound sequencing feature is powerful and well integrated. Additionally, small AI touches are well dispersed across the platform - such as a native call transcription and summarisation bot for prospect meetings.</p> | 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> |
| Ease of Use | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Apollo's web app is intuitive and easy to navigate. Additionally, its onboarding was simple and not overwhelming. It's core prospecting interfaces are familiar amongst competitors making it easy to pick up. It would take an average SMB employee less than 30 minutes to master its use.</span></p> | 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> |
| Look and feel | 7 <p>Apollo's web app is relatively simple and easy to navigate. Additionally, when tested, we find it's search pages were generally fast to load.</p><p>However, given its feature richness some views were cramped and overflowing with information. For example, its company profile view is cluttered with valuable information like recent news flow hidden in unintuitive areas.</p> | 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> |
| Customisability | 7 <p>There are a number of ways to customise your experience with Apollo, including basic channels such as creating custom lists, custom searches (which you can share with team mates) and defining criteria for lead scoring. There are also some deeper levels which you can customise such as providing the platform with context about your business and what you are selling - this information will then be used by their AI when drafting email sequences for example.</p> | 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> |
| Ease of Setup | 6 <p>Unlike many of similar products of this scale, Apollo offers a simple, self-serve free trial for their platform. When tested, we found the initial setup to be simple (taking <10 mins). However, given then feature breadth that Apollo offers, it can take a lot of time to fully customize the experience. For example - most customers will still need to connect CRMs and customize Apollo's AI 'power-ups' to suit their needs.</p> | 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> |
| Customer Support | 8 <p>You can contact a support agent via a live chat widget inside Apollo's web app. When tested, we find agents to be helpful and about to troubleshoot technical questions often in the first response.</p><p>Additionally, Apollo provides a detailed help centre which was able to answer almost all basic question we had in testing.</p> | 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> |
| Integratability | 9 <p>Apollo offers a large range of native integrations built by either them or their partners. These include ones with<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> popular CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot), sales engagement platforms (Outreach, Salesloft), email clients (Gmail, Outlook) and automation platforms like Zapier. </span></p> | 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> |
| Ease of Migration | 6 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Apollo offers self-serve export functionality for contacts directly within their web app. High export limits are also available for larger enterprises depending on what plan you are on.</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Additionally, Apollo offers a well-documented API through which businesses are able to interact with their database directly.</span></p> | 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> |
