| 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> | 3 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">LeadIQ's functionality is narrow. When it comes to prospect search, the first hurdle you'll face is the relatively small size of its database compared to some competitors. Additionally, adjacent features around email engagement are omitted entirely meaning that you will need to pay for dedicated outbound tools separately. However, LeadIQ does provide an email/message personalization AI feature which integrates nicely with many outbound platforms. </span></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> | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">LeadIQ's limited feature set means that its web app is relatively easy to navigate. Its prospecting interface is familiar when compared to competitors, however, some interfaces are clunky and cramped and often require a second look to find the data point/button you're hunting for. Overall, it would take an average SMB employee a few hours to master its use.</span></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> | 2 <p>LeadIQ's UI feels dated. When tested, we find many pages to be overwhelming and confusingly laid out which made navigation difficult at times despite the overall lack of functionality. Additionally, search pages were often slow to load (occasionally taking >5 seconds to load).</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> | 6 <p>LeadIQ offers a handful of avenues for customisation that would be help to both SMBs and larger enterprises. For example you're able to map additional custom fields when adding contacts to external CRMs/engagement platforms and you're able to manage/assign territories for individual sales agents.</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> | 7 <p>LeadIQ offers a simple, self-serve free trial for their platform. When tested, we found the initial setup to be very simple (taking <5 mins). Additionally, the lack of native email sequencing functionality means it doesn't take long to get the most out of the platform either. The only areas which do take some time to configure are buried in settings - such as the ability to <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">manage/assign territories for individual sales agents.</span></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> | 3 <p>You can contact a support agent via a live chat widget inside LeadIQ's web app. When tested, we found the default chat bot to be unhelpful and often linking to irrelevant help centre articles. Additionally, when tested, it took over 24 hours to contact a real agent to answer our queries.</p><p>However, LeadIQ does provide a detailed help centre which was able to answer almost all basic questions we had in testing.</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><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">LeadIQ provides a number of integrations with popular CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot), email clients (Gmail) and engagement platforms (Outreach, Salesloft). However, we would like to see an API offered (as most competitors do today).</span></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> | 4 <p>LeadIQ offers self-serve export functionality within its web app.</p><p>However, we would like to have seen an API on offer (as many competitors do currently) for direct querying and interaction with the LeadIQ database.</p> |
