| 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> | 6 <p>Lemlist is not your typical lead generation tool. Instead, it's core functionality is outbound sequencing and as part of that, there's a native prospecting tool built in. Though Lemlist's contact database is large (450M contacts) and the filters it provides are granular - we find it to be inaccurate and cumbersome to use. In many case, it failed to provide emails for our usual test searches. That being said, Lemlist's outbound functionality is well executed and feature rich.</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> | 3 <p>We find Lemlist's web app to be well laid out and intuitive to navigate. However, certain interfaces, such as the prospecting interface, are cumbersome to use. Additionally, list building interface was particularly buggy and confusing to use - often displaying error messages with no clear action for the user to resolve.</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> | 4 <p>Lemlist's design aesthetic is modern, clean and easy on the eyes. However, we noticed some elements of the UI were often positioned poorly or cut off by other components - for example, the inability to close toast messages was particularly annoying on many occasions.</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> | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">While Lemlist offers the ability to create custom lists, it lacks some customisability facets that larger businesses may find helpful. For example the ability to manage and assign territories to specific sales agents or score leads.</span></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> | 8 <p>Lemlist 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.</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> | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Lemlist's primary means for customer support is via a live chat widget within their web app. It was quick and simple to contact a real support agent (often <5 mins) and when tested, we find them to be helpful and about to troubleshoot technical questions often in the first response.</span></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> | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Lemlist provides a number of integrations with popular CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot) and automation platforms like Zapier. Additionally, it offers an API through which users can interact with Lemlist's database directly. However, we were disappointed to see a lack of integrations with external sales engagement platforms such as Salesloft or Outreach.</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> | 6 <p>Lemlist offers self-serve export functionality within its web app.</p><p>Additionally, Lemlist offers a well-documented API through which businesses are able to interact with their database directly.</p> |
