Comparison
Lead Scorer vs Clay
Clay is the deepest enrichment orchestrator on the market and it does not send a single message. Lead Scorer does the research and the sending in one subscription. The real question is how many tools you want to run before a prospect hears from you.
Verdict
Pick Clay if you enjoy building your own waterfalls, run several ICPs at once, and have the volume to amortise $167/month before a message goes out. Pick Lead Scorer if you want one subscription that finds, scores, writes and queues — and you would rather spend the evening on the product than on the table.
What Clay really costs one person
500 new prospects a month, one person, a 3-touch email sequence (1,500 emails).
Advertised
$167/month billed annually (Launch) — $185 monthly
Real month, one person
≈ $284/month
1.7× the advertised price
Lead Scorer, same month
Scale is €200/month and includes up to 5 connected email accounts, 1 LinkedIn account, 2,000 credits and €80 of monthly AI budget.
Billed monthly, cancel anytime. Yearly billing gives 12 months for the price of 10: Pro €990, Done for You at its live five-spot tier price and Scale €2,000.
Read on Clay's own pricing page. The March 2026 restructure is reported, corroborated by roughly six independent analyses.
clay.comWhat the advertised price leaves out
- Clay has no sending channel at all. The scenario adds a sequencer (Instantly Growth $37.60) and a LinkedIn tool (Waalaxy Advanced €49 ≈ $57).
- 3 mailboxes ≈ $21/month and 2 secondary domains ≈ $1.74/month, as with every stack.
- Data credit overage carries a 30% premium, from $0.05/credit. Actions have no overage at all — you change tier or you stop.
- Since the restructure of 11 March 2026, HTTP and API calls consume Actions. They used to be free. Marketplace data prices dropped 50–90% in the same move.
- Same page, two answers: the Launch card says 3K data credits, the FAQ below says 2,500. Read on 2026-08-09.
How we priced this
- Scenario
- 500 new prospects a month, one person, a 3-touch email sequence (1,500 emails).
- Infrastructure counted in every total
- 3 mailboxes at 30 emails/day (Google Workspace Business Starter, ≈$21/month) and 2 secondary domains (≈$1.74/month) are counted in every stack, because every vendor leaves them out.
- Billing
- Annual commitment wherever one exists — the assumption most favourable to the vendor.
- LinkedIn cap
- LinkedIn's ~100 invitations/week soft cap means a single account cannot physically work 500 new prospects a month. The totals model 500 by email and ~400 on LinkedIn.
- Exchange rate
- €1 = $1.155 (US Federal Reserve H.10, 2026-08-06). Conversions are marked ≈.
- Limits
- No purchase was made. Every official figure comes from a vendor page read on 2026-08-09; third-party figures are labelled as such and never used as prices.
Side by side
| Feature | Lead Scorer | Clay |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Full CRM, forever | Free plan with limited credits |
| Entry price | €0 CRM · €99/mo with Pro | $167/mo (Launch, annual) |
| Real cost, 500 prospects/month | Scale €200/month + your mailboxes and domains | ≈ $284 (Clay + sequencer + LinkedIn + mailboxes) |
| Sends anything | Email and LinkedIn, after your approval | No channel at all |
| Enrichment depth | 7 fixed AI modules | 100+ providers, custom waterfalls |
| Writes the messages | Agent drafts, playbook + sanitization | AI formulas — you build the prompt and the table |
| Seat minimum | None | None — unlimited seats from the free plan |
| Published overage rate | Yes — €0.049/credit | Credits +30% · Actions have no overage |
| Agent access | MCP server, 131 tools, OAuth 2.1 | API — and API calls now consume Actions |
Where Clay beats Lead Scorer
Written by us, about our own product.
- Clay's enrichment waterfall is the deepest in the category — 100+ providers, fallback logic, and you own the recipe. Ours is a fixed 7-module pipeline you cannot rewire.
- Unlimited seats from the free plan. No seat tax at any tier, which almost nothing else in this market can say.
- It integrates with everything, including us: keeping Clay for enrichment and using Lead Scorer to write and send is a perfectly sensible stack.
- Clay publishes a real overage rate for data credits — 12 of the 17 tools we priced publish none.
Where Lead Scorer wins
Same standard of evidence, opposite direction.
- One subscription that also sends. Clay's $167 buys data and no channel; €99 buys research, copy and a queue.
- The agent writes from versioned outreach rules, then sanitizes placeholders and email HTML. Clay hands you columns and you write.
- €99/month against $167 before a single email leaves the building.
- MCP-native: your agent calls our 131 tools directly instead of you maintaining a table of formulas.
- Lead Scorer discovers companies on the web and checks their activity against the target criteria. Source links support company identification and current decision-maker research.
Which one is for you
Pick Clay if…
Growth engineers and agencies running bespoke enrichment across several ICPs, who want to own the logic and already have a sequencer they like.
Pick Lead Scorer if…
One founder who wants prospects contacted this week, not a table built this week.
Frequently asked questions
Is Clay a competitor or a complement?
Both, depending on where your time goes. Clay enriches and orchestrates; it never contacts anyone. If your bottleneck is data logic, Clay wins and you can feed its output into Lead Scorer. If your bottleneck is that nobody has been contacted yet, one subscription that researches, writes and queues is the shorter path.
What changed in Clay's pricing on 11 March 2026?
The tiers were restructured — Starter/Explorer/Pro at $149/$349/$800 became Launch/Growth/Enterprise at $185/$495/custom. Marketplace data prices fell 50–90%, but HTTP and API requests, previously free, now consume Actions. Existing customers were grandfathered and the migration window closed on 10 April 2026. This is reported, not official: it is corroborated by around six independent analyses, and Clay's live page reflects the new tiers.
How much does the whole stack cost with Clay?
≈$284/month for the scenario we priced: Clay Launch $167 (annual), Instantly Growth $37.60 for sending, Waalaxy Advanced ≈$57 for LinkedIn, 3 mailboxes ≈$21, domains ≈$1.74. That is the highest total of the nine assembled stacks we computed, and the lowest ratio to advertised price (1.7×) — Clay is expensive honestly.
Does Lead Scorer replace Clay?
Lead Scorer discovers companies on the web and checks their activity against the target criteria. Source links support company identification and current decision-maker research.
Other comparisons
Run your outreach on autopilot with AI agents.
Free CRM forever. The outbound agent from €99/month — it finds the accounts, scores them, writes the messages. Nothing sends until you approve it.