Clay vs Hunter

Clay is a go-to-market data platform from a New York company that works like a spreadsheet for prospecting and enrichment. You import or source lists of companies and people, and each column can call an external data provider, an AI agent or a formula, so a row fills itself with firmographics, contact details, technology data and custom research.

Its best-known feature is waterfall enrichment: Clay queries more than 100 providers in sequence until one returns, for example, a verified email, and you spend credits only on results. Claygent is an AI research agent that visits websites and answers custom questions, such as whether a company sells to enterprises or has a free trial. Signals track job changes, hiring and funding, and results sync to CRMs such as HubSpot and Salesforce and to sequencing tools. Plans are tiered by monthly credits, starting with a limited free plan, and credit consumption is the main cost driver.

Clay fits revenue operations teams, outbound sales teams and agencies that work at volume and can invest time in building tables. The learning curve is real, poorly designed tables burn credits, and for a simple lead list it is overkill. Apollo combines a contact database with sequencing in a simpler package, ZoomInfo is the enterprise data incumbent, and Cognism is strong for European contact data. An ecosystem of Clay agencies and consultants has grown around the product because setup skill matters so much.

Hunter is an email finding and verification service founded in Paris in 2015 by François Grante and Antoine Finkelstein. It helps marketers, recruiters, PR people and founders find the professional email address of a specific person or company, then check that the address is deliverable before sending.

Domain Search lists the public email addresses and naming pattern found for a company domain, each with sources and a confidence score. Email Finder guesses a person's address from their name and domain, Email Verifier checks deliverability through SMTP and other signals, and bulk tasks run the same jobs on uploaded lists. Campaigns sends simple personalized sequences from a connected Gmail or Outlook account, a Chrome extension surfaces emails on any website, and an API and integrations push data into CRMs such as HubSpot, Pipedrive and Salesforce. A free plan includes a small monthly pool of credits for searches and verifications; paid plans scale that credit pool.

Hunter suits people who need accurate emails without buying a large sales database. It is transparent about sources and GDPR-conscious, which matters in Europe. It does not provide phone numbers or detailed firmographic filters, its database is smaller than Apollo's, and Campaigns is basic compared with Lemlist or Instantly. Apollo bundles data and sequencing, Lusha adds phone numbers, and Snov.io or Dropcontact are close alternatives for finding and enrichment.