Quick answer: Pick Clay if you want to build data workflows: enrich lists from 150+ providers, run AI research and push the results into your CRM, ads or a sequencer, with someone on the team to set it up. Pick Buzz if you want the outreach itself done, with LinkedIn, email and calls in one seat for $79 a month billed monthly, or an AI Employee that finds prospects and books meetings for you. Clay details below come from its own pricing page, checked on November 4, 2026.
Clay and Buzz show up in the same searches because both help B2B teams fill pipeline, but they sit at different steps. Clay is where you find and shape data. Buzz is where you reach people and book meetings, either yourself or with an AI Employee doing the work. This guide compares them on what they do, channels, AI, data and price.
Buzz vs Clay at a glance
Clay prices and features come from clay.com/pricing, checked on November 4, 2026. Buzz figures come from the Buzz pricing page. Where a price is not on a public page, we say "not published".
| Buzz | Clay | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Outbound platform: LinkedIn, email and calls in one seat, or an AI Employee that runs outbound for you | Data and workflow platform: enrichment from 150+ providers, AI research (Claygent), signals and automations |
| Best for | Teams that want booked meetings without stitching tools together | GTM teams with someone to build and run data workflows, often called a GTM engineer |
| Channels | Email, LinkedIn and calls (voicemail drops included) in every Core seat | Email through Clay's sequencer or a sequencing integration; ad audiences pushed to LinkedIn, Meta and Google. LinkedIn messaging and calling not listed |
| AI | AI Employee finds prospects, writes messages, handles replies and objections, follows up and books meetings in Calendly | Claygent AI agent does web research and custom data points; AI models billed per task or by tokens |
| Contact data | 250M+ contact database with enrichment | 150+ data providers with multi-provider waterfalls, paid with data credits or your own API keys |
| Plans | Core, AI Employee, White Label | Free, Launch, Growth, Enterprise |
| Entry price | Core: $79 per seat per month, billed monthly | Launch: from $185 per month monthly, or $167 per month billed annually (15,000 actions and 2,500 data credits a month) |
| Next tier | AI Employee: custom (talk to sales) | Growth: from $495 per month monthly, or $446 per month billed annually (40,000 actions and 6,000 data credits a month) |
| Pricing model | Per seat | Per workspace, by usage: actions plus data credits; seats unlimited |
| Agencies and white label | White Label: $1,000 per month for 20 seats, billed annually | Not published |
| Free start | Start free | Free plan (500 actions and 100 data credits a month, 200 rows per table) and a 14-day trial |
Pricing: what you actually pay
Clay prices by usage, not by seat. Every plan has unlimited seats, and each price is made of two parts: actions, which pay for the platform work, and data credits, which pay for the data Clay buys from its providers. Annual billing saves 10%.
- Free: 500 actions and 100 data credits a month, up to 200 rows per table.
- Launch: from $185 a month on monthly billing ($60 for 15,000 actions plus $125 for 2,500 data credits), or $167 a month billed annually. Adds phone number enrichment, job change and other signals, and email campaign integrations.
- Growth: from $495 a month on monthly billing ($205 for 40,000 actions plus $290 for 6,000 data credits), or $446 a month billed annually. Adds CRM auto-sync, HTTP API and webhook automations, web intent signals and ad audiences.
- Enterprise: custom pricing with an annual commitment.
Bigger tiers of actions or data credits raise the price. For example, 50,000 data credits a month on Launch is listed at $2,125 a month on monthly billing. Data credits start at $0.05 each, and if you bring your own API keys you skip data credits and only pay for actions.
Buzz keeps it to three options:
- Core: $79 per seat per month, billed monthly. Includes LinkedIn and email outreach, phone calling, voicemail drops, CRM integrations and AI message drafting.
- AI Employee: custom priced, so you talk to sales.
- White Label: $1,000 a month for 20 seats, billed annually. See Buzz white label.
Bottom line on price: Clay's first paid plan starts at $185 a month on monthly billing before you add a tool to actually send LinkedIn messages or make calls. A small team on Buzz Core pays $79 per seat a month for data plus all three outreach channels. For a full cost breakdown of AI outbound, read how much an AI SDR costs.
Channels: email, LinkedIn and calls
Clay can send email through its own sequencer or pass leads to a sequencing tool, and on Growth it can push ad audiences to LinkedIn, Meta and Google. Its pricing page does not list LinkedIn messaging, connection requests or a dialer, so teams usually pair it with other outreach tools.
Buzz includes email, LinkedIn and calls from the first paid seat, and the AI Employee can run those steps for you. That matters because email-only outreach tends to stall as inboxes get stricter. Our guide on why email-only AI SDRs stall explains why, and how to build one LinkedIn and email sequence shows how to set it up.
AI: research tool or AI Employee
Clay's AI is built for research. Claygent, its AI agent, searches the web to fill in custom data points, and you can call AI models inside your tables for tasks like sorting, summaries and first lines. Most models cost a flat number of data credits per task, and heavier models are billed by the tokens they use.
Buzz's AI Employee does the outbound work itself. It learns your business, finds prospects that match your ideal customer profile, builds campaigns across LinkedIn and email, handles replies and objections, follows up when people go quiet, and books meetings in Calendly. Learn more in what an AI Employee is, or see how the roles differ in our AI BDR vs AI SDR vs AI sales agent guide.
Who should pick which
- Pick Clay if you have someone who will build data workflows and you want deep enrichment, signals and research feeding your CRM and other tools.
- Pick Buzz Core if you want contact data plus LinkedIn, email and calls in one seat at $79 a month, on monthly billing.
- Pick Buzz AI Employee if you want outbound done for you, from finding prospects to booking meetings.
- Pick Buzz White Label if you are an agency that wants to resell multichannel AI outbound under your own brand at a published price.
Still comparing? See our Buzz vs Apollo.io comparison, Buzz vs HeyReach, the best AI SDR tools of 2026 and our list of 11x alternatives.
Ready to try Buzz? Start free, or talk to sales about an AI Employee.
