Best Clay Alternatives for B2B Sales Prospecting

What It Is

Clay alternatives are B2B sales intelligence and data enrichment platforms that help revenue teams find prospect contacts, enrich lead lists, and run outbound workflows, without Clay's own approach of stitching together many third-party data providers by hand. Apollo.io and ZoomInfo are the two most commonly recommended standalone alternatives. Clearbit, often mentioned alongside them, is no longer a standalone product: HubSpot acquired it in 2023 and folded it into HubSpot as Breeze Intelligence, so it is now only available to HubSpot customers rather than as an independent tool.

Key Features

• Apollo.io and ZoomInfo both provide verified business email addresses, direct dials, and firmographic or technographic company data pulled from their own proprietary databases.
• Both integrate with CRMs such as HubSpot and Salesforce for two-way contact and activity sync.
• Both bundle outbound engagement tools with their data: Apollo includes email sequencing and a dialer directly in its plans, while ZoomInfo offers this through Engage, an add-on sold on top of its core SalesOS platform.
• Breeze Intelligence (formerly Clearbit) still does firmographic and contact enrichment, plus website-visitor identification, but only inside HubSpot's ecosystem.

Best Use Cases

• Building targeted outbound prospect lists using firmographic, technographic, and job-title filters. Apollo and ZoomInfo both do this from their own databases, without the multi-provider setup Clay requires.
• Enriching inbound leads for routing and rep research, especially for teams already standardized on a single CRM that do not want to build custom enrichment workflows themselves.

Pricing Model

Apollo.io has a free plan, then paid tiers around $49, $79, and $119 per user per month on annual billing, roughly $59, $99, and $149 on monthly billing, with a 3-seat minimum on its top tier. ZoomInfo does not publish list prices; it offers a free ZoomInfo Lite tier, and buyer-reported quotes for its main plans generally start around $15,000 a year for Professional, rising to roughly $25,000 to $30,000 for Advanced and $40,000 or more for Elite, all on annual contracts only. Breeze Intelligence (Clearbit) is credit-based, but that fee sits on top of a required paid HubSpot subscription, so there is no standalone price to quote at all.

My Take

Apollo is the better fit for smaller or mid-sized teams that want a self-serve, all-in-one database with built-in sequencing and a real free tier to start from. ZoomInfo fits larger teams that need deeper account and intent data and can commit to a five-figure annual contract; it is not a fit for anyone who wants to try before signing, since there is no self-serve path onto its main platform. Neither is a good match for a team that specifically wants Clay's approach of custom workflows, an AI research agent, and true multi-provider waterfall enrichment across 100-plus data sources, since Apollo and ZoomInfo both enrich from their own single database rather than cascading across outside providers. One real caveat: if you are comparing "Clearbit" to Clay based on older reviews, know that Clearbit as an independent product does not exist anymore. You are really comparing Clay to HubSpot Breeze Intelligence, which only works if you are already a HubSpot customer.