The field guide · 6 tools reviewed

Best Clay alternatives in 2026

Clay is powerful but comes with a learning curve, an operator cost, and credit bills that are hard to forecast. If you want company research and enrichment without the spreadsheet workbench, these are the strongest alternatives in 2026, ordered by how directly they replace Clay's research job.

1. 1

   Gumshoethat's us

   AGENTIC COMPANY RESEARCH API · gumshoe.run

   Send a plain-English brief, get a company research verdict back as structured JSON with citations and timestamped screenshot evidence. Drives a real browser when a site is JS-heavy or gated, and builds lists from scratch with server-side dedup.

   PRICING: Free 100 cases/mo, no card. $99/mo for 2,000 cases. One case = one company = one credit.

   BEST FOR: GTM engineers and lean teams who want deep, evidence-backed research and TAM building by API, at a fixed, forecastable price.

2. 2

   Apollo

   B2B CONTACT DATABASE · apollo.io

   An all-in-one B2B database with prospecting, sequences, and enrichment. Broad coverage, cheap entry, large contact volume.

   PRICING: Free tier, then $59 to $149/seat/mo. CRM enrichment billed separately.

   BEST FOR: Teams that need raw contact volume and sequencing on a budget.

3. 3

   Crustdata

   REAL-TIME GTM DATA API · crustdata.com

   A real-time company and people data API: firmographics, headcount trends, and signals delivered as structured data.

   PRICING: Priced by call/record for structured data and signals.

   BEST FOR: Teams piping clean structured firmographic fields and signals into a warehouse.

4. 4

   Sixtyfour AI

   COMPANY/PEOPLE RESEARCH AGENTS · sixtyfour.ai

   AI agents that enrich companies and people against a defined schema by actively browsing the web (YC-backed).

   PRICING: Credit-based; Company Intelligence roughly 0.3 to 15 credits per call.

   BEST FOR: Teams wanting agentic enrichment against a custom schema.

5. 5

   Parallel

   WEB RESEARCH API · parallel.ai

   Web infrastructure for AI agents with a strong deep-research Task API and the Basis framework: citations, reasoning, and calibrated confidence per field.

   PRICING: Task API $5 to $2,400 per 1k requests by depth. Search $1 to $5/1k.

   BEST FOR: Teams doing open-web deep research that want best-in-class citations and calibrated confidence.

6. 6

   Exa

   NEURAL SEARCH API · exa.ai

   A neural search API with LLM-optimized indexes and Websets for no-code enrichment. An excellent, cheap search primitive to build on.

   PRICING: Search $7/1k, Deep Search $12 to $15/1k. Per search, not per finished research.

   BEST FOR: Developers building their own research pipeline who want the best search primitive.