Clay Alternative for Small Teams (2026): 11 Tools Costed Per 1,000 Units

The 11 tools, side by side

Every figure came off the vendor's own pricing page or documentation rather than a review site, and each was fetched on 5 September 2026 unless the notes say otherwise. Where a vendor publishes two conflicting figures we print both. Where a vendor publishes nothing we say so rather than estimating.

On the Clay row. The two Launch prices are not our typo. On 5 September 2026 the plan cards on clay.com/pricing read $167/mo for Launch and $446/mo for Growth, while the FAQ lower on the same page read "Launch (starting at $185/mo)" and "Growth (starting at $495/mo)". The cards list 3,000 data credits on Launch; the FAQ lists 2,500. We record the conflict and do not resolve it, because we cannot know which figure a new customer is charged. (clay.com/pricing, fetched 5 September 2026.)

*Waalaxy's pricing page currently advertises a 14-day trial only; a permanent freemium tier is described in Waalaxy's own blog documentation but is not surfaced there, so we report the pricing page and footnote the rest. PhantomBuster's pricing page is a JavaScript-only single page application, so its figures come from two vendor-owned posts eight months apart that agree exactly. Kaspr's lower figure is the annual rate, a detail that inverts easily. All competitor pricing here is as published in September 2026 and it changes often. Check the vendor's own page before you buy, and tell us if you spot something out of date.

Why this page exists. It clears our publishing bar on two counts rather than one: reconciled dated vendor pricing, every figure carrying its source and the date we fetched it, plus a computed figure available nowhere else, the cost per 1,000 units for each tool derived by dividing those published numbers.

Why we put ourselves on this page

Disclosure before anything else: we build Leadsforlinked, so we are not a neutral referee and you should read row 1 with that in mind. We put ourselves at the top rather than hiding in the last row, and further down we say plainly what Clay does better than us.

The honest reason we belong on a "Clay alternative" page: most people typing that query are not shopping for a replacement enrichment engine. They opened Clay, saw a three-figure monthly number, and went looking for something that solves the part they actually have, which is usually a list of the right people and a way to contact them, this month, on a budget nobody has to approve.

We price a lead, not a package

One credit equals one lead and duplicates are refunded. Packs start at EUR 1.99 for 500 leads and never expire, so a quiet quarter does not burn capacity you paid for. Subscriptions are EUR 4.99 a month for Basic, or EUR 2.99 billed yearly, EUR 29 for Starter which adds campaigns, EUR 79 for Diamond Pro which adds the AI Responder, and EUR 149 for Diamond Plus. The full ladder is in how Leadsforlinked pricing works.

Eight sourcing methods, not one search box

Most tools here read one thing, the results of a LinkedIn search. Leadsforlinked reads eight: search results, post commenters, post reactors, event attendees, group members, post monitors, profile visitors and job-change signals. The warmest lists are not search results. Fourteen people who commented on a post about the problem you solve have publicly raised their hands, and no filter combination reproduces that list.

No seat multiplier, no Sales Navigator line

Pricing is by lead rather than by seat, so two people running the same campaign do not pay twice, which is what quietly makes agency work expensive elsewhere. Sales Navigator is optional with us, and that is worth a number: Core is $119.99 per month per seat, Advanced $159.99 (LinkedIn Sales Navigator pricing, verified September 2026). Most comparison pages still quote roughly $99, which understates every total-cost claim built on it. For the workflow without that line, see how to scrape LinkedIn without Sales Navigator.

Paced deliberately

Delays between actions are drawn from a normal distribution rather than a fixed interval, pages are separated by several seconds, and every click scrolls into view and pauses first. Free leads arrive in batches of 20 rather than one burst. We describe the mechanisms rather than promising outcomes, because outcomes here are not within any vendor's control.

What Clay actually is in 2026

Clay is a GTM data orchestration platform. You work in spreadsheet-style tables where each column can call a data provider, a scraping step, an AI research agent or your own HTTP endpoint. Its signature move is waterfall enrichment: ask for an email, and Clay tries provider one, then two, then three, across a marketplace of more than 150 providers. Claygent is its research agent, and there is an MCP server. This is a serious product and nothing below argues otherwise.

The pricing page contradicts itself, and we will not resolve it

We fetched clay.com/pricing on 5 September 2026 and read it in full. The plan cards read $167 a month for Launch and $446 for Growth. The FAQ block lower on the very same page reads "Launch (starting at $185/mo)" and "Growth (starting at $495/mo)". The cards attribute 3,000 data credits to Launch; the FAQ attributes 2,500 data credits and 15,000 actions to Launch, and 6,000 credits with 40,000 actions to Growth. Two prices and two credit counts, one page, one day. We cannot tell you which a new customer is billed and we will not guess, because guessing is exactly this category's failure mode. Both figures are here, both dated. If Clay has tidied it up by the time you read this, the vendor page is the authority, not us.

New pricing took effect on 11 March 2026

Clay's own FAQ states it plainly: "New pricing takes effect March 11, 2026." Starter, Explorer and Pro were retired for new customers. Clay's pricing memo, published on its own blog, says the old Pro plan was $800 a month against the new Growth at $495, that marketplace data cost was cut by 50 to 90 percent, and that the top-up premium fell from 50 percent to 30 percent (clay.com/blog/clay-pricing-memo-internal, fetched 5 September 2026). Existing customers were not forced across: "You'll stay on your current plan by default", and "Customers will have 30 days to decide which legacy plan they want to keep." That is a decent migration and worth saying. It also means two people comparing quotes in 2026 may be reading different price lists.

Actions, data credits, and the thing nobody mentions

Clay meters two separate things. Data credits are spent buying data from Clay's marketplace. Actions measure the orchestration you run inside Clay. Verbatim from the vendor: "Actions reset each billing cycle and don't roll over." And: "Data Credits work more like a currency and do roll over. On Launch and Growth plans, unused credits can accumulate up to 2x your monthly credit amount." Top-ups carry a 30 percent premium, the annual toggle reads "Annual, Save 10%", and annual plans "Get all credits up front". Launch includes 15,000 actions and up to 50,000 rows per table; Growth adds 40,000 actions, 6,000 data credits, CRM sync and HTTP API.

The part that surprises people: exporting your data out of Clay consumes Actions. Getting rows in is metered and getting them out is metered too. It is not hidden, it sits in Clay's own description of an Action, but it rarely reaches comparison content, and it changes the calculation if you planned a big export in the last week of a cycle.

Where Clay is simply better than us, and it is not close

Clay's waterfall enrichment across more than 150 data providers, its Claygent research agent, its permanent free plan with unlimited seats and tables, and its MCP server together make up a category of orchestration that we do not attempt at all. We are not a smaller Clay, we are a different shape. If your problem is enriching a list you already have, across many providers, with fallback logic and research steps in between, Clay is the better tool and we are not close. If that is your problem, stop reading and go use Clay, ideally starting on the free plan.

What a unit actually costs

First, the caveat that makes the rest honest

A credit, an action and a lead are not the same unit. Clay's data credits buy marketplace data, an enrichment result pulled from a provider. Our credits buy a lead row sourced from LinkedIn. Captain Data's credits buy workflow executions, Lusha's buy a contact record, Lemlist's buy an email verification. Dividing each vendor's price by its own unit tells you what that vendor charges for the thing it sells. It does not tell you one vendor's unit is as good as another's. This is a list-price comparison, not a like-for-like quality comparison, and anyone presenting one as the other is selling you something.

Clay's own sliders, divided out

Clay's headline is a package price, because actions and data credits carry separate sliders. The number on the card is one point on a surface, not the price of a lever. The published endpoints work out as follows (clay.com/pricing, fetched 5 September 2026).

• Launch data credits, slider floor. $125 for 2,500 credits. 125 divided by 2,500 is $0.05, so $50.00 per 1,000 data credits. The slider runs up to $2,125 for 50,000.
• Launch actions, floor. $60 for 15,000. 60 divided by 15,000 is $0.004, so $4.00 per 1,000 actions.
• Launch actions, top. $540 for 200,000. 540 divided by 200,000 is $0.0027, so $2.70 per 1,000 actions.
• Growth actions, floor. $205 for 40,000. 205 divided by 40,000 is $0.005125, so $5.13 per 1,000 actions.
• Growth actions, top. $850 for 200,000. 850 divided by 200,000 is $0.00425, so $4.25 per 1,000 actions.

The finding: the bigger plan does not buy a better action rate

Line those up and something falls out that the plan cards do not show. At the slider floor, Growth is $5.13 per 1,000 actions against Launch at $4.00. At the top, Growth is $4.25 against Launch at $2.70. At both ends, the more expensive plan costs more per action than the cheaper one.

To be careful about what that does and does not mean: this is arithmetic on Clay's own published slider figures, and it is what those published numbers imply. It is not a claim about what Clay intends. Growth includes things Launch does not, among them 6,000 data credits, CRM and warehouse sync and HTTP API access, so there are good reasons to buy it. But if you are upgrading in the belief that volume buys a better rate on actions, the published figures say it does not.

The rest of the table, per 1,000

Same method for everyone else: the vendor's own published price divided by the vendor's own published unit count.

• Leadsforlinked: EUR 1.99 for 500 leads. 1.99 divided by 500 is EUR 0.00398, so EUR 3.98 per 1,000 leads, and the pack never expires.
• Captain Data: EUR 59.99 per 1,000 credits base rate, falling to EUR 29.99 per 1,000 on the SILVER band at 20,000 credits a month; unused credits do not roll over (captaindata.com/pricing, fetched 5 September 2026).
• Evaboot: 500 credits for $29. 29 divided by 500 is $0.058, so $58 per 1,000, before the mandatory Sales Navigator seat (evaboot.com/pricing, verified September 2026).
• Lusha Starter: $49.90 for 400 credits. 49.90 divided by 400 is $0.12475, so $124.75 per 1,000 (lusha.com/pricing, verified September 2026).
• Lemlist: credits are $0.01 each and a verified email costs 5 credits, so $0.05 each, which is $50 per 1,000 verified emails (lemlist.com/pricing, verified September 2026).
• Instantly Credits Growth: $47 for 1,500 to 2,000 credits, which is $23.50 to $31.33 per 1,000 (instantly.ai/pricing, fetched 5 September 2026).

Read that column and the shape of the market appears: marketplace enrichment data is the expensive unit, LinkedIn sourcing is the cheap one. If cost per unit is your axis, we went deeper in the cheapest LinkedIn scraping tools.

The other nine tools, briefly

PhantomBuster is a general scraping platform rather than a LinkedIn tool: 130 plus Phantoms across 15 plus platforms, priced in execution hours and slots, so unlimited users share one bucket. Start is $69 a month or $56 annual, Grow $159, Scale $439. The free tier is crippled at 30 minutes a month, one slot and a 10-row export cap.

Captain Data is the closest thing here to Clay's orchestration shape, aimed at ops teams wiring multi-source workflows. No free tier, only a one-off 100 credits, and unused credits do not roll over.

Evaboot cleans and enriches Sales Navigator exports and does it well. No free tier and no trial, and Sales Navigator is a hard requirement stated in Evaboot's own FAQ, which puts $119.99 a month per seat underneath the $29 you were quoted. Seats themselves are unlimited and free on one shared balance, which is genuinely generous.

Kaspr is a contact data provider rather than automation, with a real permanent free tier: 5 phone and 5 direct email credits a month, 3 CSV launches, 25 rows per CSV, and 20 plus LinkedIn connections required. Starter is EUR 59 monthly or EUR 45 annual, Business EUR 99 or EUR 79 annual, per seat.

Lusha is the same category with a more generous permanent free tier at 40 credits a month, no rollover. Starter $49.90 or $37.45 annual for 400 credits, Professional $69.90, Premium $399.90, on one shared balance rather than per seat.

Lemlist is a sequencer with a large lead database attached. No free tier, 14-day trial. The Email plan is $69 a month or $55 annual with unlimited users, which is unusual and useful; Multichannel is $109 per user or $87 annual, which is not.

Instantly is built for high-volume cold email on its own inbox infrastructure, with no free tier and no trial. The trap: Outreach Growth at $47 a month and Credits Growth at $47 a month are two separate subscriptions, so if you need both, and most buyers do, the real floor is $94 a month.

Waalaxy is LinkedIn automation and an email finder, priced per user: Pro EUR 19, Advanced EUR 49, Business EUR 69. Per-seat pricing is what makes it expensive for agencies running several client accounts.

LeadFuze left the self-serve market. It is now a Data Licence reported at $1,500 to $2,000 a month behind a request-access form, with no end-user interface. If you are a small team you are no longer the customer, whatever the older content still ranking on it implies.

When to choose each

Choose Clay if your list already exists and your problem is making it useful. Waterfall enrichment across 150 plus providers, Claygent, CRM and warehouse sync on Growth, and an MCP server are not features we or most of this table can approximate. Start on the permanent free plan and see how far 500 actions and 100 data credits get you before committing to either published price.

Choose Captain Data or PhantomBuster if orchestration across many sources is the job but Clay's package price is not justifiable yet: Captain Data for enrichment workflows, PhantomBuster for scraping across many platforms inside execution hours. Choose Kaspr or Lusha if what you are missing is phone numbers or verified contact records on people you have already identified. Choose Lemlist or Instantly if the list is solved and the bottleneck is sending. Choose Evaboot if you live in Sales Navigator anyway and already pay for it.

Choose Leadsforlinked if the list does not exist yet, if the people you want are not sitting in a search result, if you would rather pay for leads than seats, and if you want to see the export before spending anything. That last part is not a flourish. Take the 100 free leads, open the CSV, and count the rows you would genuinely contact. That number tells you more than any comparison table, this one included. For the broader field, we ranked it in the best LinkedIn scrapers of 2026.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best Clay alternative for a small team?

It depends which half of Clay you were using. If you were building lists out of LinkedIn, Leadsforlinked costs EUR 1.99 for 500 leads, which is EUR 3.98 per 1,000 leads, and the packs never expire. If you were enriching a list you already have across many providers at once, nothing cheap on this page replaces that, and Captain Data or Clay's own permanent free plan is the more honest answer. Price the unit you actually consume before you switch, because a credit, an action and a lead are three different things.

How much does Clay cost in 2026?

Clay's own pricing page publishes two answers at the same time. The plan cards read 167 dollars a month for Launch and 446 dollars a month for Growth. The FAQ further down the same page reads Launch starting at 185 dollars a month and Growth starting at 495 dollars a month. The cards give Launch 3,000 data credits while the FAQ gives it 2,500. We fetched clay.com/pricing on 5 September 2026 and both sets of figures were live together, so we publish both rather than quietly picking one.

Does Clay have a free plan?

Yes, and it is permanent rather than a trial. It gives 500 actions a month, 100 data credits a month, unlimited seats and tables, up to 200 rows per table, and the option to bring your own API key. Paid tiers are offered on top of that as a 14 day trial. For a small team that wants to learn the tool without handing over a card, the free plan is genuinely useful and we are happy to say so.

Do Clay credits expire?

Actions and data credits behave differently. Clay states that actions reset each billing cycle and do not roll over. Data credits do roll over, and on the Launch and Growth plans unused credits can accumulate up to twice your monthly credit amount. Extra credits are sold as top ups at a 30 percent premium. Exporting your data out of Clay also consumes actions, which is worth knowing before you plan a large export at the end of a billing cycle.

Does Clay require LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

No. Clay does not require Sales Navigator and does not list it as a requirement, and neither does Leadsforlinked. Evaboot does require it, in the words of its own vendor FAQ, and Sales Navigator Core is 119.99 dollars per month per seat rather than the 99 dollars that most comparison pages still quote. That line sits on top of whatever the tool itself costs, so check the requirement before you compare headline prices.