Clay vs Qualified
A side-by-side comparison of capabilities, autonomy, integrations, and pricing to help you choose.
Short answer: choose Clay if you want programmable gtm data platform with ai research agents (claygent) (Supervised agent, freemium); choose Qualified if you want piper, the ai sdr that converts inbound website traffic into pipeline (Supervised agent, enterprise).
| Clay | Qualified | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Programmable GTM data platform with AI research agents (Claygent) | Piper, the AI SDR that converts inbound website traffic into pipeline |
| Type | platform | product-with-agents |
| Autonomy | Supervised agent | Supervised agent |
| Pricing | freemium · Free tier; paid Launch from ~$185/mo (after March 2026 pricing change) | enterprise |
| Best for | smb, mid-market, enterprise, developers | mid-market, enterprise |
| Deployment | saas, api | saas |
| Modalities | text, browser, api | text, voice, email |
| Models | model-agnostic, gpt, claude | proprietary, model-agnostic |
| Protocols | rest-api, function-calling | rest-api, function-calling |
| Integrations | HubSpot, Salesforce, Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Slack, Gmail | Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, 6sense, Demandbase, Gong |
| Capabilities | 5 documented | 4 documented |
Clay
- +Composable enrichment: waterfalls across 150+ providers in one workflow beat any single-vendor dataset on match rate
- +Claygent plus Navigator can extract bespoke data (and interact with pages) that fixed providers miss
- +Free tier and broad integrations make it accessible, with API and webhooks for programmatic use
- -Steep learning curve; getting value requires building and tuning workflows, not just turning it on
- -Credit-based costs (split into Data Credits and Actions after the March 2026 pricing change) can be hard to predict at scale
Qualified
- +Purpose-built for inbound: Piper engages live website traffic over chat, voice, and video and books meetings autonomously, 24/7
- +Deep CRM personalization using live Salesforce (or, since 2025, HubSpot) data
- +Strong category position with a large public review footprint and 500+ reported deployments
- -Expensive and contact-sales only; third-party reports put it in the tens of thousands of dollars per year, and the CRM stack adds more
- -Historically Salesforce-dependent (HubSpot support came in late 2025), so value is tied to clean CRM data
Which should you choose?
Clay is programmable gtm data platform with ai research agents (claygent), best for smb, mid-market, enterprise, developers. Qualified is piper, the ai sdr that converts inbound website traffic into pipeline, best for mid-market, enterprise. The right choice depends on the autonomy level you want, your existing integrations, and your budget, all compared above.