COMPARE:
Clay or Clearbit for enriching company records
Clay and Clearbit both do filling in the company behind a domain or an email, and this page puts them on the same seven questions. Mamba Labs builds Apify actors. Company Firmographics is ours, it is the third column, and it does not win most of these rows.
The short answer
Clearbit is a single clean API call and it now lives inside HubSpot. Clay is a table that calls Clearbit among many others. If you are on HubSpot the decision has largely been made for you.
Dimension by dimension
| Clay | Clearbit | Company Firmographics | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it actually does | Builds and enriches a list in a table, with each column calling a provider and falling through to the next. | Takes a domain or an email and returns the company behind it, with firmographics attached. | Takes a domain and returns the firmographic fields a scoring model or a CRM record needs. |
| Coverage and hit rate | The widest provider catalog anywhere, and a waterfall that tries them in the order you set. | Strong company level data. Person level coverage was cut back after the HubSpot acquisition. | Any company with a public web presence, including the small ones the big databases skip. |
| What it costs | Credits, spent per column run, and a run that returns nothing still costs on most providers. | Bought as HubSpot credits now, spent per enriched record, rather than as a standalone API plan. | Cents per enriched domain, charged on a returned row. |
| How it fits a workflow | The table is the workflow. Exports and webhooks push the finished rows onward. | A clean API and a deep HubSpot integration, which is the path it is now built around. | An HTTP column in Clay, or one API call per domain from your own code. |
| Where the data comes from | Other people's data, resold through one interface, plus whatever you point its agent at. | Public web sources and its own crawl, resolved onto a company record. | The company's own site and public registers, with the origin named per field. |
| What it takes to set up | An afternoon to a first useful table, longer before the credit cost stops surprising you. | Inside HubSpot it is a toggle. Outside HubSpot it is now a harder product to buy at all. | Send a list of domains. Nothing to map and nothing to connect. |
| Where it stops | You cannot run your own code in it, so an unusual step is a step you cannot build. | It is a HubSpot feature now. Building on it without HubSpot is a shrinking option. | Company level only. It does not hold people and does not pretend to. |
The same seven questions are asked on every compare page here, in this order, so two of these pages can be read against each other.
Where each one genuinely wins
- Clay wins on coverage and hit rate, how it fits a workflow. A spreadsheet that calls a hundred data providers, one column at a time.
- Clearbit wins on what it actually does. A firmographic enrichment API, now sold inside HubSpot as Breeze Intelligence.
- Company Firmographics wins on where the data comes from. Turns a domain into employee count, industry, headquarters and revenue band.
- Nobody wins on what it costs, what it takes to set up, where it stops. Clay and Clearbit give the same answer on those, and we are not going to invent a difference.
Where to get them
What we would actually do
Clearbit inside HubSpot is the easiest company enrichment there is, and for a team already paying for HubSpot it is close to free effort. Outside HubSpot it is a harder product to buy every year, and building on it now is building on something being folded into somebody else's platform. Clay is the durable choice because it is not one provider, and a provider that disappears is one column to swap. For firmographics alone, both are more machinery than the job needs. The fields are public and an actor reads them per domain for cents.
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