Clay Review: Manage Your Business and Personal Contacts for Success

Clay

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Clay is a networking CRM that helps you build and manage personal and professional relationships. Consider it a modern-day Rolodex, contact directory, or part CRM software with networking and relationship-building tools.

At its core, Clay centralizes all your contacts and related data from email, calendar, iMessage, Google and iOS contacts, WhatsApp, and other social media apps.

Clay automatically creates profiles along with the social history of each contact. You can access contacts, take notes, and monitor changes across your network from the comfort of your iPhone, Mac, Windows, or web app.

I’m doing this Clay review because I heard about Clay from my colleague who’s a master of networking. It got me excited to see how a personal CRM is gaining recognition among sales and marketing professionals, business leaders, consultants, and freelancers.

In this review, I’ve documented my assessment and experience using Clay.

Features

• Create detailed contact profiles with personal, social, and organizational data
• Customize your Home Feed to see real-time updates, reminders, and events from your contacts
• Set up reminders by typing in a day or date or via the built-in calendar
• Offers advanced search and filters to find contacts by location, company name, when you last contacted them, etc.
• Provides conversational AI, Nexus, to answer questions related to your contacts, brainstorm ideas, and compose messages

Pros

• Free version available
• Sleek and easy-to-use interface design
• Remote accessibility for iOS users

Cons

• Extremely limited by design
• No in-app communication tool

6 Reasons To Use Clay

Apart from the UI, which is sleek and beautifully built by a thoughtful team, here’s what else Clay offers:

1. Automated Contact Management

Clays helps you manage thousands of contacts in one place. You can connect Clay with your accounts through email, calendar, Facebook, LinkedIn, iMessage, X (Twitter), WhatsApp, and other apps.

If you have contacts in other formats—a spreadsheet, Notion, Airtable, etc.—you can import them to your account. All imported contacts are automatically visible from the People section on the right-hand sidebar.

It is likely that you may connect with someone over different channels. You start off on LinkedIn but carry the conversation to email or WhatsApp—how does Clay handle such conflicts?

Well! Clay automatically merges duplicate contacts across integrated apps. You can toggle it from Settings> General panel > Resolve Duplicates. (It’s on by default)

Clay automatically creates individual cards or profiles for your contacts. If you have added a data source (e.g., email or Twitter handle), Clay will enrich that card with publicly available information, if possible.

I like the ribbon-style toolbar on top of each card. It helps me perform contact-specific actions right from the card. For example, I can:

• View contact details such as telephony, email, and other integrated sources
• Set a reminder, as in the birthdays, events, meetings, and more
• Add private notes (only visible to me) 
• Edit profile, social, and organization information

2. Live Home Feed

Social media has immense potential, and I second that. But, at times—reels, memes, judgments–could be distracting.

Clay’s Home View is like your personal feed, helping you cut down on social media noise and focus on what and who matters to you.

It only displays activities from your contacts, whether someone updated their Twitter bio, is mentioned in the news, or has birthdays.

Actually, you can easily filter what you view. 👇

As you filter through Home, you can select the check mark to star a contact, take a note, change the reconnect cadence, or resolve any items that don’t need action.

You can also customize the home feed from the Settings panel. Here, you get more options to personalize your feed and make it relevant to enhance relationships.

3. AI-Powered Reminders

My favorite part of using Clay was that I could create a reminder anywhere, on any card, by typing in a date and time. 

Suppose I want to add a reminder for Lisa’s birthday. I simply visit her profile, and in the notes, I type ‘next week Tuesday’ and tada!

Clay understands phrases like “tomorrow night,” “next Tuesday,” “December 17th,” and “in 6 hours,” meaning you can type the way you think.

If you’re importing contacts from a spreadsheet or .csv file, ensure you have the correct formatting. When I imported my contact list, the birthdays didn’t get into the system with this error popping up.

4. Smart Search & Filters

Clay’s Search is incredibly powerful and removes the need to create dedicated groups for locations or professions. It lets you search by location, company name, when you last saw them, what you talked about.

You can combine queries together to create advanced searches with tags, filters, etc. Now that’s SMART!

Suppose I have a contact list with 500+ contacts. I remember asking someone for a podcast, but I’m unsure who. I can simply enter the term ‘Podcast’ and get a list of moments where the term is mentioned. See the example below.

Apart from this, Clay has its library of example search terms to intelligently search through your network.

💡Tip: Hit Ctrl + K to bring up our command palette. You can instantly do or search for any action from there.

5. Note-Taking & Tagging

Notes are one of the core building blocks of Clay. You can add text notes to contact cards, reference other contacts with @, and tag contacts with specific labels using # that can be filtered for in Clay Search.

On iOS, there are two other ways to create notes:

• Tap the ‘Dictate‘ button and speak, and let Clay’s innovative voice-to-text software add punctuation and recognize names
• Use optical character recognition (OCR) to scan hand-written notes or business cards and convert them into digital cards

Clay Notes support Markdown formatting. That means you can write in Markdown or paste text directly, and it will be converted to rich text automatically.

My Two cents: While I’m all hands down for Clay’s intelligent note-taking, it’s still far from what AI note-taking tools can do.

6. Cross-Platform Support

Clay offers multi-device support, making it accessible on iOS, Mac, Windows, and the web. The web app isn’t very responsive when used on mobile, but the iOS native app is great.

Unfortunately, Android is still missing. According to Clay, it will be available someday, but they don’t say when.

5 Clay Use Case 

My assessment led to a few genuine use cases of Clay:

1. Networking & Relationship Building

Do you keep missing updates (and opportunities) from your network because they’re buried in your inbox or notifications?

The Clay Home tab updates you with recent activities from your contacts across integrated channels. It helps you manage and deepen relationships with personalized follow-ups, making networking more intentional.

On top of that, the ‘Reconnect Cadence’ is where Clay earns its keep. If I haven’t checked in with someone in a while, Clay gives me a nudge. It’s like having an assistant whose only job is making sure I don’t lose touch.

Apart from professional networking, a California-based NGO is making thoughtful use of Clay:

In senior care, relationships are everything. Clay has allowed me to strengthen those connections in an organic way. When a resident’s daughter calls with concerns, I want to remember exactly what we talked about the last time.

When the families don’t reach out for long periods, I get a nudge to reconnect with them. Clay makes that easy. It lets me stay organized without feeling robotic but more intentional and personal.

– Moti Gamburd, CEO of Raya’s Paradise, a senior living organization

2. Sales & Business Development

If you’re looking for sales intelligence software but don’t yet require the extensive functionality attached to it, Clay might help.

Clay offers real-time updates on clients, prospects, and business partners, whether it’s remembering what they do, where they work, past issues with your service or product, or even creating notes to add details like their pet’s name, favorite dish, etc.

Clay helped me keep track of all my important contacts—customers, vendors, and partners. In my line of work, relationships matter. With Clay, I can remember key details about people, like when I last spoke to a customer or what issues we helped them with. It’s made follow-ups easy and more personal, which keeps people coming back.

– John Wilson, Home Services Industry

3. Recruiting & Hiring

Being a contact management software, Clay simplifies the recruiting process by tracking and managing candidates.

You can maintain detailed records, such as candidate profiles, interaction timelines, interview dates, contact details, and background information, ensuring effective candidate engagement. 

4. Event Planning

Are you juggling multiple events this week? With Clay, you can:

• Plan, schedule, and sync events with your calendar
• Manage and keep track of contacts
• Prioritize follow-ups and create personalized outreach

In event planning, whether it’s industry conferences or product launch events, Clay keeps track of RSVPs, key speakers, and partner interactions. I also set reminders to reconnect with people I meet, ensuring valuable connections don’t slip through the cracks.

– Pieter Wellens, CTO of Apicbase

5. Personal Contact Management

Clay focuses on managing personal contacts in the best way possible. For example, you can add/edit contact fields, set up reminders, reconnect cadence, and add notes, for every contact. 

Clay Home feed provides contextual insights into your contacts, ensuring you’re always in touch and relationships are nurtured and maintained over time.

The meeting prep is where Clay really earns its keep. When I open it up in the morning, I see a rundown of everyone I’m meeting that day, complete with bios, work history, social posts, and even past email subjects. No scrambling to remember what we last talked about.

— Thomas Franklin, CEO Swapped

Is Clay a CRM?

Clay is more relationship-centric. It solely focuses on managing and deepening personal and professional connections via insights, reminders, and follow-ups based on interactions.

I prefer calling it a personal CRM because it helps with relationship management (which is part of a CRM), but it does not turn up as a full-fledged CRM.

You see, I expect my CRM software to do the following, but not Clay:

• Help with lead tracking, scoring, and prioritization
• Automate marketing and outreach
• Create, visualize, and manage sales pipelines
• Identify patterns and trends in prospect behavior
• Provide real-time insights and data to enhance conversion

What is Clay Nexus?

Clay Nexus is an AI-powered conversational intelligence that answers any questions about people in your network. For example, to prepare for a meeting, you might request, “Please summarize Susan’s background for me.”

Or, the conversation could be REALLY interesting 👇

Apart from that, Nexus is readily accessible on all contacts. Simply right-click on any contact and let Nexus brief you on the contact.

Clay Pricing

Clay offers a generous free plan that allows you to manage up to 1000 contacts, integrate with Email, Calendar, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more, and use all essential Clay features, such as smart search and groups.

Other than that, it has three plans, which are summarized below in a comparison table.

Parameters	Pro	Team	Enterprise
Monthly Pricing	$10	$49	Custom
Features	Unlimited contacts, Integrations with messaging channels, Support data import via spreadsheets and CSVs, Invoice-based billing, Real-time network data refreshes	Up to 4 team members, Advanced data enrichment, Custom integration and setup, Admin tools and controls	Unlimited team members, VIP data import from 100+ software tools, SOC 2 Type II certification
Support	Priority support	Priority support	Dedicated success manager; SAML SSO

Best Clay Alternatives

Although Clay is a simple yet smart Rolodex software for personal and professional relationship management, it costs $20/month when billed monthly. It’s not cheap, for sure. So, I prepared a list of the best clay alternatives.

Have a look! 👀

Clay Integration

Clay offers direct integrations with the communication apps you use regularly, such as Email, Calendar, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, iMessage, WhatsApp, and more. 

With the Enterprise Plan, you can import data from 100+ software tools. 

However, I wish it had Slack and Telegram integrations, as that’s where most of my conversations happen. Also, the lack of a Google Contacts sync really kills the value for anyone, like me, who’s totally invested in that ecosystem.

As a relationship management tool, Clay fails to match the integration capabilities of full-fledged CRMs. However, its built-in Zapier integration gives you some extendability and allows you to transfer data from other apps to Clay, as well as automate contact or note creation.

Who Should Use Clay

My assessment says, Clay is a good choice for you if you’re looking for a simple, personal relationship management tool.

Clay is ideal for:

• Professionals looking to manage and engage with an extensive network.
• Salespeople and business developers looking to build relationships and retain clients.
• Entrepreneurs and executives who’d love a personal social media and CRM for only their closest network.
• Individuals who prioritize maintaining strong personal and professional relationships.

Who Shouldn’t Use Clay

Clay might not be the right option for:

• Businesses looking for a full-fledged CRM, with marketing automation and analytics features. You might want to try HubSpot or Pipedrive.
• Individuals looking for simple note-taking apps. Try Obsidian and xTiles instead.
• Businesses requiring extensive sales pipeline management. You might want to try Freshsales or Salesmate.

Clay Verdict

Clay is your best option if you’re looking for a simple CRM that sticks to managing your personal and professional network.

After my assessment, I found no ifs and buts in recommending Clay as an excellent contact management app. With the range of features it offers, it’s just perfect for anyone, regardless of their background, who wants to build personal and professional relationships.

However, the rub is that limited customization options and the lack of a dedicated app for Android users are some turn-offs that will face until future updates from Clay!

Clay receives the Geekflare Amazing Innovation Award for its minimalistic CRM design and use of AI to streamline personal and professional contact management.