Clay vs Freckle - Which is best for 2-10 person GTM teams?

You shouldn’t send data straight from source to sequencer. You should have something in the middle to enrich, filter and write relevant copy.

Clay is the most popular tool for this, but is it the best?

After building GTM engines for 2 to 10 person sales teams, we believe Freckle is the better option.

Here’s why.

1 / Setup and Time to Value (TTV)

Clay takes longer to set up because it has a steeper learning curve and a more complex interface. You need to spend hours or even days going through Clay University just to understand the basics. Then you need to practice on your own. It usually takes weeks to build something of real value.

Freckle has a much shorter TTV. The interface is simple and easy to use. You can connect your data source and start building right away. Most teams can build a useful workflow in days, not weeks.

Winner 🏆: Freckle

2 / Building Your GTM Engine

Regardless of the tool, you should bring in GTM experts to build or rebuild your engine. Your sales reps don’t have the expertise to do this properly, and even if they did, their time is better spent speaking with prospects, not building workflows, scoring, or routing. Put the probabilities in your favor and leave this to the experts.

3 / Maintaining Your GTM Engine

With Clay, things break, fields need updating, and providers change. Most people don’t know where to start. You need a GTM engineer to keep Clay running properly. In other words, the capabilities required to maintain it sit outside your existing sales team (and also cost a lot of money).

Freckle is much easier to maintain. While it’s still best to have a non-sales rep own it (their time is better spent speaking with prospects), the tool is simple enough that your existing sales team could maintain it if needed. And if you do hire someone new to own it, they don’t need to be a specialist GTM engineer.

As a result, Freckle is easier and less costly to maintain.

Winner 🏆: Freckle

4 / Pricing, Credits & Transparency

Freckle uses credit-based pricing only. Simple. You can start small and upgrade as you go, only paying the difference (very flexible). Freckle also uses 1 credit per output, so usage is easy to predict.

Clay prices based on both features and credits, which naturally pushes you toward higher plans because you need to satisfy both requirements. Credits are variable and burn faster than expected, creating a high likelihood you’ll need to upgrade later. Clay also makes you pay in full for upgrades, which means you end up overpaying if you need a plan with more credits. Because of this, Clay incentivizes you to overestimate your plan, which leads to buying more credits or bigger plans than you actually need.

For 2 to 10 person sales teams, these are the plans you’d likely need:

As you can see, Freckle is roughly half the cost of Clay across the board.

Note: to work out Clay equivalency, we multiplied Freckle credits by 3 (1 Freckle credit ≈ 3 Clay credits) and rounded the Clay plan up, because Clay is harder to estimate and doesn’t offer flexible upgrades.

Overall, Freckle is more affordable, transparent and flexible.

Winner 🏆: Freckle

What They Both Do Well

Both tools support the full GTM workflow from intake to processing to output.

On intake, both handle HubSpot imports, webhooks, CSV imports, company lookalikes, and local business searches (Google Maps). Clay offers more intake sources because it has its own people and company database, but this doesn’t matter much for small teams. We recommend Apollo as the main data source anyway (which can connect to either Clay or Freckle). Apollo + Freckle is still more cost-effective than Clay alone.

On processing, both tools perform the core tasks well, including:

• Lead and account enrichment
• Email and phone number enrichment
• Cleanup
• Scoring
• Web-scraping
• Writing personalized copy (email or cold call scripts)

On output, both tools push to sequencers and sync with CRMs.

There are differences between them, but none that impact the decision for small sales teams. Both perform these core functions to a high enough standard.

When To Use Clay

Clay is a good fit for larger sales teams (mid-market or enterprise) that:

have a dedicated GTM engineer

need complex, multi-step workflows

want deeper customization and flexibility

If you have full-time technical support and budget isn’t an issue, Clay makes sense.

Why We Use Freckle

For 2 to 10 person sales teams, Freckle is the clear winner.

Clay takes longer to learn, is harder to adopt, requires a skilled GTM engineer to maintain, and costs significantly more.

Freckle is easier to use, has a shorter TTV, is more cost-effective, and can be maintained without hiring a specialist GTM engineer. And it covers everything a small team needs for outbound and enrichment.

That is why we use Freckle over Clay for 2 to 10 person sales teams.