5 Best Clay Alternatives (Free & Paid AI Automation Tools)

As automation becomes increasingly vital for modern professionals and teams, finding the right platform to handle your data and workflows can be a game-changer.

Clay has quickly gained popularity for its elegant design and ability to centralize contact data across platforms, but it’s not the perfect fit for everyone—especially if you're looking for broader automation functionality, AI-first workflows, or more developer control.

Whether you're starting to feel limited by Clay's feature set or you're just exploring what else is out there, this guide will walk you through some standout alternatives that might align better with your goals.

Let’s take a closer look at Clay, and then dive into a few compelling options that go beyond it.

What is Clay?

Clay is a personal CRM and relationship intelligence platform that helps users manage and understand their network more meaningfully. It automatically pulls in data from sources like email, calendar, LinkedIn, Twitter (now X), and more—organizing your contacts in a smart, searchable interface.

Designed with busy professionals in mind, Clay offers features like daily briefings, notes, reminders, and automatic enrichment of contact profiles. Its clean UI and AI-powered summaries make it ideal for founders, operators, investors, and network-driven professionals who want to stay thoughtful and intentional in their relationships.

Key Features of Clay

• Automatic contact syncing from Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, and more
• Notes, reminders, and tags for relationship management
• AI-generated bios and summaries
• Daily digests with important contact updates
• Searchable relationship timeline

Clay is easy to set up and requires no coding, making it highly accessible. But for users looking for automation across broader use cases—such as business processes, content workflows, or AI agents—Clay can feel limited.

That’s where some of the alternatives come in.

5 Clay Alternatives

TextCortex: AI-Driven Knowledge & Content Automation

If you're intrigued by the idea of intelligent, hands-off workflows that go beyond people and into content, research, or data automation, TextCortex is a top pick.

While Clay focuses on enriching and organizing your relationships, TextCortex Flows allows you to build autonomous AI agents that handle complex, repetitive tasks. Whether you're gathering insights from the web, summarizing documents, or drafting personalized emails at scale, TextCortex takes automation to another level.

For example, with the Flow feature you can set up a flow that monitors industry trends, compiles the key points weekly, and sends a polished update to your team. It's ideal for marketers, analysts, or knowledge workers who want content generation and research to happen automatically.

TextCortex Key Strengths

• Pre-built AI agents that handle research, summarization, outreach
• Seamless integration with Google Drive, OneDrive, Notion, SharePoint for connecting company data
• Fully customizable workflows, scheduled to run on autopilot
• Useful for content marketing, sales enablement, and documentation

TextCortex Pricing

You can choose between three different plans:

• Free Plan: 20 daily creations for $0/month
• Premium Plan: Starting from $29.99/month
• Enterprise: Custom Pricing

Click here to try TextCortex!

Folk – For Modern, Collaborative Relationship Management

Folk is a rising alternative to Clay, aimed at users who want a collaborative, team-friendly CRM. Unlike Clay’s solo experience, Folk is designed for teams to work together on managing contacts, outreach, and pipelines.

It’s perfect for PR teams, sales departments, or VC firms that need shared notes, reminders, and contact updates in one unified workspace.

Folk Key Strengths

• Shared contact management
• Outreach and follow-up automation
• Tagging, filtering, and pipeline views
• Gmail and LinkedIn integrations

Folk Pricing

• Standard Plan: $20 per member/month
• Premium Plan: $40 per member/month
• Custom Plan: starting from $80 per member/month

Affinity – For Data-Driven Deal and Relationship Tracking

Affinity is built for investors, deal teams, and B2B professionals who need deep visibility into their networks and pipelines. It tracks every email, meeting, and interaction automatically, much like Clay—but adds more CRM functionality and analytics.

Affinity Key Strengths

• Powerful relationship intelligence with reporting dashboards
• Ideal for VCs, M&A teams, and enterprise BD
• Auto-captures all communication history
• Smart reminders, scorecards, and pipeline tracking

Affinity Pricing

• Essential Plan: $2000 per user/year
• Scale Plan: $2300 per user/year
• Advabced Plan: $2700 per user/year
• Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing

Dex – For Individuals Who Want Simplicity

Dex is like a minimalist cousin to Clay—designed for people who want a lightweight, personal CRM without all the bells and whistles. It’s great for students, job seekers, or anyone who wants to stay in touch with people in a structured way.

Dex Key Strengths

• Simple note-taking and reminders
• Lightweight contact syncing
• Chrome extension for quick capture
• One-time import from LinkedIn

Dex Pricing

You can get Dex for $15/month.

UpHabit – For Personal Contact Management with Boundaries

UpHabit is another personal CRM alternative to Clay, with a big emphasis on privacy and data control. It's great for users who want to manage contacts without worrying about invasive data scraping or sharing.

UpHabit Key Strengths

• Private, encrypted contact management
• Custom reminders and note fields
• iOS, Android, and web support

UpHabit Pricing

You can get UpHabit for free or you can get a Business Plan for $19.99/month.

Conclusion

While several options exist for managing professional relationships, TextCortex stands out for its AI-powered automation capabilities. For professionals seeking to streamline their workflow and leverage the power of artificial intelligence to enhance their networking efforts, TextCortex offers a compelling and intuitive solution

Check out the results from one of our case studies:

Kemény Boehme Consultants saw impressive results after implementing TextCortex:

• Employees gained 94% improved work quality.
• Employee confidence in AI increased by 67%.
• The implementation resulted in 12% faster proposal creation for the responsible team

Whether you're a solo professional looking for AI-powered automation with TextCortex, a team needing shared pipelines with Folk, or an investor wanting deeper analytics with Affinity, there's a tool out there that fits your workflow.