Clay vs Coresignal (2026): Data, Pricing and API Compared

Clay and Coresignal are not the same kind of product. Clay is a workflow table that calls 150+ data providers and bills two meters. Coresignal is a data supplier that sells employee, company and job records by the credit.

Verdict

• Pick Clay if ops people build enrichment in a table without code, or you want waterfalls and AI research per row. It fits best at 10,000 records a month or less.
• Pick Coresignal if you need job postings, company signals, raw profile volume or flat-file datasets, and you pull them in code. It lists 907M+ employee records and 482M+ job postings.
• Pick neither if you need contact data at volume through an API at a price you can read. Neither publishes a 1M price. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month, flat.

Side by side

Data and coverage

Coresignal publishes its size. Clay does not. That alone makes Coresignal the easier one to judge before you buy.

Coresignal lists 907M+ employee records, 70M+ companies and 482M+ job postings, with company data delivered daily (Coresignal, September 2026). Many of those are profiles with no contact field.

Clay gives no record count. It has its own database for people and company search, and it reaches 150+ providers for enrichment (Clay developer docs, September 2026; Clay MCP guide, September 2026). The answer to an email lookup depends on which provider returns it.

Neither publishes the share of records with an email or a phone. Coresignal's multi-source employee records carry a professional email with four status levels: verified, matched_email, matched_pattern and guessed_common_pattern. Its Base Employee API pages list no email field (Coresignal data dictionary, September 2026).

Phone is where they split. Clay sells phone enrichment but publishes no credit price for a number, and neither the Free plan nor the trial includes phone enrichment (Clay pricing, September 2026). Coresignal lists no phone field in either employee dictionary, so a dial list needs a second source.

Coresignal's MCP email lookup excludes employees in the EEA and UK (Coresignal MCP docs, September 2026). If your list is European, test that first.

Coresignal's edge is signals. Job postings cost 1 credit each. Clay reaches hiring data through its providers and Claygent research columns, one row at a time.

API and developer experience

Both have an API, but they point at different work. Coresignal is built to collect records by ID or URL. Clay is built to run a routine, which is a function you set up in Clay, and read the result later.

Clay's Public API is on every plan, including Free. It authenticates with a clay-api-key header and runs against https://api.clay.com/public/v0 (Clay docs, September 2026; Clay Routines API, September 2026). A run takes 1 to 100 items and is asynchronous:

curl --request POST \
  --url "https://api.clay.com/public/v0/routines/function:t_abc123/run" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --header "clay-api-key: $CLAY_PUBLIC_API_KEY" \
  --data '{"items":[{"id":"row-1","inputs":{"domain":"acme.com"}}]}'

The call returns a routine_run_id. You then poll GET /routines/run/{routine_run_id}/results until it returns HTTP 200. A completed run can still hold failed items, so check each item's status.

Search is separate. Clay returns 500 results per request on paid plans, and a Free workspace gets 50 per request and 100 per 30 days (Clay developer docs, September 2026). Only structured table queries are Enterprise (Clay docs, September 2026).

Coresignal sends a key in an apikey header (Coresignal docs, September 2026). The collect call takes a shorthand name from a profile URL and costs 20 credits on the multi-source API (Coresignal docs, September 2026).

curl -X GET \
  "https://api.coresignal.com/cdapi/v2/employee_multi_source/collect/jane-doe" \
  -H "accept: application/json" \
  -H "apikey: $CORESIGNAL_API_KEY"

Coresignal search by filter or Elasticsearch DSL is free and returns IDs. You pay when you collect, and a search preview costs 10 to 20 credits (Coresignal docs, September 2026).

Rate limits differ in kind. Clay publishes no number and returns a Retry-After header on a 429. Coresignal ties speed to the plan: 10 requests a second on Pro, 50 on Premium, 100 on Scale (Coresignal rate limits, September 2026).

Both have an MCP server. Clay's connects to ChatGPT, Claude and Codex, and new accounts get 500 free credits on first connect (Clay MCP guide, September 2026). Coresignal's signs in with OAuth 2.1 and has 5 tools. entity_search costs 20 credits a call (Coresignal MCP docs, September 2026).

For bulk work, Coresignal's Bulk Collect is asynchronous at 10,000 records per request. Clay's batch runs take a JSONL file, and a table stops at 50,000 rows below Enterprise.

Pricing

Clay bills two meters. An Action pays for each enrichment, and a Data Credit pays for the data. Coresignal bills one meter, the credit. To compare them, price both as work-email lookups.

At 10,000 records a month

Clay: a lookup costs 1 Action plus 0.5 Data Credit, using Clay's docs example. That is 10,000 Actions and 5,000 credits. On Launch, monthly billing, the 15,000 Action tier is $60 and the 6,000 credit tier is $290. So $60 + $290 = $350 a month. Billed yearly it is about $315, which is 10 percent off (our arithmetic). That is $0.035 a lookup on the monthly price (Clay pricing, September 2026; Clay docs, September 2026).

The 0.5 credit is an example, not a rate card. Clay's own doc says a fully enriched record typically costs 6 to 20 credits. At 6 credits, 10,000 records need 60,000, above the 50,000 credit top tier. No result means no charge.

Coresignal: 10,000 lookups x 20 credits = 200,000 credits. Contact enrichment starts at Pro, and Growth stops at 150,000 credits. That leaves Premium at $1,500 a month for 1,000,000 credits, or $1,350 a month billed yearly. You use a fifth of it, so $0.15 a lookup on the monthly price (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

The pricing page shows a Get started button on Premium but also flags Premium, Scale and Elite for contact sales. Confirm you can buy it self-serve before you plan around it (Coresignal pricing, September 2026).

At small scale the order flips. Coresignal Pro is $499 for 35,000 credits, which is 1,750 lookups, or about $0.29 each. Clay is cheaper at 10,000 lookups. The units also differ: a Clay lookup returns what a provider found, and a Coresignal call returns a full multi-source record.

At 1M records a month

Clay: no public 1M price. 1,000,000 lookups need 1,000,000 Actions, and Actions cannot be topped up. The largest public Action tier is 200,000 a month. The top public Growth plan, 200,000 Actions plus 50,000 credits, is $2,975 a month, or $2,678 billed yearly. At 0.5 credit that covers 100,000 lookups, a tenth of 1M (Clay pricing, September 2026).

Above that is an Enterprise quote. Multiplying a rate out to 1M would not be a price, so this page does not.

Coresignal: no public 1M price. 1,000,000 lookups x 20 credits = 20,000,000 credits, and no public plan reaches that. The top plan, Elite, is $5,000 a month for 10,000,000 credits, which covers 500,000 lookups.

Coresignal does not document buying two Elite plans in one month, and lists no plan above Elite (Coresignal pricing, September 2026). Ask for a quote.

Where Clay wins

• No-code workflows. Ops people edit columns, add conditions and watch each row run. Coresignal is an API with no table.
• Many providers in one place. A waterfall of 150+ sources is one column away, and Claygent runs web research per row.
• Cheaper at 10,000 lookups. About $0.035 a lookup on Launch, against $0.15 on Coresignal Premium.
• A usable Free plan. 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions a month, plus the Public API, against a 7-day trial.
• MCP for reps. Connect Clay to ChatGPT or Claude and ask in plain language.

Where Coresignal wins

• Raw size and signals. 907M+ employee records and 482M+ job postings, sold as their own datasets.
• A public price ladder. Seven paid plans from $49 to $5,000 a month, with 100+ requests a second at the top.
• Speed you can read. A published rate limit per plan, where Clay publishes none.
• Bulk and datasets. Bulk Collect takes 10,000 records per request, and flat-file datasets start at $1,000 a month.
• No table ceiling. You collect records into your own store instead of a 50,000 row table.

If you need volume through an API

We build LeadOcean, so weigh this section accordingly. LeadOcean holds 693M people and 63M companies, reachable over REST and MCP. Free is 1,000 records, one-off, with no card. Pro is $499 a month, flat, with no credits and a limit of 100 requests per second per key (LeadOcean pricing, September 2026).

For bulk work, POST /v1/exports returns up to 50,000 rows per request. The app also has an Exports page with a filter builder and CSV download (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). It has no table builder, sequencer or job-posting data. See the Clay alternative page or the Clay alternatives roundup for a line-by-line version.

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