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

Clay and Lusha both fill in emails and phone numbers, but they sit at different layers. Lusha is a contact and company database sold on credits. Clay is a workflow layer that buys data from 150+ partners, and Lusha is one of them.

Verdict

• Pick Clay if a GTM engineer will build waterfalls and research workflows across many providers. You get unlimited seats and pay nothing for an empty result.
• Pick Lusha if reps want one contact database with a Chrome extension and CRM integrations, and you can live inside a credit budget. Entry plans start at $49.90 a month.
• Pick neither if you need 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

Lusha publishes its size: 525M+ contacts and 29M+ companies, with 165M+ emails and 117M+ direct dials (Lusha homepage, September 2026). Clay publishes no size. Its pricing page says you find and enrich data from 150+ providers (Clay pricing, September 2026).

That changes what coverage means. With Lusha, a record is whatever Lusha holds. With Clay, a waterfall asks providers in turn until one answers. Clay describes it that way itself, so read it as its claim, not a test.

The two overlap. Clay announced Lusha as a data partner in March 2026, available with Clay Credits (Clay blog, September 2026). You can put Lusha first in a Clay waterfall.

Phones are the costly part on both. Lusha charges 5 credits for a phone against 1 for an email. Clay has no phone enrichment on Free, and its credit price per phone is not published.

Match rate depends on the input. A LinkedIn URL or work email matches far more reliably than a name alone. Run the same 500 people through both free plans before you pay. Lusha's Free gives 40 credits a month. Clay's gives 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions, with no phones.

API and developer experience

Both have a developer API. Lusha is a direct lookup call. Clay runs a routine you build first, then you poll for the results.

Lusha authenticates with an api_key header. Its V3 search takes a batch of contacts, each by LinkedIn URL, email or name plus domain (Lusha API overview, September 2026). Here is one lookup.

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.lusha.com/v3/contacts/search \
  --header "api_key: $LUSHA_API_KEY" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "contacts": [
      { "clientReferenceId": "ref-1", "firstName": "Jane", "lastName": "Doe", "companyDomain": "acme.com" }
    ],
    "options": { "includePartialProfiles": true }
  }'

Search returns the matches and what is available on each. You then pass the contact id to an enrich call to reveal emails and phones. That reveal is the step that spends credits.

Clay uses a clay-api-key header and runs routines, which are functions built in Clay. The run is asynchronous. You start it, then read results by run id (Clay developer docs, September 2026):

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 response holds a routine_run_id. You poll GET /routines/run/{id}/results until it returns 200. A run takes 1 to 100 items.

Limits differ in kind. Lusha limits are per key and per plan, across minute, hour and day windows. Free and Starter get 40 a minute and 100 a day. Pro gets 50 a minute and 1,500 a day. Premium gets 300 a minute and 18,000 a day (Lusha API guide, September 2026).

Clay's Public API limit is per workspace with no published number. You get a 429 with a Retry-After header when you pass it. The HTTP API column, which calls other APIs from a table, lets you set your own limit (Clay developer docs, September 2026).

On MCP, both have an official server. Lusha's has 50 tools, from enrichment to workspace tables and CRM export, and shares the REST credit pool (Lusha MCP docs, September 2026). Clay MCP exposes its providers, research agents and your saved functions inside ChatGPT, Claude and Codex (Clay MCP guide, September 2026).

Pricing

Clay charges a plan fee built from an Action tier plus a Data Credit tier. Lusha charges for credits. To compare, convert both to cost per record.

At 10,000 records a month

Take 10,000 work emails. For Clay, use its worked example of 0.5 credit per email find. That is 5,000 Data Credits and 10,000 Actions. On monthly billing, the 15,000 Action tier is $60 and the 6,000 credit tier is $290, so $60 + $290 = $350 a month. On yearly billing it is $54 + $261 = $315 (Clay pricing, September 2026).

The 0.5 credit is an example, and real cost varies by provider. Clay says a fully enriched record typically costs 6 to 20 Data Credits. So 10,000 full records need 60,000 to 200,000 credits, and the top self-serve tier is 50,000 a month (Clay docs, September 2026).

For Lusha, 10,000 work emails by bulk API is 10,000 email credits. A bulk request also costs 1 credit per 25 results, which adds 400. That is 10,400 credits (Lusha API guide, September 2026).

The largest public monthly step is Premium at 10,000 credits for $977.40, so this month is just past it. At that step's rate of about $0.0977 a credit, 10,400 credits is roughly $1,016. Billed yearly, the best published rate is about $0.0795 a credit, which gives roughly $827 a month. Both are list-rate arithmetic past the public steps, not a published price (Lusha pricing, September 2026).

Add phones and Lusha moves far out of range. Email plus phone is 6 credits a contact in the platform, so 10,000 contacts is 60,000 credits a month. That is six times the largest listed monthly step, and Lusha publishes no price for it.

The two numbers are not like for like. Clay's $350 rests on a 0.5 credit example, and the email comes from whichever provider answers. Lusha's is one database at a fixed credit price. An empty Clay result costs nothing. Whether Lusha charges for a no-match API request is unsettled: its API guide says at least 1 credit, its billing FAQ says none (Lusha billing FAQ, September 2026).

At 1M records a month

There is no public 1M price for either tool.

For Clay, 1,000,000 lookups need 1,000,000 Actions, and Actions cannot be bought as top-ups. The largest self-serve tier is 200,000 Actions and 50,000 Data Credits a month. Above that, Clay sells Enterprise by quote (Clay pricing, September 2026).

The top Growth tier costs $850 + $2,125 = $2,975 a month on monthly billing. At 0.5 credit per email, its 50,000 credits cover 100,000 lookups, not 1M. Do not multiply that out and call it a quote.

For Lusha, 1,000,000 work emails by bulk API is 1,000,000 email credits plus 40,000 request credits, or 1,040,000 credits. The largest public monthly step holds 10,000, so 1M is 104 times the biggest listed plan. Scale is custom and publishes only "50%+ off price per credit" (Lusha pricing, September 2026).

Where Clay wins

• Many providers in one flow. A waterfall tries one source after another, so a miss on one does not end the search.
• Unlimited seats. The whole team works in one workspace for one plan fee.
• Research beyond a database. Claygent, its research agent, is on every plan including Free (Clay pricing, September 2026).
• No charge for a miss. An enrichment with no result uses no credits and no Actions.

Where Lusha wins

• One database with a published size. 525M+ contacts and 29M+ companies, so you know what you are buying (Lusha homepage, September 2026).
• A low entry price. Starter is $49.90 a month. Clay's first paid plan is $185.
• A rep-friendly surface. A Chrome extension and CRM integrations sit next to the data. Clay is built for builders.
• Published API limits per plan. You can read the per-key limit before you buy. Clay publishes no number.

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 unlimited searches and lookups and 100 requests per second per key (LeadOcean pricing, September 2026).

For bulk work, POST /v1/exports returns up to 50,000 rows per request, and the app has an Exports page with a CSV download (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). There is no table builder, Chrome extension or sequencer. If your ops team lives in Clay or your reps live in Lusha, keep them. The Clay alternative page and Clay alternatives roundup go line by line.

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