A Clay alternative for teams that want to own their data

Clay is the default answer for a B2B growth team that needs to enrich a list of leads. It is well-marketed, it has a friendly UI, and it ships a long catalog of pre-built workflows. It is also a subscription between $149 and $1,350 per month that brokers your list out to third-party vendors, billing you per result on top of the base seat.

Stekpad is a different shape. We ship 19 in-house enrichers, charge 1 credit per row per enricher, and let you run the whole thing from an API, a web app, or an MCP tool inside Claude Desktop. No seat license, no subscription required, no per-vendor markup. Credits last 12 months.

This post is the honest comparison. We are not going to pretend Stekpad is better at everything. Clay has a real lead in pre-built workflows and integration breadth, and if your team lives inside those workflows, switching costs money and time. We will walk through when each tool wins, and what a migration path looks like if you decide to move.

The two product shapes

Clay is a lead enrichment workflow builder. You drag and drop steps in a table UI, each step is typically a call to a third-party vendor (Hunter, Apollo, NeverBounce, Clearbit, Proxycurl, and a few dozen more), and Clay orchestrates the calls, handles credits, and lands results in a spreadsheet-like view. The subscription pays for the seats, the orchestration, and the vendor integrations. The per-result cost pays the vendors.

Stekpad is an API-first scraping and enrichment product. Every verb (scrape, crawl, map, extract, search) is a REST endpoint and an MCP tool. Every enricher (19 of them) is a column operation on a stored dataset. There is a web app on top for the people who prefer a UI, but the contract underneath is the same. We do not call Hunter or Apollo on your behalf — we ship the equivalent functionality ourselves.

That is the structural difference. Clay is a workflow broker on top of third-party data vendors. Stekpad is a first-party scraper and enricher. Both approaches are legitimate. They have different economics, different privacy properties, and different failure modes.

The comparison table

| | Stekpad | Clay | |---|---|---| | Pricing model | PAYG packs, no subscription required | Seat subscription, $149 to $1,350 per month | | Entry cost | 300 free credits / month, then 9 euros for 2,000 credits | $149 / month minimum on Starter | | Credit expiration | 12 months on packs | Reset monthly | | Enrichers | 19, all in-house | ~60 sources, all third-party vendors | | Scraping | First-party, 5 verbs, cookie bridge for auth | Via third-party scraping vendors | | MCP / Claude integration | Shipped day one, 8 tools | No MCP server at time of writing | | Data residency | Your data never leaves our stack | Your list is sent to each vendor you enable | | API access | Full REST + SDKs (TS, Python) | HTTP API, mainly for data-in/data-out | | Pre-built workflows | Templates catalog, smaller | Large template library | | CRM integrations | CSV export, Google Sheets push, webhooks | Deep Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach integrations | | Dataset storage | Native, editable, queryable | Tables are the product |

Two rows in that table matter more than the others.

Data residency. When you run a Clay workflow with a "find email" step, that step sends your list to Hunter (or Apollo, or whoever you configured). Your list now lives in Hunter's database too. Multiply by every enricher step. If you are enriching a list of 10,000 contacts through five vendors, you just copied that list to five third parties. Stekpad runs every enricher ourselves. Your list lands in our dataset, and nowhere else.

Pricing. Clay's Starter tier is $149 per month for 2,000 credits. Stekpad's 2,000-credit pack is 9 euros, credits last 12 months, no subscription. For teams that enrich sporadically — a list a week, a list a month — PAYG is cheaper by roughly an order of magnitude. For teams that enrich continuously at scale, Clay's volume tiers may land at similar per-credit cost, but you are still paying the vendor markup.

When Clay is the better tool

This is the honest part. Clay is legitimately better for several use cases.

Pre-built workflows. Clay has hundreds of templates for specific motions — "find the VP of Eng at every company in my CRM", "enrich a list of LinkedIn URLs with verified emails and phone numbers", "build a list of companies hiring for a given role". Those templates are real assets. If one of them matches what you need, Clay will get you to a running workflow in an hour and Stekpad will ask you to describe the same pipeline to Claude for five minutes first.

Deep CRM integrations. Clay has first-class Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, and Apollo integrations. You can wire a workflow to write back directly into your CRM on a schedule without touching code. Stekpad exports to CSV and pushes to Google Sheets, and we have webhooks you can wire to your own CRM, but we do not have a native "write this dataset back to the right Salesforce object" integration yet.

Phone numbers from third-party vendors. Our phone enricher is good for what it is — it scans the scraped page and calls a libphonenumber parser — but we do not call ZoomInfo or Apollo to back-fill missing phone numbers from their vendor databases. Clay does. If your list needs coverage from those databases specifically, Clay is going to have more of them.

Teams that have already built in Clay. If you already have 40 workflows wired up in Clay and your revenue team relies on them, switching is a project, not a weekend task. A rational migration takes months. Do not start if you have no reason to move.

The question is not "which tool is better". The question is "which tool matches the job I am doing and the data I am willing to share".

When Stekpad is the better tool

Conversely, Stekpad is the better fit when some of these are true.

You want your data to stay in one place. If sharing your list with four third-party vendors is a compliance, legal, or trust problem — or just an aesthetic one — Stekpad keeps everything inside our stack. One company, one contract, one place to audit.

You want pay-as-you-go. 9 euros for 2,000 credits, no monthly commitment. You can run Stekpad for six months on a 90-euro pack if your workload is spiky, and the unused credits are still there next quarter because they last 12 months. Clay's seat subscription is not designed for that shape.

You want to drive enrichment from Claude or Cursor. MCP is a native surface for us. Install once, and every verb and every enricher is a tool the model can call during a conversation. We wrote a tutorial that walks through building a 50-row enrichment pipeline inside one Claude session. Clay does not currently expose an MCP server, so if agent-driven enrichment is your target, the wiring is different.

You need authenticated scraping. Our cookie bridge lets you scrape pages that require a login (LinkedIn profiles, Stripe dashboards, internal admin tools) without handing over your cookies to a server. Clay's scraping is via third-party vendors that typically do server-side cookies or avoid authenticated pages entirely.

You want the raw verbs. If you are a developer and you want to call scrape, crawl, extract, and search directly, with predictable JSON and a typed error surface, our API is built for that. Clay's API is mostly data-in and data-out around the workflow engine, not verb-level.

A working migration path

If you decide Stekpad is the right fit, here is a sane migration that does not break your team on day one.

Week 1 — inventory your Clay workflows. List every active workflow and classify each step: scraping, email finding, email verification, company info, phone enrichment, LinkedIn lookup, custom HTTP call, or CRM write. You will probably find that 80 percent of the work is covered by five or six step types.

Week 2 — map steps to Stekpad primitives. Most of the common steps translate directly. Scraping maps to POST /v1/scrape. Email finding maps to find_emails. Email verification maps to email_verify. LinkedIn lookup often maps to find_socials plus the cookie bridge for authenticated fetches. Company info maps to find_company_info. Phone enrichment maps to phone_enrich. Text classification maps to ai_classify. If a step has no equivalent (a specific vendor database we do not replicate), flag it and decide whether you need it at all.

Week 3 — rebuild one workflow in Stekpad. Pick a non-critical workflow, rebuild it as a sequence of API calls or as an MCP conversation, and run both Clay and Stekpad on the same input list for a week. Compare hit rates, compare costs, compare bounce rates. Do not take our word for it.

Week 4 — cut over. If the comparison looks good, migrate the rest. Keep Clay running in parallel for one billing cycle as a fallback. Cancel on month 2.

Here is what the cutover looks like for a single workflow at the API level.

Then enrich the resulting dataset with four enrichers.

Run find_emails, email_verify, find_socials, find_company_info in sequence. That is the Clay equivalent of a standard "enrich a company URL" workflow, minus the third-party vendor hop.

A word on data brokers and compliance

If you are operating in a regime with strict data processing rules (GDPR, CCPA, CPRA, sector-specific compliance), the vendor count matters. Each third-party enrichment vendor is a subprocessor you have to list in your privacy notice. Each one is a contract you have to maintain. Each one is a breach vector you have to assess.

Stekpad's 19 in-house enrichers reduce that surface. You have one subprocessor (us), one contract, one breach surface. That is not a legal opinion, it is a structural observation. Whether it matters to your compliance team is a conversation to have with them.

Next steps

• Read the enrichment pipeline tutorial for a worked example from 50 URLs to a CSV.
• Browse the full enrichers catalog with credit costs and typical hit rates.
• See pricing — PAYG packs, no subscription required, credits last 12 months.
• Set up MCP in Claude Desktop to drive the pipeline from a conversation.