Starlight vs
Clay
Clay's enrichment is the best in outbound, and if you enjoy building systems you'll get a lot out of it. Starlight is the opposite trade: there's nothing to build. Describe your buyer, and the list, the research, and the emails are already done.
Free plan, no credit card. Every message waits for your approval.
One prompt searches the web for your best-fit buyers
See the difference
How Starlight and Clay actually differ, row by row.
| Feature | Starlight | Clay |
|---|---|---|
| Core model | Describe your buyer; the agents do the rest | Build the table, the waterfall, and the logic yourself |
| Setup effort | One sentence and a brief | Real learning curve; plays take hours to build |
| Enrichment | Built-in research and enrichment per lead | Waterfall across 150+ providers, best in class |
| Outreach writing | Written per person, then scored before you see it | AI columns you prompt, then hand to a sequencer |
| Sending and follow-up | Email and LinkedIn follow-ups, sent in their working hours | Basic built-in sequencer, or export to a sending tool |
| Human review | Every message approved before send | Whatever your downstream sequencer does |
| Scheduling | Native booking pages and links included | Not offered |
| Entry pricing | Free plan, then pay for what you use, from $12/mo | Free tier, then $167/mo (Launch) |
| Seats | No per-seat fees | Unlimited seats on all plans |
Where Starlight is the better fit
- There's nothing to build. The searching, scoring, research, writing and follow-up already work together, rather than being columns you wire up yourself.
- Outreach is the product, not the last column of a spreadsheet. Multi-step email and LinkedIn follow-ups, a quality score on every message, reply drafts, and booking.
- Priced for one person: free to start, then $12 a month, against Clay's $167 entry plan.
- Agents run on a schedule and re-plan their own searches, so pipeline keeps arriving without you opening the tool.
Where Clay is strong
- The strongest enrichment layer in the category. Waterfalling 150+ providers means Clay fills fields nobody else fills, and you only pay for the credit that hits.
- Genuine flexibility: if you can describe a GTM play as a table plus some logic, Clay can probably build it, including plays no product would ship as a feature.
- A large template library and an unusually active community, so most common plays already exist as something you can copy.
- Unlimited seats on every plan, including free, which is rare and matters for teams.
What using it actually looks like
You describe the buyer. Starlight does the rest, and shows you its work.
Describe the buyer. That's the setup. One sentence about who you're trying to reach. Starlight works out the searches, runs them, and keeps digging once the obvious results run out.
Bad-fit prospects never reach you. Everyone is scored against your ideal customer before you see them, with the reasoning shown. You spend your attention on the ones worth having.
You'll know if it's working. Your numbers come with a plain-English read on what changed and what to do next, instead of a dashboard you have to interpret yourself.
AI outreach you'd put your name on.
The worry with an AI sales agent is simple: what is it saying to people, and would you have said it? Starlight answers that by showing you. Every draft is graded before it reaches you, and the weak ones are rewritten automatically.
Grounded
Every claim traces back to something real about that person or their company. Invented details get caught.
Human
It has to read like you wrote it on a good day, not like a template with the gaps filled in.
On brief
It does what you actually asked for. Ask for a reply and it won't quietly push for a call instead.
What's left takes a few seconds each to approve, edit, or delete. Once an agent has earned it, you can let it send on its own.
Why teams pick Starlight over Clay
Clay is a workbench, and that's meant as a compliment: the enrichment is the best in the category, and a good operator can assemble plays in it that no packaged product would ever ship. The catch is that the play is yours to build, maintain, and debug, and the first paid plan is $167 a month before you've sent a single email.
Starlight is a tool for people who want the play to already exist. You write a sentence describing the buyer and a brief describing the pitch, and the agent handles the searching, the scoring, the research, the writing across email and LinkedIn, the follow-up timing, and the reply drafts. The output lands in a review queue with a quality score on every message. There is no table to design, which also means there is no table to fix at eleven at night.
Clay wins when enrichment coverage is genuinely your bottleneck, or when you have an operator who enjoys building systems. For most small teams neither is true: the bottleneck is that nobody has time to build anything, and $167 a month is a lot to pay for a workbench nobody has opened. Starlight is the finished version of the play you would have built in Clay, free to start and $12 a month after that.
Read more: How Starlight's agents work·Natural-language lead search·Starlight vs Apollo.io
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Other comparisons
View all comparisons →Cold email sending infrastructure
Starlight vs Instantly
Instantly is very good at getting a lot of email delivered without landing in spam. Starlight is for the other kind of outbound: fewer people, properly researched, every message written for one person and read by you before it goes out.
Multichannel outbound sequencer
Starlight vs lemlist
lemlist gives you more channels than almost anyone: email, LinkedIn, SMS, WhatsApp, calls. What it doesn't give you is the campaign. You still pick the people and write every line. Starlight does both, and hands you the result to approve.
Cold email infrastructure for agencies
Starlight vs Smartlead
Smartlead is the cheapest honest way to run high-volume sending, and agencies live in it for good reason. But it's bring your own list and bring your own copy, and that is where the hours actually go. Starlight brings both.
Competitor details and pricing reflect public positioning as of 2026-08-11. Spotted something out of date? Let us know.