Starlight vs
Clay

Skip the spreadsheet. Describe the buyer — Starlight returns the list, the research, and the emails. Clay makes you build the system first.

Start free See the difference

Free plan, no credit card. Every message waits for your approval.

One prompt searches the web for your best-fit buyers

See the difference

Where Starlight pulls ahead of Clay, row by row.

Starlight vs Clay: a feature-by-feature comparison
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 you assemble yourself across 150+ providers
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	Review mode or autopilot, per agent	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

Why Starlight wins

The play ships. Search, score, research, write, follow up — already connected.
Outreach is the product: scored drafts, LinkedIn, replies, booking.
Free, then $12. You experiment instead of submitting a budget.
Agents re-plan their own searches. Pipeline arrives without you opening a grid.

What you'd still do in Clay

You are the operator: table, waterfall, logic, maintenance.
It does not send a finished campaign. You still need a sequencer and a writer.
$167 a month before a single email leaves.

What using it actually looks like

You describe the buyer. Starlight does the rest, and shows you its work.

Starlight's search page, where an ideal customer is described in plain language

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.

A Starlight contact record showing a match score and the reasoning behind it

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.

Starlight's metrics dashboard with a written summary above the charts

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.

Starlight's Messages page showing drafted outreach waiting for review and approval

5xMore replies to cold outreach

3xMore qualified meetings per rep

50%More pipeline per rep in 90 days

5xFaster from first touch to booked

60%Fewer leads lost to slow follow-up

Why you switch from Clay

Most teams do not have a Clay problem. They have a Tuesday problem: nobody built the play, so nobody got emailed. A workbench cannot fix a missing operator. It just invoices you $167 to stare at an empty table.

Starlight is the play, shipped. One sentence. One brief. An agent that returns researched people and scored copy across email and LinkedIn. That is the entire setup.

Stop assembling outbound. Start sending it. The finished version of the Clay play is free to try this afternoon.

Frequently
asked questions

Yes. Starlight is the finished outbound play: find, research, write, send, book. You do not need a workbench, a sequencer, and an operator. Custom columns in a warehouse are a different job than getting meetings.

Usually not. Starlight enriches every lead from established B2B data providers and researches the person and their company on the open web before writing a word. Waterfall enrichment earns its keep when you need unusual fields nobody else carries; for finding the right people and saying something true to them, the research Starlight already does is what actually shows up in the email.

Both have a free tier, but the step up is very different: Clay's first paid plan is $167 a month, Starlight's is $12. If you're one person still testing whether outbound works for you at all, that's the difference between a decision and an experiment.