Apify vs. Clay: which Clay do you mean?
Two unrelated companies ship a product called Clay, and the search results mix them. Clay.com is a go-to-market platform that enriches contact lists for sales teams. Clay on clay.earth was a personal CRM; that domain now permanently redirects to me.sh, where the product is called Mesh. Apify competes head-on with neither. It runs the crawlers that produce raw web data, which is one of the inputs the other two consume.
So the honest answer to "Apify vs Clay" is that you are not choosing between two versions of the same thing. You are deciding which layer of the stack you are short of: extraction, enrichment, or memory.
Which Clay does your search mean?
| Apify | Clay (clay.com) | Mesh (was clay.earth) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Cloud platform for running web scrapers and browser automation | GTM data platform: enrich, research, and route lists to sales tools | Personal CRM that keeps a timeline of the people you already know |
| Where the data comes from | Pages you point a crawler at | 200+ commercial data providers plus AI research agents | Your own inbox, calendar, and connected accounts |
| Who buys it | Developers, data teams, growth engineers | Sales ops, RevOps, outbound teams | Founders, investors, operators who live in their network |
| Entry price | Free $0 with $5 monthly usage; Starter $19/mo | Free with 500 monthly actions and 100 data credits; Launch from $167/mo | Personal free up to 1,000 contacts; Pro $10/mo |
| Top of the published range | Business $999/mo | Growth from $446/mo, then Enterprise custom | Team $40/seat/mo up to 4 members, then Enterprise custom |
| Billing unit | Compute units plus per-Actor charges | Actions and data credits | Seats |
| Price source, checked 2026-09-09 | apify.com/pricing | clay.com/pricing | me.sh/pricing |
Mesh's pricing page defaults to annual billing, and the -50% (Pro) and -18% (Team) badges are the annual-versus-monthly saving, so $10 and $40 are the annual-billing rates. Clay.com also lists a 10% discount for annual billing.
What changed, and when
Three facts underneath this comparison, each re-checked on 2026-09-09.
- clay.earth is gone as a destination.
curl -I https://clay.earth/returns301withlocation: https://me.sh/. The redirect drops the query string entirely, so any tracking or campaign parameter appended to a clay.earth URL is discarded before the visitor lands. The product now presents itself only as "Mesh". - Apify's cheapest paid plan is Starter. It is $19/month subject to change · verified 2026-09-09, or $17/month billed annually, and it includes $19 of platform usage at $0.20 per compute unit (apify.com/pricing).
- The Apify Store lists "70,000+ ready-to-run tools called Actors" in its own copy (apify.com/store).
Every Mesh link on this page is a plain editorial link. Our referral parameter did not survive the clay.earth redirect, and rather than leave a dead tracking parameter on the page we removed it. The Apify links are affiliate links.
Apify vs Clay.com: which one gets the data?
Both can put a row in a spreadsheet, but they get there differently, and the difference decides which one you should buy.
Apify runs your crawler against a site you choose. You control the target, the parse, the schedule, and the output shape. That is the right tool when the data lives on a page nobody sells: a niche directory, a municipal register, a marketplace's listing pages, a competitor's changelog.
Clay.com does not crawl arbitrary pages for you. It resolves records against commercial data providers and its own research agents, then writes the result into your CRM or sequencer. If your job is "get me a verified work email and headcount for these 500 companies", that is Clay.com's home turf, and assembling the same coverage from scrapers is slower and worse.
Clay.com is the better buy if your bottleneck is only contact resolution (emails, phone numbers, firmographics, intent signals) and you do not want to maintain a pipeline. You are buying data access and orchestration, not extraction. Its Launch plan starts at $167/month for 15,000 monthly actions and 3,000 data credits (clay.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-09), against Apify's $19. You are paying for the data, not the compute.
Apify is the better buy when the source is a website rather than a data vendor, when you need the same extraction to run on a schedule for months, or when the coverage you need does not exist in any provider's database. See Apify pricing for how compute units and per-Actor charges stack.
Apify vs Mesh: do they overlap at all?
No. Mesh reads accounts you already own and builds a timeline out of them: who you emailed, when you last met, what changed in their profile. It has no facility for pointing a crawler at a URL you supply.
That makes the pairing straightforward rather than competitive. Apify answers "what changed on the web?" Mesh answers "who should I talk to, and what do I already know about them?" Neither answers the other's question, and no amount of configuration will make it.
If you want relationship intelligence without web scraping in the mix, skip Apify entirely and read our roundup of Clay (Mesh) alternatives instead.
What does it cost to feed a CRM from Apify?
A worked example, so the number is not abstract. Say you track 5,000 X/Twitter posts a month as relationship signals using Tweet Scraper V2, which charges $0.0004 per tweet across every plan tier since 2026-06-09 (api.apify.com/v2/acts/apidojo~tweet-scraper, checked 2026-09-09).
- 5,000 tweets × $0.0004 = $2.00 in Actor charges.
- Apify Starter includes $19 of monthly usage, so that run sits inside the plan you already pay for.
- Total: $19/month, with room left for other Actors.
The comparison to Clay.com's $167/month is not like-for-like and should not be read as one. Actions and data credits buy provider lookups, not crawl volume, and 5,000 scraped posts are not 5,000 enriched contacts. The point is narrower: if the input you need is public pages rather than provider records, the extraction layer is cheap, and the money question is which layer you were actually missing.
How do you connect Apify to Clay or Mesh?
Neither vendor ships a native Apify integration. Apify's own integrations page lists n8n, Make, Zapier, Gumloop, Airtable, HubSpot, Snowflake, and Google Drive; Clay is not on it (docs.apify.com/integrations, checked 2026-09-09). So the connection is built, not installed:
- Run the Actor on a schedule in Apify and let results land in a dataset.
- Pull the dataset over the API. The run-sync-get-dataset-items endpoint returns items directly, which is the simplest thing for Clay to call.
- Into Clay.com: use its HTTP API enrichment column, which "lets you send or retrieve data from any tool or database using an API endpoint, even when Clay doesn't offer a native integration" (university.clay.com, checked 2026-09-09). As a source it paginates up to 50,000 rows.
- Into Mesh: there is no public API path. Mesh's Pro tier advertises custom data imports from spreadsheets and CSVs, so the route is an export from Apify into a sheet and an import into Mesh. Budget for that being a manual step.
Deduplicate before you push, not after. Match on email or LinkedIn URL, since both destinations will happily create a second record for the same person. Processing scraped data covers the cleanup, and the Google Sheets integration covers the hand-off. For the full build, read Apify + Clay: relationship intelligence.
Which one should you buy?
- Buy Apify if the data you need is on a web page and nobody sells it to you as a list. Start on the free plan and validate one Actor on real URLs before you pay anything.
- Buy Clay.com if the data you need is a verified contact record and you would rather rent a provider network than build a pipeline.
- Buy Mesh if nothing is wrong with your data and everything is wrong with your follow-up.
- Buy two of them only after you have run the free tier of the one you think you need. Most people who ask this question are missing one layer, not two.
Not to either Clay. Apify runs web scrapers; Clay.com resolves contact records against commercial data providers; Mesh (formerly clay.earth) is a personal CRM built on your own inbox and calendar. Apify can supply data that makes either one more useful, but it does not replace provider coverage or a relationship timeline.
They are separate companies with the same product name. Clay.com is a GTM platform for sales and RevOps teams, priced from $167/month on its Launch plan. Clay.earth was a personal CRM for individuals; as of 2026-09-09 that domain returns a 301 redirect to me.sh and the product is branded Mesh.
The personal CRM is. Checked 2026-09-09, https://clay.earth/ responds 301 with location https://me.sh/, and me.sh describes itself as Mesh with no Clay branding. The redirect also discards any query string, so old clay.earth links with tracking or campaign parameters lose them. The unrelated clay.com is still called Clay.
Personal is free for up to 1,000 contacts. Pro is listed at $10 per month, flat rather than per seat, and Team at $40 per seat per month, adding up to 4 team members. Those are the annual-billing rates shown on me.sh/pricing on 2026-09-09; the page defaults to annual and the -50% and -18% badges are the annual-versus-monthly saving. Enterprise is quoted on request.
Apify's Free plan is $0 with $5 of monthly usage and Starter is $19/month with $19 of usage included, at $0.20 per compute unit (apify.com/pricing, 2026-09-09). Clay.com's Launch plan starts at $167/month. The units are not comparable: Apify bills compute and per-Actor charges, Clay.com bills actions and data credits.
Yes, through Clay's HTTP API enrichment column, which calls any endpoint even where no native integration exists. Point it at Apify's run-sync-get-dataset-items endpoint with your Actor and token. Neither vendor lists the other as a native integration, so this is a build rather than a toggle.
Not for the simple path. You can run a ready-made Actor from the Apify Store with no code, export CSV or JSON, and import it. Code helps when you need custom sites, complex parsing, deduplication at volume, or a pipeline that runs unattended for months.