Head-to-head
Clay vs Cognism
Clay: Spreadsheet-style enrichment workspace that waterfalls dozens of data providers per cell. Cognism: Sales-intelligence provider known for phone-verified mobile numbers.
Overlapping capabilities: Email finding.
Benchmark: people search
Clay and Cognism have no completed benchmark run yet — this comparison fills in as suites run. Reviews below are live.
Reviews across the web
Clay is beloved by power users — near-perfect scores on G2 (4.9) and Product Hunt (4.8) driven by its waterfall enrichment and AI research agent — but community sentiment is more divided than the ratings suggest. The recurring complaints are opaque credit economics, surprise billing, and a learning curve that punishes casual users, reflected in a much lower Trustpilot score. It rewards teams willing to invest in learning it and monitoring credit burn.
Full roundup →Cognism scores well with buyers (4.5 on G2 across ~1,200 reviews, 4.7 on Capterra) and is the community's default recommendation for GDPR-compliant European data and verified mobile numbers. The consistent knocks are expensive, opaque pricing that shuts out small teams, weaker US coverage, and the gap between the headline accuracy claim and the full database. Data-subject privacy complaints drive a much lower Trustpilot score.
Full roundup →