Clay.earth Review: Is THIS an End-Game Personal CRM?

I do a lot of networking, and recently I’ve asked myself a crucial question: How do I systemize my personal network of people? I started researching how others solve this problem. Long story short, everyone uses their own system, often built on either paper cards or digital records. Yet, during my research, one app stood out: Clay.earth. This application was seemingly built for the very purpose of solving the problem of systemizing a personal network.

I was looking for an application that would allow me to better manage my personal contacts – not work contacts, not professional ones, not clients, but personal ones. Obviously, most of my network is still professional, but I wanted a tool that would allow me, as a professional, to connect with people from my vast network. Often, this means just randomly chatting with someone without a particular purpose, simply for the sake of building better relationships.

So, here’s the question: Is Clay.earth holding its promise? Is this the app that’s going to be part of my personal software arsenal and replace my current mental CRM?

In this article, I’ll explain what Clay is, what company stands behind it, who this product was created for, and most importantly, who this product is not intended for. I’ll discuss the user experience and implementation into personal life. I’ll cover the features – what it can and, most interestingly, what it cannot do. 

I’ll also talk about the application versions, product support (which I’ve had experience with), and the community. I’ll provide a very brief technical overview so you can better understand how it works. Of course, I’ll definitely talk about security and compliance. 

Finally, I’ll discuss its cost and express my personal opinion: whether this application suited me, whether I can use it, what I liked and disliked about it, and what was sufficient versus what was lacking.

So, is Clay.earth a hidden gem or just another shiny app? Let’s dive in and find out!

Company and Product Positioning

Clay.earth (do not confuse it with another “Clay” that has similar functionality) was founded in 2019, as far as I understand, in the United States. On June 12, 2024, the company was acquired by Automattic – the company behind WordPress. If you don’t know what WordPress is, it’s a huge platform for creating websites. By the way, my company’s website is built on WordPress, as are the vast majority of great sites and blogs you’ve seen. According to some data, almost 40% of websites on the internet consist of WordPress. Don’t hold me to these exact figures – the precise numbers vary greatly – but let’s agree on one thing: a significant portion of the internet consists of WordPress-based sites.

From what I understood after studying the topic a bit, Automattic plans to integrate this product into their overall system. They have many products, including Beeper and Tumblr – I highly recommend searching for them. Automattic plans to integrate Clay as what they call an “identity layer,” whatever that means.

What’s important for us is that Automattic is a well-established company that recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. This suggests one important thing: the product is reliable, likely won’t disappear anytime soon (unless Automattic decides to significantly transform it), and can generally be trusted. This leads me to an important question: Who is Clay for?

Who is Clay for?

Naturally, I looked at Clay’s own description of what they say about themselves. They say approximately the following: it’s for professionals who want to manage their own database of people – clients and potential clients, friends and family, personal circle, and personal network management.

Interestingly, Clay says they are not a networking application, which is funny because, as it seemed to me, that’s exactly what they should be working for. I don’t entirely understand the difference between networking and managing a circle of people, but what’s interesting is they promote one unique concept: they want to introduce “happy serendipity” into your life by suggesting several people to think about.

I’ll explain how this works later, but it’s a very interesting and unusual concept. I’m not sure I agree with it, but I can’t say it doesn’t work. This is a very interesting feature of this application.

Honestly, I’m very grateful specifically to Clay, their philosophy, and their blog, because I didn’t even know how much I needed this application. I pulled out all my contacts from all the years I’ve had – over five thousand of them – and went through them. Not each one individually, but by using their filters and many other tools, I found many interesting old contacts I reconnected with. I don’t know what will come of this, but it’s very interesting, at minimum.

In other words, Clay was created specifically for people like me – professionals who either have their own business, are self-employed and personally involved, or simply work in large companies and want to manage their own network of people, acquaintances, friends, remember birthdays, and so on.

Who Clay is NOT for

Now, it’s also worth mentioning who Clay is NOT for. First, it’s not for sales teams, despite having a team subscription. This application is not about sales because it simply lacks the necessary functionality. It’s not for people who manage sales funnels because there is no sales funnel there. It’s just a big address book with very interesting features.

Finally, as they say themselves, this is not a networking application, which I personally don’t entirely agree with. In my understanding, this application is exactly for networking. In any case, it’s a good time to look at the application itself and discuss its user experience and adoption.

Experience and Adoption

Application Structure

When you open the application, you see four main tabs (there are actually five, but let’s focus on four, as the fifth is search, which we’ll discuss separately).

Home Tab: Here, you see all changes happening in your network, for example, job changes. It pulls this from Twitter or LinkedIn. If you live in non-US countries where LinkedIn isn’t widely used, unfortunately, this feature will be useless. And it’s a very useful feature when it works.

You also see people Clay suggests you think about. This works using AI. I don’t know – I think they themselves don’t know exactly how this algorithm works, as it’s some AI that learns from you, your network, and randomly selects 3-5 people. You can actually configure how many people you want, up to 10 people maximum, 0 minimum. This is called “Automatic Reconnect,” and it randomly shows you a few people. This is that “happy serendipity” they want to introduce into your life – a few random people to think about and reflect on relationships. I perceive this as simply writing “hey, how are you” to these people, and you never know what it might lead to. It’s quite a cool concept. I like it, though I prefer a bit more control.

Then there are birthdays, events, social media changes, social media posts from these people, the reconnect button (which is exactly this suggestion to think about certain people), reminders you set for yourself, and sharing – a place where you can see people and lists shared with you if you have a team subscription. 

People Tab: This is simply a list of all your contacts with the ability to open each one separately. There’s nothing more to add here; it’s a great list. What I liked is that in the desktop application, you can use shortcuts directly from the list to change something in this people list. You just navigate up and down with keyboard arrows, press, for example, the E key for edit, and edit the contact. It’s very convenient. The application’s shortcuts are simply delightful.

Contact Cards: If you open a person’s card, it’s very interestingly built around notes. You can and should write what you wanted to remember and leave different tags with hashtags. With the add button, you can mark connections between people. For example, if you introduced someone to someone else, you mark that on such-and-such date you introduced this person to that person, just to remember that you introduced them.

Then there’s a contact button, and here’s one very big drawback: there’s simply no Telegram button to easily add Telegram as a source. What is a source? Sources are where to pull information from; at least, that’s what they call them. But additionally, these are also contacts. Instead of writing a phone number, you write a source. Why is it done this way? Because it pulls contacts from different sources – WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter, email – these are all sources. They’re also means of communication, so if you press the “contact” button, it takes you to one of the sources.

Since Telegram doesn’t support the same functions as, for example, WhatsApp for Business, where you can see the entire correspondence (the application can see the entire correspondence, which completely suits me because I can see from contacts when I communicated via WhatsApp – it’s very convenient and cool), and Telegram doesn’t allow this, they should at least add a link for me. But I can’t. The only thing I can do is add a custom URL. I need to write  t.me/username each time. But this is inconvenient, to put it mildly. This functionality is missing, and it’s a big drawback of this application.

Feed: In the Feed, you can see all interactions – emails, WhatsApp, calls, iMessage, calendar. It’s convenient to track what was happening with this person. This is one of the best applications in terms of showing context – showing the context of what’s happening with a specific person. Thanks to Clay, I discovered many people I simply didn’t remember who they were. I started reading correspondence; it pulled email and even WhatsApp conversations for me. I could open an email, read correspondence, and remember who this person was. This way, I found several interesting contacts.

Reminders: You can set reminders for people you want to follow up with, but there’s a design flaw: all reminders must be assigned a specific time, which creates confusion. First, it’s unclear whether these reminders will repeat or appear just once. Second, this time requirement is problematic because in practice, 95% of your reminders should be “sometime today” rather than “at 2 PM sharp.” When you’re forced to assign arbitrary times to most reminders that don’t actually need them, you’ll naturally start ignoring the time component entirely – including for that crucial 5% of reminders where timing actually matters, like “call back at noon as promised.”

It would be better if they made day reminders and time reminders separately. Then you’d simply have a list like “today you generally need to write, call, or do something with people at any available time.” But there’s a part of reminders that needs time. Nevertheless, they work, they appear in the list, and they don’t disappear. Until you explicitly mark that you’ve done them, they won’t disappear anywhere.

Cadence: This is the frequency with which you should contact a person. There’s a cool feature – there are different time periods (week, two months, etc.), but the most interesting starts automatically. This is where AI comes up with when a person should receive a reminder. I don’t really understand yet whether this is good or bad. I feel like I lack a bit of control. I’d like more control, but on the other hand, there’s a large part of contacts where you look and think, “I don’t know when to contact them, I can’t make a decision, let someone make this decision for me.” And this is cool on one hand, but I don’t know what the maximum frequency of these reminders is. Won’t there be a situation where you set it to automatic, and because you have many people in contacts (for example, 1,500), and you only get three people per day (that’s 900 or 1,000 people per year), there might be a situation where it simply skips someone for longer than a year? I don’t really understand how this works, but the idea of some hypothetical automatic cadence is cool. And what if there are 5,000 contacts? That’s the thing.

Nexus: This is an AI agent that understands text. It’s convenient when there’s a lot of context about a person and you need to make a summary or ask questions about a specific person. Though it seems to me this is more of a toy. It’s hard for me to say – I’d be interested to hear from someone who really uses this, because I have nothing to comment about this Nexus yet. It’s another LLM; I don’t know what it’s based on, but it’s there, and it’s cool. The future is definitely behind this, and it’s convenient, but I don’t know how well it works.

Groups: You can add people to groups, set cadence at the group level, copy all emails and numbers to make, for example, a mailing list, and export everything to a CSV file. In groups, you can see so-called highlights – all the same things as on the home page, but filtered by this group. This is convenient if you need to track participants of some event or, for example, all executives. Though I can’t yet think of what exactly these highlights in these groups are needed for. Fairly speaking, I don’t know, maybe it’s related to my specific case, but for some reason, my highlights in groups showed people who had nothing to do with these groups. I don’t know if this is a bug or maybe I misunderstood the feature.

Now, it is a great time to talk about Search. Here, it should be noted that officially this is their big feature. In fact, I’m not entirely sure I fully figured it out because the idea of search is that you can write in simple words what you want to filter. But the problem is they seem to use some syntax of their own.

For example, I wanted to filter people with whom I had no interactions at all. I couldn’t do it. Another example: “give me everyone with a low relationship level,” which, by the way, is a separate feature of Clay. If you go to a contact, they have network strength in the upper right corner—high, medium, and low. I wanted to say, “filter everyone with low network strength for me,” and I couldn’t do this – search doesn’t provide this.

Search promises to be very simple, but often I didn’t see people in results who should have fit this description, who definitely had certain tags. They have their own syntax described on the site, but I always have a suspicion that it’s not fully described, or if it’s complete, it’s very small and limited.

What should be their key feature didn’t work for me. I don’t understand why, but it’s like the idea is great, but first, people who should definitely fall under these criteria weren’t filtered, and those who were caught were some random folk – I don’t understand by what principle at all. Often, I simply lack functionality like “filter everyone by weak network strength.”

Also, for example, I filtered people I met more than a year ago. It only filters people with whom there were meetings. If there were no meetings with people, if there were no interactions with people at all, they don’t fall into any search at all; they just seem to be invisible for the search. This is a real problem.

Adding Contacts: Clay offers a genuinely clever feature for adding new contacts – you can simply paste a LinkedIn URL and it should automatically import the person’s information. Picture this: you’re at a networking event, someone says “find me on LinkedIn,” you grab your phone, locate their profile, copy the link, and paste it into Clay. In theory, their contact details should populate instantly. When this works, it’s brilliant and saves tons of manual data entry. Unfortunately, the feature is unreliable – sometimes the LinkedIn link imports perfectly, other times nothing happens at all. This inconsistency is particularly frustrating when you’re trying to quickly capture contacts during or right after events.

My workaround is to manually enter the person’s name and paste their LinkedIn URL in the notes section along with a quick tag (I use numbers to identify events – much faster than typing full event names). While this defeats the purpose of the automatic import, Clay still excels at contact creation overall. The interface is designed around creating notes first, contacts second – you’re essentially jotting down thoughts about a person with the option to formalize it into a contact later. This approach feels more natural than traditional contact apps.

The mobile experience adds some nice touches: you can record voice notes that automatically convert to text (English only, unfortunately), photograph business cards for quick import, cross-reference existing contacts, and set follow-up reminders. These features make Clay genuinely practical for real-world networking situations, even when the LinkedIn import doesn’t cooperate.

Automatic Import: This is where Clay truly shines. Beyond basic LinkedIn integration (which many apps offer), Clay monitors your calendar and automatically creates contact entries for people you have meetings with. Here’s how it works: someone sends you a meeting invite for next week, and Clay immediately pulls that person into your contact database and flags the upcoming meeting in your weekly overview. When you open their profile, you might not know anything about them yet, but you can see the meeting context and start building their profile before you actually meet. This proactive approach means you never lose track of people you’re interacting with – Clay captures everyone who enters your professional orbit automatically. It’s an incredibly thoughtful feature that deserves serious credit.

Application Versions

Now, it is a great time to talk about Clay’s availability on different platforms. 

Clay offers three platforms: desktop apps for macOS and Windows (though Windows naturally lacks iMessage integration), mobile for iOS only, and a web version.

The iOS-only mobile app is a significant limitation – Android users are completely excluded. This affected me personally since I use a Google Pixel for client work (some clients require dedicated devices for security reasons, and I chose Android over a second iPhone for variety). Without an Android app, I’m restricted to desktop and web access at times when I only have my Pixel phone.

The web version functions well and serves as a decent fallback. However, I encountered persistent stability issues across both desktop and web platforms. While the apps don’t crash outright, they constantly fail to load content properly – requiring frequent page refreshes, reopening windows, or hitting Command-R to reload. Data doesn’t update reliably, and interface elements regularly need manual refreshing to display correctly. I can’t speak to Windows performance, but these issues plagued both macOS desktop and web versions throughout my testing. It’s frustrating when you’re trying to quickly update contacts or check information.

Which brings me to the product support discussion.

Product Support

Normally, when I review software, I take a look at the ecosystem of the product, but unlike enterprise software, Clay doesn’t have consultants, extensive communities, or dedicated customer success teams. It’s designed for individuals and small teams. So instead of traditional support metrics, let’s evaluate Clay’s long-term viability and trustworthiness.

I can’t predict the future or guarantee any product’s longevity, but I can assess the available signals. Since Automattic’s acquisition in June 2024, Clay’s public presence has noticeably quieted. Their social media activity dropped significantly – LinkedIn posts became sporadic, blog updates ceased, and promotional content disappeared. While this could simply reflect Automattic’s directive to focus on development rather than marketing, it creates uncertainty.

Clay’s documentation exists and covers their core philosophy, but it feels stagnant since the acquisition. The writing frequency has clearly decreased, mirroring their reduced social media presence.

On the other hand, despite the marketing silence, Clay recently shipped WhatsApp integration – a substantial feature that significantly improves the user experience. I can now see my WhatsApp communication history directly in contact profiles, which has actually influenced my messaging app preferences. This suggests active development continues behind the scenes.

But then, Clay’s supposed user forum is essentially non-existent – their website mentions it, but it’s inaccessible. Reddit has scattered individual posts but no dedicated community. This absence adds to my uncertainty about the product’s momentum.

Finally, Customer Support: When I encountered an issue with the app from the app store, Clay’s support team took a full week to respond. They did resolve the issue, but the delay felt telling. As an independent company, they likely prioritized rapid support to retain customers and attract investors. Now, with Automattic’s backing and some strategic integration plan, there’s less urgency around customer service excellence. But again, that’s my speculation, and I’m not basing this off any insights, just my observations.

My overall assessment is mixed. The facts show continued development, but my intuition suggests something has shifted post-acquisition. Clay feels less urgent, less customer-focused – though still functional and evolving. Which brings me to the very short, but also very important part of this article – technical review.

Technical Review

Clay keeps things deliberately simple, targeting individual users and power users rather than enterprise teams. Their main automation offering is Make.com integration, but it’s frustratingly limited.

I expected robust workflow capabilities – for instance, automatically syncing Clay reminders to my task manager (I switched from Things for Mac to Todoist for better project tracking). Instead, Make.com offers just two Clay modules: “Create a Contact” and “Create/Update a Contact.” This means you can push contacts into Clay from external sources, but you can’t pull data out of Clay for use elsewhere. It’s a one-way street that severely limits workflow integration.

Another major limitation is No Custom Fields: Clay doesn’t allow custom dropdowns or specialized data fields. While I can’t immediately think of what custom fields I’d need for personal contacts, the limitation becomes apparent when you want to expand beyond basic contact management. The workaround is using hashtags, but that’s less structured than proper custom fields and limits filtering capabilities.

And of course, the Telegram Gap: While Clay integrates beautifully with WhatsApp (showing full conversation history), Telegram integration is nonexistent. This isn’t entirely Clay’s fault – Telegram’s API philosophy differs from WhatsApp’s business-friendly approach. Still, Clay could at least provide a “Contact via Telegram” button that opens the app with the right person. Currently, you’d need to manually create custom URLs (t.me/username) for each contact, which is cumbersome. 

These limitations reflect Clay’s consumer focus but feel restrictive for users wanting to build more sophisticated personal CRM workflows. Which brings me to the discussion of their pricing.

Pricing and Value

Plans

Clay has three pricing plans:

• Free: Up to 1,000 contacts
• PRO: Unlimited contacts
• Team: Up to 4 users

What’s interesting and really intrigued me is they have Advanced Data Enrichment in their TEAM plan. I’m very interested in what this means. I contacted the guys but haven’t received an answer yet. At the time of writing this article, there’s no answer yet. And that’s it. Literally there’s nothing to discuss, which is a good time to give my take on this app.

Personal Take

Clay fundamentally changed how I think about contact management. Coming from Salesforce – which I now realize is terrible for personal relationship tracking – Clay introduced me to the concept of a personal CRM. The impact was immediate: I imported over 5,000 contacts accumulated over years and rediscovered dozens of people I’d lost touch with. Reaching out to contacts from 5-7 years ago yielded surprisingly warm responses – turns out these relationships were more valuable than I’d remembered.

Clay is undeniably useful, but it feels structurally limited. Everything revolves around basic groups and hashtags, which becomes primitive when managing large contact databases. I found myself wanting proper filtering systems, custom reports, and ways to extract specific contact lists for targeted outreach. The organization feels more like a digital notebook than a sophisticated database.

My biggest frustration is search reliability. While Clay excels at enriching data for digitally active professionals, it struggles with my “offline” contacts – manufacturing company owners, niche business operators, people without significant web presence. These contacts essentially disappear from search results unless I remember their exact names. Even then, search sometimes fails to find people I know are in the system.

I absolutely loved the hotkey-driven interface, the design is genuinely beautiful (10/10), and the contact context display is unmatched. The integration experience, especially for adding new contacts, sets the standard for this category.

However, decreased social activity, performance issues, and that unreliable search function that should be Clay’s crown jewel.

So, Would I Want to Use This System?  

And at this point, I’m withholding judgment until my next review, where I’ll compare Clay to its closest competitor. They’re so similar they could be twins, with nearly identical feature sets and naming conventions. I’m currently using both applications in parallel to make a proper comparison.

Curious which app will come out on top? Stay tuned – I’ll reveal it in my next article!