Lusha vs Clay
 Lusha |  Clay | |
|---|---|---|
| Sentiment | ||
| Score | 43/100 | 25/100 |
| Rank in category | #1 | #4 |
| Rated comments | 21 | 19 |
| Best for | Individual reps doing occasional lookups on a budget; A secondary source alongside another database; Small teams starting on a free plan | RevOps or GTM engineers who will build and maintain custom enrichment workflows; Waterfall enrichment across several data providers; Targeted, lower-volume lists where data quality matters more than cost per row |
| Skip it if | Enterprise or Fortune 500 prospecting; Large list building with fine-grained filters; Teams that cannot absorb bounces from unverified emails | Teams that just want a contact database with no setup; High-volume bulk enrichment on a tight budget; Agencies that need predictable per-client costs |
| Pricing (vendor-stated) | Free plan with 40 credits per month. Paid plans per the pricing page's plan data: Starter $37.45/mo billed annually ($49.90 monthly) for 400 credits per month, Pro $52.45/mo annually ($69.90 monthly) for 600, Premium $299.95/mo annually ($399.90 monthly) for 3,400; Scale is custom. An email reveal costs 1 credit and a phone number 5. The page does not state whether prices are per user; teams above 5 users are sent to sales. No free trial beyond the free plan. | Free plan with 100 data credits and 500 actions a month (tables capped at 200 rows, no phone enrichment). Launch from $167/mo billed annually ($185 monthly) with 2,500 data credits and 15,000 actions a month; Growth from $446/mo billed annually ($495 monthly) with 6,000 data credits and 40,000 actions; Enterprise is custom with an annual commitment. Data credits start at $0.05 each; bring-your-own API key runs use actions only. 14-day trial. |
Independent users see Lusha as a budget-friendly lookup tool that some find more accurate than Apollo for emails and phone numbers, useful as a second source or for one-off lookups. The trade-off is uneven accuracy (users report invented emails, invalid numbers and roughly 50/50 hit rates), thin coverage for enterprise and EMEA work, and weak filtering and credit terms. More than half of the Reddit mentions were promotional: one cluster of comments repeats 'Lusha for accuracy, Apollo for volume' in vendor terms, and many replies to Lusha complaints exist to plug alternatives (Bookyourdata, UpLead, ContactOut, FullEnrich and others), so this rests on about 21 independent opinions, most of them brief.
Users like
- Budget friendly, with free credits that make it easy to start and combine with Apollo[1][2][3]
- Some users find its emails and numbers more accurate than Apollo's or ZoomInfo's, though it returns fewer results[1][2][3][4]
- Phone numbers, including mobiles, work fairly well for some teams despite occasional misses[1][2]
- Useful as one of two sources: users pair it with Apollo, and one found it surfaced far more decision makers than Apollo for the same companies[1][2][3]
Users complain about
- Accuracy is unreliable for some: users report about 50/50 accuracy, invalid numbers that hurt domains, and one domain owner traced made-up email addresses sent to his company back to Lusha[1][2][3][4]
- Falls short against premium providers: it lost to ZoomInfo and Cognism in US and EMEA tests and was not enough for Fortune 500 IT prospecting[1][2][3]
- Filtering and user experience are weak, and one user calls the UX horrible enough to make it 2 to 3 times more expensive in practice[1]
- Credit terms frustrate users: no refunds for bad data, CRM saving gated on the first paid tier, and a search limit that appeared without notice[1][2]
Independent users largely agree Clay is the most flexible way to run waterfall enrichment and custom research workflows, because it can query many providers and route the results into a CRM. The trade-off is cost and effort: credits burn quickly, the 2026 move to billing every workflow action makes bills hard to predict, and teams say it takes a skilled builder or a dedicated person to get value from it. More than half of the Reddit mentions are promotional, including a cluster of about a dozen r/coldemail comments from May and June 2026 that all pair Prospeo with Clay in the same talking points, plus many replies plugging Clay alternatives such as Bitscale, Floqer, Airscale and pipe0; this review rests on about 20 independent opinions.
Users like
- Waterfall enrichment across many providers: users say it pulls from more sources than single databases like Apollo and fills gaps they would otherwise miss[1][2][3][4][5]
- Flexible enough for custom work once someone learns it: AI account research, hiring signals, CRM imports and middleware between other tools[1][2][3][4][5]
- Costs become manageable for teams that filter lists with cheap signals before enriching, or bring their own provider API keys instead of paying Clay's data markup[1][2][3]
Users complain about
- Expensive: credits burn quickly because it can do so much, and one team cites a $26k quote for what it considered entry-level work[1][2][3][4][5]
- The 2026 pricing change bills every workflow step, HTTP call and CRM push as an action, which users say makes costs hard to predict at agency scale[1][2]
- Steep learning curve: every use case has to be built by hand, and some teams say they would need to hire someone just to run it[1][2][3][4]
- Economics weaken at high volume: users who run it as a bulk data provider find it expensive and suggest reserving it for a filtered or top-priority slice of the list[1][2]