Clay is a data and enrichment engine, a layer you point at lists to find and enrich leads. It is not a CRM, and that is the gap people feel. Orbit is a full all-in-one CRM with one AI assistant, Hiro, that drafts follow-ups and reminders, plus the timelines, pipeline, and invoices to hold the relationship together. Free to start.
Clay is powerful at one thing: pulling data. You feed it lists, point it at dozens of sources, run enrichment and lookups, and pipe the results out to wherever your outreach happens. For data and growth teams running large prospecting machines, it is a serious tool.
The reason a relationship-led operator outgrows it, or never fully fits it, is that Clay is a layer, not a home. It finds and enriches contacts, but it does not hold the relationship after the first touch. There is no real contact timeline, no pipeline you live in, no follow-up engine, no invoices. You still need a CRM underneath it, and you still do all the follow-through by hand.
If your work is one strong relationship at a time rather than ten thousand rows, you do not need a bigger enrichment engine. You need a CRM that keeps the relationship together and drafts the human follow-up for you.
| Orbit | Clay | |
|---|---|---|
| Large-scale data enrichment | Lighter | Deeper |
| Full contact timeline | ||
| Deal pipeline you live in | ||
| AI assistant (Hiro) that drafts and does the busywork | ||
| Built-in email inbox with tracking | ||
| Invoices, proposals, and booking pages included | ||
| Built-in MCP server to connect Claude | ||
| Free plan, no credit card |
Orbit gives you the CRM Clay lacks, then carries the relationship the whole way. Ask Hiro and it hands you a draft to approve.
Stay on Clay if your job is large-scale data work: enriching tens of thousands of rows, chaining many data providers, building custom waterfalls, and feeding a high-volume outbound machine. That is its home turf, and Orbit does not try to match that depth of enrichment tooling.
Many people run both. Use Clay as your data engine and Orbit as the CRM that holds the relationships and does the AI-assisted follow-up on the ones that matter. Pick Orbit on its own when the work is relationship-led and you want a single place that tracks, follows up, and invoices.
Partly. Orbit is the full CRM Clay lacks: timelines, pipeline, a built-in email inbox, invoices, and one AI assistant, Hiro, that drafts follow-ups. But Clay is far deeper at large-scale, multi-source data enrichment, so high-volume data teams may keep it and pair it with Orbit as the CRM.
Yes. Orbit's assistant Hiro drafts follow-ups and replies from each contact's history, all as drafts you approve before they send. AI is included with free monthly credits on every plan, so there is nothing to paste or configure. Nothing sends on its own.
Yes. Export your enriched lists from Clay as CSV files, then import the contacts into Orbit and map the enriched columns to fields and tags. From there you can build your pipeline and let Hiro draft the follow-up.
Keep Clay if your work is large-scale data enrichment: tens of thousands of rows, chained data providers, custom waterfalls, and high-volume outbound. Orbit is built for relationship-led work where you track, follow up, and invoice in one place.
Orbit is free to start, no credit card. Import your Clay lists and let Hiro draft the follow-up today.
Free forever plan. No credit card. No spam.