Heliyos vs Clay

What Clay does well

Clay’s headline is "Build systems to grow revenue", and it describes itself as "infrastructure to get any data, run agentic workflows, and launch GTM plays". It has defined a category and the product reflects that depth.

• The data marketplace. Clay says one contract gives access to data from more than 200 data and AI vendors, with waterfall enrichment that tries providers in order until one returns a result. If an enrichment returns nothing, no credits are charged.
• Claygent. AI research agents prompted in plain language for "company research, lead qualification, signal detection", returning structured data. Clay calls its approach "glass box, not black box" and attaches a reasoning trace to each decision.
• A visual canvas for plays, built with clicks, code or chat, and signals such as job changes, hiring and web intent that drive scoring and outreach.
• CRM and data warehouse sync on the Growth plan, webhooks, an email sequencer and ad audience syncing to LinkedIn, Meta and Google Ads.

Where Heliyos differs

Clay starts from a table of rows. Heliyos starts from an account.

• Memory. Heliyos keeps one customer memory per account, built from email, meetings, notes and files, which workers read before acting and write to after. Clay stores enriched rows in tables and pushes them to your CRM or warehouse; the memory lives elsewhere.
• Workers. Heliyos ships Taylor, an AI account executive for follow-ups, proposals and scheduling, and Parker, an AI platform admin who keeps company, people and deal records current, plus custom workers. Clay’s Claygents research and qualify; its Account Agents, in beta, synthesise CRM, warehouse and call data into account-level work.
• Review. Heliyos has a Reviews queue for outbound email, deal stage changes and file sharing, with evidence and reasoning beside each item. Clay lists CRM and warehouse writes from Account Agents as "automatic (human-approved)" and shows reasoning traces; email sending runs through its sequencer or your tools.
• Sandboxed computer. Heliyos workers run on their own sandboxed computer with only the tools their job allows, including inbox, calendar, files and the web. Clay runs enrichment and agents inside its tables and canvas.
• Pricing. Heliyos is usage-based with no seats. Clay also has no seat charge and meters actions and data credits, so the two are closer here than most pairs on this site.

How they handle enrichment and research

In Clay, you build a table of companies or people, add enrichment columns that waterfall across providers, add Claygent columns with a research prompt, score and route the rows, then push the result to a CRM, a sequencer or an ad audience. Each run costs actions and, for provider data, data credits. The strength is volume and provider breadth.

In Heliyos, Enrichment fills company and people fields on the accounts in your Watchlist, AI research columns answer a question per account from the web and your Knowledge, and Scouts watch for changes. The results land in the customer memory where Taylor and Parker use them: a research finding becomes context in the next follow-up draft, and a job change becomes a Task. Research is attached to the account and used by the workers rather than sitting in a table.

Setup and time to value

Clay can produce a useful enriched table within an hour and a well-built play within a day. Consistent value means someone owning the tables, credits and prompts; Clay’s own framing of the GTM engineer reflects that.

Heliyos asks you to connect Gmail or Outlook, a calendar and optionally HubSpot, then add accounts to the Watchlist. Enrichment and research run on those accounts and the workers start. There is no table to build. Heliyos is in closed beta with a waitlist.

Pricing and who it fits

Clay’s pricing page lists Free, Launch, Growth and Enterprise. Launch starts at $54 a month on annual billing or $60 monthly and scales by action volume; Growth, which adds CRM sync and enrichment, starts at $185 a month annually or $205 monthly. Headline prices on the page are higher at larger volumes and Enterprise is custom. Data credits start at $0.05 each and actions at under $0.01; top-ups carry a 30 percent premium. Seats and tables are unlimited on every plan, and Free includes 500 actions and 100 data credits a month.

Heliyos prices on usage with no seats. You pay for the work the workers do across the accounts you watch. Clay suits a team whose main problem is finding and qualifying new accounts at scale. Heliyos suits a team whose main problem is working the accounts it already has without losing control.

When to choose Clay, when to choose Heliyos, when to run both

• Choose Clay alone if your job is list building, enrichment at volume and outbound plays, and you have someone to own the tables and credits.
• Choose Heliyos alone if your accounts are known, the work is follow-up, meetings, proposals and keeping the record straight, and you want a Reviews queue on everything outbound.
• Run both, which is common: use Clay to find and enrich new accounts from its marketplace and push them to HubSpot or directly into your Heliyos Watchlist, then let Taylor and Parker work them. Clay supplies the data; Heliyos does the account work with review.