PeopleBlade compared with Clay

What Clay does

Clay is a hosted data platform for go-to-market work. Teams build tables of companies and people, enrich them through waterfall lookups across a marketplace of more than 200 providers, track signals such as job changes, and feed the results to outreach: a native email sequencer, ad audiences, and CRM sync. Claygent is its AI researcher, and webhook, HTTP-API, and MCP automation cover the tooling side, with Clay's own API reserved for Enterprise.

The pricing page lists a free plan with unlimited seats and tables of up to 200 rows, then Launch listed from $167 a month and Growth from $446 a month, with usage expanding above those starting points, and custom Enterprise pricing. Exporting a table is a first-class feature: Tools → Export opens a modal that downloads a CSV, and past exports stay listed under Available Exports.

• Clay's pricing
• Clay University's export lesson

What PeopleBlade does

PeopleBlade is a personal contact book, not a pipeline tool. It unifies the people already in your macOS Contacts, Google Contacts, Beeper, WhatsApp, iMessage interaction metadata, and LinkedIn, Instagram, and X exports into one SQLite file on your computer, records where each detail came from, and lets you review every suggested merge before it happens.

Private notes sit beside each person. Your agent works the book through peopleblade JSON commands and can receive one person's background as a packet, and optional hosted research fills in a selected contact's public details for prepaid credits. There is no list building, no enrichment waterfall, no sequencer, and no team workspace.

Public CLI · npm 0.6.0. Install it with bun add --global @hraness/peopleblade@0.6.0 on macOS or Linux.

• Read the contact-book guide
• See every supported source

How they compare

The short version is that these are different categories sharing three letters. Clay turns prospects into pipeline; PeopleBlade keeps track of relationships you already have. The table lines them up anyway, since searchers land on both.

Leaving Clay with a contact list

If a Clay table holds people you want to keep as contacts rather than prospects, export it first: choose Tools → Export on the table and download the CSV. PeopleBlade has no generic CSV importer, so the file needs one intermediate stop: import the CSV into Google Contacts and run peopleblade google sync --auth gmail-main --json, or convert it to vCards, load them into macOS Contacts, and run peopleblade contacts sync --json. Campaign fields that do not map to names, organizations, titles, birthdays, emails, and phones do not carry.

• Set up your contact book

Which one fits

Choose Clay when the work is outbound: prospect lists, multi-provider enrichment, sequences, and CRM handoff for a team that measures pipeline.

Choose PeopleBlade when the work is remembering actual relationships: one private, free book on your computer that your agent can search and annotate. If you reached this page looking for a cheaper Clay for personal use, the fit is real only at the address-book level.

Can PeopleBlade replace Clay?

Only when Clay was being used as a personal address book. PeopleBlade cannot build prospect lists, run enrichment waterfalls, score signals, or send sequences, and it does not try to.

Can I import a Clay CSV into PeopleBlade?

Not directly, because there is no generic CSV or vCard import. Put the CSV through Google Contacts or macOS Contacts first, then run the matching PeopleBlade sync command, and fields beyond ordinary contact details stay behind.

Does PeopleBlade do enrichment like Clay?

At a different scale. Hosted research looks up one contact you select, cites its sources, and costs prepaid credits per contact, or your own agent researches a one-person packet. There is no bulk enrichment over a table.

Is Clay free like PeopleBlade?

Clay has a free plan limited to small tables of 200 rows; paid team plans are listed from $167 a month. PeopleBlade's local CLI and workspace are free and MIT licensed with no row limit, and only optional hosted research costs anything.