Clay vs ZoomInfo: enrichment or database

Clay collects your sales tax and owns the nexus ZoomInfo hands straight back to you

Clay charges US sales tax and bears its own nexus, calculating the amount from product taxability and the customer’s address before remitting it, while ZoomInfo’s License terms put the sales and use tax burden on the customer, who must also indemnify ZoomInfo, with an exemption available only through a certificate emailed to ar@zoominfo.com. Scope compared, criterion by criterion. Checked 7 September 2026.

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Clay

VS

ZoomInfo

Clay vs ZoomInfo: scope compared, criterion by criterion — checked September 7, 2026
Clay	ZoomInfo
What the tool answers
What it measures or produces
Clay produces enriched tables of accounts and contacts fed by a marketplace of third-party vendors, then runs agentic workflows and pushes actions into the connected go-to-market stack.	ZoomInfo produces searchable B2B company and contact records that can be enriched on demand, plus buying-intent signals and account-level web activity data.
The job it equips
Clay addresses the GTM engineer and GTM Ops / RevOps teams, the people who build the data foundation feeding campaigns rather than the reps running the calls themselves.	The outbound sales rep — SDR and Account Executive — is the targeted role, with prospecting automation, outreach personalization, and follow-up handled inside the tool.
What it cannot tell you
For reasoning models billed at actual cost, Clay cannot tell you what a run will cost before it happens: it withholds an estimate, then reconciles the real amount afterward.	The license bars using the data to assess a person's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, or a government license or benefit — no FCRA-governed use case.
The data and how fresh it is
Database size
Clay states it is not a data provider itself: it publishes no size for a database of its own, only integration with third-party providers in a waterfall. No total record count is published.	ZoomInfo states “500M+ Total Professional Profiles”, “300M+ Verified business emails”, “135M+ Direct dial numbers” and “122M+ company records”. No publication date accompanies these figures on the page.
Freshness and verification
Verification is built into the waterfall: it stops at the first result judged valid, with four validation strategies. Refresh can be scheduled down to hourly (Enterprise only).	The publisher states the database is “updated daily” from over 38 million online sources, and publishes per-field rates without defining the measurement method.
Intent data
Clay offers signals (web intent, visitors, job changes, news, social listening). Web intent costs 1 action plus the data credits of the chosen de-anonymization provider, cached for 30 days.	Intent data is present, measured on content consumption, and capped by tier: 25 topics on Marketing Demand, 100 on ABM Lite, unlimited on ABM Enterprise.
Phone numbers
No database of its own. Cost varies by the provider called: from 2 credits, up to 5 (People Data Labs), 13 (Selligence), 15 (ContactOut) or 25 (Datagma) per mobile number found.	Direct dials and mobiles are distinguished and counted separately. A national Do Not Call registry suppression exists, admin-activated, masking numbers across the entire instance.
Credit model
Two distinct counters, in USD: Actions (orchestration capacity, a few tenths of a penny each) and Data Credits (purchase of third-party data, a few pennies each).	One “bulk data credit” is consumed on a record's first enrichment; the record then goes “Under Management” for twelve months and can be re-enriched without another credit.
GDPR compliance
Clay commits to providing a data processing agreement on request, to never using customer data to train its AI models, and to selecting compliant providers.	Legal basis invoked: legitimate interest. The publisher states it notifies data subjects under Articles 13 or 14, and positions itself as an independent controller toward the customer.
Compliance with state privacy laws
The policy (2020) names only California, CCPA included, no CPRA or later law; sale opt-out by email within 15 days. The enterprise page markets “CCPA opt-out” even as Clay elsewhere calls itself a third-party data provider.	ZoomInfo registers as a data broker in Texas only, not California or Vermont, and admits selling personal data. Fifteen state laws named, four more announced. Deletion runs through three online forms, whose content would not load.
US geographic coverage
No US volume published, while European volumes are — the imbalance is the fact. It matches what Clay writes about itself, “Clay doesn’t have any native data”, the volumes it cites belonging to its provider network. Its only US claim is qualitative: “Highest data quality and coverage”.	On its “Our Data” page ZoomInfo credits North America with 79.6M+ companies, 157.8M+ contacts and 77.7M+ mobile numbers. No United States-only subtotal, no state or metro named, and no measurement date.
What comes out of it
Export formats
One documented file format, CSV, downloaded from the Actions menu; everything else leaves through connectors into CRMs, warehouses, sequencers and webhooks rather than as a file.	List exports produce a .csv delivered by email notification; for Salesforce, an admin caps per-object exports at up to 100,000 records at once, dropping to 5,000 through the Native App.
Shareable reports
Sharing a table or workbook produces a template: the column structure plus a single sample row, via a public link or named email addresses, never the full dataset.	Reporting is tiered: “Audience & campaign reporting” in Marketing Demand, “Advanced reporting and analytics” reserved for Copilot Enterprise. External sharing of reports is not publicly documented.
API access
Public API and CLI are open on every plan, free and trial included; the quota unit is search results, from 100 per month on Free to 10 million per year on Enterprise.	API access requires the Enterprise API or Copilot package; the billing unit is one credit per newly enriched record, free for the next twelve months, with search endpoints costing nothing.
What it connects to
Native integrations
The Integrations page advertises “200+ providers”; the three that shape real usage are Salesforce and HubSpot on the CRM side and Snowflake on the warehouse side, both as source and destination.	The vendor directory shows 185 integrations as of 2026-09-02; the three that matter for an outbound stack are Salesforce, HubSpot, and Outreach or Salesloft for sending.
Google tools it connects to
Google Sheets exposes three native actions — add a row, look up a row, and look up / add / update — authenticated through a connected Google account; Google Docs and Google Translate have their own integrations.	Google Cloud is listed among the natively supported warehouses for data delivery, and a Gmail integration is published, categorized under “Email” and “Export from ZoomInfo”.
Bringing your existing data across
A table starts from four documented sources: a CSV import, a HubSpot or Salesforce connection, an inbound webhook, or the “Find Companies” and “Find People” list builders.	Existing CRM records are queried and matched in batches through the Salesforce Bulk API, 10,000 per batch, before enrichment; one credit is charged per new record.
Getting started, and the fine print
Support
The one publicly documented channel is email at support@clay.com; the Growth tier adds priority support and Enterprise adds a dedicated Slack channel plus an assigned growth strategist.	Support is reached by web form or at +1 866-904-9666; the level depends on the package — “Standard support” on Professional versus a dedicated manager on Copilot Enterprise.
Where the data is hosted
The documentation names a single region: the United States, on AWS US-East infrastructure, for primary processing of customer data.	The vendor places its services with three major cloud providers, with hosting data centers in the U.S.; no provider is named and no European residency option is published.
What happens if you leave
Cancelling moves the account down to the free plan at the next billing date; deleting the account deletes the data with it, and a deleted workspace is purged after thirty days.	The decisive contractual point: materials obtained during the term stay usable after it ends, but remain subject to the agreement, so no resale or transfer to any third party.
Minimum seats billed
No minimum is billed: the pricing page advertises unlimited seats starting on the free plan, and the workspace separates Admin, Editor, Viewer and Sales rep roles.	No seat minimum is published. The license defers to the Ordering Document, and the pricing page states a seat-based model with no stated floor.
Data residency and regulated cloud
Clay names one region, AWS US-East, and claims for itself an “active” SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance. A HIPAA BAA is available only via a separate agreement, outside any pricing tier. FedRAMP, StateRAMP and GovCloud are absent from the pages read; the Trust Center could not be accessed.	ZoomInfo says it hosts “in the U.S.” (AWS, Google, no region), yet its Privacy Policy admits transfer to “any other country.” Own certs: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001/27701/27017. FedRAMP, StateRAMP, TX-RAMP, GovCloud, BAA absent.
What it costs
The entry price and what it includes
A free plan gives 500 Actions and 100 Data Credits per month, capped at 200 rows per table. The first paid tier, Launch, is listed at 167 US dollars per month on annual billing on the pricing page, and at 185 in the vendor's own documentation	No price is published: no currency, no amount, no billing period. Six packages are named with their features, and a separate free tier called ZoomInfo Lite exists
What pushes the bill up
Three levers: the add-on Data Credit tier, starting at 54 US dollars a month on Launch and 185 on Growth; the provider you pick per lookup; and one-time top-ups sold at a premium.	Three stated drivers: number of licenses, monthly credit consumption for exports, and depth of intelligence required; paid add-ons such as intent, Chorus, and Copilot stack on top.
Sales tax and nexus
Clay charges US sales tax and itself bears nexus, calculated from product taxability and the customer's address; amount remitted, no state named. Exemption via certificate; no calculation offered for the customer's own sales.	ZoomInfo puts the tax burden on the customer (License T&Cs): liable for sales/use tax, must indemnify ZoomInfo, exemption via certificate to ar@zoominfo.com. No tax page, state list, nexus statement, or local calc published.
Procurement and invoicing
Clay: card only, no purchase orders, net-30, ACH, or W-9; Enterprise alone (annual quote) sits outside self-service. Contradiction: Free $0, Launch $167/mo ($1,620/yr), Growth $446/mo ($4,016/yr) vs FAQ “$149/mo,” “Pro Plan.”	ZoomInfo accepts card, ACH, wire, check, and Bill.com/Ariba/Coupa; POs by email, W-9 as PDF. Net-30 by default (T&Cs), late interest 1.5%/month. No non-card threshold published; pricing page shows no price or checkout.

Key takeaways

One vendor remits the tax, the other one hands you the bill and the liability

Clay charges US sales tax itself and bears its own nexus, calculating the amount from the product’s taxability and the customer’s address before remitting it — no state is named on the page, and an exemption certificate is accepted, though Clay offers no calculation for the customer’s own downstream sales. ZoomInfo instead puts the entire burden on the customer through its License terms and conditions: liable for sales and use tax, required to indemnify ZoomInfo, with an exemption available only by emailing a certificate to ar@zoominfo.com.

Neither company names the state, only who owes what happens next

No tax page, state list, nexus statement, or local calculation appears anywhere on ZoomInfo’s own pages — the indemnification clause stands in for all of that detail. Clay is only slightly more specific: it states that it calculates and remits, without ever naming which state, or how many, that calculation covers.

Clay claims its own certifications as “active,” ZoomInfo claims a country it then contradicts

Clay names one region, AWS US-East, and describes its own SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance as “active,” with a HIPAA business associate agreement available only through a separate agreement outside any pricing tier. ZoomInfo states it hosts “in the U.S.” across AWS and Google Cloud, naming no region, yet its own Privacy Policy admits transferring data to “any other country.” FedRAMP, StateRAMP, and GovCloud are absent from both.

Buying either one still runs into the same missing checkout

Clay accepts card only, with no purchase orders, net-30 terms, ACH, or W-9 at any tier, and Enterprise alone requires an annual quote outside self-service; its own FAQ additionally names a “Pro Plan” at a price that matches none of the tiers on its pricing page. ZoomInfo accepts a wider set — card, ACH, wire transfer, check, and purchase orders through Bill.com, Ariba, or Coupa — but names no price anywhere for any of its six packages.

What each company’s tax posture asks of the buyer

Choosing Clay means its tax liability is largely handled on the vendor’s own side, remitted rather than passed through, though the buyer’s own downstream sales tax stays entirely their problem either way. Choosing ZoomInfo means accepting a contractual indemnification clause on top of the tax itself — a heavier documented obligation than anything Clay’s own terms describe.

Frequently asked questions

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Who bears the sales-tax nexus burden, Clay or ZoomInfo?

Clay charges US sales tax itself and bears nexus, calculating the amount from product taxability and the customer’s address, with exemption available via certificate. ZoomInfo does the opposite: its license terms make the customer liable for sales and use tax and require the customer to indemnify ZoomInfo, exemption running only through a certificate sent to ar@zoominfo.com. For a buyer, ZoomInfo shifts a compliance burden that Clay absorbs itself.

Does Clay offer a HIPAA business associate agreement on any pricing tier?

No: Clay’s HIPAA BAA is only available through a separate agreement outside any pricing tier, with FedRAMP, StateRAMP, and GovCloud absent from the pages read. ZoomInfo fares no better: it names no BAA either, alongside the same absence of FedRAMP, StateRAMP, TX-RAMP, and GovCloud. For a buyer in a regulated industry, neither vendor bundles a HIPAA BAA into a standard plan.

Does Clay accept purchase orders or net-30 invoicing below its Enterprise tier?

No: below Enterprise, Clay is card-only, with no purchase orders, net-30 terms, ACH, or W-9 offered; only the Enterprise tier, sold on an annual quote, sits outside self-service. ZoomInfo accepts card, ACH, wire, check, and procurement platforms like Ariba or Coupa, issues purchase orders by email and a W-9 as a PDF, and defaults to net-30 with 1.5 percent monthly late interest. For a buyer needing standard procurement paperwork, ZoomInfo supports it well before Clay does.