Oxygen vs Clay

If you Google "Clay alternative" you get a wall of bench-vs-bench specsheets. None of them are honest about where Clay still wins.

We built Oxygen because Clay didn't fit our shape. We're agent-first. We wanted CLI and MCP as primary surfaces. We wanted CRM syncs, HTTP calls, and webhooks at the entry tier instead of $446/mo. Below is the fair side by side. If Clay is the right answer for you, we'll say so.

TL;DR

If you run GTM through agents (Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT) and your stack lives in code, pick Oxygen. If you need SSO, RBAC, and a spreadsheet UX for a 50-person sales team that won't touch a terminal, pick Clay.

Self-serve list prices:

Clay's plan price scales via a usage slider inside each tier (Launch runs ~$167 to ~$290/mo, Growth runs ~$446 to ~$2,125/mo at 50K actions). Oxygen's tiers are fixed price with a known credit and action bundle. Both platforms support BYOK on every provider. Both meter platform usage as "actions" or "runs" on top of data credits.

Where Oxygen wins

1. Price at every tier

Oxygen Starter is $99/mo. Clay Launch starts at $167/mo. The mid tiers are $249 vs $446 (Growth base). Roughly 40% cheaper at the entry and mid bands, with comparable bundled credits (2,500 to 6,000 per month).

The gap widens at the top of the self-serve range. Oxygen Team is $749/mo. Clay's Growth tier slides up to ~$2,125/mo as you raise the action volume. With BYOK on both sides, your bill ends up dominated by provider costs rather than platform fees, but the platform fee itself stays meaningfully lower on Oxygen at every tier.

2. CRM sync, HTTP, and webhooks at the entry tier

This is the line that bit us when we used Clay. On Clay, "Auto-sync and enrich CRM", "Integrate with any HTTP API", and "Automate any signal via webhook" all sit behind Growth ($446/mo). You cannot drive a custom CRM update or call a private API from Launch or Free. You upgrade or you do without.

On Oxygen, integrations are first-class primitives at every tier. Attio, HubSpot, HeyReach, Instantly, Smartlead, Salesforge, ZapMail, Apollo, Crustdata, PDL, Hunter, Icypeas, and Prospeo are all live on Starter ($99). Any HTTP call you want to make is a workflow step. Webhooks in and out. No gating.

If your real workflow looks like "enrich lead, push to Attio, trigger HeyReach sequence, log the result back in the table", Clay's Launch tier doesn't get you there. Oxygen's Starter does.

3. MCP and CLI as primary surfaces

Oxygen ships an MCP server and a CLI as the primary execution surfaces. The web app and inline ui:// widgets exist for inspection, approval, and visualization, but every workflow you run is driven from CLI or MCP. That's the product doctrine, not a side feature.

Practically: if you want to build a TAM list from Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, or any future agent, it's one tool call. Bulk-enrich 5,000 rows from a shell pipeline: one CLI command. Daily lead-hygiene job: a cron that hits the CLI.

Clay has Claygent (their AI inside the web UI) but no public MCP. To drive Clay from an agent you write Python against their HTTP API. And remember, the HTTP API itself is Growth-tier-gated. Clay is built for humans clicking. Oxygen is built for agents calling.

4. Agent-native primitives

Tables, columns, workflows, runs, tools. Five first-class API objects in Oxygen. Preflight a workflow, dry-run a tool, approve a run, replay failed rows. Every step is observable, idempotent, and inspectable from any client.

Clay's primitives are tables and steps inside a table. There are no standalone workflows you can call by name from another tool. The model is "fill this table, then sync it". Oxygen's is "describe what to do, then run it from anywhere".

5. Workflows that survive failures, plus blueprints

Oxygen has a durable workflow engine: recipes that survive crashes, retries, and process restarts. You author them in TypeScript, ship them as templates, share them as blueprints. Another Oxygen workspace can apply your blueprint with one command and inherit the whole table, columns, and workflow stack.

Clay's closest equivalent is recipes: pre-built table templates you copy. No durability, no programmatic apply, no observability beyond table cells turning yellow when something errors.

Where Clay still wins

Enterprise compliance and SSO

Clay is SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, GDPR, and CCPA certified at the company level. Oxygen is on the SOC 2 path but not yet certified. If your procurement form starts with a security questionnaire, pick Clay.

(SSO is a Growth add-on on Clay, and RBAC is Enterprise-only. They aren't free at Launch. But the underlying certifications cover every tier.)

Spreadsheet UX for non-coders

Clay's table UI is the best-in-class GTM spreadsheet. If your team thinks in Excel, Clay feels like home. Oxygen visualizes tables too, but the primary surface is CLI and MCP. If five people on your sales team need to look at a row and approve a send without learning a new tool, Clay is the easier handoff.

Raw provider depth

Clay markets a 150+ provider marketplace. If you live or die by exotic enrichment waterfalls (B2C residential phone, EU-only emails, niche datasets), check whether the specific providers you waterfall through are already in Oxygen's stack before you switch. Clay still has more raw breadth here today.

When to pick which

FAQ

Can I run Oxygen against my existing Clay tables? Yes. Export as CSV and import, or mirror a Clay sheet through Oxygen's tables API. Most teams keep both running for a month, then collapse to one.

What's the migration cost? Days, not weeks. Tables are the same primitive; the column-by-column waterfall translates 1:1. The bigger lift is rewriting sequences if you used Clay's Sequencer. We don't have one, so pair Oxygen with Instantly, Smartlead, or Salesforge.

Who is Oxygen for if not enterprise? Founders and early revenue leaders at B2B SaaS companies between $1M and $20M ARR with product-market fit, growth bottlenecking on manual revenue execution, and no full internal GTM engineering team. Plus GTM agencies running plays for client portfolios. Today's typical Oxygen user is the GTM engineer (or the founder doing GTM engineering) at a 20 to 200 person company.

What about Clay's AI (Claygent)? Oxygen has AI columns as a first-class primitive. We also have web search agents. Claygent runs only on Clay's hosted stack with their models and credit metering.

Try Oxygen

Install the CLI, then start onboarding:

oxygen onboarding start

You'll have a workspace, your offering and ICP in context, and your first enrichment run in under five minutes. Prefer to watch it driven by an agent first? Book a 15-minute demo.