Clay builds the machine.
Salmon is the machine.
Clay is powerful — if you have an ops team to run it. Salmon is the research engine for teams who want the answer, not the tooling.
You have a technical ops team and want full control
If you have a Clay power user and want to custom-build your enrichment stack across 50+ sources, Clay's flexibility is hard to beat. You get granular control over every step.
You want research outcomes, not infrastructure
If you'd rather describe what you need than configure how to get it, Salmon is faster, simpler, and more consistent. No workflow to build. No credits to track. Just answers.
You're already deep in the Clay ecosystem
If your outbound stack is built on Clay workflows, switching costs are real. Staying makes sense if it's working for you.
Your research questions are complex or compliance-related
KYC/KYB, sanctions checks, adverse media, executive diligence — these aren't Clay's primary use case. Salmon was built for multi-step reasoning across diverse sources.
Yes. Some teams use Clay for outbound workflow orchestration and Salmon as a data source within those workflows via API. They complement each other if your team has the ops capacity for Clay.
Fundamentally different. Clay requires building and maintaining enrichment workflows. Salmon requires describing what you need. If you have a dedicated ops person, Clay's flexibility is powerful. If you want answers without infrastructure, Salmon is simpler by design.
Clay charges per credit, per row, per source — costs scale with complexity. Salmon is flat monthly pricing with unlimited research queries. For teams running complex, multi-source enrichment, Salmon is typically more predictable and often less expensive.
Clay's output quality depends on which sources you configure and how well your waterfall logic handles conflicts. Salmon's AI orchestration automatically selects the best sources, triangulates across them, and confidence-scores every output. Quality is built in, not bolted on.
Yes — KYC, KYB, AML screening, adverse media checks, and sanctions screening are core Salmon use cases. Clay wasn't designed for compliance workflows and lacks the built-in reasoning and audit trail these use cases require.
Skip the build.
Get the answer.
Show us a research question your team has been solving manually or through Clay. We'll show you what Salmon does with it in real time.