Atomic Review: Clay

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Clay is an extremely opinionated app, which is a quality I deeply respect.

It pulls the list of all your contacts from email, calendars, social networks and shows you all the moments you connected with them, along with public data available on social networks.

You can set reminders to get in touch again and add notes related to moments.

It has a Home view, with the list of people you’ll meet today, and an Explore view with those who have updated their social profiles or were in the news.

Links

• Developer site: Clay.earth
• Web app: web.clay.earth

Evaluation

• Design

Clay IS BEAUTIFUL! It has a few rough edges, but it is visibly built by a thoughtful team.

• Performance

It is an Electron app on macOS, so more or less the same thing as the web app. Both are surprisingly fast, even with a large database.

• Platforms

The web app doesn’t seem accessible from mobile. The iOS native app is great. Unfortunately, Android is still missing, and according to their site, it will be available someday, but they don’t say when.

• Integrations

Email, Calendar, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and iMessage to gather data. Zapier to automate contact or note creation. I wish it had Slack, Telegram, or Signal integrations, as that’s where most of my conversations happen.

• Flexibility

Extremely limited by design, Clay doesn’t even manage your address book. Instead, it focuses on showing you the people you interacted with, taking notes about them, and setting reminders to reconnect.

• Cost

$20/month. It’s not cheap, for sure, but it could be a bargain if it holds its promises.

Conclusion

I’ll be candid; I think I need to try and stick with it a bit longer to understand if it’s the right app for me. On the one hand, keeping my address book separate is reassuring. On the other, it means more work for me. So I’ll use it for a month, then update my review.