Clay was built for humans.Cargo is built for agents.
Clay puts a person in front of a table and makes them fast. Cargo puts the engine in a repository an agent can read, run and fix: models, plays, a CLI, a git history, and a system that keeps going when nobody is watching.
Why this matters now
The operator used to drive.Now the agent does.
Every GTM tool in market was designed around a person at a screen, because that was the only thing operating it. That assumption is what Clay is excellent at and what it cannot outgrow.
Someone has to be here for anything to happen
A screen is a ceiling
A table can only ever run what one person thought to put in it, and that person has a day job. The work is capped by their attention, and it stops when they are on holiday or when they leave.
An agent opened this. A human approves it.
A repository is not
An agent reads the whole engine, changes it, and proposes the change as a diff you approve. It looks where nobody had time to look, and it gets better every week it is left running.
What that actually means
Four things change when agents are the operator
None of this is a feature list. Each one is what an agent needs in order to run a revenue process without a person in the loop.
The engine, not a table
Accounts, deals, territories, subscriptions and your own objects, connected across CRM, warehouse, product and billing. An agent needs state it can query and write to, not rows it has to scroll.
The CLI is the product, not an add-on
Clay ships an API, a CLI and an agent plugin, and they reach parts of the product. In Cargo every primitive is defined, deployed and driven from code and over MCP, so there is nothing an agent can only do by clicking.
Git, not in-app history
The whole engine is TypeScript in your repository. Changes arrive as pull requests with a plan diff, get reviewed like any other code, and roll back to any release.
Self-driving, not campaign by campaign
Plays fire on business change rather than on someone pressing run. Failures retry, sensitive actions wait for approval, and every run leaves a trace you can query.
ClayDesigned around
Designed around
A person operating a spreadsheet
An agent operating a typed system
The artifact
The artifact
A table, and the columns configured on it
A repository: models, tools, plays and agents
How you change it
How you change it
In the UI, with an API and CLI alongside it
A pull request, planned as a diff, then deployed
How you undo it
How you undo it
In-app workflow versions
Roll back to any release
What starts the work
What starts the work
Someone presses run
The business changes
When it breaks
When it breaks
Open the row and look
Retries, approval gates, queryable traces
What it looks like
You ask, the agent builds, you approve
The engine is code, so a change to it arrives the way any other change to your systems arrives: as a diff somebody reads before it is live.
You ask for the outcome
In Claude, in Cursor, or from the terminal. You describe what the business needs, not which column to configure.
The agent writes the play
TypeScript in your repository, using the same primitives your team uses. The plan shows exactly what will change before anything does.
You approve, and it runs
Nothing reaches production until a human merges the pull request. Every release is versioned, and any one of them rolls back.
Step two is the one with no equivalent in a table. Clay keeps in-app workflow versions, so you can look back at what a workflow used to be. What does not exist is the step in the middle: a proposed change, written out, that somebody reads and approves before it is live.
Choosing
When to choose which
Clay is genuinely better at the job it was built for. The decision is whether a person or an agent is going to operate this in a year.
Choose Clay when…
Choose Cargo when…
Pricing
Price your own workload
There is no single answer: Cargo bills one shared credit pool across enrichment and orchestration, Clay meters Actions and Data Credits separately, and which wins depends on your mix. Published pricing on both sides.
Your current Clay plan
Your estimated cost
ClayWhat 5.5K credits/mo gets you on Cargo
Clay Growth: 40K Actions/mo in this tier · Cargo: steps aren't metered separately
5,445
Work emails
5,445
Companies
10,784
People
915
Phones
Estimates use published self-serve pricing and the inputs above. Actual costs vary by provider mix, AI usage and contract terms. Last verified August 2026.
See methodology and sources
Methodology: Cargo figures use published credit costs per enrichment type (shown next to each input), plus 0.01 credits per orchestration step and metered AI usage, priced against the same monthly credit tiers as our pricing page. Clay prices Actions and Data Credits as two separate tiered meters; we sum the smallest Action tier and the smallest Data Credit tier that fit the workload, on the cheapest eligible plan (Launch), so the Clay figure is never inflated. Clay Data Credit costs per enrichment (email ~3 DC, phone ~13.7 DC, person ~4 DC) are typical marketplace costs and vary by provider; every enrichment or step on Clay also consumes 1 Action, including with your own API keys. Above Clay's largest self-serve tiers (200K Actions, 50K Data Credits per month) Clay is custom-priced Enterprise, so we show no estimate. Monthly billing shown; Clay annual billing is 10% lower. Pricing sources: clay.com/pricing and Clay Actions & Data Credits. Last verified August 2026.
Migration
Move one workflow, not your whole stack
The cost of leaving Clay is people-hours, not credits. So the honest answer is what moves, what does not, and what you can skip entirely.
What moves
Tables, functions, Claygents, provider connections and scheduled workflows. Clay exports to JSON, and Cargo's coding agents read that export and rebuild each one as a model, a tool or a play.
What does not
Your Clay run history and per-row traces stay in Clay. Community template recipes have no import path, and anything held together by manual copy-paste has to become a real step. Budget the rebuild, not the export.
Or do not move at all
Cargo has an API and runs as one step inside a Clay column. Plenty of teams start there: Clay keeps provisioning the list, Cargo does the part a table cannot, and the migration question waits until there is a reason to answer it.
In ClayClay Table
Cargo Model or Segment
Clay Function
Cargo Tool or Play
Claygent
Cargo Agent
Workspace and business context
Cargo Context and knowledge resources
Provider connections
Cargo connectors, or your existing provider keys
Scheduled workflow
Cargo Play trigger
Table output and CRM push
Cargo CRM sync, with rules and approvals
“Currently downloading my Clay tables worth saving, pulling them across into Markdown to then give to Cargo. Then everything is getting rebuilt the Cargo way. Impressive”
30 minutes with a GTM engineer, and you leave with a concrete plan. Teams migrating from Clay also get two months of bonus credits matched to their plan.
Cargo vs Clay, in short
“Essential. Innovative. Indispensable. Cargo let you build your unique growth engine, a much-needed solution in the market today.”Guillaume Cabane
Co-Founder @Hypergrowth
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