Comparison

Clay vs Cognism

Clay and Cognism both land on Depends.

Clay

Depends

Confidence: Medium

Buy if you run serious outbound and have someone who owns data ops . 4.6/5 on G2 and enterprise case studies back it.

Depends

Confidence: High

Buy if you run an outbound sales team with a $15K+ budget that needs GDPR-compliant, phone-verified European contact data.

Clay versus Cognism
Compare	Clay	Cognism
Verdict	Depends	Depends
Best for	GTM and RevOps teams	European outbound sales teams
Who it's not for	Small teams without a dedicated ops owner	Startups and solo founders
Privacy	SOC 2 certified (2024) with a public trust center; the one CVE found applies to an unrelated open-source C library also named 'clay', not this vendor.¹⁵	No known public vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed; GDPR compliance is a core selling point with a public security page.
Support quality	No support evidence found	No direct evidence in reviewed sources
Public sentiment	Reviewers rate Clay 4.6/5 on G2 and call it a powerful enrichment tool, but repeatedly flag credit costs and recent pricing changes.^²	Reviewers rate Cognism 4.6/5 and praise its data accuracy and ease of use, while pricing and contract terms draw the loudest complaints.^¹
Biggest gotcha	Credit costs are the real expense; total spend often exceeds the plan price^⁷	Typical Year 1 cost is ~$15K; real range spans $1.5K-$25K depending on negotiation