Cargo vs Clay

Clay is a UI-first application for building enrichment workflows in a browser: the artifact is a table, and logic lives in formulas and column configuration. Cargo is the infrastructure layer underneath that: data models, enrichment waterfalls, scoring, routing and agents declared in TypeScript, planned as a diff, and deployed. The practical difference is what you own at the end. With Clay you own a set of tables; with Cargo you own a repository you can review, test, and roll back.

When the job is prospecting and enrichment rather than an engine, and speed to a first list matters more than operating the same system in two years. Clay is the fastest path to an enriched list without involving engineering, and it is the name most GTM practitioners already know. If nobody on the team will adopt a CLI or read a diff, Clay gets you further.

Yes. Waterfall enrichment across multiple providers is a first-class primitive in Cargo rather than a column configuration, which means the same waterfall is reusable across every play, versioned with the rest of the engine, and callable by an agent.

Two reasons come up repeatedly. Complex logic becomes nested formulas that nobody reviews, with no diff, no version history of the system as a whole, and no way to replay a past run against new logic. And credit cost is the most common complaint at scale.

Yes, and plenty of teams do. Cargo runs the durable engine, and Clay stays useful for one-off list work and fast exploration. The line most teams settle on is that anything running every day belongs in the repository, and anything answering a question this week can stay in a table.