Clay – Contacts + CRM is a versatile and powerful contacts management tool designed for Apple Vision Pro users, aimed at helping individuals seamlessly manage and deepen their personal and professional relationships. This app represents a new paradigm for contact management, offering a one-stop solution for organizing and enriching your contact database.
With Clay, you no longer need to rely on fragmented memory aids like spreadsheets, notecards, and scattered address books. The app beautifully consolidates all your contact information by syncing with various platforms including email, calendar, address book, LinkedIn, Twitter, and iMessage. This automatic aggregation ensures that all relevant details such as profile photos, bios, education and work histories, locations, and social profiles are up-to-date, saving you the hassle of manual updates.
One of the standout features of Clay is its ability to help you maintain meaningful connections. The app allows you to set reminders for significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries. You can also establish reconnection cadences to ensure you never lose touch with important contacts. Imagine knowing exactly when to reach out to celebrate milestones or just to check in; that’s the edge Clay provides.
The powerful note-taking capability in Clay makes it the ideal companion for busy individuals. You can quickly jot down important details before, during, and after any conversation, encompassing anything from kids’ names to vacation itineraries or an article you want to share. Every note is securely attached to the relevant contact’s card, which makes retrieving such information effortless.
Organizationally, Clay allows you to create custom groups for various social circles such as dinner party favorites, book club members, or high school friends. These groups make event organization a cinch. The app’s search functionality is also incredibly user-friendly. You can find people based on contextual memories like where you last met or what you discussed, making it a robust search tool that works in milliseconds.
The Home feature is another compelling aspect of Clay. It provides a comprehensive, high-level view of all updates from your network, ensuring you’re the first to congratulate someone on a new job or a feature in a major publication. This keeps you on top of significant events within your circles, reinforcing your connections.
Clay also excels in team collaboration. Sharing contacts with team members is both private and seamless, potentially replacing traditional CRM systems. The app supports multiple integrations including Gmail, Exchange, Office365, iCloud, Facebook, LinkedIn, Airtable, and many more. This ensures that your contacts are always accessible from virtually any platform.
Additional features include business card digitization, contact clean-up, cross-device synchronization, birthday reminders, and contact deduplication. Clay also offers a variety of themes, including dark and light modes, so you can customize the app to your preference.
Despite its impressive array of features, reviews of Clay present a mixed bag. Some users have lauded its beautiful design and integration capabilities, stating it has saved them time and effort in managing their contacts. They praise its seamless reminders and the way it improves business contacts management with minimal need for manual organization.
On the flip side, several users report significant issues. These range from bugs during iMessage import to missing iPhone contacts and unreliable synchronization. These users feel that the app, although promising, falls short on execution. Problems such as slow syncing of new contacts, unexplained app crashes, and cumbersome handling of large contact imports have been highlighted. Additionally, the app reportedly struggles with basic tasks like contact deduplication and efficient archiving, rendering some users frustrated. A recurring complaint is the difficulty in deleting accounts, which is cumbersome and contrary to CCPA and GDPR requirements.
Other criticisms include poor onboarding experiences and an over-designed interface that doesn’t adhere to intuitive iOS interaction patterns. Some users find the app’s reliance on importing all contacts at once, without an option for selective import, overwhelming and unmanageable.
Given its free price tag, new users receive a 14-day trial of Clay Pro, after which they can continue using the free version with a limit of 1000 contacts. While Clay has undeniable potential with its rich feature set and beautiful UI, it appears that substantial improvements in stability and functionality are necessary to make this app fully reliable and user-friendly.
