ContactOut vs Groove by Clari: Cross-Category Comparison
ContactOut covers sourcing while Groove by Clari covers sending and follow-through. Which gap to close first, what a year costs, and whether a team needs both.
Close the data gap first when the list runs out. ContactOut covers sourcing and verified contacts from $49 a month billed annually, while Groove by Clari covers sending and follow-through and names no price on its own page. Buy the sending side first only when meetings are already being booked and lost after the reply arrives.
Key takeaways
- ContactOut prints two rates per tier. Email plus Phone is $99 a month billed annually and $199 paying monthly, and every self-serve tier is one user per company.
- Groove is quoted inside the Clari platform rather than sold on its own, so its price depends on what else that contract carries.
- Half of this stack can be budgeted from public pages and half cannot, so treat any Groove figure in a plan as a placeholder until a quote lands.
- Data first, sending second, because a sending platform bought onto a thin list delivers the same thin list faster and hides the cause in its own reporting.
Reviewed and updated August 29, 2026
ContactOut vs Groove by Clari: Cross-Category Comparison
ContactOut's pricing page prints two numbers on each paid tier. ContactOut Email lists $99 a month paying monthly and $49 billed annually, and Email plus Phone lists $199 and $99. The ContactOut figures most comparisons quote are the annual ones, so a quarter-long trial costs double. Groove sits on the other side of that line and names no price on its own page, because it is sold as one product inside the Clari platform. Reading those two shapes together is what this comparison is for.
Why Compare These Two Tools?
Data enrichment tools provide the contact data that sales engagement platforms use for outreach sequences. The question for buyers is often whether an all-in-one platform that includes data can replace a dedicated enrichment tool.
ContactOut is a data enrichment tool focused on B2B lead data and contact enrichment. ContactOut is an email and phone finder with a LinkedIn-focused browser extension and AI-powered email campaigns.
Groove by Clari is a sales engagement platform focused on multi-channel sales outreach. Sales engagement and prospecting platform (now part of Clari) that automates email sequences, logging, and analytics, and integrates with Salesforce to keep activity data in the CRM.
That framing is close and it hides the thing worth reading this page for. ContactOut lists email campaigns and an AI email writer, so these two are not neatly either side of a line. What follows prices both shelves from their own published figures and answers whether Groove earns a second line on the invoice at all.
Where Each Tool Fits in Your Workflow
- Step 1Lead sourcing and data
ContactOut covers B2B lead data and contact enrichment, on a free entry plan.
- Step 2Outreach orchestration
Groove by Clari covers multi-channel sales outreach.
| Aspect | ContactOut | Groove by Clari |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Data Enrichment Tool | Sales Engagement Platform |
| Workflow Stage | Lead sourcing and data | Outreach orchestration |
| Primary Focus | B2B lead data and contact enrichment | Multi-channel sales outreach |
| Starting Price | Free | Contact Sales |
| Features Listed | 9 | 10 |
| Integrations | 8 | 9 |
What Each Side Actually Does in a Cold Outbound Run
A cold outbound run has a fixed shape, and this pair straddles it in a way the category labels hide. Targeting comes first, and that is a decision about who is worth writing to rather than a piece of software. Then the list gets built and a mailbox gets resolved for every person on it, which is squarely ContactOut's half: search filters, an extension over a profile, a spreadsheet pushed back through enrichment, and a verification pass that discards anything the provider could not confirm.
Sending is where the line blurs. Groove by Clari owns sender accounts, sending windows, daily caps, reply detection and the record of who answered, and ContactOut ships email campaigns and an AI email writer of its own. So the honest question here is whether that included sender is enough for the wave being planned. RevenueFlow runs one message per campaign either way, so nothing on that side is a bump step or a thread reply waiting to fire. A prospect who stays quiet gets re-approached later in a new campaign with a different angle, never with a second message stacked under the one they ignored, and on LinkedIn that second message does not get sent at all.
The last stage belongs to neither product. Somebody reads the reply and somebody books the meeting, and the meeting counts only against qualification criteria written down before the campaign launched.
Pricing Comparison
ContactOut Pricing
| Plan | Billed annually | Paying monthly | Exports |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | Free | 5 emails, 5 phones and 5 exports per day |
| $49/mo | $99/mo | 300 exports / month, unlimited emails | |
| Email + Phone | $99/mo | $199/mo | 600 exports / month, unlimited emails |
| Team / API | Contact Sales | Contact Sales | Bulk license, team management, account manager |
Every self-serve tier above carries a one user per company limit.
Source: ContactOut Pricing
Groove by Clari Pricing
| Plan | Price |
|---|---|
| Groove | Contact Sales |
Groove is sold as one product inside the Clari platform rather than on its own ladder, and Clari's pricing page ends at a quote form.
Source: Groove by Clari Pricing
Reading the Two Price Shapes Together
ContactOut's pricing page publishes two numbers per paid tier and the gap between them is the story. ContactOut Email lists $99 a month paying monthly and $49 billed annually; ContactOut Email plus Phone lists $199 and $99 on the same basis. Those familiar $49 and $99 ContactOut figures are therefore the annual commitment, and a team leaving after a quarter pays double. Export allowances are 300 and 600 a month, emails are listed as unlimited on both paid tiers, and every self-serve tier carries a one user per company limit.
Groove names no price and no package ladder on that page. It is sold as one product inside the Clari platform, Clari's pricing page ends at a Get a quote form, and the only public commercial detail is Clari's statement that the platform carries no extra platform fees for integrations or continuous support. The buying question is rarely Groove on its own; it is what the Clari contract covers, since the same agreement carries forecasting and revenue capture a team may not want yet.
Those are two different kinds of number and they do not compare directly. ContactOut publishes a rate a team can multiply out before speaking to anybody; Groove by Clari publishes a shape and produces the rate on a call. Half of this stack can be budgeted today and half cannot, so a plan treating the Groove line as an estimate is guessing at the larger of the two numbers.
What One Year of This Stack Actually Costs
Take an invented but ordinary case: one person sourcing 500 contacts a month, which sits inside the Email plus Phone export allowance of 600. The rates are ContactOut's own published figures; the team and the volume are invented to make the arithmetic concrete.
ContactOut Email plus Phone billed annually is $99 a month, or $1,188 for the year. The same ContactOut tier paid monthly is $199, or $2,388 a year, so the annual commitment is $1,200 cheaper and that gap exceeds the entire annual cost of the ContactOut Email tier at $588. Dropping to Email annually halves both the bill and the ceiling.
One line on the page outranks that arithmetic for a growing team: every self-serve tier carries a one user per company limit, so a second person means the Team plan and a quote, whatever the published rates suggest.
The Groove side of that year cannot be added, which is the finding rather than a gap in the research. Groove is quoted as part of the Clari platform, so the figure in a plan for it depends on what else in that platform the contract carries.
Feature Highlights
ContactOut Key Capabilities (Data Enrichment Tool)
- Professional profile database
- Browser extension for LinkedIn
- Email campaigns
- AI email writer
- Data enrichment
- List builder
- Search portal
- Bulk license (700M+ profiles on Team)
- CSV export
Groove by Clari Key Capabilities (Sales Engagement Platform)
- Multi-channel engagement flows
- Auto-logging of all activities to Salesforce
- Email tracking with open and click analytics
- Dialer with call logging and recording
- Meeting scheduler with calendar integration
- Analytics dashboards for sequence performance
- Template and snippet management
- Revenue intelligence (via Clari platform)
- Account-based engagement workflows
Where the Two Actually Overlap
ContactOut reaches into sending further than most finders. Its own pages list email campaigns and an AI email writer alongside the extension and the search portal, so the tool lists a way to send as well as a way to find. Groove lists no database. Its defining claim is where the record lands rather than what it can do: Clari's own page sells Groove as capturing every sales activity into Salesforce as a single source of truth.
Both lists are the vendors' own wording, so the honest reading is that ContactOut lists these capabilities and Groove by Clari lists those. A feature named on a plan card is a claim about scope rather than a measure of quality, and the overlap that matters in practice sits at Salesforce and Gmail, where both products write to the same record.
Integration Ecosystem
ContactOut Integrations
ContactOut connects with: Salesforce, HubSpot, Greenhouse, Lever, Bullhorn, Zapier, Gmail, Outlook.
Groove by Clari Integrations
Groove by Clari connects with: Salesforce, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365, Google Calendar, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Clari, Zoom, Slack.
Shared Integrations
Both tools integrate with: Salesforce, Gmail. This shared ecosystem means they can work together in your tech stack.
When to Choose Which
- Your biggest gap is in lead sourcing and data
- You already have a solid sales engagement platform and need specialized B2B lead data and contact enrichment capabilities
- You want an affordable entry point ($0/mo)
- Your team's primary bottleneck is B2B lead data and contact enrichment
- Your biggest gap is in outreach orchestration
- You already have a data enrichment tool and need better multi-channel sales outreach
- You need enterprise-grade multi-channel sales outreach features
- Your team's primary bottleneck is multi-channel sales outreach
Read that split as a question about which gap is open rather than about which product is better. ContactOut answers a sourcing question and Groove by Clari answers a sending one, and a team that names the wrong gap buys a capable tool that changes nothing.
Do You Need Both, and in Which Order?
Most teams reading this page do not need both yet. ContactOut lists email campaigns and an AI email writer, which is enough to run a first wave and find out whether the list is the problem. Buying Groove by Clari alongside it in the same month buys a better sending experience before anyone knows whether sending is what is failing.
The order that works is data first, sending second, for reasons of measurement rather than preference. A sending platform bought onto a thin list delivers that list faster and its reporting will blame the quiet quarter on copy. A list deep enough to keep a wave fed shows its problems within one campaign, and those problems are the brief for the sending purchase.
One case honestly reverses it. A team already booking meetings and losing them to disorganised follow-through has a workflow gap rather than a data gap. Groove is a reasonable answer there, particularly for a team whose reporting already lives in Salesforce, because auto-logging removes the step reps skip.
Whichever way round, the two connect through Salesforce and Gmail, and that is the surface to test during a trial rather than after one. A handoff needing a CSV in the middle is a handoff somebody stops doing in week three.
Using Both Together
Many sales teams use both a data enrichment tool and a sales engagement platform as part of their complete workflow. ContactOut handles lead sourcing and data while Groove by Clari covers outreach orchestration.
Since both tools integrate with Salesforce, Gmail, connecting them in your workflow is straightforward.
Rolling It Out Without Breaking the Run
Start with ContactOut, on the free tier, before any commitment. Five emails and five phones a day is enough to test coverage on a named list over a fortnight, and that test answers the only question a paid plan settles. Groove lands second, and its rollout is a Salesforce project as much as a sales one. Its Salesforce focus is the reason to buy it and also the reason the implementation touches objects, permissions and reporting that outbound does not normally touch.
Whichever order the two arrive in, keep the sending inventory out of it. Sender domains, mailbox warmup and daily caps are their own project, and a stack change made in the same week as a sending change leaves nothing to attribute a bounce rate to. Change one layer, let a full wave run, then change the next.
Two habits save real money. Trial on accounts already worked rather than on a fresh list, because the only coverage question that matters is coverage on the segment being sold to. And export what the incumbent already found before a subscription lapses: records bought once are cheap to keep and expensive to buy twice.
Decision Framework
- Name the gap before naming a tool. Write down which stage is costing meetings: a list that runs out, addresses that bounce, or messages that never go out on time. A decision made without that sentence is a preference.
- Check what the existing stack already covers. Overlapping spend is the normal failure here, and it is invisible because the two products sit under different budget lines.
- Price the whole year, not the entry tier. Seat minimums, annual billing and per-credit top-ups move the real number more than the headline does.
- Trial on the accounts being sold to. Coverage is a property of a segment rather than of a database, so a sample drawn from the target list is the only test worth running.
- Measure at the pipeline, not per tool. Both products feed one funnel, so the honest measure is meetings booked against criteria fixed in advance.
The Short Version
- ContactOut can be priced from its own page today, starting at $49 a month on the terms in the table above.
- Groove by Clari names no price on its own pricing page, so the Groove line in any budget is a quote until a call happens.
- ContactOut lists email campaigns and an AI email writer, so a first wave can run without buying Groove at the same time.
- Buy the data side first when the list runs out, and the sending side first when meetings are being lost after the reply.
- Measure the change in meetings booked against criteria fixed before launch, because that is the only number both products are trying to move.
Related Reading
- Best ContactOut Alternatives in 2026
- Best Groove by Clari Alternatives in 2026
- Apollo.io vs ContactOut: Data Enrichment Tool Comparison
- ContactOut vs ZoomInfo: Data Enrichment Tool Comparison
- Groove by Clari vs Outreach: Sales Engagement Platform Comparison
If you would rather have this run for you, RevenueFlow books qualified meetings on a pay-per-meeting basis and publishes client results.
Pricing and features are taken from the vendors' own pages. Verify current terms with the vendor before relying on them.
Frequently asked questions.
Frequently asked questions- Do I need both ContactOut and Groove, or will one do?
- Often one is enough to begin with. ContactOut lists email campaigns and an AI email writer, so a first wave can run without Groove at all, and that wave is what tells you whether sending is actually the weak link. Add Groove when the volume or the team size makes the included sender the constraint, rather than buying both in the same month.
- How much does ContactOut actually cost for a year?
- ContactOut publishes $49 and $99 a month billed annually, or $99 and $199 monthly, so the yearly number is arithmetic rather than a guess. Multiply the published rate by twelve and by the seats or the volume the plan is metered on, then check the billing basis, because the monthly and annual figures on these pages describe the same plan and differ by a meaningful amount.
- Why does Groove not publish a price?
- Groove is quoted inside the Clari platform rather than sold on its own, so its price depends on what else that contract carries. Enterprise sales engagement is sold on seats, usage and contract length together, so a public rate would be wrong for most buyers. The practical consequence for a budget is that this line is a quote, and the way to make two quotes comparable is to give each vendor the same seat count and the same volume assumption.
- What happens to the prospects who never reply?
- RevenueFlow runs one message per campaign and sends no bumps or thread replies, whichever of these products is doing the sending. A prospect who stays quiet is re-approached later in a new campaign with a different angle, and on LinkedIn that second message is not sent at all, because it lands under the one they already ignored.
About the author.
Tim Carden is CMO / CTO at RevenueFlow, which builds and operates outbound revenue engines for B2B companies. Studied at McGill University.
Tim Carden · CMO / CTO
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