Groove by Clari vs Outplay: Cross-Category Comparison

Outplay publishes a free tier with 2000 active prospects a month, then Starter at $39 a month billed annually, and sells warm-up, extra mailboxes, an AI SDR and conversation intelligence as separately priced power-ups from $15, $6, $99 and $69. Groove by Clari publishes no price and no add-on list on the pages fetched for this comparison, and the Clari pricing page ends at a Get a quote form.

Outplay's power-up list is unusually honest about what a cold programme actually costs, and Groove's page is unusually quiet about what anything costs. Between them they cover the two halves of a revenue team's tooling.

Why Compare These Two Tools?

Email sending platforms focus specifically on cold email campaigns, while sales engagement platforms offer multi-channel outreach including email, phone and social. The comparison comes down to specialization against breadth of channels.

Groove by Clari is a sales engagement and prospecting platform, now sold as part of the Clari platform, that automates email flows, logging, and analytics and integrates with Salesforce to keep activity data in the CRM. It is filed here as a sales engagement platform. To be precise about what that means, its own product page opens by calling it a complete sales engagement platform and leads on capturing sales activity into Salesforce.

Outplay is a multi-channel sales engagement platform with email sequences, a dialer, LinkedIn automation, conversation intelligence, and AI SDR capabilities. It is filed here as a cold email platform, and its own pricing page rations active prospects a month at the bottom, then seats, with mailboxes capped per tier. It is worth noting that its own description calls it a sales engagement platform too, so the cross-category framing is looser here than the labels suggest.

The category labels are the least interesting thing on this page. What decides the purchase is which meter each vendor bills on, which of the two gaps is currently costing more, and whether the second purchase can wait a quarter.

Where Each Tool Fits in Your Workflow

1. Step 1Campaign execution

   Outplay covers cold email outreach, from a free entry plan.

2. Step 2Outreach orchestration

   Groove by Clari covers multi-channel sales outreach, on a quote rather than a published price.

Groove does send email, and that is the thing to be precise about. It sends from the rep's own connected mailbox, logs every touch back to the Salesforce record, and reports on flows from inside Clari. Its product page publishes no warmup pool, no domain rotation and no send allowance on the page fetched for this comparison, because the identity it sends from is a person's real work mailbox rather than a pool of dedicated cold domains.

Outplay lists auto email rotation and spintax support on every tier including the free one, and sells warm-up as a power-up from $15/mailbox rather than bundling it. The mailbox allowance runs 2 on Free, 5 on Starter, then 5 and 15 per user.

Pricing Comparison

Groove by Clari Pricing

Groove is no longer bought on its own. Clari's site lists it alongside Capture, Inspect, Align, Copilot, Forecast and Guide as one product inside the Clari platform, and the Clari pricing page fetched for this comparison publishes no figures at all, ending instead at a Get a quote form. The one cost-shaped statement on that page is that the platform carries no extra fees for integrations or continuous support, which is worth having in writing but is not a number. Groove's own product page says 75,000+ users rely on it every day, so the quote you receive will be sized on seats.

Groove's product and pricing pages on clari.com now redirect to Salesloft. Clari and Salesloft completed their merger on December 3, 2025, and Salesloft's merger page says the two "are now operating as one company, with Salesloft as our go-forward company and platform brand." Salesloft's site still offers a Groove login, and the merged company's customer FAQ says it has no current plans for required migrations from one product to the other. The Groove details above describe the product as Clari listed it, so confirm current packaging and price with Salesloft.

Sources: Clari and Salesloft complete merger, Salesloft and Clari are now one company, merger customer FAQ

Outplay Pricing

Outplay puts several things its competitors bundle into separately priced power-ups: email warm-up from $15/mailbox, additional mailboxes from $6/mailbox, an AI SDR from $99 and conversation intelligence from $69. A realistic Outplay line is the plan plus whichever of those a cold programme actually needs, and the mailbox allowance in the last column is the number that decides how many sending domains a plan can carry.

Source: Outplay Pricing

Pricing Context

One of these pages publishes a price and the other publishes a process, which makes a headline comparison between them impossible rather than merely unhelpful. The published side can be modelled today; the unpublished side is a quote, and a quote arrives with a seat count, a term and whatever sits outside the licence attached to it. Budget the gap rather than the sticker.

What A Two-Tool Stack Costs

Here is illustrative arithmetic, invented as a worked example rather than taken from any client, for a two person team running one wave of about 2,000 prospects a month.

The Groove by Clari page fetched for this comparison publishes no figure to put in this column, so the honest entry is a quote. Leave a placeholder in the model and replace it before anyone signs anything.

On the other side the model is arithmetic rather than a negotiation, because Starter starts from 5000 active prospects and 5 mailboxes, which covers the wave, and warm-up is a separate power-up rather than part of it. Outplay on its Starter tier is $39 a month billed annually, so one account subscription across twelve months comes to $468.

That is not the whole line. Add email warm-up on all five mailboxes, 5 of them at $15 per mailbox a month, and the priced half of the stack reaches $114 a month and $1,368 across the year.

So the modelled year is $1,368 of published price plus one quote. A stack whose second line is a quote cannot be budgeted from a comparison page, and the quote is usually the larger number by some distance.

Three things make that quote arrive faster and closer to what you will actually pay: a seat count, because every unpriced vendor in this category starts there; the volume the other tool already carries, so the conversation is about what the platform adds; and a direct question about what sits outside the licence, since a platform fee, an implementation charge and a minimum term never appear on a pricing page.

Feature Highlights

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

Outplay Key Capabilities (Cold Email Platform)

• Multi-channel outreach (email, phone, LinkedIn, SMS, chat)
• AI sequence writer
• Conversation intelligence
• Power dialer with auto voicemail drop
• Website visitor tracking
• A/B testing
• Auto email rotation
• Spintax support
• AI objection handling
• Chrome extension

Where The Two Actually Overlap

Outplay publishes multi-channel outreach across email, phone, LinkedIn, SMS and chat, an AI sequence writer, conversation intelligence, a power dialer with auto voicemail drop, website visitor tracking, A/B testing, auto email rotation, spintax and AI objection handling. Groove publishes deep Salesforce integration, engagement flows, auto-logging, tracking analytics, a dialer with recording, a scheduler, flow analytics, templates and account-based workflows. Multichannel cadences, dialers and analytics appear on both.

Auto email rotation and spintax appear on Outplay's list and not on Groove's, and Salesforce activity capture appears on Groove's and not on Outplay's. Those two absences describe the two jobs precisely: one page is written for a cold list across many mailboxes, the other for a named account list inside one CRM.

Do You Need Both, And In Which Order

Outplay first for a cold programme, and the power-up list is why the answer is confident. Auto email rotation and spintax are on every Outplay tier including the free one, which is the sending behaviour a cold list needs, and warm-up is available from $15 per mailbox when it is needed.

Groove is the purchase for an established Salesforce team that wants its reps' existing activity captured and orchestrated. A company running both puts cold prospecting through Outplay's dedicated mailboxes and named accounts through Groove's Salesforce-centred flows, and draws that boundary as a list rather than a feature preference, which is what stops one prospect receiving mail from both.

Integration Ecosystem

Groove by Clari Integrations

Groove by Clari connects with: Salesforce, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365, Google Calendar, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Clari, Zoom, Slack.

Outplay Integrations

Outplay connects with: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Gmail, Outlook, Zapier, Slack, Calendly.

Shared Integrations

Both tools integrate with: Salesforce, Gmail, Slack. This shared ecosystem means they can work together in your tech stack.

When to Choose Groove by Clari

• Your biggest gap is in outreach orchestration
• You already have a solid cold email platform and need specialized multi-channel sales outreach capabilities
• You need enterprise-grade multi-channel sales outreach features
• Your team's primary bottleneck is multi-channel sales outreach

When to Choose Outplay

Choose Groove by ClariSales Engagement Platform, outreach orchestration

• Your biggest gap is in outreach orchestration
• You already have a solid cold email platform and need specialized multi-channel sales outreach capabilities
• You need enterprise-grade multi-channel sales outreach features
• Your team's primary bottleneck is multi-channel sales outreach

Choose OutplayCold Email Platform, campaign execution

• Your biggest gap is in campaign execution
• You already have a sales engagement platform and need better cold email outreach
• You want an affordable entry point ($0/mo)
• Your team's primary bottleneck is cold email outreach

• Your biggest gap is in campaign execution
• You already have a sales engagement platform and need better cold email outreach
• You want an affordable entry point ($0/mo)
• Your team's primary bottleneck is cold email outreach

Using Both Together

Both together is a real configuration rather than a theoretical one, and it needs a boundary drawn in advance, because both tools send email. The workable split is by list and by identity: cold prospects go out through Outplay on domains built for the purpose, and named accounts a rep already owns go out through Groove from that rep's own mailbox, logged straight into Salesforce.

House practice keeps that split honest. RevenueFlow runs one message per campaign, with no thread replies and no bump sequences behind it, so a prospect who appears in both systems receives at most one message from each rather than two escalating threads. The suppression list sits above the tools and is loaded into each of them before anything sends.

Salesforce, Gmail, Slack appear on both integration lists above, and those shared connectors are where a duplicate is easiest to catch, because both systems can write to the same CRM record.

Rollout Notes

Before the first wave goes out

• ✓Yes: Name the system that owns the contacted-already list
• ✓Yes: Load suppression into both tools before either sends
• ✓Yes: Send one message per campaign, with no bump step behind it
• ✓Yes: Check the sending mailboxes are warmed and authenticated
• ✓Yes: Agree in writing what counts as a qualified meeting
• ~Depends: Point replies at one inbox a person actually reads

Price the power-ups before the migration, not after. Warm-up from $15 per mailbox and additional mailboxes from $6 each are the lines that change a like-for-like comparison, and the plan's mailbox allowance decides how many sending domains fit without them. Export the contacted list and re-authenticate every mailbox in the destination.

Meetings are qualified against criteria agreed in writing before launch, and that definition should survive a tooling change unchanged. A tool migration that quietly moves the qualification bar is how a reporting line stops being comparable to last quarter's.

Decision Shortcut

1. Name the binding constraint. List quality, sending capacity, or what happens after a reply. One of the three is costing more than the other two right now.
2. Read both meters before both feature lists. Groove by Clari is priced on seats, quoted rather than published; Outplay is priced on active prospects a month at the bottom, then seats, with mailboxes capped per tier. Adding a rep and adding a domain cost different things on the two sides.
3. Price a realistic year, not a headline. Include the add-ons each tool needs to reach parity with the other, and leave the unpriced side as a placeholder until a quote arrives.
4. Decide who owns suppression. One system holds the contacted-already list, and both read from it before anything sends.
5. Re-check in a quarter. Whichever tool was bought second should have a measurable job by then, or it is a renewal to cancel.

Related Reading

• Best Groove by Clari Alternatives in 2026
• Best Outplay Alternatives in 2026
• Groove by Clari vs Outreach: Sales Engagement Platform Comparison
• Groove by Clari vs Salesloft: Sales Engagement Platform Comparison
• Instantly vs Outplay: Cold Email 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.