Why look beyond Clari
Clari provides a unified platform for revenue operations and intelligence, offering capabilities such as AI-driven forecasting, pipeline inspection, and historical analysis to aid sales and finance teams in managing revenue processes. Its strengths lie in consolidating data from various sources to offer a comprehensive view of the revenue cycle, facilitating more accurate predictability and operational efficiency. Clari is particularly suited for enterprises seeking an integrated suite to standardize their revenue workflows and improve decision-making through data-driven insights.
However, organizations may consider alternatives for several reasons. Some may find Clari's custom enterprise pricing model unsuitable for their budget or scale, particularly smaller to mid-sized businesses that require more transparent or tiered pricing structures. The platform's comprehensive nature, while beneficial for some, might also present an implementation challenge or an overly complex solution for teams with specific, narrower needs, such as a primary focus on conversation intelligence or sales engagement alone. Additionally, companies already heavily invested in a specific CRM ecosystem might seek an alternative that offers deeper native integration or a more seamless extension of their existing infrastructure, rather than a separate, overarching RO&I layer.
Top alternatives ranked
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1. Gong — Conversation intelligence for revenue teams
Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that uses artificial intelligence to analyze customer interactions across calls, emails, and web conferences. It transcribes and analyzes these conversations to identify key moments, trends, and actionable insights, providing visibility into customer sentiment and sales performance. Gong helps sales leaders coach their teams more effectively by highlighting successful behaviors and areas for improvement based on real customer interactions. The platform also contributes to forecasting accuracy by identifying deal risks and opportunities based on engagement patterns and conversation content.
Compared to Clari, which offers a broader revenue operations platform focused on forecasting and pipeline management, Gong specializes in conversation intelligence. While Clari aggregates data across various sales activities to predict revenue, Gong deep-dives into the actual content of sales conversations to uncover nuances in customer engagement and rep performance. This makes Gong particularly strong for organizations prioritizing the understanding and optimization of sales interactions and identifying best practices through spoken and written communication. Gong's insights can complement a broader revenue operations strategy by providing granular data on customer engagement that informs pipeline health and forecasting.
Best for:
- Analyzing sales conversations for coaching and compliance
- Identifying customer trends and sentiment from interactions
- Improving sales effectiveness through data-driven insights
- Organizations prioritizing granular conversation intelligence
Explore Gong's profile page for more details or visit the official Gong website.
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2. Salesforce Sales Cloud — The core CRM for sales management
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed to manage sales, customer service, and marketing operations. Its core functionalities include lead management, opportunity tracking, forecasting, reporting, and territory management. Sales Cloud provides a centralized system for sales teams to track customer interactions, manage their pipelines, and automate various sales processes. It aims to improve sales productivity and provide a holistic view of the customer journey, from initial contact through to deal closure.
As an alternative to Clari, Salesforce Sales Cloud serves as a foundational platform for sales operations. While Clari focuses on revenue operations and intelligence by consolidating data from various sources to provide forecasting and pipeline insights, Sales Cloud is primarily a system of record for customer data and sales activities. Organizations deeply integrated into the Salesforce ecosystem might find Sales Cloud's native forecasting and reporting tools sufficient or prefer to extend its capabilities with AppExchange solutions rather than adopting a separate RO&I platform. For many businesses, Sales Cloud is the central hub for all sales-related data, making it a natural starting point for managing revenue-generating activities. Its extensibility allows for customization and integration with a wide array of third-party applications, which can collectively address many of the needs Clari targets.
Best for:
- Centralized customer and sales data management
- Lead, opportunity, and account management
- Sales forecasting and reporting within a CRM
- Organizations already invested in the Salesforce ecosystem
Explore Salesforce Sales Cloud's profile page for more details or visit the official Salesforce Sales Cloud website.
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3. Outreach — Sales engagement and execution platform
Outreach is a sales engagement platform that helps sales teams streamline and automate their communication workflows across multiple channels, including email, phone, and social media. It provides tools for sequencing outreach, scheduling meetings, tracking engagement, and managing prospect interactions. Outreach aims to increase sales productivity by enabling reps to execute personalized campaigns at scale, ensuring consistent follow-up and optimized communication strategies. The platform also offers analytics to measure the effectiveness of outreach efforts and identify best practices.
In contrast to Clari's focus on revenue intelligence and forecasting, Outreach specializes in the execution layer of the sales process. While Clari provides insights into the health of the entire revenue pipeline and helps predict outcomes, Outreach focuses on optimizing the initial and ongoing engagement with prospects and customers. For organizations looking to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their sales development and account executive teams' communication, Outreach offers a dedicated solution. Its strengths lie in automating repetitive tasks, personalizing outreach at scale, and providing granular data on engagement metrics. When integrated with a CRM like Salesforce, Outreach can significantly enhance the data available for revenue operations, though its primary function is distinct from Clari's overarching RO&I platform.
Best for:
- Automating sales outreach and follow-up sequences
- Personalizing communication at scale across channels
- Tracking prospect engagement and measuring campaign effectiveness
- Sales development and account executive teams
Explore Outreach's profile page for more details or visit the official Outreach website.
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4. H2O.ai — Open-source and enterprise AI for predictive analytics
H2O.ai provides an open-source machine learning platform and enterprise products for building, deploying, and managing AI models. Its flagship product, H2O-3, is an open-source, scalable machine learning platform that supports various algorithms for predictive analytics, including generalized linear models, gradient boosting machines, and deep learning. Driverless AI, an enterprise product, automates many aspects of machine learning workflow, from feature engineering to model deployment, making it accessible to data scientists and developers. H2O.ai focuses on enabling organizations to leverage AI for a wide range of analytical tasks, including fraud detection, risk management, and customer churn prediction.
As an alternative in the broader AI landscape, H2O.ai offers a distinct approach compared to Clari. While Clari provides a pre-built, specialized AI solution tailored for revenue operations, H2O.ai offers a foundational AI platform that allows organizations to build custom predictive models. This means that while Clari delivers out-of-the-box revenue intelligence, H2O.ai empowers data science teams to develop their own AI solutions for forecasting, anomaly detection, or other revenue-related predictions using their specific datasets. It offers greater flexibility and control over the model development process, making it suitable for organizations with in-house data science capabilities that require highly customized or domain-specific AI applications, including those relevant to revenue forecasting and optimization.
Best for:
- Building custom machine learning models for predictive analytics
- Automating model development and deployment workflows
- Organizations with in-house data science teams
- Developing highly specialized AI applications beyond standard RO&I
Explore H2O.ai's profile page for more details or visit the official H2O.ai website.
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5. MLflow — Open-source MLOps platform for machine learning lifecycle
MLflow is an open-source platform designed to manage the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle. It comprises four primary components: MLflow Tracking for recording experiments and results, MLflow Projects for packaging code, MLflow Models for deploying models to various serving platforms, and MLflow Model Registry for collaborative model management. MLflow enables data scientists and machine learning engineers to track, reproduce, and deploy models efficiently, fostering collaboration and ensuring consistency across the development and production phases of AI projects.
MLflow differs significantly from Clari. Clari is a commercial, integrated platform offering specific AI-driven solutions for revenue operations, whereas MLflow is an open-source MLOps tool. MLflow does not provide out-of-the-box revenue forecasting or pipeline management. Instead, it offers the infrastructure for organizations to build and manage their own custom machine learning models, which could include models for predicting sales, identifying at-risk deals, or optimizing pricing. For businesses with strong data science and engineering teams that prefer to develop proprietary AI solutions and manage the entire machine learning lifecycle in-house, MLflow provides the necessary tooling. It offers flexibility to integrate with various machine learning frameworks and deployment environments, allowing for a highly customized approach to leveraging AI for revenue-related challenges.
Best for:
- Managing the machine learning lifecycle for custom AI models
- Tracking experiments and reproducing results in ML projects
- Deploying and managing bespoke machine learning models
- Organizations with in-house data science and MLOps capabilities
Explore MLflow's profile page for more details or visit the official MLflow website.
Side-by-side
| Feature | Clari | Gong | Salesforce Sales Cloud | Outreach | H2O.ai | MLflow |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core Focus | Revenue Operations & Intelligence | Conversation Intelligence | CRM & Sales Management | Sales Engagement | AI Platform for Predictive Models | MLOps Lifecycle Management |
| AI Capabilities | AI-driven forecasting, pipeline inspection | AI analysis of conversations | AI-powered insights (Einstein AI) | AI for sequence optimization | Open-source & enterprise ML platform | Tools for managing custom ML models |
| Primary Users | Revenue Leaders, Sales Ops, Finance | Sales Reps, Sales Managers, RevOps | Sales Reps, Sales Managers, Admins | Sales Dev Reps, Account Execs | Data Scientists, ML Engineers | Data Scientists, ML Engineers |
| Deployment | SaaS (Cloud) | SaaS (Cloud) | SaaS (Cloud) | SaaS (Cloud) | On-prem, Cloud, Hybrid | Open-source, deployable anywhere |
| Pricing Model | Custom Enterprise | Custom Enterprise | Tiered Subscriptions | Tiered Subscriptions | Open-source & Enterprise licenses | Open-source (free), commercial support available |
| Developer APIs | Integrations, limited custom APIs | Extensive APIs for data access | Comprehensive APIs (REST, SOAP) | APIs for integration & automation | APIs for model building & deployment | APIs for tracking, projects, models |
| Open Source | No | No | No | No | Yes (H2O-3), Commercial options | Yes |
How to pick
Selecting an alternative to Clari depends on an organization's specific revenue operations needs, existing tech stack, and internal resources. Consider the following decision-tree approach:
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Is your primary goal focused on understanding and improving sales conversations?
- If yes, Gong is likely the most suitable option. It specializes in analyzing spoken and written interactions to provide coaching insights and identify trends that impact deal outcomes. Gong excels when detailed conversation intelligence is a top priority for sales enablement and effectiveness.
- If no, proceed to the next question.
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Are you seeking a foundational CRM to manage sales processes and customer data, with integrated forecasting capabilities?
- If yes, Salesforce Sales Cloud is a strong contender. Especially if you are already using or planning to adopt the Salesforce ecosystem, its comprehensive CRM functionalities, combined with native forecasting and extensibility, can serve as the central hub for your sales operations.
- If no, proceed.
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Is optimizing and automating your sales team's outreach and engagement efforts a critical need?
- If yes, Outreach specializes in sales engagement. It provides tools to automate sequences, personalize communication, and track prospect interactions across channels, significantly boosting sales development and account executive productivity.
- If no, consider your organization's AI capabilities.
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Do you have an in-house data science or machine learning team capable of building custom predictive models for revenue-related challenges?
- If yes, consider platforms that offer more foundational AI tooling:
- For general-purpose AI model building and deployment, with options for both open-source and enterprise features, H2O.ai provides a robust platform for developing custom predictive analytics solutions.
- For managing the entire lifecycle of custom machine learning models, from experimentation to deployment, MLflow offers an open-source solution for MLOps. This is ideal if you need fine-grained control over your AI pipeline and want to leverage existing data science expertise.
- If no, and you require pre-built, out-of-the-box revenue intelligence without building custom models, then a platform like Clari or a solution with similar integrated RO&I capabilities might be more appropriate.
- If yes, consider platforms that offer more foundational AI tooling:
Ultimately, the choice hinges on whether you need a specialized tool for a particular aspect of revenue operations (like conversation intelligence or sales engagement), a foundational CRM with integrated sales management, or an underlying AI platform to build custom, data-driven solutions in-house.