Contrack vs Clay

Contrack vs Clay

Compared in October 2026: Contrack 2.0.0 and Clay (hosted SaaS).

Clay is a polished commercial personal CRM known for its editorial design, automatic social and email imports, and natural-language search across your network.

Contrack brings that same focus on thoughtful design, effortless capture, semantic search and relationship cadences to an open-source, self-hosted server that runs on a single SQLite file, so your personal and professional relationships, notes, emails and calendar history never leave hardware you control.

At a glance

Area	Contrack 2.0.0	Clay (hosted SaaS)
Hosting and license	Self-hosted, open-source (AGPL-3.0), free with no seat or contact limits	Cloud-only proprietary SaaS with paid monthly tiers
Stack and storage	1 Node container and 1 SQLite file (curator.db) on your own disk	Hosted cloud infrastructure managed by Clay
Data privacy	Zero telemetry; notes, emails and embeddings stay on your server	Contact graph, email headers/metadata and notes stored in Clay cloud
Personal context	Friends, family, birthdays, anniversaries, custom dates, gift ideas in notes, tags, lists, @mentions	Notes, birthdays, reminders, lists and life updates
Professional context	Role, company, experience, education, cadence, relationship score, web research and pre-meeting briefs	Work history, social profiles, job change alerts and notes
Getting data in	Google Contacts, Gmail, Google Calendar, IMAP, ICS, vCard/CSV/JSON import, and Add from text	Google/Microsoft email & calendar, iMessage, LinkedIn, CSV/vCard
Keeping up	Opt-in tracking per person, custom cadence, Pulse morning page, overdue and upcoming milestones	Reconnect cadences, home feed and reminders
Search	Local hybrid search (FTS5 + sqlite-vec embeddings + local cross-encoder reranker) and Notes mode	Cloud-hosted semantic and keyword search (Nexus)
Map	Built-in MapLibre world map with clustering, box/lasso selection, saved views and custom pin placement	Location search and list filtering; no interactive lasso world map
AI and web enrichment	Optional BYO-key or local Ollama + SearXNG web research with cited sources and Not this person	Built-in cloud AI (Nexus) and commercial profile enrichment
MCP server	Built in at /api/mcp (18 tools, personal tokens and OAuth 2.1 on your own server)	Hosted MCP integration tied to a Clay account
Multi-user / household	Multiple isolated accounts on one server, included for free	Paid per-user plans and team workspaces

Self-hosted ownership vs cloud-only SaaS

A personal CRM holds some of your most sensitive context: private notes about friends and family, candid takeaways from investor or recruiting meetings, email correspondence, and where the people you care about live.

• Clay is a closed-source cloud service. Using it means syncing your email, calendar and notes to Clay's servers and paying an ongoing subscription to keep full access to your network and search.
• Contrack runs on your own machine, home server or VPS as a single Node.js process over one SQLite file (curator.db). There is no telemetry, no vendor cloud, and no per-contact or per-seat pricing. Backing up your entire CRM is a single SQLite snapshot via Settings → Backups or automatic daily backups (see Self-hosting and Privacy).

Local hybrid search and optional AI vs cloud-only AI

Both Clay and Contrack treat search as a core workflow rather than an afterthought, but they run that search very differently:

• Clay indexes your contacts and notes in the cloud and routes natural-language queries through its hosted Nexus AI service.
• Contrack runs its entire hybrid search pipeline locally on CPU inside the container, with no API key required:
  • Every contact, note, interaction and custom fact is indexed in SQLite FTS5 and embedded locally with bge-small-en-v1.5 (384 dimensions) in sqlite-vec, then reranked with a local ms-marco-MiniLM-L-6-v2 cross-encoder.
  • You can search people ("Who do I know in Tokyo?", "fintech founders") or switch to Notes mode to search across every note and interaction passage ("Who mentioned natural wine?", "seed round").
  • If you turn on AI features such as Ask Contrack, Add from text, pre-meeting briefs, or web enrichment, you choose the model provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, or a local Ollama model) and web search engine (provider-native, Brave, Tavily, Serper or self-hosted SearXNG). See Search and Ask Contrack and AI and research.

Calm, intentional tracking vs social feed noise

When you connect email and address books, thousands of people flow in at once.

• Clay automatically imports contacts across connected accounts and surfaces a stream of social updates and reconnect prompts.
• Contrack separates your address book from your tracked inner circle:
  • Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, IMAP and ICS connectors sync quietly in the background and attach emails and meetings to existing contacts (see Import, sync and export).
  • Only the people you explicitly mark as Tracked appear in your overdue check-ins on Pulse and factor into your network health score.
  • Add from text (Smart Paste) lets you drop in a quick note after a wedding or a coffee meeting, like "Met at Sarah's wedding, loves natural wine, kids are Leo and Maya, catch up every quarter" or "Partner at Sequoia, follow up next Tuesday on seed round", and turns it into a structured contact, tags, custom facts and dated timeline entries in seconds.

Interactive world map and self-hosted MCP

• World map. Planning a trip to London or New York? Contrack's Map plots your contacts on an interactive MapLibre globe and flat map, resolves metro and regional locations automatically, lets you draw a rectangle or freehand lasso around a city to add everyone to a trip list, and saves named map views.
• MCP server on your terms. Contrack ships a built-in Model Context Protocol server at /api/mcp with 18 tools, scoped read-only or read-write personal tokens, and OAuth 2.1, so Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, or Cursor can work with your CRM directly against your own server (see MCP server).

When Clay might still fit better

Clay has a few capabilities that come from its commercial data partnerships and native Apple client apps:

• Native iOS and macOS apps with direct local access to iMessage history on a Mac (Contrack is a responsive web app that installs as a PWA on mobile and desktop).
• Direct LinkedIn and X/Twitter sync and automatic job-change alerts powered by commercial third-party data brokers (Contrack enriches profiles on demand via web research with cited source URLs).
• Zero hosting setup if you prefer a managed SaaS subscription over running Docker.

Moving from Clay to Contrack

1. In Clay, open Settings → Export and export your contacts as a CSV or vCard (.vcf) file.
2. In Contrack, open Settings → Import (or press ⌘K and type Import), upload the exported file, and review any suggested merges in the duplicate check.
3. Connect Google or IMAP/ICS accounts in Settings → Connectors if you want automatic email and calendar timelines, then mark your priority relationships as Tracked on Pulse.