Comparison · Updated August 2026

Weft vs Mesh (formerly Clay)

Two personal CRMs with opposite design philosophies. Mesh — the product that used to be called Clay — treats AI as a feature; Weft treats AI as something to refuse. Pick the one whose stance matches yours.

The one-line answer. Mesh (formerly Clay) is a beautiful cross-platform personal CRM with automatic enrichment, an AI layer, and a premium price. Weft is a quiet iOS-first indie with zero cloud AI, written by one person, priced for a single individual paying out of pocket.

What each tool is designed for

Clay is now Mesh. If you came here looking for Clay (clay.earth), the product still exists — it was acquired by Automattic in June 2025 and rebranded to Mesh, at me.sh. No features were removed in the rename. Everything below refers to Mesh under its current name.

Mesh is a polished, design-forward product that describes itself as a rolodex and CRM that "brings together everyone you've ever met." The defining feature is automatic enrichment: connect email, calendar, LinkedIn, Facebook, iMessage and more, and Mesh keeps contact details current, surfaces job changes and news mentions, and prompts you to reconnect. There is an AI layer (Nexus) on top of it. The aesthetic is genuinely lovely. Mesh Personal is free for up to 1,000 contacts (a credit card is required); Mesh Pro is $10/month with annual billing for unlimited contacts, and Mesh Team is $40 per seat/month.

Weft is the small-studio counterpoint. The app is built by one developer in Tokyo, runs only on iOS 26, and has no AI features at all. There is no cloud LLM in the picture — full stop. The product believes that the value is in you writing the sentence about someone; an auto-generated summary doesn't actually help you remember them, it just makes the database look populated.

Side-by-side comparison

Dimension Weft Mesh
Primary platformiOS 26macOS, Windows, Web, iOS, Android
Free tier7 people, forever · no card1,000 contacts · card required
Premium price$18.99/year or $39.99 lifetime$10/mo billed annually (Pro)
AI summarizationNone (deliberate)Yes — central to the product
Data locationOn-device + optional private iCloudMesh's cloud (required for AI)
Email/calendar integrationNoneYes (Gmail, iCloud, etc.)
Home-screen widgetsAll sizes free · full large details/action PremiumNo
People7 free · unlimited Premium1,000 free · unlimited on Pro
MakerSolo indie · TokyoVenture-funded team

Where Mesh is genuinely better

If you want the relationship layer over your existing communication tools — Gmail, calendar, conference contacts — Mesh does this beautifully. The automatic enrichment, for what it is, can save real time if you trust it. The desktop apps are genuinely lovely. If you want a polished, full-featured personal CRM that touches all your channels — on macOS, Windows, the web, iOS or Android — Mesh is mature and well-designed.

If you actively want AI to do the remembering for you, Weft will not serve that need.

Where Weft is genuinely better

If you've recoiled at the idea of an LLM reading every email about your close friends, Weft is built for you. No cloud LLM reads or writes Weft notes. Notes live in an on-device database; when Premium iCloud sync is enabled in Weft, synced records use private CloudKit and are encrypted in transit and at rest. Weft has no notes backend and cannot access those private CloudKit records.

If you're paying for an indie app out of pocket (no expense account), Weft costs roughly a sixth of Mesh Pro. If you live on iOS, Weft's home-screen and lock-screen widgets fit the device you already use most. If you find auto-generated summaries vaguely creepy — like reading a CRM's polite description of a friend — Weft's blank textarea is calmer.

And honestly: most people don't have a thousand close friends. They have ten. The "OS for your personal life" framing assumes a busier life than most of us have. Weft assumes the opposite.

The honest verdict

The question that distinguishes these two:

  • "Do I want AI to read my emails and tell me about my friends?"Mesh, if yes.
  • "Do I want a quiet, on-device notebook where I do the remembering myself?"Weft, if yes.

Both are valid answers. They just point to different products.

Try Weft. Free for up to 7 people, forever. No Weft account, no card, no cloud AI. Get it on the App Store →

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