As organizations deepen their investment in Microsoft’s CRM and analytics ecosystem, it’s common to reassess how external data tools fit alongside native platforms. Questions often arise around overlap—particularly when tools appear to offer similar concepts such as enrichment, scoring, or prioritization.
Most of this confusion comes from looking at features in isolation rather than understanding where each platform operates in the broader data architecture. When viewed through that lens, the distinction between Clay, Dynamics 365 Insights, and Microsoft Fabric becomes much clearer.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Insights is a Microsoft-managed product layer embedded directly within the Dynamics 365 CRM. Its purpose is to surface insights that users can act on immediately, without leaving the CRM interface or relying on external systems.
Because it lives inside Dynamics 365, Insights is tightly aligned with Microsoft’s security model, licensing, governance standards, and user experience. It applies Microsoft-defined data models to provide enrichment, scoring, prioritization, and Copilot-style recommendations that are natively attached to CRM entities.
At a high level, Dynamics 365 Insights is designed to:
This also means the platform is intentionally opinionated. Enrichment is limited to Microsoft signals and a small set of supported third-party providers, and scoring logic follows predefined, productized models rather than bespoke business rules.
In practice, Dynamics 365 Insights answers a focused and deliberate question:
Based on Microsoft’s supported models and data sources, what insights should be surfaced about this record inside the CRM?
Clay serves a very different role in the stack.
Rather than operating inside the CRM, Clay functions as a data operations and workflow environment that sits upstream of operational systems like Dynamics 365. It is not an insights feature, Copilot extension, or CRM add-on. Instead, it is where teams decide how data should be defined, enriched, scored, and consolidated before it becomes operational or analytical truth.
In practice, Clay is used to handle a set of upstream responsibilities that native CRM tooling is not designed to manage, including:
Clay is also the layer where more complex, cross-system data challenges are addressed. This typically includes scenarios such as identity resolution, parent–child and roll-up relationships, and multi-entity or multi-identifier data models that span systems and datasets.
Once data has been processed and validated, Clay writes structured, enriched outputs back into Dynamics 365, where they can be used operationally by sales, marketing, and service teams.
Where Dynamics 365 Insights focuses on what should be shown inside the CRM, Clay answers a broader upstream question:
How should data be defined, enriched, and validated so it can be trusted across systems?
One of the most important distinctions is structural.
Dynamics 365 Insights is a product with predefined capabilities delivered inside the CRM. Clay, by contrast, is an environment that allows teams to design and operate their own data workflows.
This distinction explains why the two tools coexist cleanly. While Dynamics 365 Insights surfaces Microsoft-defined intelligence, Clay provides the flexibility to orchestrate data across systems, incorporate external signals, and apply complex logic before data ever reaches the CRM.
In practice, Clay functions as an upstream decision and conditioning layer, while Dynamics 365 remains the system of record where insights are consumed and acted upon.
Microsoft Fabric plays a complementary role to both Clay and Dynamics 365. It is designed to store, govern, model, and report on data at scale.
Clay does not replace Fabric. Instead, it prepares data so that what flows into Fabric is already standardized, enriched, and analytically ready. A simple way to think about the architecture is that Clay sits between raw data sources and Fabric, acting as a transformation layer before long-term storage and reporting.
Raw data from CRMs, APIs, web sources, and external providers is processed in Clay, then passed downstream into Fabric for analytics and Power BI reporting.
Clay integrates with Microsoft Fabric using standard ingestion patterns rather than proprietary connectors. Depending on operational and governance requirements, data may flow into Fabric through scheduled exports, pipeline-based ingestion, or event-driven workflows using Azure services.
From an analytics perspective, this ensures a consistent outcome:
Microsoft Fabric is designed to ingest structured data from virtually any source. Because of this, Clay does not require a dedicated or native Fabric connector. Its responsibility is to produce clean, well-structured datasets and hand them off using standard Microsoft ingestion patterns.
This keeps governance and security centralized within Microsoft, while allowing Clay to remain flexible and lightweight as a data processing layer.
When used together, each platform plays a distinct role within the Microsoft-centric stack. Dynamics 365 continues to function as the operational system of record. Dynamics 365 Insights provides Microsoft-defined intelligence directly within the CRM experience. Clay determines what data is trustworthy, enriched, and consolidated before it reaches downstream systems. Microsoft Fabric stores and reports on that data at scale.
A useful shorthand is:
Clay is the thinking layer.
Fabric is the memory layer.
Dynamics is the execution layer.
This architecture improves data quality, prioritization, and visibility without disrupting existing Microsoft investments or introducing unnecessary overlap.