Day.ai vs Lightfield

Day.ai vs Lightfield: why we put teams on Day.ai

Two CRMs that build themselves out of your email and calendar. We put our clients on Day.ai. This page is the reason, and the two cases where we do something else.

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The short answer

We put teams on Day.ai. Three reasons: you can run it free on your own mail before you pay anything, you pay for the agents doing work and not for the people they watch, and what you buy stays bought. We pick Lightfield when a team wants one pooled budget for the whole workspace, or has a big CRM to move by a date somebody else set.

The feature lists are close enough that comparing them wastes a week. Both write the records themselves. Both record meetings. Both have custom objects, an API and MCP access. They split on how they charge you, and that is the rest of this page.

Three reasons we put teams on Day.ai

None of the three is a feature. All three are about how you get billed.

  1. Run it free on your own mail before you pay anything

    Day.ai's free plan is not a stripped one. It reads your Gmail and calendar, records your meetings, takes the notes, and lets you search everything it built. Connect your real inbox, leave it a month, and decide on what it did with your own customers.

    Lightfield has no free plan. The entry tier gives you a 14 day trial. Two weeks is a demo. Your slowest deal will not have moved, and the reports you would judge it on need a quarter of history before they say anything.

    Both vendors' own pricing pages, read 12 September 2026

  2. You pay for the agents doing work, not for the people they watch

    Day.ai charges a flat monthly rate per agent. Everyone else is free, and free here is not a viewer seat. Their mail and calendar get read, their meetings recorded, their customers into the record, at no cost. More of your team in the CRM makes it better, and on Day.ai that costs nothing.

    Lightfield's plans include a set number of captured inboxes and charge monthly for each one past that. Viewers are unlimited, but a viewer only reads. The moment you want somebody's conversations in the CRM, they go on the bill.

    Day.ai

    Who needs an agent?

    • Agent
    • Agent
    • Free
    • Agent
    • Free
    • Free
    • Agent
    • Free
    • Free
    • Free

    Four agents on the bill. The other six are in the record for free, mail and meetings included.

    Lightfield

    Whose conversations does it read?

    • Viewer
    • Captured
    • Captured
    • Viewer
    • Captured
    • Viewer
    • Viewer
    • Viewer
    • Captured
    • Viewer

    Four captured inboxes. The other six can read the CRM but are not in it until you pay for them.

    Same team, same numbers, different question. On Day.ai growing the record is free. On Lightfield it is the line item.

  3. What you buy stays bought

    Day.ai gives each agent a set number of automated skill slots. You get the same capability in a quiet month as a busy one, and an agent you are not using can be switched off.

    Lightfield runs agent work out of a pool of workspace credits. The credits are annual. Unused ones expire at year end. Going past the cap bills at an overage rate agreed up front. And the entry plan has no credits at all, so agent work starts a tier up, along with workflows, sequences and reporting.

    That is harder to budget. A quiet year is money forfeited and a busy quarter is an invoice nobody planned for.

    teamlightfield.com/pricing, read 12 September 2026

The side by side

Five rows. The rest of the feature list is a wash.

 Day.aiLightfieldWhat that means
Trying it for real A free plan that reads your Gmail and calendar and records your meetings A 14 day trial on the entry plan. No free plan A month on your own mail is evidence. Two weeks is a demo.
What the bill counts Each agent you deploy. Colleagues without one are in the record for free Each captured inbox beyond the number your plan includes On Day.ai, putting more of the business into the CRM does not move the bill.
Where agent work starts Automated skill slots on every paid plan Workspace credits from the second plan up. The entry plan has none Lightfield's entry tier is a CRM that records itself. The agents are a tier above it.
Unused capacity Skill slots are a standing capability, the same every month Credits are annual, do not carry over at year end, and overage bills at a pre-agreed rate One is a number you can plan around. The other is a drawdown.
Mail and calendar Gmail and Google Calendar Gmail, and Microsoft Outlook or Office 365 Lightfield wins this row today.

Read 12 September 2026 from day.ai/pricing, teamlightfield.com/pricing and Lightfield's documentation. The rates are on those two pages, not this one.

When we say Lightfield instead

Two cases. In both of them we tell you to buy the other one.

You want one budget for the whole workspace

Lightfield's agent work comes out of a pooled credit balance you buy for the year and spend across the team. If your finance team would rather approve one number once a year than sign off on each agent, that is Lightfield. Day.ai makes you decide person by person, and plenty of people do not want to be asked that often.

You need a big CRM moved this week

Lightfield publishes a migration agent that moves about 15,000 records an hour. If you are coming off a big Salesforce or HubSpot instance and the date is not yours to move, that is the fastest route on this page. Take it.

Where the time goes

The part neither vendor sells you. It is most of the work.

About 40 hours

A ten person move, off our own builds. Same shape on either platform.

  • Setting up the workspace. The data model, the views, the lists, the automations, the import.

    25 hrs

  • One person at a time. What their CRM may read, what their records should look like, and what each agent is for.

    15 hrs

Look at the split. The workspace half gets cheaper every year, because that is the half both products keep automating: Day.ai publishes a free setup harness and we measured about an eighth off that half when we ran it, and nothing off the other. The per person half is a conversation with each person about what their CRM may read and what their agent is for. Nobody has automated that. It is also the half that decides whether your team trusts the CRM by month three.

Ten people, ten agents, moving off a CRM that already exists. A smaller team moves the second number and barely touches the first. If your own arithmetic comes out well under this, do it yourself. If it does not, this is what we do.

Get a recommendation

Tell us what you run, and we will tell you which one

One email back, from a person, naming the one we would put you on and what it would take. If the answer is neither, we will say so.

Questions people actually ask

Which is better, Day.ai or Lightfield?

We put teams on Day.ai. Three reasons: you can run it free on your own mail before you pay anything, you pay for the agents doing work and not for the people they watch, and what you buy stays bought. We pick Lightfield when a team wants one pooled budget for the whole workspace, or has a big CRM to move by a date somebody else set. Both build the record out of your email and calendar, so the feature list is rarely what decides it.

Does Day.ai have a free plan?

Yes, and it is a working one. It reads your Gmail and calendar, records your meetings, takes the notes, and lets you search everything it built. Lightfield has no free plan. Its entry tier gives you a 14 day trial.

Which is cheaper, Day.ai or Lightfield?

It depends on what you are adding. Day.ai charges a flat monthly rate per agent and nothing for a colleague without one, so adding people to the record is free and adding automated work is what costs. Lightfield charges a plan price for the workspace with a set number of captured inboxes, a monthly rate for each inbox past that, and a pooled credit balance for agent work that is annual, expires at year end, and bills at an overage rate past the cap. Work your own team out both ways on the two pricing pages.

Can I start on one and switch later?

More easily than off a traditional CRM. Neither one is where the history lives: both rebuild the record out of your email and calendar, so a move means reconnecting mail instead of exporting years of hand-typed notes. What does not carry across is everything a person put on top, the custom fields, the pipeline shape, the agent instructions. So start on the one you can run free.

How long does a switch take?

The software part is days. On our own ten person builds the whole thing runs about forty hours, and roughly fifteen of those are one person at a time. No product automates that part.

Both products are months old, and both shipped something new while this page was being written. If anything here does not match what you see on their pages, theirs is right. Tell us and we will fix it.

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