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.
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.
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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 -
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.
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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.ai | Lightfield | What 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. With one Professional agent in the workspace, colleagues without one are 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.
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Setting up the workspace. Data model, views, lists, automations, import.
25 hrs -
One person at a time. What their CRM may read, and what their agent is for.
15 hrs
The two bars move in opposite directions. Read against our own build, Day.ai's free setup tool nets about an eighth off the left one. It takes nothing off the right bar, and that is structural: no tool can create an agent or push a privacy setting. That half is also what decides whether your team trusts the CRM by month three.
Well under forty on your own arithmetic and you should do it yourself; if not, this is what we do. Day.ai's setup tool is public at github.com/day-ai/gtm-brain; we read it on 4 September 2026 and have not run it.
Before you decide
Fifteen things to settle about your own company
A sheet about your side of this, not about the two products: what your mail runs on, who signs off on spend, how many of your people need an agent, and twelve more. It can tell you to pick Lightfield. Two fields, and it lands in a minute.
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.
Read next
- Four CRMs side by side · HubSpot, Attio, Day.ai and Clarify, every number sourced.
- Moving from HubSpot to Day.ai · what carries across, what does not, and when to stay put.
- Whether to own the record at all · build the tools, never the record.
- Living in Day.ai · what it covers and what you still need beside it.
- Day.ai against YouSpot · the other head to head, where the question is how many people are in the business rather than which product is better.
- Having it built for you · the three shapes an implementation takes.
- Where reach fits beside the record · why a tidier CRM does not start conversations.