Zero vs Lightfield

The short version

Both products make the same promise: your CRM should keep itself up to date instead of turning your team into data entry clerks. The difference is where each one starts.

Lightfield is built outward from the conversation. Meetings, calls and the inbox are the source of truth, and the record follows. Zero is built outward from the pipeline. Sourcing, outreach and deals run inside the platform, and the record updates itself as the work happens.

We will say it plainly: we rate Lightfield. The team, the founders of Tome, ships a polished product, and if your sales motion lives in customer meetings it deserves a serious look.

Pick Lightfield if meetings are your main signal source and you want best in class native call capture, transcription and conversation memory, with unlimited seats so the whole company can read the record.

Pick Zero if you run inbound and outbound and want the whole motion, sourcing, enrichment, sequences, pipeline and reporting, in one platform on one predictable bill, working the same for a three person founder team or a thirty person go to market org.

How we wrote this

We build Zero, so read this as a competitor's comparison. Every page under /compare follows the same three rules: we name where the other product is better, we re-verify competitor prices monthly and print the date we checked, and we cite our own customers only where a published story backs the number.

Section by section

CRM foundation and data

Both products are real CRMs underneath, not assistants bolted onto a spreadsheet. Lightfield keeps accounts, contacts and deals current from synced mail, calendar, Slack and LinkedIn, and offers custom data model configuration on its Pro plan. Zero includes a full CRM underneath, with a complete customer record, contacts, emails, pipeline and a database of more than 20 million companies, which is exactly why its agents can act on the whole picture rather than fragments.

Verdict:Even. Both treat automated record keeping as the core product and both do it well. Lightfield's record is richest around conversations, Zero's around pipeline and go to market data.

Meeting capture and conversation intelligence

This one goes to Lightfield. A native meeting recorder, transcription, summaries and a searchable conversation memory are the heart of the product. Ask what a prospect said about budget and you get an answer with citations back to the transcript.

Zero takes a different route. It integrates with recorders including Granola, Circleback, Fathom, Fireflies, Notion and Garba, and mines tasks and context out of those conversations, rather than shipping a recorder of its own.

Verdict:Lightfield. If conversation intelligence is your first buying criterion, Lightfield is the stronger native offering. Zero covers the job through integrations and folds the output into the same record its agents act on.

Sourcing, outreach and pipeline generation

This one goes to Zero. Sourcing and outreach are core product here: a database of more than 20 million companies, enrichment, a dialer, and email and LinkedIn sequences running natively on the same customer record, so there is no second tool and no second schema.

Lightfield has been moving in this direction too. Sequences are live, marked beta on its pricing page as of August 2026, and outbound campaign setup is included as a service on its $2,000 a month Growth plan. That is a credible roadmap. It is newer to their product than it is to ours.

Verdict:Zero. If your motion includes finding and reaching new customers, not only managing the ones already talking to you, Zero does more of it today, on every plan.

AI agents and autonomy

Both products let you build agents from plain language prompts, and both automate record updates, enrichment and follow-up drafts. Lightfield's agent platform and workflow builder are genuinely good.

Zero's difference is scope and guardrails. Agents operate across the full motion, from sourcing through pipeline, admin work runs on its own, and outbound actions go through approval with a full audit trail. The honest version of the autonomy promise is the one we make: nobody logs in to do admin, which is not the same as never opening the product. More on where we draw that line in AI agents in your CRM.

Verdict:Close to even. Lightfield automates the conversation to record loop excellently. Zero's agents cover a wider slice of the motion and come with explicit approval controls.

Pricing

Lightfield moved to usage based pricing in 2026: unlimited seats on every plan, billed by credits. Starter is pay as you go, with 5,000 free credits and then $0.040 a credit. Pro is $1,000 a month with 400,000 credits a year, at $0.030 a credit. Growth is $2,000 a month with 850,000 credits a year, at $0.028 a credit. By Lightfield's own budgeting guidance an active seller uses roughly 37,000 credits a month, which is about $1,450 a month per seller pay as you go, or around $1,100 at the Pro rate. Two things to price in: credits are annual and unused ones do not roll over, and overage bills automatically at your plan rate. Single sign-on and role based access control are Enterprise only.

Unlimited seats is a genuinely good idea, because everyone in the company can live in the customer record without a per seat toll. For a founder team with two to four people actually selling, though, Lightfield's own guidance prices each active seller well above premium per seat CRMs, and usage based billing means your CRM cost moves with your activity in ways that are hard to forecast at seed stage.

Zero is flat. Pro is $60 per seat a month at the launch price, held twelve months on annual billing and three on monthly, with 500 credits per seat a month and single sign-on available on Scale rather than only at enterprise scale. Pantera consolidated their sales stack into Zero and came out at a quarter of what their legacy CRM tiers cost.

Verdict:Depends on your usage. Heavy meeting volume with few sellers can pencil out fine on Lightfield. Teams that want a predictable line item, and single sign-on before an enterprise contract, will prefer Zero's model.

Setup, team scale, and where each company lives

Both set up fast. This generation of CRM imports your data and configures itself, and both products deliver on that. Lightfield's evaluation motion is demo led for Pro and above, and they stand up a workspace on your real data, which is a nice touch. Starter is self serve.

Lightfield's traction story runs through the US and the Y Combinator ecosystem, backed by strong SaaStr coverage. That is real momentum, and we respect it. Zero is built in Europe, with the team based in Helsinki and customers across European and US startup hubs. If you are a European founder, you are on our home turf, not an expansion market.

On social proof, honesty cuts both ways. Lightfield had no public G2 review footprint as of August 2026, and Zero's G2 profile is new, with the first reviews landing around our September launch. Judge both on the product, then on the reviews as they arrive.

The quieter difference is what happens next. Lightfield's centre of gravity is the conversation layer. Zero's is the whole motion, and that is what a team grows into. Vidar Trojenborg, co-founder at Emfas, runs more than 60 customer relationships alone on Zero, with about a workday a week of admin automated. When he hires his first go to market person nothing changes: same record, same agents, same pipeline, one more seat. That is the test we would apply to any tool in this category: not what it does for you today, but whether it is still the right system when your team triples.

Verdict:Lightfield for US and Y Combinator centric teams that want a white glove start. Zero for teams, especially in Europe, that want self serve speed and a platform designed to scale from founder led selling to a full go to market team without switching tools.

Where Lightfield is the better choice

• Meetings are your main signal source and you want native recording, transcription and conversation memory in the box rather than through an integration.
• You want citation backed answers about what was said on past calls. Lightfield's conversation memory is more mature than ours today.
• You want unlimited seats so the whole company can read the customer record without paying per person.
• Your selling is inbound or referral led, so sourcing and sequences would sit idle.
• You want a vendor that will stand up a workspace on your real data before you buy.

Where Zero is the better choice

• You run outbound as well as inbound, and want sourcing, enrichment and sequences in the same product as the pipeline.
• You want a predictable bill. Flat per seat pricing does not move when your team has a busy month.
• You want single sign-on without an enterprise contract.
• You want agents that act across the whole motion, with approval reserved for what reaches a customer.
• You are about to grow from founder led selling into a team, and do not want a migration in the middle of it.

Zero and Lightfield at a glance

Frequently asked questions