Instantly vs Lemlist: Which Is The Right Sales Tool for Your Business?

Vlad Oleksiienko 13 Aug 2024

Welcome to another series of sales software reviews, where we will compare Instantly and lemlist to help you decide which may be the better choice for your business.

We’ve already covered separate, in-depth reviews of both Instantly and lemlist, but now it’s time to put them back to back and see how they measure up against one another.

From key features to pricing plans and user reviews and top alternatives on the market, we’ve got you covered.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again—taking the time to make an informed decision regarding which sales tool to pick is absolutely crucial, having a direct impact on your sales team’s efficiency and productivity, and ultimately, business revenue.

So without further ado, buckle up, and let’s take a closer look at these two relatively new yet already-established outreach tools.

Lemlist vs Instantly overview

We’ll start with a general overview of the two platforms to get a general idea of their functionality and use cases.

At their core, both lemlist and Instantly aim to automate, enhance, and personalize outreach at scale, helping sales and marketing teams better engage and connect with potential customers.

Much like other prominent sales platforms, they have both consolidated over the years into fully-fledged outreach suites with native lead databases, email deliverability features, AI personalization, integrations with other tools, and more.

Despite this, Instantly and lemlist are both simple, lightweight tools without any ‘extra’ perks that other solutions offer.

So while they’re both more than sufficient for running mass outreach campaigns, some other tools like Reply.io offer businesses more advanced features such as an AI Sales Agent to create tailored multichannel sequences and handle responses, an AI Chatbot to capture and qualify inbound leads, or dedicated agency plans and features, to name a few.

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With thousands of verified reviews from real users, G2 has lemlist rated at 4.4/5 and Instantly at 4.9/5, so we can confidently say that both are reliable investments for businesses looking to elevate their sales and/or marketing efforts.

After reading through them, here are the most commonly-mentioned pros and cons:

Instantly pros & cons

✅Instantly users consistently report high email deliverability rates in their mass outreach campaigns;
✅Users praise the simple and easy-to-use UI, which makes the learning curve virtually non-existent;
✅The ‘Unibox’ feature that allows teams with multiple email accounts to manage them all under one roof;

❎ Contact/company data provided by the lead database is at times inaccurate, leading to higher bounce rates;
❎ Instantly doesn’t offer a freemium plan (more on that later), while some users report that the lower-tier plan isn’t sufficient for complex sales engagement campaigns;
❎Instantly’s API integrations are often challenging to set up, making it challenging to incorporate into existing tool stacks.

Lemlist pros & cons

✅Much like Instantly, lemlist offers users an intuitive, clean, and easy-to-use UI, allowing users to experience the tool in its full powers with ease;
✅Users often mention lemlist’s powerful campaign management features, allowing them to set up and automate complex sequences;
✅lemlist is consistently praised for their responsive customer support, not something you see often in the B2B space;

❎The advanced campaign management features just mentioned have a steep learning curve for many sales professionals, but that’s understandable given their complex nature;
❎Occasional minor technical glitches, a couple of which we’ve encountered during our product review, though nothing too serious;
❎lemlist’s email deliverability is highly praised by some users and severely criticized by others, and mixed feedback on something as crucial as email deliverability raises some alarms.

Instantly vs lemlist: The battle of the features

Now that we’ve covered the basics and got a feel for the platforms, it’s time to compare their features.

After extensively testing both tools and seeing them in action, it became clear that Instantly and lemlist are very similar in terms of features and user experience, though, each has its own unique perks, as well.

Lead database

Both tools have their own native lead databases, which is always a big plus when it comes to outreach tools because it helps sales and marketing teams build targeted prospect lists and expand their reach.

lemlist’s database has a whopping 450M+ leads, which is even more than most standalone B2B contact database providers.

Their database also has an abundance of various search filters that go beyond the classic ‘industry’ and ‘location’ parameters, including a very cool ‘intent signal’ filter to help sales teams focus their efforts on the hottest leads:

lemlist’s lead database

Instantly’s lead database has 160M contacts, though they promise to keep adding more and more as time goes on.

While it has significantly fewer contacts than lemlist, Instantly does have a pretty neat ‘keyword’ search filter to simplify prospecting, as well as a ‘clone’ feature that analyzes your newly found prospects and automatically provides lists with very similar leads.

In terms of UI, Instantly’s lead database is just as neat and easy to navigate as lemlist’s:

Instantly’s lead database

Both platforms empower users to seamlessly add their sourced leads into existing outreach campaigns with a click of a button. All in all, both databases are solid, but the winner here is clearly lemlist due to a much, much higher volume of leads and search filters available.

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Campaign management

Creating and running outreach campaigns is the main reason businesses look for a sales automation tool, so this is where the devil is truly in the details.

For starters, Instantly is solely an email outreach platform (though, they promise that cloud calls and SMS are coming soon), whereas lemlist has always been positioned as a multichannel tool, offering emails, LinkedIn messages, and phone calls.

Given the more simple nature of Instantly’s outreach campaigns, this platform is extremely easy to set up and run your email outreach, simply adding multiple steps consisting of initial emails and follow-ups:

Instantly’s outreach campaign

Instantly provides numerous variables and ready-to-use email templates to make your messages feel much more personal, even when automating thousands of emails at a time.

On top of that, users can easily run A/B tests before launching their mass campaigns. Moreover, their ‘Unibox’ feature integrates multiple email mailboxes under one roof, allowing you to easier manage your campaigns.

With lemlist, setting up a campaign is slightly more complicated, but it definitely gives more wiggle room for sales and marketing teams to effectively connect with leads. At first, lemlist users can choose to create their campaigns manually or ask AI to handle that right away:

lemlist’s outreach campaign

Rather than focusing on linear sequences like Instantly, lemlist can create complex, conditional (cause-trigger) sequences, in other words, adjusting to the actions taken or not taken by each lead to determine and execute the best next step. For instance, if your lead accepts the automated LinkedIn request within 3 days, they get email ‘A’, whereas, if they don’t, they get email ‘B’.

AI personalization

In the context of modern-day outreach campaigns, it would be wrong not to mention AI, which is the superpower that allows sales and marketing tools to hyper-personalize messages at scale in seconds, without hindering quality.

Both Instantly and lemlist offer AI personalization features that leverage sourced or enriched prospect and company data to create tailored messages.

Instantly’s AI features help users optimize their subject lines, email content, and sending times to ensure the best engagement and conversion rates.

After accessing the AI generator, users can provide information on prospects’ competitors, pain points, and other data that AI would use to create the most relevant and tailored email:

Instantly’s AI tab

lemlist’s AI features are, once again, much more advanced than Instantly’s. Besides personalizing email and LinkedIn messages with relevant data points, as well as snippets and icebreakers, lemlist also allows you to generate personalized images and landing pages at scale:

lemlist’s AI tab

This is definitely a pretty unique feature that would be extremely useful for marketing campaigns, but that’s where their AI features end.

In both tools, users can simply input information about their business, value proposition, target audience, and reason for outreach, and then AI will determine the best sequences and messages to include for the campaigns.

For those looking to take their sales outreach to the next level, Reply.io offers a native AI SDR that not only generates hyper-personalized messages (from sourcing relevant prospect data) but also handles responses and books meetings on your behalf, as well as a dedicated AI Chatbot that captures and qualifies warm inbound leads. Check it out for yourself!

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Email deliverability

In light of Google’s new 2024 strict email policies, email deliverability has become one of the most important elements of all business outreach. As no surprise, both lemlist and Instantly have added several key features to make sure users’ emails actually land in recipients’ inboxes.

Instantly includes a special ‘ramp-up mode’ that gradually builds up users’ sender reputation to avoid raising any red flags, as well as a dedicated spam monitoring tool to ensure users don’t surpass the strict (and very punishable) spam thresholds.

One of Instantly’s main selling points has always been email deliverability, and they’ve made it very easy to set up and monitor, empowering users to focus on their outreach without worrying about deliverability or spam.

Instantly’s email deliverability tab

lemlist has their own, unique deliverability features that work just as well. For starters, they have a dedicated lemwarm feature that gradually grows your domain credibility by automatically sending emails to their network of real users.

lemlist’s email deliverability tab

After the initial warm-up is complete, lemlist keeps track of your deliverability and spam rates in the background, autonomously making the necessary changes to ensure everything runs smoothly at all times. lemlist also offers inbox rotation, which alternates the sending patterns of your email campaigns.

Unique bonus features

lemlist and Instantly have even more similarities in store, such as integration capabilities, detailed analytics and reporting dashboards, but now let’s take a quick look at some of the unique features that make both of these tools stand out.

Instantly → recently announced their plans to shift from a traditional email outreach platform into a fully-fledged CRM, which will include inbound lead generation features, new AI workflows, multichannel sequences, and targeted sales campaigns:

lemlist → they have their very own Chrome extension that captures LinkedIn users’ emails and enriches their customer profiles with more relevant data, helping businesses generate leads:

FYI, at Reply.io, we have a similar LinkedIn prospecting Chrome extension, Findy, which works in pretty much the same way. But regardless of which you prefer, we’d highly recommend using multiple LinkedIn scraping tools for your prospecting efforts.

All in all, lemlist vs Instantly turned out to be a pretty equal battle, both having their pros, cons, and unique value propositions.

Lemlist vs Instantly.ai: Pricing plans

When it comes to powerful business software, pricing is often a sensitive subject. Sales and marketing automation tools are the backbone of most B2B tool stacks, so you definitely want to find a reliable tool that covers your business needs, but it’s just as important to strike a balance with budget in mind.

Instantly’s and lemlist’s pricing strategies are quite different, and which will end up being the better ‘bang for your buck’ solely depends on what features you really need and the size of your team.

Instantly doesn’t offer a freemium pricing plan while lemlist does, though, it’s worth mentioning that it’s far too limited for any serious work to get done. Users of both tools can enjoy a 14-day free trial to see them in action before committing to a purchase.

Instantly’s pricing plans are per workspace/month rather than per user/month like most sales platforms have, so it’s definitely a much cheaper solution for bigger teams:

Moreover, Instantly is split into two separate products when it comes to pricing—‘Sending & Warmup’, which has all the outreach and deliverability features, and ‘Leads’, which is their native contact database.

While this means paying almost double to enjoy the full platform, on the other hand, businesses with an existing lead database can just get the outreach and warmup features.

lemlist’s pricing plans are slightly more straightforward—2 ‘starter’ plans for individual professionals not planning to run mass outreach campaigns, and 3 plans for businesses as seen below:

Instantly’s most popular pricing plan — Hypergrowth, and lemlist’s most popular plan — Multichannel Expert are priced approximately the same, but keep in mind that, unlike Instantly, lemlist has a per user/per month pricing for all its plans.

And truthfully speaking, for sales and marketing teams looking to truly elevate their outreach, neither of the two platforms’ lower-tier plans than the ones just mentioned would be sufficient.

Also, it’s interesting to see that lemlist recently added a dedicated ‘Outbound agency’ plan, though there’s not much information on it available.

On a final note, Instantly’s pricing is much more competitive than lemlist’s for a team of more than two users, even when taking into account the need to pay for two separate products, however, as concluded in this article — lemlist does offer more features.

Instantly and lemlist: Alternatives & competitors

Instantly and lemlist are without a doubt solid solutions for business outreach, but depending on your business needs and goals, there may be some more suitable sales automation alternatives on the market with some more advanced features that go beyond outreach.

Instantly vs smartlead alterntives

As previously mentioned, choosing the right sales platform is critical to staying ahead in an increasingly competitive landscape, directly affecting how well your business connects with potential customers and turns them into buyers.

So, if you’re simply looking for software to automate mass outreach, lemlist and Instantly will get the job done just fine, but if your business is at the growth stage where you could benefit from a more comprehensive sales automation suite with advanced features, we encourage you to take a closer look at Reply.io.

We have detailed comparisons of Reply.io vs Instantly and Reply.io vs lemlist for you to check out, but here’s a quick overview of how Reply.io has the upper hand:

Multichannel outreach sequences for your sales and marketing campaigns, including email, cloud calls, LinkedIn, SMS, WhatsApp, and trigger-based actions;
Enjoy a built-in AI SDR that hyper-personalizes your outreach at scale AND handles responses on your behalf (including handling common objections and booking meetings);
Native AI Chatbot that captures, qualifies, and nurtures inbound leads, helping businesses generate more warm leads 24/7;

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Top-class email deliverability with Google Postmaster and MailToaster integrations, as well as a dedicated deliverability team at your disposal;
LinkedIn automation features to take your outreach game to the next level and seamlessly connect with key B2B decision-makers;
Extensive team management features to manage your sales team’s performance, tasks, and KPIs, along with detailed analytics to refine outreach strategies with actionable data.

In case you’re interested, here are a few back-to-back comparisons of Reply.io and some of the leading sales automation platforms on the market in 2024:

Lemlist vs Instantly: The final verdict

Now, back to our main question — Instantly vs lemlist, who comes out on top?

While the two platforms are fairly similar in nature, there are some distinct differences that determine which is the better option depending on your business.

If you’re a small team looking for a more ‘packed’ platform with more advanced campaign management features and a much bigger lead database for prospecting — lemlist is the superior option, though, it gets much more expensive with every next user.

However, if you’re merely looking for a lightweight platform to automate outreach campaigns and have peace of mind that your emails reach your recipients’ inboxes, or if you’re a much bigger team with a tight budget — Instantly is the winner.

On a final note, if you’re in the market for a reliable, AI-driven sales automation platform and can’t seem to find ‘the one’, we invite you to take Reply.io for a free spin and see for yourself the fusion of robust features, user-friendly interface, and cutting-edge AI.