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

Vlad Oleksiienko 01 Aug 2024

Greetings with another series of our sales software reviews!

In this article, we’ll compare two established players on the market—Instantly.ai and Smartlead.ai, and also take a look at how they measure up with Reply.io, to help you best determine which tool may be more suitable for your business.

In our previous reviews, we’ve already separately covered Instantly and Smartlead, as well as some other prominent sales platforms including Apollo and lemlist, so make sure to check those out too!

Both are positioned as lightweight sales outreach/engagement tools, but make no mistake—they are quite different in terms of features.

In a nutshell, Instantly and Smartlead both empower businesses to improve their sales and marketing prospecting, outreach, and conversions through efficiency-driven email automation.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Instantly vs Apollo overview

First, let’s cover the basics with a general overview of the two products.

Smartlead is an AI-powered email outreach platform designed to automate and improve business communication, often used by sales and marketing teams, recruiters, and lead generation agencies. The product mainly focuses on AI-automated email campaigns, premium email deliverability, and powerful API integrations.

On the other hand, Instantly is an all-in-one outreach suite with a dedicated lead database, mass-email campaign automations, AI email writing assistant, and flawless email deliverability, catering to sales, marketing, and business development teams.

Instantly and Smartlead pride themselves on simplicity and efficiency, and while some other sales software alternatives provide extra perks like multichannel outreach and dedicated agency plans, both tools are highly effective in running successful email campaigns.

Speaking of their credibility, G2 has Smartlead rated at 4.8/5 and Instantly at 4.9/5 with thousands of verified reviews from real users, so it’s safe that both are viable investments for businesses looking to level up their sales and marketing teams.

After reading through numerous user reviews, the most common pros and cons mentioned are:

Instantly pros & cons

Instantly website

✅Instantly is consistently praised for its email deliverability features, with many users reporting high deliverability rates in their outreach campaigns;
✅Users love Instantly’s simple, easy-to-use user interface, which is not that easy to find in complex automation tools;
✅A special ‘Unibox’ feature that allows users to manage multiple mailboxes under one roof;

❎ At times, some lead data may be inaccurate, which leads to higher bounce rates and harms email deliverability;
❎ 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;
❎ Some users have mentioned limited integration capabilities with third-party tools, making it at times complicated to add Instantly to existing tool stacks.

Smartlead pros & cons

Smartlead website

✅ Users find Smartlead’s interface really easy and intuitive, making it simple to manage email campaigns;
✅ Many are thrilled with their email deliverability rates thanks to the unlimited email warm-up and inbox rotation features;
✅ The analytics and reporting tools are often praised for providing useful insights into campaign performance;

❎ While users praise Smartlead’s powerful API & webhook integrations, they are quite technically challenging, so many users are faced with a steep learning curve with Smartlead;
❎ As previously mentioned, the very limited selection of pre-designed email templates available is quite underwhelming for teams looking to create effective email messages;
❎Customer support queries often take a while to get resolved, causing frustration at times, though, all queries do get successfully resolved from what we’ve seen.

Instantly vs Smartlead — the battle of the features

Both of these sales outreach tools have some similar features that we will compare back to back, as well as their very own unique features that differentiate them.

Let’s get down to it.

Campaign management

We’ll start off with the main feature of any sales or marketing platform—outreach campaign management. In simple terms, we’re referring to the step-by-step sequences including the initial cold email, follow-ups, and nurturing touchpoints, and then automating them across hundreds or thousands of prospects.

After testing out the tools, it’s pretty interesting that both Instantly and Smartlead are quite similar in this feature—they both have extremely neat campaign dashboards, allowing users to create complex email sequences with ease:

Campaign management on Instantly vs Smartlead

Both tools provide ready-to-use variables like {{first_name}}, {{last name}}, {{company_name}}, as well some other, more interesting ones such as {{website}} and {{linkedin_profile}} to facilitate personalization at scale.

After structuring their emails, subject lines, follow-ups, and nurturing messages, users can simply plan the timing of the campaign, in other words—after how many days the next automated message will be sent, and…that’s it!

Smartlead takes this one step further by also including some easy-made email templates (circled in blue below) for some of the most common sales use cases to further simplify the email writing process (though, there aren’t that many to choose from):

Campaign management on smartlead vs instantly ai

Finally, both Smartlead and Instantly users allow users to add multiple (virtually an unlimited amount) email accounts and then manage them all under one roof through their dedicated Master Inbox features.

On the topic of outreach campaigns, for those looking to take their sales or marketing campaigns a step further—Reply.io allows users to create more complex outreach sequences with not only emails, but also SMS, cloud calls, LinkedIn touches, WhatsApp, and automated triggers.

Supercharge your outreach!

Imagine having unlimited mailboxes, seamless warmups, and advanced multichannel outreach all in one place. With Reply.io, it’s not just a dream—it’s your new reality!

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AI

When creating your outreach campaigns, both Instantly and Smartlead can choose to either create their emails and follow-ups manually or leverage the power of AI to simplify this process.

Meaningful, tailored messaging at scale has never been more simple!

With these tools’ native AI features, sales and marketing teams can leverage relevant prospect and company data to create hyper-personalized emails, significantly reducing the time spent creating effective messaging and empowering them to focus on other tasks that AI can’t handle (yet…).

With a click of a button, Instantly users can access its neat AI personalization tab and fill in some relevant prospect and company data, after which, Instantly AI will create effective, converting email messages:

smartlead vs instantly ai features

Smartlead’s AI features are quite similar—the product allows users to integrate the famous ChatGPT right into the product to create meaningful, personalized emails at scale.

It’s worth noting that in order to take advantage of this feature, users have to integrate ChatGPT into Smartlead on their own with a dedicated API key, so make sure you have someone on your team with technical expertise.

Smartlead’s AI features are also one of the reasons why their email warm-up is top-notch — they ensure that all those emails sent out to build up your sender reputation are meaningful and humanized at all times, which brings us to our next feature.

But before moving on, 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 by sourcing relevant prospect data but also handles responses on your behalf. Check it out for yourself!

Meet AI SDR!

Want to book more meetings effortlessly? AI SDR automates your entire sales outreach, from prospecting to response management. Say goodbye to manual tasks and hello to more sales!

Try AI SDR Now!

Email warm-up & deliverability

Don’t overlook the importance of email deliverability in 2024—it can really make or break your entire outreach campaign! Especially with the rise of Google’s new security policies, manually ensuring your email deliverability is intact has become virtually impossible.

Luckily, both Instantly and Smartlead have built a solid reputation in this regard, providing users with premium deliverability features, ensuring that your emails actually reach your recipients’ inboxes and don’t end up in spam.

Instantly offers unlimited email warm-up to gradually ramp up users’ sender reputation, which is one of the most crucial factors affecting deliverability, as well as a detailed deliverability dashboard to help you stay on top of the most important metrics including spam rates.

Smartlead is just as impressive with regards to email deliverability, also offering users unlimited email warm-up to gradually build a solid and sustainable sender reputation.

Moreover, Smartlead has an additional ‘inbox rotation’ feature that strategically varies the email account used for outreach, significantly decreasing the chances of Gmail or Outlook blocking your emails from reaching their intended recipients.

As a cherry on top, Smartlead users can enjoy its dedicated ‘spam rescue’ tab that monitors spam rates and ensures users don’t surpass the strict spam thresholds in 2024.

Analytics and reporting

Similar to other reputable sales and marketing automation platforms, Smartlead and Instantly both offer comprehensive analytics with detailed reports that highlight campaign performance.

This is really the only way to objectively measure the performance of your outreach campaigns, and both platforms take care of this without the need to lift a finger.

In Smartlead, users can filter their analytics reports by campaign or by client, getting a visualized and detailed overview of their performance as seen below:

Instantly vs Smartlead reporting features

Source: Medium

Instantly provides similar reports on your campaign performance, and while they are less visual than Smartlead’s, they do provide tons of detailed metrics that help sales teams tweak their outreach strategies for maximum conversions.

Instantly report — Account level

Instantly reports on the open rates, click-through rates, reply rates, opportunities, and meetings booked, completed, and closed. Users can also choose to check the analytics on the campaign level, or on the step level, which analyzes the performance of each step in their sequences:

Instantly report — Step level

Unique bonus features

While so far the two tools have been somewhat similar, now it’s time to cover the unique features that make them stand out.

Right off the bat, Instantly has announced its plans to soon become a fully-fledged AI-powered CRM. which will add several extra outreach channels like cloud calls and SMS, new AI sales workflows, as well as a dedicated ‘website visitors’ feature that will help businesses capture and nurture their B2B inbound leads.

After this, qualified website visitors (determined by your set filters) will be automatically pushed into your existing automated outreach campaigns. Pretty neat if you ask me!

website visitors qualification by Instantly

It goes without saying that Instantly’s native lead database also deserves a mention, offering 160M verified B2B contacts, and constantly working on increasing the number.

Instantly database

Instantly’s lead database

It’s incredibly easy to use, simply put in their filters (location, company size, job title, etc.) — get extensive lists of targeted prospects for your outreach campaigns, and push them into your created sequences with a push of a button.

Now it’s Smartlead’s time to shine!

First of all, users can enjoy their really cool ‘Client Access’ feature, which provides limited access for viewing the performance of their campaigns, undeniably facilitating agency-client collaboration.

Designed for sales, marketing, and lead generation agencies, these detailed agency reports empower clients to monitor the key metrics and KPIs of their campaigns in real-time, removing the need to spend time generating separate reports for all your clients and constantly sharing them.

Last but not least, Smartlead has its very own mobile app!

That’s right, sales and marketing teams can access and manage their inboxes anywhere on the go, never missing a potential time-sensitive opportunity:

The app provides a decent amount of advanced features such as real-time alerts, advanced filtering options, inbox categorization, and more, making it more than sufficient to ensure your outreach campaigns are consistently running smoothly.

Smartlead vs Instantly.ai pricing

Equipping your sales team with a reliable outreach platform is an investment, directly impacting how well they will engage with prospects and convert them into long-term customers. It’s crucial to strike a balance between your business needs and budget is one of the key steps in the decision-making process.

Unlike many other sales automation platforms, both Instantly and Smartlead price their product per workspace—not per person, which is especially useful for bigger teams on tighter budgets.

Smartlead’s starting plan is priced at $33/month, and Instantly’s — $37/month, making it a very similar entry point for sales teams. After that, Instantly’s pricing plans get increasingly more expensive compared to Smartlead’s, with its premium ‘Light Speed’ plan priced at $358/month.

Instantly pricing

Instantly’s pricing plans

It’s worth noting that Instantly separates its platform into two separate products — ‘Sending & Warmup’, which is the email automation and deliverability suite, and ‘Leads’, which is the contact database, each having its own pricing plans and sold separately.

Smartlead’s pricing plans are quite straightforward — 3 plans, with the ‘Basic Plan’ designed for individual users and solopreneurs, and the other 2 designed for sales teams of two or more.

Pricing in Smartlead review

Smartlead’s pricing plans

These 2 plans — ‘Pro Plan’ and ‘Custom Plan’ allow businesses to add their clients to the platform to enjoy some of the relevant agency features such as real-time campaign reports, priced at $29/client/month.

As a result, Instantly’s is undoubtedly the more expensive of the two, especially if you also want their lead database, though, in all fairness, you will get more bang for your buck.

Top Instantly and Smartlead alternatives

While on the topic of Smartlead vs Instantly AI, even though both are fantastic cold outreach tools, no doubt about it, keep in mind that there are several other great, and perhaps, more suitable sales automation alternatives out there.

Instantly vs smartlead alterntives

As mentioned earlier, picking the right outreach tool is a crucial business decision. It affects your sales team’s efficiency and how effectively your business connects with potential customers, which directly impacts your profits, so do take your time.

While Instantly and Smartlead are great lightweight solutions for your sales outreach, if you’re looking for more powerful, all-in-one sales automation suites to fully empower your sales team, you’re better off investing in tools like Reply.io and Apollo that cover all aspects of the sales process.

We have detailed comparisons of Reply.io vs Instantly and Reply.io vs Smartlead for you to check out, but here’s a quick rundown of how Reply.io offers users more bang for their buck:

Multiple outreach channels for your sales and marketing campaigns (including email, cloud calls, LinkedIn, SMS, and WhatsApp);
A native AI SDR that hyper-personalizes your outreach AND handles responses on your behalf (including handling common objections and booking meetings);
An awesome AI Chatbot that captures, qualifies, and nurtures inbound leads, empowering businesses to generate more warm leads 24/7;

Capture leads with AI Chat!

Our AI with video avatars captures visitors and converts them into hot leads and booked meetings—all within the chat.

Try AI Chat Now!

Google Postmaster and MailToaster integrations, along with a dedicated deliverability team at their disposal, provide top-class email deliverability for outreach campaigns;
LinkedIn automation to step up your outreach game on one of the top professional networks, making it a breeze to connect with key decision-makers;
Powerful team management features to seamlessly manage and keep track of sales reps’ performance, tasks, KPIs, etc.

For those interested, here are some more back-to-back comparisons of Reply.io and some of the leading sales automation platforms:

Instantly or Smartlead — the final verdict

The big question on the agenda is — Instantly vs Smartlead, who is the winner? The answer, as always in software comparisons, boils down to your unique business needs.

If you’re merely looking for a tool to automate and enhance your email outreach with AI, ensure flawless deliverability, and seamless integration into an existing tool stack — Smartlead is the better and cheaper option.

If, however, you’d like to enjoy some of the more advanced features that could help your sales team close more deals, such as a lead database and inbound lead generation, Instantly is the one to go with.

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.