Outreach Review In 2025: The Right Sales Tool for Your Business?

Vlad Oleksiienko 10 Sep 2024

In our new series of sales software reviews, we’re covering what’s now become a giant player in the market—Outreach.io.

Most tools we’ve previously covered were primarily focused on outreach, but, ironically, Outreach the software—not so much.

While still positioned as a sales engagement platform, Outreach software also offers revenue intelligence and operations features to help sales teams increase efficiency and effectiveness across the entire sales cycle.

The downside?

It may lack in some areas of sales outreach when compared to traditional sales engagement platforms, which in turn don’t have the revenue intelligence features of Outreach.io.

As with most software decisions, it’s crucial to prioritize your business goals and needs to determine the best solution, so stick around as we explore Outreach.io’s features, user reviews, pricing plans, and alternatives to help you make an informed decision.

Let’s get started.

What is Outreach.io? Product overview

According to their own description on G2, Outreach.io is “the leading sales execution platform that helps market-facing teams efficiently create and predictably close more pipeline.”

That’s quite a statement, but what does Outreach do to help sales teams close more deals?

For starters, this platform provides a bundle of various sales functionalities under one roof, most noteworthy of which are:

sales engagement → multichannel, AI-driven sequences with integrated A/B testing;

sales intelligence → deal insights and conversation intelligence with suggested actions;

sales coaching → summarized transcripts, coach cards, and feedback reports;

sales forecasting → projected sales team and reps’ performance dashboards.

Now, if you’re a larger business that needs some (or all) of these extra features on top of your outreach platform, then Outreach.io very well may be a top choice for you, considering that it’s always best to go for consolidated tools.

However, if you’re a smaller business or a startup, or simply looking to automate and improve your prospecting and outreach, you most probably don’t need all these extra perks to scale your sales workflow.

Instead, opt for a dedicated sales automation platform like Reply.io and enjoy a built-in lead database, an AI SDR that handles responses and books meetings on your behalf and powerful email deliverability features, all of which Outreach.io doesn’t offer.

It’s also worth noting that, surprisingly and unfortunately, Outreach.io does not offer a free trial for interested sales professionals to test out the product before making a premium purchase (more on that later).

Once you do make an account, the dashboard is exactly as one would expect such a complex tool to have—complicated:

All in all, Outreach.io is a sales execution platform that helps sales teams engage with prospects and effectively close more deals through AI intelligence and analytics.

Now, let’s see what that looks like in practice.

What are the main Outreach.io features?

The big question is, do Outreach.io’s features live up to the hype, and are they that much more impressive than those of some of the lightweight sales engagement alternatives?

Even though this tool has an abundance of different features, we’ll focus on the five that businesses consider most when choosing Outreach.io as their sales automation platform.

Sales engagement

All sales automation platforms can be split into two groups—those that offer exclusively email outreach campaigns and those that offer multichannel outreach campaigns, and Outreach.io falls into the latter.

With Outreach.io, users can create sales campaigns with emails, phone calls, and LinkedIn touches, which has shown over the years to be more effective than traditional email-only outreach.

To take it a step further, Outreach.io utilizes AI to make the outreach sequences more personalized and effective. It takes into account prospect data and behavior, to then generate the most relevant email/message/follow-up at the most appropriate time on autopilot.

Last but not least, Outreach software employs AI-driven sentiment analysis to accurately evaluate your prospects’ responses in real time to further personalize your value proposition, CTA, timing, etc.

While this is pretty standard in the AI sales realm in 2025, Outreach.io has yet to incorporate some of the more advanced AI features like automated response-handling into their product.

Sales intelligence

This is one of the biggest selling points of Outreach.io—leveraging AI and data to provide automated actionable insights, empowering sales reps to take the best next course of action in each of their accounts.

By providing a comprehensive view of their current campaigns, sales reps get an objective and holistic view of all their deal’s ‘health’ status:

By notifying sales teams which deals are at risk or which have shown strong intent, this data-driven approach allows SDRs to take immediate action and ensure no opportunity falls through the cracks.

Instead of merely showing the health status of each account, Outreach.io’s AI will also suggest the next step sales reps can take, based on concrete data and expert sales knowledge built into the product. For instance, if it notices that the deal is at risk because a prospect hasn’t responded to the previous 3 emails, it may suggest connecting via LinkedIn with an automated message to get the ball rolling.

Outreach.io also offers its very own conversation intelligence—Kaia, an AI-powered assistant that improves sales conversations with real-time insights and suggestions:

It does this by first transcribing the conversation in real-time, taking note of the most critical phrases mentioned and actions taken throughout the call. Kaia then provides expert recommendations during the call, based on the conversation’s flow.

Pipeline management

This is where I’ll take my hat off for Outreach.io.

They provide users with a comprehensive overview of the sales pipeline, integrating data from multiple sources such as your CRM, outreach campaigns, and customer profiles, providing sales reps with a unified, birds-eye view of their deals:

It shows cool data like quota attainment %, projected revenue from deals closed (more on that later), top deals closed, and revenue comparison by quarter. Sales teams can use this crucial data to identify any gaps in their strategy and focus on continuous improvement.

Analyzing progress deal by deal has its perks, but so does analyzing the entire pipeline, especially for sales leaders and managers who are in charge of strategy.

Another cool thing about Outreach.io’s pipeline management features is that users can then customize their reports based on specific needs, removing any irrelevant metrics and emphasizing those that matter most.

Sales forecasting

Outreach.io has already shown its data-driven approach with its sales intelligence features, but it doesn’t stop there. Outreach software also leverages AI to create accurate, data-driven forecasts for each unique deal, location, or sales rep, depending on your preferences:

Outreach.io makes some excellent dashboards, and this one is just as effective at analyzing performance and refining the overall sales strategy for sales managers.

The forecasts are highly customizable and updated in real-time, automatically sourcing any relevant data from your tool stack, ensuring the most accurate and comprehensive projected revenue, and allowing business executives to allocate their resources accordingly.

Outreach.io’s forecasting tools also include scenario modeling features, which, in a nutshell, allow sales professionals to explore different case scenarios and strategies to find the best projected next course of action.

For example, a sales team lead can compare the impact of growing the sales team with adjusting existing reps’ sales quotas to see which should theoretically be more effective.

By using historical data and predictive analytics, Outreach.io will provide the most accurate result, empowering sales leaders to evaluate the potential risks and rewards of different strategies and make the most informed decisions.

One sequence. Infinite paths.

Most follow-ups are copy-paste snoozefests. This guide shows you how to build adaptive “choose your own adventure” sequences that react in real time—switching channels, tweaking messages, and tripling replies without extra sends.

Sales coaching

Outreach.io has already shown its ability to coach sales professionals with its conversational intelligence Kaia which helps them handle objections, and actionable insights that help them make better decisions with each unique account.

Outreach.io consistently summarizes each sales rep’s performance, automatically creating personalized ‘coach cards’ that provide summarized feedback, focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of each rep.

With so much critical data that Outreach.io provides, sales managers can then focus their training efforts around the most common problem areas, creating their very own training videos and materials and storing them in the platform’s library for easy access:

This synergy between Outreach.io’s powerful actionable insights and AI-powered predictive not only helps sales reps become better at their job, but also greatly helps sales leaders to identify trends in team performance, pinpoint areas where additional coaching is needed, recognize high and low performers, and continuously refine the overall sales strategy.

What are the Outreach.io reviews by real users?

With thousands of verified reviews available, it’s clear that Outreach.io is a well-known and established platform. Surprisingly enough, the average ratings were not quite as high as I expected for a tool with such a reputation:

G2 → 4.3 ⭐️/ 5
Capterra → 4.4 ⭐️/ 5

The most commonly-mentioned pros and cons after looking through hundreds of lemlist referral reviews include:

✅Outreach.io is consistently praised for its seamless integration capabilities with most major sales tools like Salesforce, empowering SDRs to streamline workflows and drive efficiency;
✅The outreach campaigns have received a good reputation among users, who appreciate the streamlined automation of complex, multichannel sequences with AI personalization;
✅Their sales intelligence features don’t go unnoticed, as many users appreciate the data-driven insights, including real-time analytics, identifying trends, and predicting campaign and sales team performance;

❎Not surprising at all, Outreach.io users often report the steep learning curve when starting to use the platform, especially the more complex set of features;
❎Due to its complexity and abundance of features, the interface feels less intuitive and user-friendly, something that I’ve also noticed while reviewing the platform;
❎Something that’s never a good sign—many, many users report a poor customer service experience with Outreach.io, including issues with billing.

And, here are some of the most helpful and upvoted real-world reviews:

“Great experience. Smooth during the sales cycle. Connects well to other solutions, pulling in key data on prospects. Product roadmap is also exciting (i.e. prospect insights and intelligence improving over time with AI insights).“

“Overall, I’m a huge fan of Outreach. It’s a tool that I’ll look for in my next company or at least recommend. If you have a large SDR and Inside Sales force, it’s just silly not to invest in this technology. I save so much time on my prospecting and it holds me accountable.“

What do you like best about Outreach?

“Absolutely nothing. Their software is an absolute disaster, riddled with an abundance of infuriatingly clunky, muddled, and dreadfully inefficient bugs. To make matters worse, their so-called “customer support” is non-existent, leaving you stranded and abandoned in a sea of frustration. Their contracts are a masterclass in draconian oppression, expertly crafted to ensnare you with strict, minuscule clauses that twist the knife in your gut, amplifying the torment of dealing with their abysmal product.“ (😖 yikes!)

What are the Outreach.io pricing plans?

We’ve covered the features and user reviews, and now, it’s time to address the elephant in the room—how much is Outreach.io?

Without a doubt, Outreach.io has one of the strangest pricing ‘strategies’ I’ve ever seen, and that’s mainly for two reasons:

… they don’t include the prices of their different plans! To find out how much they cost, interested parties will have to contact the support team with their request;
The platform is split into five separate products, with no ‘tiered’ pricing plans like most other sales automation platforms;
After some digging, I discovered that Outreach.io does NOT provide a monthly pricing plan, so users wishing to add this to their tool stack will need to pay upfront for a year.

The lack of transparency regarding their pricing and the absence of monthly plans makes this a less-than-pleasant experience and as the cherry on top—the cheapest price starts at around $100/user/month.

The good part about the separate product pricing plans is that businesses can pay only for what they exactly need, though, considering the steep starting price, it’s still gonna cost you quite a bit.

It’s also interesting that the ‘Call’ and ‘Meet’ plans are separate from the ‘Engage’ plan, which means that users who are simply on the market for an outreach automation tool will still have to purchase multiple plans.

What are the top Outreach.io alternatives?

While many sales automation platforms are quite alike in terms of functionality and value proposition, Outreach.io is definitely not one of them.

As previously mentioned, if you’re a business or sales team looking to scale, automate, and enhance your outreach efforts—there are numerous other, more affordable, and less clustered options out there.

We’ve compared most of the top sales tools in the market, and truthfully speaking, unless you’re specifically looking for sales intelligence and sales coaching features in addition to your outreach campaigns, Outreach.io falls behind some of the other alternatives out there:

For reference, we invite you to check out Reply.io to see if that would be a better fit for you. To make things simpler, we’ve curated a detailed comparison of the two tools.

Key differences include:

Reply.io comes with a revolutionary AI SDR that creates tailored outreach sequences, hyper-personalizes your outreach, AND handles responses on your behalf (including booking meetings);
Reply comes with native Google Postmaster and MailToaster integrations, as well as a dedicated deliverability team at your disposal, ensuring your emails always reach their intended recipients;
Reply.io is much cheaper than Outreach.io, especially if compared to the entire Outreach.io bundle;
Last but not least, Reply.io also provides robust management features to keep track of sales reps’ performance, tasks, KPIs, etc.

The final verdict

Outreach.io is definitely a viable sales solution for many businesses, but whether it’s the right choice for you solely depends on your sales workflows and goals.

Each leading sales platform has its own unique ‘selling point’, and Outreach.io happens to be its sales intelligence, forecasting, and coaching features, for which users are expected to pay a premium.

The absence of a free trial coupled with the less-than-friendly pricing strategy (and annual-only commitment) is less than inviting, so you’ll have to be triple sure that Outreach.io is the right tool for your business before giving it a fair shot.

On this note, we humbly invite you to take Reply.io for a free 14-day spin to experience the full power of AI outreach, supplemented with a rich lead database, AI inbound lead generation, and much more.

Who knows, maybe we’re the perfect fit!