Smartlead Review in 2024: The Right Sales Tool for Your Business?

Vlad Oleksiienko 11 Jul 2024

Without a doubt, the modern B2B sales software competition is ruthless. New great tools are constantly emerging while established firms are continuously adding new features and further consolidating their products.

Although this keeps SaaS firms on their toes to keep perfecting their products to stay competitive, the end users are now faced with a severe choice overload when it comes to buying sales software.

In our new review series, we will take an objective look at one of the rising stars of the sales automation realm — Smartlead, reviewing its features, pricing plans, user feedback, and how it measures up with other prominent and more established tools like Reply.io.

What is Smartlead? Product overview

So, let’s cover the basics — what is Smartlead, and how is it different from the competition?

Smartlead is an AI-powered B2B sales automation platform designed to enhance business’s email outreach. While some alternatives provide multichannel outreach campaign features, Smartlead focuses entirely on emails, which are undoubtedly the most popular and effective business communication channel in 2024.

While some alternatives like Reply.io provide multichannel outreach campaign features, Smartlead focuses entirely on emails, which are undoubtedly the most popular and effective business communication channel in 2024, but at times not enough on their own.

It provides a decent set of features ranging from email deliverability to powerful APIs and AI automations (more on that later), but definitely lacks in some of the more advanced additions.

Smartlead has developed a reputation for simplicity and efficiency among businesses of all sizes, catering to sales, marketing, and recruiting teams, as well as lead generation agencies.

Getting started with Smartlead review

In the spirit of staying competitive with other sales automation platforms, Smartlead is exceptionally easy to get started with, offering a free 14-day trial to all new users.

Bear in mind that you cannot sign up for Smartlead with a personal email—it has to be a company domain email address, which is a common practice for such tools.

After filling in a few details about yourself and your company — you are directly taken to the neat dashboard, with dedicated onboarding to help you get the platform up and running:

Smartlead review

The onboarding consists of connecting your Email Account (both Gmail and Outlook available), enabling and optimizing your email warm-up and deliverability settings, and walking you through creating your first Smartlead outreach campaign.

What caught my attention right away is the Master Inbox tab on the left side of the dashboard, which allows you to add multiple email accounts and manage them from one designated inbox, and just in case you’re wondering—this feature is available in the cheapest pricing plan.

When creating an email outreach campaign with Smartlead, the first step is importing leads from your CSV file, considering they do not have their own contact database like some other sales automation platforms.

On this note, it’s definitely preferable to have all your sales processes under one roof. Although there are numerous B2B lead databases that Smartlead users can use for generating leads and then uploading them to the platform, users of more consolidated sales tools like Reply.io can build targeted prospect lists and then ‘push’ them into their outreach campaigns with a click of a button.

What are the main Smartlead features?

Now that we’ve covered the basics, it’s time to dive into the more technical aspects of Smartlead and its main features. This tool focuses entirely on the sales engagement and nurturing steps of the sales process, which, in my humble opinion, are the most crucial ones when it comes to B2B selling.

Smartlead’s main features include automated email campaigns with AI personalization, email deliverability, API integrations, client access, and powerful analytics.

Automated email campaigns

As previously mentioned, Smartlead focuses on email outreach, allowing users to create complex sequences with, both automated and manual touches, from the initial email to follow-ups and nurturing.

smartlead reviews for automated email campaigns

Smartlead provides ready-to-use variables to personalize your emails, including the basic ‘{{first_name}}, {{last name}}, {{company_name}}, but also more interesting variables such as {{website}} and {{linkedin_profile}}.

On top of that, users can turn to their selection of ready-made email templates (circled in blue) to further simplify their email writing, though, I was slightly underwhelmed with the limited number of email templates provided:

smartlead ai reviews with its email templates

Perhaps most importantly — this is where Smartlead’s AI features come into play, allowing users to generate personalized email messages and follow-ups with the power of ChatGPT.

However, it’s definitely worth mentioning that in order to enjoy these AI writing features, users will have to integrate ChatGPT 4 into Smartlead with a dedicated API key, which may require some technical expertise for those who are unfamiliar with this process.

Finally, Smartlead users can then seamlessly manage their email campaigns from their Master Inbox, which combines all of their email accounts, as well as separately from the Email Accounts tab where they can track and compare progress from each designated email account.

While fully functional, Smartlead’s outreach features are quite limited. For those looking to take their sales or marketing outreach a step further — tools like Reply.io allow users to create more complex campaigns supplemented with emails, SMS, calls, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and automated triggers, all while leveraging AI to generate personalized messages AND handle responses on their behalf.

Email deliverability

Smartlead prides itself on providing top-class email deliverability to its users through multiple key features—unlimited email warm-up and inbox rotation.

The platform helps users build and maintain their sender reputation by helping generate ‘humanized’ email content and sending patterns while their dedicated Spam Rescue will monitor spam rates to ensure it doesn’t come close to the danger zone.

smartlead reviews for its email deliverability

Moreover, users can enjoy Smartlead’s Inbox Rotation feature, which I have to say is the first of its kind I’ve seen, which is ideal for teams that have connected multiple email accounts.

By strategically varying the email account used for mass email campaigns, Smartlead further decreases the chances of Gmail or Outlook safeguarding your emails from reaching their intended recipients, keeping your email deliverability intact.

These features should (in theory) be enough to ensure your emails reach their designated inboxes, but considering how crucial email deliverability has become in 2024, Reply.io also provides users with a dedicated deliverability team at their assistance to help setup, authenticate, and monitor email accounts.

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API integrations

While Smartlead has very limited native integrations (only Clay, Listkit, and HubSpot in beta), they do offer robust API integrations that allow seamless integration with most CRM platforms and other tools, facilitating data synchronization and workflow automation.

In fact, they say that the Smartlead API is “the most powerful cold email API and automation infrastructure in the market”.

If your team already uses several tools for various prospecting, data enrichment, and sales intelligence processes—then Smartlead may be just the right option for you despite being a more lightweight email outreach solution.

With the powerful Smartlead API and webhook infrastructure, users can create a cohesive sales or marketing suite containing separate tools, without worrying about the data flow.

smartlead api reviews

Though this will definitely require some initial help from an IT specialist, once everything is set in motion—you can sit back and enjoy the power of API integrations.

Alternatively, you can choose to go for a more consolidated sales automation platform like Reply.io that has everything you need in one suite — lead contact database, multichannel outreach campaigns, an AI SDR that writes and responds to emails, inbound AI chatbot for capturing and qualifying warm leads, native cloud calls, and more. Keeping everything under one roof is always the preferred method, especially in sales and marketing, given the seamless data flow and cohesion it provides, helping you make informed decisions at all times.

Client access

Designed for sales, marketing, lead generation, and other types of agencies—Smartlead has a really cool Client Access feature, which in simple terms provides limited access to clients for viewing the performance of their campaigns.

With detailed agency reports and designated dashboards, clients can monitor the performance of their campaigns at their own convenience.

KPIs, outreach campaign performance, and visual data presentation are just a few of the valuable elements of such agency reports, and while most agencies have to manually create and share such reports with their clients, Smartlead completely simplifies this process (though, for an extra cost).

This feature facilitates simple communication and collaboration among agencies and their clients regarding metrics, strategies, and objectives.

But even then, Smartlead faces a huge challenge competing with more established agency-providing sales platforms like Reply.io, which on top of personalized client access also offers unlimited mailboxes, unlimited clients, unlimited contact storage, and unlimited warmup.

Analytics and reporting

Much like most reputable sales and marketing automation platforms, Smartlead also provides comprehensive analytics with detailed reports showcasing campaign performance.

This is by far the only way to objectively track the success of one’s outreach campaigns, and Smartlead does a great job at this.

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

Reporting in Smartlead review

Source: Medium

In this same dashboard below is the performance overview of your email warm-up and deliverability, ensuring that you have a full understanding of how compliant your campaigns are with Google’s increasingly strict email policies.

What are the Smartlead pricing plans?

The Smartlead pricing plans are pretty straightforward—3 plans ranging from $33/month to $148/month, depending on your team size and business needs.

As usual, those ready to commit to a year-long subscription will enjoy an extra 17% discount (though, they already provide a hefty discount for a monthly subscription as well).

Pricing in Smartlead review

Let’s take a closer look at the 3 Smartlead pricing plans:

Starter Plan ($33/month)

The ‘Starter Plan’ is the cheapest Smartlead pricing plan and is designed for individual users, as well as those wanting to try out the product before upgrading to a more expensive plan.

This plan includes basic email outreach features with a limit of 6000 emails per month, while also providing unlimited email accounts and unlimited email warm-up. Starter Plan users also get access to Smartlead’s Master Inbox and Analytics.

All in all, this Smartlead pricing plan is not as limited as most starter plans for sales and marketing automation tools, but as mentioned, is only suitable for individual users, so teams with two or more outreach professionals will have to choose one of the two next plans.

Pro Plan ($80/month)

The Smartlead ‘Pro Plan’ is designed for smaller, pre-scale sales and marketing teams, and is the perfect choice for growing businesses.

This Smartlead pricing plan ramps up the monthly email-sending limit to 150,000 and provides users with its famous API and webhook integration technologies.

All in all, the Pro Plan is a slightly more powerful plan than the Starter Plan, but suitable for teams with multiple professionals who will be using this platform.

Starting with the Pro Plan, teams can begin adding clients at a price of $29/month.

Custom Plan (starting at $148/month)

Designed for scale-up businesses and lead generation agencies, the ‘Custom Plan’ starts at $148 per month.

This premium Smartlead pricing plan includes all of the Pro Plan’s features with much more volume for adding leads and sending emails (60 million to be exact).

Just like with the Pro Plan, users on the Custom Plan can add clients at a price of $29/month.

While the Custom Plan does not provide many additional features than on the Pro Plan, it is the only suitable option for large-scale agencies and businesses with significant email outreach needs.

What are Smartlead AI reviews by real users?

You know what they say—software is only as good as the user reviews!

While there aren’t that many Smartlead reviews out there, there are definitely enough to make an accurate judgment of how satisfied users are with this product:

G2 → 4.8 / 5
Capterra → 4.7 / 5

After looking through hundreds of Smartlead AI reviews from real users, the most often-mentioned pros and cons include:

✅Users love Smartlead’s intuitive and user-friendly interface which makes it very easy to create and manage their email campaigns;
✅With its unlimited email warm-up and inbox rotation features, a good chunk of users are very satisfied with their deliverability rates when using Smartlead;
✅ Smartlead’s comprehensive analytics and reporting features are often praised by users for providing valuable insights into their campaign performances;

❎ While users love the powerful API & webhook integrations, they are quite challenging to set up, so many users voice their concerns about the steep learning curve with Smartlead;
❎ As we’ve pointed out in our journey of using this product, many users mention the very limited selection of pre-designed email templates available in the Smartlead platform;
❎ Some users reported occasional delays in their customer support queries, which caused some frustration, though it’s worth mentioning that they were all eventually resolved.

And, some real-world reviews:

A Promising Platform with Room for Improvement

“What do you like best about Smartlead?

Smartlead’s email follow-up automation is a time-saver for crafting and delivering outreach sequences.
Pre-designed templates are cool and a helpful advantage, especially for those new to cold emailing.
Smartlead emphasizes its technology to boost email deliverability, a significant concern for cold emailers.
Smartlead’s analytics that provide insights into email warming and campaign metrics

What do you dislike about Smartlead?

Some users report a high number of emails ending up in spam.
The interface isn’t the most intuitive. If you’re new to cold email platforms, there might be a learning curve involved.
Customer support response could be improved”

Good tool for cold emailing

“What do you like best about Smartlead?

It’s good at what it does, cold emailing. Adding in leads to email is fairly simple as well as building campaigns. Also, I like you can add multiple “clients” and teammates at no extra cost.
It’s also easy to use for the most part.

What do you dislike about Smartlead?

It’s a bit clunky. You have to click “edit”, scroll to leads to add in more leads to an ongoing campaign every single time which is a bit counterintuitive vs other tools like outreach.
Also the analytics is a bit wonky. I’ve noticed I’ll have almost a 0% open rate until the second email in a campaign sends which is a new development. It never was like that before.
Also I WISH it had the functionality of Apollo where they had a chrome extension and I could scrape someone from linkedin and drop them directly into a campaign/sequence.”

What is the best Smartlead alternative?

After spending countless hours comparing the top sales automation platforms ourselves, it’s safe to say that Smartlead has definitely built up its reputation to be in the conversation.

Smartlead review of its alternatives

With its robust features focusing on email outreach, email deliverability, and API integrations, this is definitely a great choice for smaller-scale businesses that only use emails to engage with their prospects.

However, businesses that need a more powerful sales engagement platform with additional outreach channels and AI automations should probably take a look at alternatives like Reply.io.

On this note, we invite you to check out Reply.io’s sales suite and see if that would be a better fit for you. For the same price, you can also enjoy multichannel outreach, powerful AI outreach features, inbound AI lead generation, and more.

Here are the key differences in more detail:

Key differences include:

With Reply.io, you get more channels for your outreach campaigns (including email, cloud calls, LinkedIn, SMS, and WhatsApp);
With Reply’s native B2B contact database, users can build targeted prospect lists right through the platform, and then add them to tailored, AI-generated outreach campaigns with a click of a button;
Reply.io comes with a native AI SDR that hyper-personalizes your outreach AND handles responses on your behalf (including booking meetings);

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Reply.io provides businesses with an awesome AI Chatbot that captures, qualifies, and nurtures inbound leads to generate more warm leads;
With Reply’s Google Postmaster and MailToaster integrations, and a dedicated deliverability team at their disposal, users can enjoy the same top-class email deliverability as with Smartlead;
Take advantage of 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.
Last but not least, Reply.io provides much more powerful team management features to keep better track of sales reps’ performance, tasks, KPIs, etc.

Ultimately, while Smartlead is a strong choice for businesses focusing on email deliverability and personalization, Reply.io might be the better option for those seeking advanced outreach and AI features, a built-in contact database, and inbound lead generation, all under one roof.

How to choose your sales automation platform?

Choosing the right sales automation platform depends on various factors such as business size, budget, and specific needs. Smartlead offers a comprehensive suite of features suitable for businesses aiming for high deliverability and solely email outreach.

If you’re only in need of email campaign automations — Smartlead is a fantastic lightweight and cost-effective solution that will also ensure your deliverability stays high. On top of that, businesses can leverage its powerful API features to seamlessly integrate Smartlead into their existing tool stack without compromising the quality of data flow.

However, businesses looking to equip their sales teams with a more consolidated automation platform should probably consider some of the other great options out there, looking for tools that also have native lead databases, multichannel outreach campaigns, deal management features, and so on.

Once again, we invite you to take Reply.io for a spin and contact our sales or CS teams if you have any questions, we’d be more than happy to talk!

Stay tuned for more in-depth reviews of the top sales automation tools coming soon. Until next time!