8 Best Instantly Alternatives for Accelerated Lead Generation

Looking for an alternative to Instantly? Then, you have landed in the right place!

If you are doing scalable cold email outreach to generate leads, you must be using (or might have used) Instantly.

Instantly is an excellent cold email software that enables you to start with your cold email outreach.

But it has some significant limitations in its capabilities, such as:

• Limited features in the basic plans, like you can’t use a unified inbox or add team members
• Constant bugs and glitches

Which may have created a need for an alternative.

Hence, we have decided to write this blog and mention the 8 best Instantly alternatives that might be a better fit for your every business use case.

Let’s get straight into it! 

Instantly Alternatives: Which One Comes Out on Top?

Here is a high-level overview of the top Instantly alternatives, providing a better understanding of their features, user ratings, and entry pricing plans.

Top 8 Instantly Alternatives In 2024

We have been in the cold email industry for over a decade, and we understand that every business has unique needs and preferences—there is no one-size-fits-all concept.

Hence, we’ve included all kinds of Instantly alternative tools in our blog.

In this blog section, our aim is to provide you with the following for each Instantly alternative:

• G2 & Capterra ratings
• Key features
• Detailed pricing plans
• Pros & cons

1. Saleshandy

G2: 4.6/5 (570+ reviews) 
Capterra: 4.5/5 (120+ reviews) 

Saleshandy is one of the best Instantly alternatives if you want to scale your outreach by multifold, book more meetings, and generate more leads at affordable prices. 

After you sign up on Saleshandy, you can start your cold outreach directly by finding ideal prospects in the B2B database, bulk exporting leads, and creating sequences. 

It has all the basic features, such as automatic follow-ups, merge tags to personalize emails for each prospect and sync your activities with top tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM if you are on the basic pricing plan. 

Key Features

• Unlimited 1:1 Email Tracking: You can track unlimited emails from Gmail using a Chrome extension and get notifications when your prospects open and click the emails.
• Sequence Score: Saleshandy’s sequence score feature allows you to check the health of your email sequence before sending the emails.
• Unified Inbox: With the Unified Inbox, you can manage conversations with all your prospects in one place, eliminating the need to switch between multiple email accounts.
• A-Z Testing: A-Z is a multi-variant testing feature by Saleshandy that enables you to test up to 26 variations of your email.
• Sender Rotation: You can connect multiple email accounts in one sequence and automatically rotate the senders to ensure higher deliverability rates.

Pros

• You can connect an unlimited number of email accounts.
• To scale your outreach efforts, Saleshandy allows you to create unlimited sequences.
• You can invite an unlimited number of team members and create an unlimited number of teams.
• It has native integrations with Salesforce, Zoho, Hubspot, etc.
• Saleshandy also offers API and webhook functionalities.

Cons

• It doesn’t have a free pricing plan; it only offers a 7-day free trial.

Pricing Plans (Billed Annually) 

Saleshandy offers detailed pricing plans tailored for every use case. Check it out here.

What do Users Have to Say? 

Source: G2

Click here to know how Saleshandy is better than Instantly. 

2.SmartLead

G2: 4.8/5 (70+ reviews)
Capterra: 4.7/5 (3 reviews)

You can go with SmartLead as an alternative to Instantly if you are looking for a scalable and streamlined outreach tool that manages your entire sales cycle in one place.

You can add unlimited mailboxes, perform email warm-ups, and reach out to prospects on multiple channels. Moreover, for enhanced workflow, SmartLead allows you to integrate with Zapier, Outlook, Slack, HubSpot, etc.

Key Features

• Unified Master Inbox: With SmartLead’s unified master inbox, you can manage your entire deal flow from one place.
• Powerful APIs and Automation: You can automate your entire sales cycle with your go-to tools and boost your productivity efficiently.
• Email Follow-Up Automation: Automate your follow-up emails to waste less time on tedious manual work and book more demo calls.

Pros

• It has a multi-channel outreach infrastructure.
• SmartLead enables you to create customized white-labeling solutions.
• You can do unlimited email warm-ups.
• Their customer success team provides great assistance.

Cons

• There are no native integrations.
• The UI/UX is not intuitive.

Pricing Plans (Billed Annually)

What do Users Have to Say?

Source: G2

3. Woodpecker 

G2: 4.1/ 5 (40+ reviews) 
Capterra: 4.5/5 (30+ reviews)

Woodpecker is a cold email tool that can be the best instant alternative if you don’t want to go for a prospecting or advanced sales engagement platform.

It includes all the basic functionalities that you would expect from a cold email tool, like automating follow-ups, A/B testing, reply detection, personalization, and email warm-up.

Moreover, Woodpecker has an intuitive and easy-to-use UI, so it is easy to set up for those who are new to cold emailing. To boost efficiency, it also enables you to integrate with popular CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot.

Key Features

• AI-email assistant: With Woodpecker, you can create cold email copies with AI and tweak them to create an email campaign faster.  
• Condition-based campaigns: You can set up follow-up emails with variations depending on your prospect’s behavior.
• A/B Tests: Woodpecker allows you to test up to 5 variations of a message to determine which improves reply rates. 

Pros

• It allows you to do in-thread follow-ups.
• You can access a dedicated recovery mode feature that protects your sender’s reputation.
• You can utilize the Bounce Shield system to prevent exceeding email provider limits.
• The Reply detection feature automatically detects out-of-office replies, immediately stops following up, and starts sending them once your prospects return.  

Cons

• Sometimes, users have faced bugs in Woodpecker’s interface.
•  You cannot build unlimited teams on Woodpecker.

Pricing Plans (Billed Annually)

Woodpecker has pay-as-you-go pricing; here is their starting pricing plan for contacting 500 prospects. 

What do Users Have to Say?

Source: G2

4. Lemlist

G2: 4.4/5 (200 + reviews) 
Capterra: 4.6/5 (370+ reviews) 

Lemlist can be considered a better alternative to Instantly if you only want to do solid cold outreach. It enables you to build a list of verified emails and perform multi-channel prospecting to reach out to leads on the platform where they spend most of their time.

Moreover, to ensure hyper-personalization, Lemlist lets you use AI to utilize custom variables and automatically add custom images, landing pages, and videos to your emails. For instance, you can add your prospect’s LinkedIn profile picture to your email.

Key Features

• B2B Lead Database: It allows you to find your ideal leads from the database of 450+ million contacts.
• Inbox Rotation: To boost email deliverability, you can attach multiple email addresses to send campaigns from multiple inboxes.
• Campaign A/B Tests: You can test email copies to increase conversion rates.
• Automated Email Campaigns: Lemlist allows users to create and automatically send personalized email campaigns to their prospects.

Pros

• It integrates seamlessly with various tools, like Zapier, to streamline workflows and automate tasks.
• With Lemlist, you can use Liquid Syntax to include custom code variables to turn your generic cold emails into hyper-personalized messages.
•  The platform is easy to use.
•  Lemlist allows you to leverage AI to create icebreaker messages.
•   It has an advanced email verifier tool.

Cons

• For email warm-up, you need to pay for Lemwarm, a separate tool (which is only free for higher plans), which can increase your budget.
•  You can’t add unlimited email accounts.

Pricing Plans (Billed Annually)

What do Users have To Say?

Source: G2

5. QuickMail

G2: 4.6/5 (80+ reviews) 
Capterra: 4.7/5 (80+ reviews) 

If you want a lightweight platform to run cold email campaigns, you should consider QuickMail as an alternative to Instantly.

It allows you to send highly personalized emails straight from your inbox with the custom attribute feature and integrates natively with an email warm-up tool to maximize email deliverability.

Moreover, there is built-in error detection to ensure that you send mistake-free messages.

Key Features

• Advanced analytics: Advanced analytics capabilities allow you to analyze important data to make insightful decisions.
• Email verification: A built-in app allows you to clean your prospect data and ensure that you send emails to the right email addresses.
• AI sentiment detection: It allows you to analyze the tone and sentiment of prospects’ replies.
• Email List Hygiene: To avoid bounces, you can upload your prospects’ sheets and delete duplicate prospects.

Pros

•  It has a free AutoWarmer integration.
• QuickMail has the capability to automatically stop a follow-up email when a response from the prospects is detected.
• It seamlessly integrates with Twilio to support SMS campaigns.
• With the Auto unsubscribe functionality, QuickMail detects and handles unsubscribe requests.
• You can sync your data with native CRM integrations with HubSpot & Pipedrive.

Cons

• It doesn’t have a B2B database.
• A few customers on Capterra have reported that the tool’s UI is very poor compared to other alternatives.

Pricing Plan (Billed Annually)               

What do Users Have to Say? 

Source: G2

6. Apollo.io 

G2: 4.8/5 (6,800+ reviews) 
Capterra: 4.6/5 (300+ reviews)

Apollo.io is one of the best Instantly alternatives if you want a sales intelligence tool in addition to cold email outreach software.

If you’re looking for that one platform that would handle every process in your outreach process, this could be an option. Primarily, Apollo.io is known for its robust & accurate B2B database of 275M contacts and 73M companies that you can use to build lists in seconds with 65+ filters.

Moreover, to accelerate closing more deals, Apollo.io has smart, simplified, and streamlined deal management features.

Key Features

• Buying Intent: With this feature, you can filter your company search by intent topic, intent score, or time range to find those leads who have expressed interest in products and services similar to yours.
• Data Enrichment: This feature allows you to keep your CRM clean by enriching the contact information of your leads.
• Conversation Intelligence: Apollo.io has an AI-powered conversation intelligence tool that shares actionable insights and recommendations after analyzing video calls.
• Advanced Reports & Dashboards (Pre-Built): It has pre-built reports and dashboards that give you a high-level overview of your outreach process so that you can get an overview to improve messaging via calling & emailing, targeting, and execution.

Pros

• It has a robust Gmail Extension allows you to find contact information, push emails to your CRM, set follow-up reminders, and analyze when prospects open & click your emails.
• Apollo.io has an in-tool meeting scheduler.
• You can use their Advanced Dialer to call prospects locally and internationally.
• Their customer support is great.

Cons

• You cannot connect unlimited email accounts.
• Integration capabilities are limited.

Pricing Plan (Billed Annually) 

What do Users Have to Say? 

Source: G2

7. Reply.io 

G2: 4.6/5 (1200+ reviews) 
Capterra: 4.6/5 (90+ reviews)

If you are looking for an alternative to Instantly that can help you with your multi-channel sales engagement, Reply is the one you should choose.

Reply is fueled by AI to automate & scale your multi-channel outreach efforts, acquire new customers quickly, and drive more revenue faster.

Key Features

• AI assistant: Reply.io’s AI assistant provides smart and actionable suggestions that can help you compose and improve your emails. Moreover, it categorizes conversations and automatically starts handling them to provide basic customer responses.
• B2B Contact Database: It has an accurate database that you can filter using 10+ filters to find your ideal customer.
• Meeting Scheduler: You can seamlessly book meetings and fill your calendar to close more deals faster.

Pros

• It enables you to craft and send personalized email sequences.
• Reply.io supports various channels like email, LinkedIn, SMS, and WhatsApp.
• You can seamlessly integrate with popular CRMs like Salesforce and Hubspot.
• With comprehensive analytics, you can monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns and user engagements.

Cons

• The UI/UX of the analytical dashboard is not user-friendly.
• Sometimes, data in the database can be outdated.

Pricing Plans (Billed Annually)

What do Users Have to Say?

Source: G2

8. Snov.io 

G2: 4.6/5 (300+ reviews) 
Capterra: 4.5/5 (200+ reviews)

Snov.io is a sales automation platform that finds and enables you to engage with leads, scaling your sales efforts with an out-of-the-box sales toolbox.

Their sales suite has amazing features, such as an in-built database, email verification and warm-up, email outreach, analytical capabilities, and customer management, to automate and accelerate your sales and lead generation process.

Key Features

• Mailbox rotation: You can seamlessly add additional sender accounts to campaigns and gradually increase sending limits.
• Custom tracking domain: To enhance your email deliverability, Snov.io allows you to add a custom tracking domain.
• AI-generated email content: To ensure your prospects receive a unique email message, you can utilize Snov.io’s AI content generator. 
• Social URL Search: You can find contacts of leads with links to their social media profiles.

Pros

• Snov.io integrates with 5,000+ of your favorite tools and apps.
• It has an email finder tool.
• For your convenience, it is localized into 5 languages: English, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ukrainian.
• You can send emails based on prospects’ actions using behavioral triggers.

Cons

• The database is not up-to-date.
• Snov.io has poor analytical capabilities.  

Pricing Plan (Billed Annually) 

What do Users have to Say? 

Source: G2

It’s Time to Choose the Best Instantly Alternative

So, which one is the best Instantly alternative?

Well, the answer depends on your needs. Do you want to scale your cold email outreach, do multi-channel targeting, or want a tool to streamline your entire sales process?

The answer depends on your business needs! However, if you are still unsure which of these Instantly alternatives to choose, you can sign up for Saleshandy. It has a 7-day free trial, which can help you make a decision faster.

FAQs

1. Can I migrate my data easily from Instantly to any of these alternatives?

You can easily migrate your data smoothly from any of these Instantly alternatives. All you have to do is export your data from Instantly into a common file format like CSV and then import it into the new platform

Moreover, it’s always a good idea to contact the support team of the Instantly alternatives you want to use and ask for their assistance in this process. 

2. Which alternative would be the most suitable for a startup with limited resources?

As a startup, you would have limited resources. Hence, you should look for those Instantly alternatives that offer a free trial, scalability, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness. For a startup with limited resources, saleshandy could be a good option as it provides a free trial and pay-as-you-go pricing.

3. What are the advantages of having a unified inbox in lead generation tools?

A unified inbox in a cold email outreach tool allows you to manage all your communications from one place. This, in turn, helps you save time and effort switching between different platforms and ensures that you don’t miss any important messages. Many of the above-mentioned Instantly alternatives have unified inbox functionality.

4. Why are email follow-ups important for successful cold email outreach?

Email follow-ups are crucial to keeping the conversation going and can help turn a cold lead into a warm prospect. However, your initial email might often go unnoticed or get buried under other emails.

By sending a follow-up email, you remind the recipient of your previous communication and increase the likelihood of engaging with them.