The Best Instantly Alternatives for Cold Outreach

Andrew Pierno

May 19, 2023 • 9 min read

Cold email outreach is a powerful way of generating leads for your business. And using a cold outreach tool makes the job easier and more convenient! Now, Instantly may be popular, but it’s not the only kid on the block.

Today, I’ll show you some of the best Instantly alternatives! You and I will compare their key features, pricing, and user reviews to help you choose the perfect cold outreach tool.

How Does Instantly Work?

Instantly helps users send personalized cold emails and follow-ups at scale. You can create custom email templates, add personalization variables, and send emails in bulk to targeted audiences.

One of the critical features of Instantly is its ability to dynamically personalize emails with custom variables, such as first name, company name, or job title, which can help increase response rates.

The tool also provides reporting and analytics features that allow users to track open rates, click-through rates, and reply rates for their email campaigns.

Pros and Cons of Instantly

Since I’ve been around the cold outreach block, there are a few things my peers and I noticed when using Instantly.

It offers the basic starting package for a startup founder doing cold outreach for the first time, but you’ll have difficulty scaling.

Instantly Pros

Personalization. Personalization is awesome, but then again, personalization is the standard for cold outreach tools these days, so Instantly no longer has the high ground.
Easy to use. The tool's user interface is intuitive and easy to use. Plus, the automation features are immensely helpful!
Warmup included. Warm up your inboxes before you start firing off those emails with Instantly’s warmup pool of over 200k inboxes.
Reply detection. It will take a few minutes for Instantly to detect a reply before automating your follow-up campaign, buuuut it gets there!

Instantly Cons

Lack of features. Instantly is new and growing, so they lack some features, but the problem exists when you want to see your email deliverability store – which is only available if you upgrade.
Limited integrations. You’ll need to upgrade to get webhooks, integrations, and the API.
Pricing. Compared to similar tools, you might find Instantly expensive as it starts at $30/mo.
Single-channel. I don’t like putting all my eggs in one basket, and it’s wiser to target your leads on different channels they may use. Since Instantly doesn’t offer anything other than email outreach, you’ll have to find an additional tool for your phone, Twitter, or LinkedIn outreach needs.

The 10 Best Instantly Alternatives for Cold Outreach, Sales Automation (and More)

1. Mailshake

Why We Love Mailshake as an Instantly Alternative:

With Mailshake, you can create custom workflows that automate complex email campaigns, including multi-step sequences and conditional branching based on recipients’ behavior.
It offers way more integrations than Instantly, so you can add texts, social media, and other channels to your cold outreach mix. (Plus, Mailshake integrates with LinkedIn, so you can personalize your outreach there, too.)
If you’re working with a team, Mailshake is great for collaboration. You can use team-wide templates and campaigns so everyone bands together to work on outreach.
Using the warm leads feature, you can import a list of contacts who have expressed interest in your product or service and then target them with personalized outreach.

Mailshake Pricing: Starts at $58/month

2. Super Send: The Best Instantly Alternative

Super Send is a versatile cold outreach tool that offers a multitude of features at an affordable price.

From automated follow-ups to conditional sequences, email finding, lead enrichment, or multi-channel outreach, you name it – Super Send keeps getting better with each update!

Thank you!

What Makes Super Send an Excellent Instantly Alternative?

The rotating inbox feature allows you to send emails from multiple inboxes without worrying about sending limits of service providers.
Similarly, warm up your inboxes with the integrated feature!
You can send personalized images for hyper-targeted outreach.
The new drag-and-drop sequence builder is intuitive and easy to use.
You can create GPT-generated sequences, which makes email copywriting a piece of cake.
Super Send’s multi-channel outreach helps you reach your prospects on Twitter and LinkedIn, AKA: everyone and their CEOs’ favorite hangouts these days.

Price: Super Send starts at $40/month

3. Saleshandy

Why Consider Saleshandy as an Instantly Alternative?

Saleshandy is used by sales teams of all sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises, to automate and streamline their sales process.
It offers automated follow-ups, which can be triggered based on the recipient’s behavior, such as opening an email or clicking a link. (This is similar to Instantly’s reply tracking feature.)
You can also track when recipients open and engage with attached documents, such as proposals or sales decks.
Email warmup and unified inboxes? You got it!
Saleshandy integrates with LinkedIn, allowing you to view LinkedIn profiles and send connection requests directly from within the tool. You can always take them off LinkedIn with Saleshandy’s LinkedIn email finder.

Price: Saleshandy starts at $27/month

4. Reply.io

Why Is Reply.io a Good Alternative to Instantly?

Reply.io uses algorithms to sort incoming emails into relevant folders, helping you prioritize your outreach efforts and stay organized. That’s why it’s a good option for enterprise teams collaborating on outreach.
Its mail merge feature allows you to send personalized emails to multiple recipients at once while also allowing for customization based on recipient data, such as job title or company size.
Reply.io offers a sales dialer feature to make and receive calls directly from within the tool without switching to a separate phone system.
Its spam-detection functionality helps detect spam-triggering words in an email or DM, so you can avoid them and prevent spam triggers from tanking your deliverability.

Price: Reply.io starts at $60/month

5. Lemlist: A Great Instantly Alternative

Why Choose Lemlist As an Instantly Alternative?

Lemlist's warmup mode is its most popular feature. It allows you to gradually increase your email sending volume over time to avoid triggering spam filters and improve deliverability, similarly to what Instantly does - but with Lemlist, it’s included in the starting plan.
Create campaigns with a drag-and-drop builder and a bunch of templates.
You can create customized landing pages for each recipient based on location, industry, or other factors.
Lemlist's email validation feature ensures that email addresses are accurate and up-to-date before sending emails, reducing bounce rates and improving deliverability.
Its reply detection feature automatically identifies and sorts incoming replies to help users prioritize and respond to them quickly.

Price: Lemlist starts at $50/month

6. Woodpecker

Best Woodpecker Features

Woodpecker’s email tracking feature provides detailed analytics on email opens, clicks, and replies. You can get insights for individual recipients, which can help a bunch if you want to go granular or if your enterprise team is working on account-based marketing.
The advanced conditional automation includes automatically sending follow-up sequences, tracking emails, and detecting replies.
You can manage multiple email campaigns at once, making it easier to track different campaigns, their statuses, and their outcomes.

Price: Woodpecker starts at $49/month

7. Yesware

Why Consider Yesware as an Instantly Alternative?

Yesware offers a library of customizable email templates that you can use to save time and maintain consistency across your entire sales team.
It integrates with popular CRMs, including Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics. You can sync all email engagement data from Yesware to Salesforce with just one click, so it’s almost like you’ve never even left the Salesforce ecosystem.
Its calendar scheduling feature makes scheduling meetings with prospects easier. Simply share your availability and let the prospect choose the best time for them.
You’ll get detailed analytics and reports on the team and individual performance, including email open and response rates, pipeline metrics, and more.
Yesware's Send Later feature allows scheduling emails to be sent at a specific time, ensuring that emails are delivered when the lead has the highest chance of opening them.
Yesware supports multi-channel campaigns and attachment tracking and helps you prospect, so it’s a good option if you plan to scale your sales team.

Price: Yesware starts at $15

8. Gmass

Gmass is an add-on outreach tool that operates from within your inbox. You just need to download the extension and start using it for your Gmail cold outreach! However, keep in mind that it’s Gmail-only.

Why I Love Gmass as an Instantly Alternative

Listen, sometimes you want to keep it simple and just run the whole thing from your Gmail inbox. This is a good option if you’re sending a few emails every day (otherwise, the warmup and the sending limits can be a pain for manual management). And that’s what Gmass provides: easy cold outreach through Gmail.
Gmass supports spintax, a feature that allows you to create multiple variations of the same email content. This feature can increase email deliverability rates by avoiding spam filters.
Gmass provides an automatic unsubscribe option for recipients, making it easy to comply with anti-spam laws and avoid blocklisting.
It tracks replies to emails and provides detailed reports on response rates.

Price: Gmass starts at $19.95/month

9. Quickmail.io

Best Quickmail Features

Quickmail’s automated list-building capability lets you import and segment contacts from various sources on auto-pilot.
Quickmail supports multi-channel outreach, including LinkedIn and text/SMS.
The real-time activity feed provides instant notifications and updates on the status of campaigns. So you'll love this one if you’re super hyped about landing every single lead and watching them convert in real time. ;)
You can see the deliverability score for each inbox on the dashboard, as well as use multiple inboxes.
Quickmail ticks all the essential cold outreach boxes: personalized templates, automated follow-ups, A/B testing, and more.

Price: Quickmail starts at $59/month

10. Outreach

Why Is Outreach a Good Instantly Alternative?

Outreach is a sales execution platform, so you can lean on it for more than cold outreach. It’ll help you tackle everything from lead capture to sales flow automation (and, yes, cold email).
You’ll get personalization, automated sequencing, and a sales dialer for all your cold (or warm) phone call needs.
The analytics and reporting capabilities are neat! Plus, you’ll get real-time data on open and response rates to optimize your outreach.
You can create customizable sales engagement workflows tailored to your specific needs and lead segments.
It supports multiple channels for sales outreach, including email, phone, and LinkedIn.

Price: Outreach offers tailored pricing, so you’ll need to contact them for a quote.

Verdict: What’s The Best Instantly Alternative?

As I’ve shown you, every outreach tool serves a specific purpose, but your first criterium should be your team size and requirements.

Some tools are better suited for small businesses and entrepreneurs who need to get their first customers with pure cold email (e.g., Super Send, Gmass, Lemlist). In contrast, others work best for enterprise sales teams that want to handle their entire sales outreach automation with a single tool (e.g., Saleshandy, Outreach).

Next up, we’ll need to talk budgets. Most of the tools I recommended are either cheaper than Instantly or offer better features at a similar price point.

For example, suppose you want to handle your cold outreach in full (including email warmups, multi-channel outreach, and conditional sequences) with cost-effective pricing. In that case, Super Send (which starts at $40/month for your entire company) offers the best value for your money.

However, you’ll need a more robust solution to handle your entire sales automation, so you’ll be looking at $70+ per user per month.

If I didn’t build Super Send to provide a more affordable cold outreach solution (with all the essentials + multi-channel outreach), I’d recommend trying Mailshake, Lemlist, and Woodpecker.

But since Super Send is right here - why not give it a whirl?

Take it for a test drive!