Instantly.ai Review (2025): My Experience With This Cold Emailing Tool

Trying and testing cold emailing software is my version of binge-watching Netflix — except with more tabs and fewer popcorn.

When I was looking for a new tool to test and tear apart (lovingly, of course), one name kept popping up — Instantly.ai.

It was hyped as THE platform for cold outreach — promising incredible deliverability, seamless scalability, a built-in prospecting database, and more.

My cold email senses were tingling, and I did what I had to do — I put it to the test!

This blog is my unbiased, in-depth review of Instantly.ai.

I’ve broken down everything — from features and pricing to what actually worked (and what didn’t).

Keep reading to find out whether it’s worth adding to your outreach stack.

TL;DR: My Take on Instantly.ai – Is It the Right Cold Email Tool for You?

Want it quick and fast? I got you!

Here’s the short version 👇

Instantly.ai lives up to its name — it’s scalable and built for cold emailing.

But… it comes with less flexible, overpriced plans.

So, if you don’t mind a little extra money flowing out and cutting into your ROI, Instantly.ai gets the job done.

But if you’re looking for an alternative that matches its capabilities with more flexible and affordable pricing — Saleshandy is worth a serious look.

How Saleshandy Stacks Up Against Instantly.ai

Looking at the table, you might think I am biased toward Saleshandy. But I am not.

As I said, Saleshandy is a much better and cost-effective alternative to Instantly.ai — and this is clearly reflected in the table.

My Hands-On Experience With Instantly.ai: Features and Functionality Breakdown

If you want a serious, in-depth review of Instantly.ai, I suggest you grab a coffee — I went all in, and there’s a lot to share.

That said, I’ve kept things super simple and easy to follow, so you’ll get a clear view of what Instantly.ai brings to the table — and what it doesn’t.

I will share my experience with these Instantly.ai features in detail below

1. Cold Email Campaign Automation
2. Email Warm Up
3. Lead Database
4. Centralized Reply Management – Unibox
5. Analytics and Reporting
6. Inbox Placement Tests
7. DFY Email Account Setup
8. CRM
9. Website Visitor Identification

1. Cold Email Campaign Automation

The core functionality of a cold email automation software is to help you reach more people faster without having to sound like a bot or look like a spammer.

On that front, Instantly.ai performs well.

I was able to quickly and easily set up cold email sequences with personalized messaging — and honestly, even if you’re a beginner, you’ll get the hang of it pretty fast.

What stood out to me were the AI features in Instantly.ai.

One such feature is the AI Sequence Generator, which can easily help you create entire sequences complete with email copies!

That said, getting the right prompt was a bit of a challenge, and the quality of AI-generated copy varied quite a bit. I often had to tweak it to make it feel more natural and less… robotic.

In addition to that, you get the standard features you’d expect from a cold outreach platform — such as A/B testing, time zone-based scheduling, and sending limits.

Overall, creating cold email campaigns with Instantly.ai felt intuitive and hassle-free.

2. Email Warm Up

Coming to the deliverability side of Instantly.ai, you can easily warm up your email accounts on the platform.

The built-in warm-up feature has been the talk of the town, especially on Reddit.

Everyone seems to have something to say — some good, some bad, and some questioning whether warm-up even makes sense 😶.

From what I experienced, though, it does what it claims — and does it fairly well.

The system automatically sends emails, gets replies, and engages with inboxes to gradually build your sender reputation.

 What I liked:
✅ Simple, beginner-friendly setup
✅ Works well in the background — truly “set it and forget it”
✅ Saves you from relying on third-party warm-up tools

What could be better:
❌ Analytics could be more detailed (no inbox vs. spam tracking)
❌ No real-time alerts if warm-up performance drops

My take:

If you’re working with fresh domains or new accounts, Instantly.ai’s warm-up is a good built-in solution — just don’t expect deep diagnostics or analytics.

3. Lead Database

Instantly.ai also comes with a built-in lead database that you can use to prospect and find the right people for your outreach.

The database (claims to) offer access to over 160 million B2B contacts — and it comes with a decent set of advanced filters like:

• Location
• Technology
• Employee Headcount
• Company Revenue
• Role, etc.

Note: Instantly.ai has separate pricing plans for its lead database — starting at $37.60/month for 1,000 credits, billed annually.

I found it quite helpful to easily build a segmented list of prospects for my outreach without having to rely on another platform like Apollo.io or Lusha.

(This felt close to what Saleshandy had to offer, so I felt right at home)

That said, here’s what I liked:
✅ Convenient to find and add leads without leaving the platform
✅ Good variety of filters for basic segmentation
✅ Saves time for quick campaigns or rapid testing

What could be better:
❌ Hit-or-miss data accuracy
❌ Filtering could be more granular

My take:

Instantly.ai’s Lead Finder is on the expensive side — especially when compared to other platforms that offer larger, more accurate databases with better filtering.

That said, if you want everything under a single roof, it can be a helpful add-on.

4. Centralized Reply Management – Unibox

If you’re sending emails from multiple accounts associated with multiple domains, managing replies can be a huuuuge headache.

Thankfully, Instantly.ai has a centralized reply management system called Unibox — and it genuinely makes life easier.

In Unibox, you can see all your conversations in one clean, unified dashboard. You can view, filter, and respond to conversations from all your sending accounts in one place.

What I like very much is again Instantly.ai’s AI features like:

• AI reply suggestions – Offers reply suggestions using ChatGPT integration
• AI Inbox Manager (Early Access) – Useful for engaging with leads who have replied positively.

Apart from these, I also liked the clean interface and the smart filters, which make it super easy to sort, prioritize, and manage replies.

5. Analytics and Reporting

I was genuinely looking forward to the analytics and reporting section.

Why? 

Because a lot of cold emailers and lead gen. experts have been sharing their campaign results on LinkedIn and Reddit — often with very aesthetic-looking screenshots.

Naturally, I was curious to see if Instantly.ai lived up to the hype.

Here is what you get — The analytics is divided into 2 main categories such as,

• Campaign Analytics – Where your campaign data will be shown.
• Account Analytics – Where your account’s performance will be shown.

You can filter reports based on campaign status — active, paused, or completed. This makes it easy for you to find exactly what you are looking for.

Additionally, you can compare performance across different time periods — whether it’s week-over-week, month-over-month, or a custom date range.

Personally, I loved the graphical view. It’s clean, visual, and pretty great if you want to flex your results in a case study or LinkedIn post.

6. Inbox Placement Tests

So far, everything I’ve talked about falls under what I consider the core offering for any solid cold email automation platform.

From this section on, I’ll be covering the “nice-to-haves” — the add-on features that aren’t absolutely essential but can be helpful if used right!

Let’s start with one that’s super underrated but incredibly useful — Inbox Placement Tests.

With this feature, you can text your deliverability across various email service providers.

What it does:

Basically, it helps you understand where your emails are actually landing — Primary inbox, Promotions tab, Updates, or spam folders — across various email service providers

Here’s how it works 👇

Instantly.ai runs a detailed analysis — it checks your email content, authentication protocols (like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC), and scans your IP and sending domain across 94 known blacklists.

You then get detailed insights along with AI-generated suggestions for improving your deliverability.

What’s my take?

Well, it’s a good feature to have — especially if you’re serious about deliverability and want to avoid landing in spam without guessing.

It’s not something you’ll use every day!

Is it essential? Not really.

Is it helpful? 100%.

7. DFY Email Account Setup

If you want new secondary domains and email accounts for your cold email outreach, Instantly.ai’s got you covered!

With their Done-For-You (DFY) service, you don’t have to worry about purchasing domains and email accounts, configuring DNS settings, and connecting them to Instantly.ai.

Instantly.ai’s team takes care of the entire process completely for you!

All you have to do is give them the right details!

I didn’t try this, but here are the details I got from talking with the support team.

“Our DFY (Done-For-You) Outreach System is priced as follows:

• $5 per DFY email account per month
• $15 per domain per year
• $10 per Pre-warmed email account per month

This service is separate from our other plans and billed independently. You’ll only be charged for the email accounts and domains you purchase.

The service includes domain registration, email account creation, DNS record configuration, and custom tracking domain setup.

You can have up to 5 DFY accounts per domain. For example, if you select five domains, you can have up to 25 inboxes.

After placing an order, it takes 24 to 72 hours for setup and DNS propagation.”

My Take:

If you’re not confident setting things up yourself, want to save time, or just prefer a plug-and-play experience — this is a super handy service.

8. CRM

Instantly.ai also offers an in-built CRM.

Again, this is separately charged, and I haven’t tried it. 

But based on my chat with the support team, you can actually make calls and send SMS from the CRM!

Now, this is interesting — because Instantly.ai is no longer just a cold email platform. It’s more like a multichannel sales engagement tool.

I also got to know that with the CRM you can:

• Track lead stages through various stages — from interested to meetings booked, won, or even custom stages based on your sales flow.
• Assign new opportunities to team members.
• Create custom sales flows.

So, it does look good on paper — especially if you don’t have a CRM and want an all-in-one tool to handle outreach, follow-ups, and light pipeline tracking.

Note: Instantly also offers native CRM integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. You can also integrate with other CRMs through Zapier. 

9. Website Visitor Identification

This might not be something you see every day — but Instantly.ai comes with a Website Visitor Identification feature that’s honestly quite interesting.

With this feature, you can identify individuals from the US (only) — including their business email addresses, job titles, company names, and even which pages they’ve visited on your website.

This can easily supercharge your outreach — because you can find people who are interested in your product or service and reach out to them.

You can tailor your messaging based on the exact pages they viewed and their job titles — making your cold emails feel a lot warmer.

And with that, we come to the end of the feature breakdown.

Next… the Pricing!

Instantly.ai Pricing Plans – Cost for Value?

Instantly.ai has a lot of add-ons and multiple pricing plans — and if you’re not careful, the costs can pile up fast.

Let me break them down for you and share whether they’re cost-effective — and if there’s a better option out there.

1. Sending and Warm Up
2. Leads (Database)
3. Inbox Placement
4. CRM
5. Website Visitor Identification

1. Sending and Warm Up

You get 4 annual plans:

• Growth – $30/month, 5k Emails Monthly, 1k Uploaded Contacts
• Hypergrowth – $77.6/month, 100k Emails Monthly, 25k Uploaded Contacts
• Light Speed – $286.3/month, 500k Emails Monthly, 100k Uploaded Contacts
• Enterprise – Custom, 500k+ Emails Monthly, 100k+ Uploaded Contacts

In all plans, you can connect unlimited email accounts for scaling and also get unlimited email warm-ups.

Is It Cost-Effective?

Not really…

While you do get unlimited account connections and warm-ups, the plans are structured with big jumps in sending volume: from 5k → 100k → 500k emails/month.

If you fall anywhere in between, you’re either overpaying or underutilizing — not the most flexible setup.

For agencies, it gets worse — you have to create separate workspaces (with separate subscriptions) for each client, which can get expensive quickly.

Is There a More Cost-Effective Option?

Yes — if you’re looking for more flexibility without compromising on core features, Saleshandy is a strong contender.

You get:

• Flexible pricing plans that scale with your needs — no massive jumps in sending volume
• As an agency, you can add unlimited clients at no additional cost and give them separate view, read, and edit access to their campaigns.
• All essential features at a much more affordable price

It’s a better fit for businesses and agencies of all sizes that want scalability without the heavy price tag.

2. Leads (Database)

Here, you also get 4 paid plans

• Growth Leads – $37.6/month, 1k Verified Leads Monthly
• Supersonic Leads – $77.6/month, 4.5k Verified Leads Monthly
• HyperLeads – $157.6/month, 10k Verified Leads Monthly
• LightSpeed Leads – $492/month, 25k Verified Leads Monthly

Is It Cost-Effective?

There aren’t many platforms that are on par with Instantly.ai when it comes to offering a built-in lead database directly within your cold email tool.

Yes, It’s definitely convenient — you can find leads and launch campaigns from one place without switching tools.

That said, the pricing feels a bit steep, especially as you scale. While the data is decent, it’s not always the most accurate or comprehensive.

If you ask me, there are more cost-effective tools out there with better data quality and filtering.

Is There a More Cost-Effective Option?

Definitely – Saleshandy Lead Finder.

Let me tell you why:

• You get access to a much bigger database with over 700 Million B2B contacts from 60 Million+ companies.
• You can get both email addresses and phone numbers of your prospects.
• The pricing is much more affordable.
• Accuracy is over 95% for Grade A email addresses and 85% in general.
• If a valid email address isn’t found, your credit will be refunded.
• Any unused credits will be rolled over to the next month.

I guess these points should be more than enough — Saleshandy just makes more sense if you’re serious about cost-effective prospecting at scale.

3. Inbox Placement

You get 2 paid plans

• Growth Inbox Placement – $37.6/month, unlimited one-time deliverability tests, unlimited sending accounts per test.
• Hypergrowth Inbox Placement – $77.6/month, unlimited automated and recurring tests.

Is It Cost-Effective?

It depends!

If you’re scaling across multiple domains or agencies, the automated tests are handy.

But if you’re just running a few campaigns a month, you can easily skip this or use one-off free tools for similar insights.

4. CRM

There are 2 paid plans

• Growth CRM – $37.6/month, Unlimited Seats, Integrations, 
• Hyper CRM – $77.6/month, Calling & SMS, Salesflows, Website Visitors inside CRM

Is It Cost-Effective?

Only if you don’t already have a CRM — and you’re looking for a basic multichannel setup.

It’s a decent add-on if you want to handle calls, SMS, and email follow-ups from one place without switching tools.

But let’s be honest — the CRM features are still fairly limited compared to platforms like HubSpot or Pipedrive.

5. Website Visitor Identification

Instantly.ai offers 3 paid plans

• Hyper Visitors – $77.6/month, 500 Credits
• Lightspeed Visitors – $317.6/month, 5k Credits
• Enterprise – Custom

Is It Cost-Effective?

Well, seeing as there are no other cold email platforms that offer website visitor identification built-in — this feature definitely stands out.

If you’re targeting US-based B2B traffic, it can be a solid add-on for uncovering warm leads who are already engaging with your site.

Whether it’s cost-effective or not really depends on your use case.

If you have a good amount of US-based traffic and want to squeeze more value from your website visits, this feature could justify the price.

Apart from these, you can also get email verification credits on a monthly or one-time basis. 

You can use these credits to verify the email addresses of your prospects when you import them into Instantly.ai for outreach purposes.

Okay, next, I’ll share some of the user reviews I read.

What Users Are Saying About Instantly.ai? (G2 and Reddit)

Okay, now that I’ve shared my hands-on experience and thoughts on the pricing…

Let’s take a look at what actual users are saying about Instantly.ai — the good, the bad, and everything in between.

These insights are gathered from G2 reviews and posts across Reddit communities like r/coldemail and r/Emailmarketing.

First, let’s go through the G2 reviews!

1. Good Customer Support, But Very Expensive

What didn’t work for the customers?

Customers feel the pricing can be better. The medium-level plan is a must, according to them, to use this platform.

2. Good Email Warming, But Better Alternatives are Available

What didn’t work for the customers?

Customers feel that Instantly’s email warm-up is very useful. However, again, this tool is costing them 3x more more.

3. Allows to Add Follow Ups, But Facing Issues in Running Campaigns

What didn’t work for the customers?

Customers feel that the blocking feature is good. However, they feel the lead quality isn’t that great, and the per-day limit of leads is also not enough for running campaigns smoothly.

Now, let’s look at some of the Reddit posts on Instantly.ai and what people in the community have to say about it.

A simple search for “Instantly” on Reddit will pull up a bunch of real user threads — and as expected, the opinions vary quite a bit:

The general consensus of this post is that some users found Instantly.ai quite reliable for sending large volumes of emails while avoiding spam folders.

Others shared that they combine Instantly with tools like Apollo and Clay, making it part of a larger cold email tech stack.

While some pointed out that it’s not perfect, but “it just works” — especially for warming up new accounts.

And then… there’s this gem of a post on Reddit:

Now, don’t take the title too seriously — this one feels less like feedback and more like a full-blown marketing war between tools.

Some users were quick to call it out as just another platform battle, while others chimed in defending Instantly’s results.

Fun twist? Even Smartlead’s co-founder shows up in the comments. Yep — it’s that kind of thread.

So if you’re scrolling Reddit for real feedback, maybe take this one with a grain of salt (and some popcorn 🍿).

But hey, it’s still a fun read — and proof that cold email tools are out here fighting for attention.

My Final Verdict: Is Instantly.ai Worth the Spend in 2025?

Using and analyzing a tool’s performance can take days or weeks.

This struggle can affect your business’s revenue, which is never a good idea!

Sadly, cold marketers don’t have time to sit and test every tool. 

Because let’s be clear, we are here to make money, not spend it, duh! 

Instantly.ai has a great, beginner-friendly interface. Their focus on developing ai-empowered features is also very visible and futuristic. 

Apart from the pros and cons mentioned above, some common complaints on Reddit and other places are crucial to highlight in the review.

Here are they,

1. Minimal API integration for working with a large set of sales software.
2. Regular malfunctioning and glitches that hamper sales productivity
3. Customer response delays
4. Sudden drops in email deliverability numbers of users with little to no change in the    outreach strategy
5. Not-so-helpful blocklist feature for newly added leads to the campaign.

If you think the above-mentioned cons are a blocker for you, you can check them in their trial version and then decide.

The Best Instantly Alternative for 2025!

Instantly.ai is undoubtedly good — it’s earned praise not just from me, but from plenty of users across Reddit, LinkedIn, and cold email communities.

That said, it’s not perfect.

The main drawbacks? It’s high cost and limited flexibility in pricing plans.

So, is there a better option than Instantly.ai?

Yes, there are many — but only one that I can confidently say matches Instantly.ai’s core functionality while offering more flexible pricing, better support, and equally strong deliverability — Saleshandy

Instead of me explaining what you can do with Saleshandy, I suggest you take the free trial and test it out.

Honestly, nothing beats testing a tool on your own.

Plus, with Saleshandy, chances are… you won’t be looking back.

FAQs

1. Does Instantly.ai provide leads?

Yes. Instantly have a database of 160 million from where you can choose your leads.

2. What is better than Instantly.ai?

Well, it’s not easy to compare as it depends on what features the customer wants. But if affordability is your concern, there are other options you can look at. 

3. Does Instantly have CRM?

Yes, Instantly has a CRM system that is in beta form. CRM service is charged additionally.