Smartlead.ai Review 2024: Features, Pricing & More Details

“Shortcuts exist for a reason—they’re meant to be taken to save your time and effort.”
~ We don’t know who said this. We just follow it.

This software review blog is going to be your shortcut for evaluating Smartlead.ai as a potential cold email automation tool for your team.

Smartlead is considered by many companies and agencies to be a great tool for reaching out to prospective customers.

But is it the right tool for your business or team? Is it worth the hype, as some user review suggests?

This Smartlead.ai review blog is your shortcut to finding that out.

We tried and tested Smartlead.ai during its trial period and have put our findings together in this detailed review.

The review covers Smartlead.ai’s features, pros and cons, user feedback, and an evaluation of its pricing structure for business friendliness.

Additionally, you’ll find a possible alternative to Smartlead.ai discussed.

That’s enough for the introduction. Let’s jump into the review!

Smartlead.ai Reviews: Table of Contents

• The Ultimate Cold Email Software Comparison
• Review of Smartlead.ai’s Top Features
• What are Smartleads.ai’s Pros and Cons?
• What Do Users Have to Say About Smartlead.ai?
• Smartlead.ai’s Pricing Plan’s Breakdown
• Choose the Best Alternative to Smartlead.ai – Saleshandy
• Is Smartlead.ai the Best Cold Email Software for You?
• FAQs

The Ultimate Cold Email Software Comparison

Review of Smartlead.ai’s Top Features

In this section, you’ll learn about the top features of Smartlead.ai and their functionalities.

Here’s a list of features you’ll be looking at:

1. Email Warmup
2. Cold Email Campaign Automation
3. Master Inbox
4. Client Management (Agency Feature)
5. Global Analytics
6. Team Member Management
7. Integrations

1. Email Warmup

As a cold emailer, your very first step after purchasing your secondary domains and setting up authentication records is to start warming up your email accounts.

This is a non-negotiable task if you don’t want to end up in your prospects’ spam folder.

In Smartlead.ai, you can easily warm up your connected email accounts.

The best part!

It comes with your pricing plan, and you don’t have to pay a single penny extra, and that’s not all. It’s also unlimited. You can warm up as many accounts as you like.

That’s a strong start for Smartlead.ai if you ask us!

2. Cold Email Campaign Automation

Now, let’s look at the main feature and functionality of Smartlead.ai, or any cold email software for that matter – Automating cold email campaigns.

In Smartlead.ai, you can create as many campaigns as you want, fully automated from start to finish.

Next, let’s look at the feature that can help you create your campaigns:

1. Compose With AI
2. Personalization Features
3. A/B Testing
4. Manual Task
5. Sub-Sequence

Compose With AI

This is quite a handy feature to have.

In Smartlead.ai, you can link your ChatGPT account through API to help you generate personalized sequences.

You can also create your own templates or pick one from Smartlead.ai’s existing templates.

Either way, you will be saving a lot of time with this feature!

Personalization

The most important feature of all – Personalization.

Why?

Without this feature, your cold emails will not work. They will not sound relevant and will look very generic.

You get 2 personalization features in Smartlead.ai:

• Variables (Inbuilt & Custom)
• Spintax

With Variables, you can personalize your cold email copies for each prospect, making it super relevant to them.

Some of the inbuilt variables are:

• First name
• Last name
• Company name
• Day of the week

Spintax can help you make simple alterations to the email copy you send to your prospects. It’s easier to see it in action.

Here is the syntax for Spintax → {Let’s jump on a call | Are you free tomorrow? | Keen for a demo ?}

This syntax will randomly alternate between:

• Let’s jump on a call.
• Are you free tomorrow?
• Keen for a demo?

This way, you can avoid sending repetitive emails and keep under the radar of ESP spam filters.

A/B Testing (Multivariate)

Another key feature in Smartlead.ai is the A/B Testing.

You can test different elements of your cold email, like subject lines, openers, CTA, etc., and find which variation works best for your target audience.

Usually, you can only test 2 variations at a time, but this is where Smartlead.ai shines.

In Smartlead.ai, you can text up to 26 variations at a time. Moreover, you can even configure your A/B testing manually or let AI handle the whole process for you.

Either way, you can text, optimize, and find the best cold email framework that works for you.

3. Master Inbox

The Master Inbox feature centralizes your email communication.

It brings all emails from various email accounts and campaigns under a single tab. You can easily filter by campaign, email account, lead category, and more.

This way, you can swiftly follow up, reply to your prospects, and move them faster through the funnel.

4. Client Management (Agency Feature)

This agency feature of Smartlead.ai is ideal for agencies handling cold email campaigns for their clients.

Available on Smartlead.ai’s Pro Plan, which starts at $79/month (billed annually), it allows unlimited client additions.

However, there is a monthly charge of $29 per client.

That means if you onboard 10 clients, you’ll effectively have to pay $290 per month. In a year, it would sum up to $3,480..

This cost can quickly escalate as you scale your agency and manage more clients.

5. Global Analytics

This is a must-have feature in any cold email software, as analytics help determine if your campaigns are working correctly.

You also use the filter options to view the performance campaign-wise or client-wise.

Alternatively, Smartlead.ai also has a performance and analytics section within the campaigns.

This will give you further insights into the progress of your campaigns, deal value, etc.

What’s more, you can quickly download a snapshot of your campaign’s performance, activities, and deliverability reports to share with your stakeholders.

6. Team Member Management

In Smartlead.ai, you can invite your team members and assign them roles.

(It starts from the PRO plan and is not available in the starting plan.)

Here’s the best part.

You can invite your entire team to the platform at no additional charge, be it 5 or 500 folks.

You can assign roles like:

• Admin – Has access to everything except the Billing section in settings
• Full Member – Has access to everything except the Billing and Team Member sections in settings.
• Read-Only User – Has read-only access to all sections, no editing or modification capabilities.

This is a great feature for both agencies and non-agencies.

In the case of agencies, you can have different teams to manage clients respectively. 

Once assigned to a client, your team members will be able to create and manage campaigns for that particular client.

Similarly, for non-agencies, you can have various teams, like sales, SEO (backlinks), etc., working simultaneously on their respective campaigns.

7. Integrations

Smartlead.ai offers just 3 integrations.

1. Hubspot – CRM
2. Clay – A data enrichment tool to help scale your personalized outreach.
3. Listkit – A B2B data provider (Smartlead.ai does not have its own database like the alternative tool you will see later in the blog.)

These integrations can help you streamline your cold outreach. Here’s how:

1. You can prospect using ListKit to get prospects that match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and buyer persona.
2. You can then export your data directly into Smartlead.ai.
3. With HubSpot connected, all the prospects you import into Smartlead.ai will also be added to the CRM. You can also transfer prospects from HubSpot to your cold email campaigns.
4. You can then use Clay to enrich your prospects’ data. Alternatively, if you wish to, you can directly create and run entire cold email campaigns from Clay.

Sounds great, right? 

Well, it is, but here is the catch.

With just a glance, you can confidently say that Smartlead.ai is more suited for teams using HubSpot as a CRM.

But, not to worry, Smartlead.ai supports you with API and Webhooks. So, even if you don’t have the tools they integrate with, you can still streamline your actions.

Also Read: Saleshandy Review & Tutorial: How To Generate Leads in 2024?

What are Smartleads.ai’s Pros and Cons?

Now that you have seen the best of what Smartlead.ai has to offer, here’s our list of pros and cons you should know before proceeding further.

Smartlead.ai is a great tool, but as they say, no one is perfect. It may be a great tool for your use case, but it might not work for others.

Next, let’s take a look at what users have to say about Samartlead.ai.

What Do Users Have to Say About Smartlead.ai?

User reviews and testimonials are among the most important factors to consider before making your decision.

Why?

You will get insights into the users’ experiences and see how the tool has worked for others in your niche.

This will give you a better idea of whether the tool is suited for you or not.

Here’s what a few users have shared

Source: G2

Source: G2

Source: G2

Source: G2

What’s good about Smartlead.ai according to users:

• Cold email automation – Saves a lot of time and effort.
• The founder is active and updates the platform based on user feedback.
• Templates are a great help for first-time cold emailers.
• Uses technology to boost deliverability (warmup)
• AI to categorize replies.
• Analytics and reports are really helpful.

What users disliked about Smartlead.ai:

• Additional charge for onboarding clients.
• UI/UX is clucky. There may be a learning curve involved with beginners.
• It would be great to have a Chrome extension that can help scrape data from LinkedIn.
• Support was faster previously, but it has slowed down. Sometimes, it takes 4+ hrs to get a response.
• Templates need to be updated to the latest standards.

With the user reviews covered, let’s get down to what matters most – Money!

Smartlead.ai’s Pricing Plans Breakdown

Here, we’ll be considering the yearly plans to see how business-friendly they are.

Note: At the time of writing this blog, Smartlead.ai is celebrating its birthday and has changed its pricing from what it usually is. But we promise to update it as soon as they revert to their regular pricing.

Basic Plan – $34/month

You can not add clients or team members.

This plan is best for small businesses and agencies that do not provide cold emailing as a service.

With this plan, you get the following:

• 2,000 active Leads
• 6,000 Emails per month
• Unlimited Email Warm Up
• Unlimited Email Accounts
• Dynamic IP Addresses
• Centralized Master Inbox
• Dynamic Sequences
• Detailed Analytics
• General Support

PRO Plan – $79/month.

You can add clients for an additional charge of $29/client/month and have unlimited team members.

This plan is more suited for medium-sized businesses that have a dedicated team for cold emailing and agencies providing cold emailing services.

Here’s what is unique in this plan:

• 30,000 active Leads
• 150,000 Emails per month
• Custom CRM
• Email Guide Assistance
• Active Support
• Global Block List
• Webhooks & Integrations
• API Access
• Unlimited Seats

As you can see, customer support is based on pricing. This could be the reason why some users have expressed that customer support is slow for them.

Also, Smartlead.ai does not have a custom plan on its yearly plan page. This can be a limitation for you if you have specific custom needs.

You have seen all that Smartlead.ai has to offer – features, pros, cons, user reviews, and its pricing structure.

If you feel that it is the tool for your needs after reading this, then we are glad this Smartlead.ai review blog helped you.

That said, we ask you to patiently take a look at the next section, where we showcase a tool that is much more budget and user-friendly and offers more features.

Choose a Better Smartlead.ai Alternative – Saleshandy

After we tried out Smartlead.ai for the entire trial period, we noticed a few places where other tools were far better.

One such tool is Saleshandy.

Saleshandy is a cold email automation software that can help you scale personalized cold email outreach cost-efficiently.

Here are a couple of places where Saleshandy stands out compared to Smartlead.ai:

1. More Features To Improve Deliverability
2. A Cost Effective Cold Email Software for Agencies
3. One Tool For Your Outreach and Prospecting Needs
4. More Useful Integrations
5. Better UI/UX
6. Friendlier Pricing For All

1. More Features To Improve Deliverability

Some of you may be professionals who know the ins and outs of cold emailing, the best practices, mistakes to avoid in cold emailing, and so on.

But the same cannot be said for those who are starting out.

That’s why tools like Saleshandy have features like Email Sequence Score.

This feature acts like a cold email checklist and scores your sequence based on the best practices you have done.

It is recommended that every Saleshandy user use this feature to ensure 99% deliverability at all times.

The next feature of Saleshandy is a built-in email verifier.

You can use this feature to double-check your prospects’ emails to make sure they are valid. This will help you reduce bound rates and help maintain a high deliverability rate.

Note: You get email verification credits with all plans of Saleshandy. If you need, you can also purchase additional credits.

2. A Cost Effective Cold Email Software for Agencies

Saleshandy is one of the most cost-effective tools that agencies can have in their toolkit.

Here’s why. You are not charged additionally for onboarding clients or team members.

Compared to Smartlead.ai, in Saleshandy, you can start adding unlimited clients from the starter plan – Outreach Starter, which is $25/month when billed yearly and $36/month when billed monthly.

Further, you can white-label your dashboard according to your branding needs. This will provide your clients with a seamless and professional experience, increasing your agency’s image and credibility.

Note: Whitelabeling is charged separately.

3. One Tool For Your Outreach and Prospecting Needs

One common need we noticed from user reviews is the ability to add prospects directly from LinkedIn with the use of a Chrome extension.

Saleshandy can do one better!

With Saleshandy’s Lead Finder, you can access a vast B2B database to find prospects that match your ICP and Buyer Persona, along with their contact information.

You can use various filters to pinpoint your prospects from over 700M professional profiles and 60M+ companies worldwide.

Once you have filtered down your ideal prospects, you can get their contact information and directly add them to an active or new cold email campaign.

This will help you save a lot of time that you would have wasted moving from one tool to another.

4. More Useful Integrations

Integration is the most important part of any tool.

As you already read, Smartlead.ai integrates with only 3 other tools. On the other hand, with Saleshandy, you can integrate multiple tools.

Here’s a list of all native integrations you get with Saleshandy.

• HubSpot
• Salesforce
• Zoho
• Pipedrive

Apart from native integrations, you also get:

• Zapier
• Webhooks
• Saleshandy API

5. Better UI/UX

Smartlead.ai’s UI/UX is not feature-friendly.

What we mean by this is that you will not be aware of valuable features like Readability Spam Checker and Spintax unless you have gone through the help doc or taken a demo.

This is not the case with Saleshandy.

The UI/UX is very intuitive, and you can easily find features even though you didn’t know they existed.

Moreover, Saleshandy’s support is just a few clicks and minutes away from responding to your queries.

Whether you’re on a trial period or a paid plan, support is extended to everyone at the same pace – which is much faster than 4 hours.

6. Affordable Pricing for All

Saleshandy offers more pricing options and customization capabilities than Smartlead.ai.

This flexibility extends to both monthly and yearly plans.

Saleshandy provides separate pricing plans tailored to businesses needing agency capabilities and those focused on cold emailing for their own revenue generation.

This is the starting plan of Saleshandy Outreach Starter – $25/month (billed annually)

• Unlimited clients and email accounts
• 2,000 total prospects
• 10,000 emails per month
• 2,500 email verification credits
• Sender rotation starter
• Unified inbox starter
• 5 email accounts for warm-up

This is one of the highest pricing plans available. Outreach Scale Plus 100k – $219/month (billed annually)

• 100,000 total prospects
• 350,000 emails per month
• 45,000 email verification credits
• 75 email accounts for warm-up
• Dedicated success manager

After this, except for total prospects and email sending volume, the rest stay the same.

The agency pricing plans are the same as the individual ones. The only difference is you can add unlimited clients and team members.

To learn more about Saleshandy’s pricing plans, visit the pricing page.

What Else Does Saleshandy Have to Offer?

You also get various features like:

• Sender rotation, which randomly alternates between your connected email accounts when sending emails. This helps maintain the deliverability of email accounts and improve the scalability of your outreach campaigns.
• Unified Inbox, which is a feature that brings all your prospects replies under a single location, so you don’t miss any opportunity to close deals.
• Email warmup powered by our partner TrulyInbox. With all pricing plans, you can warm up a certain number of email accounts.
• Reports, which give you insights into the performance of your campaigns.
• You can connect unlimited email accounts as well.
• Merge tag and Spintax, the personalization features of Saleshandy, to tailor your emails and make them more relevant to your prospects.

As you can see, we can go on and on, but we don’t want to bore you.

Instead, take a 7-day free trial and experience the tool for yourself, and if you have any questions, Saleshandy’s support is just minutes away!

Is Smartlead.ai the Best Cold Email Software for You?

We have placed all the cards before you. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

You can decide which is the best tool for you, whether it’s Smartlead.ai or Saleshandy. Whatever you decide, make sure it:

• Fits your budget.
• Meets your team’s needs.
• Helps achieve your business goals.
• Can scale with your team and adapt to future growth.

The best way to decide this is to take the free trial offered by the tools to see which covers all the above. You can also contact the support or sales team to request a demo.

Both teams would be more than happy to show how they can bring value to your business and enhance your outreach efforts.

FAQs

1. What is the primary advantage of using Smartlead.ai for cold email campaigns?

Smartlead.ai offers robust email automation features, including email warmup, AI-assisted composition, personalization with variables and Spintax, and A/B testing, enhancing deliverability and efficiency.

2. How does Saleshandy compare to Smartlead.ai in terms of integrations and pricing?

Saleshandy provides more integrations (HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive) and flexible pricing, starting at $25/month billed annually, without additional charges for onboarding clients or team members.

3. Can I use Saleshandy or Smartlead.ai to manage multiple email accounts and team members?

Yes, both tools allow managing multiple email accounts and team members, but Saleshandy offers unlimited accounts and team management without extra fees, unlike Smartlead.ai.