Smartlead vs Instantly: Which is Better Cold Email Software in 2024?

Sending cold emails is a proven way for businesses to find new prospects and turn them into paying customers.

However, because there are so many different cold email tools available in the market, it becomes difficult for businesses to identify the right software solution that fulfills their requirements.

While smartlead and Instantly are both very popular cold email software, you don’t necessarily have to pick one from just these two.

There is one more tool that has emerged as the best cold email software in 2024 – Saleshandy.

In this post, we have compared SmartLead and Instantly along with Saleshandy, so that you can make the right choice.

SmartLead vs Instantly – Table of Contents

• SmartLead vs Instantly vs Saleshandy: Comparison Chart
• SmartLead vs Instantly – A Detailed Comparison
  • Key Features
  • Benefits
  • Limitations
  • Pricing
  • Customer Ratings
• Smartlead vs Instantly: Making a Choice
• What is Saleshandy?
  • Unique Features of Saleshandy
  • Key Features of Saleshandy
  • Benefits of Saleshandy
  • Saleshandy Pricing
  • Customer Reviews
• Final Verdict!

SmartLead vs Instantly vs Saleshandy: Comparison Chart

SmartLead vs Instantly – A Detailed Comparison

If you’re struggling to make a choice between SmartLead vs Instantly, this detailed comparison should help you evaluate the key differences across key features, benefits, limitations, and pricing.

Key Features

Though both SmartLead and Instantly have their unique strengths, weighing their key features side-by-side can make your decision easier.

SmartLead.AI Features

• Automated Campaigns – You can automate your entire lead generation process, from campaign creation to managing follow-ups based on lead behavior. The platform supports the creation of subsequences that trigger based on specific actions or intentions of the leads.

• Advanced Personalization – SmartLead.ai supports advanced personalization through dynamic content insertion and Spintax. This allows you to create highly personalized and engaging emails at scale.

• Email Warm Up – SmartLead.ai has employed advanced AI technology to simulate natural conversations and interactions in emails, which helps in warming up email accounts. This feature is designed to improve and maintain your sender’s reputation and ensures your emails land in the primary inbox rather than the spam folder.

• Auto-Rotating Email Accounts – You can easily scale your cold email outreach efforts without worrying about daily limits or email reputation damage. The platform allows for the connection of unlimited mailboxes and utilizes auto-rotating email accounts to distribute messages. This helps in maintaining deliverability and avoiding the spam folder.

• Unified Inbox – SmartLead.ai offers a unified inbox that consolidates all deal-related communications in one place. This allows users to manage their entire revenue cycle from a single platform.

• Analytics and Reporting – SmartLead.ai comes with advanced analytics and reporting features using which, you can track the performance of your outreach efforts. Tracking your campaigns’ performance like this can help you refine your cold outreach strategies, and boost overall conversion rates.

Instantly.AI Features

• Automated and Personalized Email Campaigns – Instantly.ai offers a campaign builder and integrations that automate and personalize your email outreach. This allows for more targeted and effective communication with your prospects.

• Email Warm Up – Instantly.ai offers a large email warmup pool of over 200,000 real human accounts. This automated tool helps improve your email’s chance of landing in the inbox by keeping it out of spam and boosting your sending reputation.

• Email Validation – This feature confirms that the email addresses you’re sending emails to are real and active. This helps to make sure your emails don’t bounce back, which can damage your reputation as a sender.

• Unibox for Lead Management – With Unibox, you can manage all the emails you receive from your prospects in one place. This makes it easier to keep track of which leads are interested or not, forward emails, and respond. It’s designed to help you book more meetings and close more deals efficiently.

• Campaign Analytics – Instantly.ai provides detailed analytics so you can understand how well your email campaigns are performing. You can easily see which campaigns are doing well and which ones need improvement. This helps you to optimize your email outreach strategy for better results.

Benefits

SmartLead.AI Benefits

• It’s designed to be user-friendly and straightforward to use.
• It can handle sending a large number of emails for your outreach campaigns.
• You can create unlimited email accounts, allowing you to scale up your outreach efforts without worrying about hitting sending limits or damaging your reputation as a sender.
• It makes it easy for teams to collaborate, with shared access to campaigns, analytics, and lead data.
• It uses artificial intelligence to nurture leads, engage with chatbots, and provide predictive insights based on data.

Instantly.AI Benefits

• Simple and intuitive interface.
• Competitively priced plans compared to other email outreach tools.
• Allows managing multiple email accounts and warming them up efficiently for better deliverability.
• It gives you detailed analytics so you can see how well your email campaigns are doing.
• It has a large collection of pre-written email templates, strategies, and guides to help improve your cold email outreach efforts.

Limitations

SmartLead.AI Limitations

• Some features are more complex than necessary.
• Setting up integrations with other tools requires technical expertise.
• Requires careful list management to avoid spam filters.

Instantly.AI Limitations

• Instantly.ai’s agency portal is not reliable.
• Primarily uses Zapier for integrations.

Pricing

SmartLead.AI Pricing

• Basic Plan – $33 per month
• Popular Plan – $65 per month
• Pro Plan – $78 per month

Instantly.AI Pricing

• Growth Plan – $30 per month
• Hypergrowth Plan – $77.6 per month
• Light Speed Plan – $286.3 per month

Customer Ratings

SmartLead.AI Ratings

• G2 – 4.8⭐/5 based on 67 reviews
• Capterra – 5⭐/5 based on 1 review

Instantly.AI Ratings

• G2 – 4.9⭐/5 based on 1,600+ reviews
• Capterra – 3.5⭐/5 based on 4 reviews

Smartlead vs Instantly: Making a Choice

• SmartLead.AI – Ideal for large sales teams, complex workflows, and data-driven campaigns. Requires a bigger budget and technical expertise.

• Instantly.AI – Good option for small teams who want to send personalized emails. But unlike other tools, Instantly.AI doesn’t have as many advanced features & third-party CRM and sales tools integrations.

Ultimately, figuring out which cold email software is best for you entirely depends on your specific requirements, your budget, and the total size of your team.

In other words, as a business owner, it’s your job to identify which features are most important for your sales team and find the cold email tools that offer them.

That said, if you want an all-in-one solution that can handle all aspects of sending cold emails for outreach, Saleshandy is a better choice compared to both SmartLead and Instantly.

What is Saleshandy?

Saleshandy is the best cold email software to streamline and automate your outreach. It helps you launch highly targeted, personalized, and automated cold email campaigns to a large number of potential customers at once.

With Saleshandy, you can set up personalized sequences of emails that automatically get sent out, use merge tags to insert prospect details and Spintax to rephrase content slightly. Furthermore, you can even set up automated follow-up emails to get sent after your initial emails.

Unlike SmartLead and Instantly, Saleshandy has a vast database of 750+ million B2B contacts with verified emails and phone numbers from 60+ million company profiles. This makes Saleshandy an all-in-one platform for all your cold outreach needs.

Not only that but Saleshandy even comes with sender rotation, sequence score, unified inbox, and many more advanced features that further increase your chances of launching successful campaigns.

Unique Features of Saleshandy

• B2B Lead Finder – Saleshandy’s B2B lead finder lets you find relevant prospects for your business from over 750 million contacts around the globe. It provides a simple dashboard to search for company names and people.
  
  You just have to enter names to get their contact information like email and phone numbers. It also provides advanced filters to search by things like company, job title, and location. This helps you find more relevant leads to contact.

• Sender Rotation – Saleshandy lets you connect unlimited email accounts and automatically rotate email addresses using Sender Rotation. This helps to improve email deliverability and reach your prospects’ primary inboxes.

• Sequence Score – With Sequence Score, you can get a clear idea if your email sequences are optimized for best results. It evaluates your email setup, timing, and messaging. You get a score showing how good your sequence is. It also provides tips to improve your emails.

• Agency Portal – Saleshandy has a separate Agency Portal for lead generation agencies. It allows agencies to manage all their clients’ email outreach campaigns from one central place. With the Agency Portal, you can handle an unlimited number of clients and launch cold email campaigns on their behalf. This can really help boost growth for your agency business.

• Out-of-Office Detection – This feature automatically detects when someone has an “Out-of-Office” email autoresponder set up. When it spots one of those responses, it marks that lead as currently out of the office and pauses any scheduled email sequences to them. This prevents sending unnecessary emails to people who aren’t reading them right now. It ensures you only engage with prospects when the timing is right for them.

Key Features of Saleshandy

• Hyper-Personalization Features – Saleshandy lets you customize emails for each person you email using merge tags. You can include their name, company, and other details. This makes your emails feel more personal. With Spintax, you can create different versions of words and sentences in your emails. This means you don’t have to rewrite emails over and over. It allows you to scale your efforts quickly.

• Auto Follow-Up – The Auto Follow-Up feature is non-negotiable in cold email software because it helps to automate the entire follow-up email-sending process. This can save your sales team a huge amount of time and allow them to focus more on other important tasks.

• Unified Inbox – The Unified Inbox, as the name suggests, basically consolidates responses from prospects to all your secondary email addresses into one central inbox. Thanks to this, it becomes effortless for you and your team members to keep track of conversations by eliminating the need to switch between multiple inboxes.

• Email Ramp-Up – This is another incredibly vital feature because it helps to automatically ramp up the number of your outgoing emails slowly over time. When you send emails like this, there are far fewer chances of your emails landing in the spam folder and as a result, it helps to build a good sender’s reputation as well.

• A-Z Testing – The A-Z Testing feature lets you test up to 26 different variations (A, B, C…Z) of parts of your email like the subject line, preview text, or body content. When you send a campaign, it randomly sends out the different versions you created. This allows you to experiment to see what performs best.

• AI-Powered Email Assistant – This AI assistant provides suggestions as you write emails to help improve them. It offers tips on creating better subject lines, avoiding spam triggers, personalizing messages, and properly formatting links. It also alerts you if you accidentally include any spam-like text to prevent your emails from getting blocked.

• Advanced Team Management – This allows you to set up different roles and permission levels for your team members, like owner, manager, etc. It provides a dashboard to monitor team performance, which helps you effectively manage your team’s workflows.

• CRM Integrations – You can connect Saleshandy to your CRM platform like Zoho, HubSpot, or Pipedrive. This syncs up your customer information between the two tools. When you sync them, activities you do in Saleshandy will automatically transfer over to your CRM. This integration saves you time and keeps all your customer data seamless.

Benefits of Saleshandy

There are several advantages to using Saleshandy over SmartLead and Instantly.ai for cold email outreach.

Let’s check out:

• User-friendly Interface – Saleshandy’s UI is very user-friendly, intuitive, and straightforward to navigate.

• Advanced Analytics – Saleshandy has an in-depth analytics and reporting feature that gives you useful insights into metrics like email open rates, click rates, and overall campaign performance.

• Team Collaboration Features – Saleshandy offers a suite of advanced team collaboration features using which your sales team members can share email templates, documents, and much more with each other.

• Affordable Pricing – Compared to SmartLead and Instantly.ai, Saleshandy’s pricing plans offer good value by balancing robust features with affordability.

• Responsive Customer Support – Saleshandy is very popular among sales teams for its responsive and helpful customer support team who quickly address any issues or questions you have.

Saleshandy Pricing

Saleshandy’s pricing is divided into four parts:

Cold Emailing

• Outreach Starter – $25 per month
• Outreach Pro – $74 per month
• Outreach Scale – $149 per month
• Outreach Scale Plus – $219 per month

B2B Lead Finder (Only Email)

• Lead Starter – $39/Month (1,000 Credits)
• Lead Pro – $79/Month (2,500 Credits)
• Lead Scale – $159/Month (5,000 Credits)
• Lead Scale Plus – $249/Month (10,000 Credits)

B2B Lead Finder (Email + Phone Number)

• Lead Starter – $66/Month (1,000 Credits)
• Lead Pro – $144/Month (2,500 Credits)
• Lead Scale – $269/Month (5,000 Credits)
• Lead Scale Plus – $509/Month (10,000 Credits)

Customer Ratings

• G2 – 4.6⭐/5 based on 500+ reviews
• Capterra – 4.5⭐/5 based on 100+ reviews

Give Saleshandy a Try!

If you’ve read this far, you probably understand why using Saleshandy for cold outreach makes sense. So go ahead and try it out – Getting started takes just a few minutes.

Once you experience how it automates follow-ups, organizes leads, and provides real-time feedback to optimize emails, you’ll wonder why you didn’t try it earlier.

Even after the free trial ends, Saleshandy’s paid plans are very affordable compared to the time they save you. Many of our users find the tool pays for itself by helping them land more deals.

What are you waiting for?

Sign up for a free trial and see firsthand how it can take your outreach results to the next level!