We assume you’re here because you are evaluating between Lemlist and Instantly.ai. Given the sheer number of options in this space, it’s often overwhelming to evaluate them quickly and effectively for your set of use cases.

When buying an email automation tool—you have to look at its price, ease of use, market positioning, product capabilities, scalability, and more.

With this comparison article we hope we’ll be able to help you pick the one that’s right for you.

How are Lemlist and Instantly.ai different from each other?

Lemlist: Value for money with a slight learning curve

Lemlist is a powerful email outreach tool that has gained immense recognition for its advanced personalization features. Lemlist enables you to send customized emails at scale, saving time and increasing the likelihood of engaging recipients. 

Unlike standard email marketing tools that rely heavily on generic templates, Lemlist allows users to include personalized images, videos, and dynamic content within their emails. This level of customization leads to higher engagement rates, as recipients feel they are receiving a message tailored specifically to them. 

The email automation platform also offers several other features, such as A/B testing, follow-up automation, and analytics, all of which can boost the effectiveness of your sales outreach campaigns.

If your primary focus is setting up outbound sequences, Lemlist offers a lot to explore and is worth the learning curve, according to its users. 🎯

Instantly.ai: The nimble AI copilot for B2B outreach

When compared to other best email automation tools, Instantly.ai stands out with its unique AI-powered features. Unlike Lemlist, Instantly.ai is a rising star in the world of automated email outreach. It is a tool built in public by the founders (Reio Suun and Nils Schneider) based on continuous feedback, and it's evident based on the way it's priced.

Instantly.ai helps you find leads, build lists, manage leads, warm up domains and mailboxes, and set up personalized email sequences with advanced customer segmentation, supported by AI-driven analytics. It also offers impressive automation capabilities, allowing you to schedule emails, auto-respond, and more. 

Its key selling point is its smart AI technology, which can craft compelling email copy and follow-ups, virtually negating the need for human input. This not only saves time but also ensures that the quality of your emails remains high, irrespective of the volume.

Unlike most email outreach tools, Instantly.ai doesn't constrain you with limited mailbox capabilities or limit you to emails per user (most other tools restrict you to one email per user and make you pay for every additional email, even for the same user).

If you're a small business wanting to immediately raise your bar on email outreach—Instantly.ai provides value for your money. 🎯

Choosing between Lemlist and Instantly.ai

When you are comparing two SaaS products, it’s best to evaluate them from three critical lenses. 

Key factors for evaluation: 

1. Ease of use 

The ease of using a sales engagement tool is an important factor to consider since it determines how well your sales and other teams can use the product and maximize its full range of functionalities. 

Questions to ask: 

• How easy or hard is it to set up and implement the software? 
• Do you need a dedicated person to administer the tool? 
• Can you trial the tool by yourself? 
• How complex is the user interface for you to start using the tool?

2. Product capabilities 

The next step in comparing Lemlist and Instantly.io is on the features front. To successfully evaluate a product, you should be able to understand what it can do for you. 

Questions to ask:

• How comprehensive is the software in terms of its feature offerings?
• Are its functionalities out-of-the-box or customizable? 
• What integrations does it support? 
• Does it support native integrations or via some third-party API connectors? 

3. Scalability 

When you're buying an email automation software, you're not just buying to solve your pressing needs today but also looking to use it for your future needs. 

Questions to ask: 

• How easy and affordable is it to add more users?
• Does it offer multi-channel features?
• How rich are its integration offerings?

4. Pricing 

Pricing is an important component for making a purchase decision since it directly maps to the ROI (return on investment). For growing teams, pricing also impacts product adoption and the scale at which it can solve their growing needs.

Questions to ask: 

• Does the app offer a free trial or a freemium subscription? 
• Is the pricing affordable, flexible, and fair for your business use cases?
• Does it have flexible monthly billing options? Does it force you to sign annual contracts?
• Are there any hidden costs or add-on service fees?

Lemlist vs Instantly.ai: side-by-side comparison 

The TL;DR version

1. Ease of use

Lemlist

Lemlist users highly rate the platform's user interface and ease of use. In G2, it scores 4.4 out of 5 from 203 reviews. 

Lemlist’s customers particularly admire the platform for being able to adapt to the different user intricacies, and the amount of personalization and customization levels they offer, compared to most other tools in the market.

The common standout aspect according to its customers is their outstanding support and service, adding tremendous value to their experience. 

Lemlist offers a variety of powerful templates and with its AI, it is easy to set up and get started. Its integration with Gmail is easy, spot on and given their knowledge hub, I am never stuck.
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- Anthony Suarez, Sales Development Representative, 506.ai

Instantly.ai

Instantly's users rate the platform even higher than Outreach—probably because the scope of the platform is much narrower in comparison. In G2, it scores 4.9 out of 5 from 1600 reviews. 

Instantly.ai brings AI-powered email outreach to your fingertips, making it easier to generate personalized and engaging emails at scale—from creating email templates to setting up automated sequences.

Instantly stands out for its user-friendly interface and rapid performance. The platform's best feature is its impressive speed in delivering real-time results, making it a top choice for quick and accurate information. The sleek design enhances the overall experience, ensuring easy navigation.
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- Karen Connell, Founder, The SMALLmighty

2. Product capabilities 

Lemlist 

Email automation

Lemlist shines when it comes to email personalization and automation. It offers dynamic placeholders, allowing you to add a personalized touch to your emails effortlessly. The level of customization is so high that you can even add personalized images or videos, potentially setting your emails apart from the rest. With its automation features, which can manage follow-ups, schedule emails, and manage email sequences, Lemlist can significantly streamline your email marketing efforts.

Integrations

If integrations are a critical part of your operations, Lemlist might be a more suitable choice. 

It provides extensive integrations with popular tools like Zapier, Pipedrive, Hubspot, and more. This means you can streamline your workflow by integrating your email marketing with CRM, social media, or other marketing tools. Plus, it offers an API for businesses that want to build a more customized setup.

Customer support and user experience

Customer support is highly praised in many Lemlist reviews. Their team is known for being responsive and helpful, ensuring any issues or queries are swiftly addressed. In addition, Lemlist's user-friendly interface makes it easy to navigate, even for beginners. 

The platform offers a comprehensive knowledge base with articles and tutorials on how to make the most of its features. However, some users have mentioned that the platform could be slightly overwhelming initially due to its extensive functionality.

Instantly.ai

Email automation

Instantly.ai is clearly not for every sales and revenue team. They integrate with very few CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. If you're using any third-party services and want to use Instantly as part of the workflow—you might have to rely on Zapier.

Its automation capabilities are impressive, but it goes one step further by providing AI-generated suggestions for scheduling emails based on the recipient's online behavior. This could potentially increase your email open rates. However, because AI controls much of the process, your personal touch might be limited.

But if you're a small-medium business and your primary use case is building a pipeline through email outreach—Instantly is brilliant for you!

Out of the box, they offer five features to help you in your cold email outreach:

• Lead Finder: It helps you find verified B2B prospects from a database of 160 million+ contacts filterable to specific job titles, industry, revenue, and more—without leaving the app. 
• Campaigns: The Lead Finder and Campaigns work in tandem. As the name suggests, Campaigns allow you to set up email campaigns for the leads and sequences you create. It's intuitive to set up advanced functions such as A/Z tests to auto-optimize, set limits to max new leads, set up CC and BCC to your emails, and more.

• Unibox and CRM: It's a centralized inbox where you can view and reply to all emails. Warm-up automation comes along with the Unibox, helping you ensure that the email addresses are warmed up, thus increasing your domain reputation so that the emails land in the inbox of your recipients.
• Tracking and Analytics: It helps you understand how your campaigns are performing and gives you insights into how your prospects interact with your emails. It captures critical metrics such as open rate, click rate, reply rate, and opportunities. 
• Lead Management: Manage all your leads from a centralized place. It helps you quickly move leads from lists to campaigns and vice versa.

Integrations

In comparison to Lemlist, Instantly.ai offers limited integrations. 

However, its focus is on building in-depth integrations with fewer tools, such as major CRMs, rather than providing a wide array of superficial connections. This approach might be more beneficial for businesses that want to build a deeper connection with a specific tool. However, if your workflow involves multiple tools, this could be a limitation.

Customer support and user experience

Instantly.ai also provides quality customer support, but differentiates itself with its single-point-of-contact approach. This means that each customer is assigned a dedicated support agent who handles their queries from the beginning to the end, ensuring a personalized and consistent experience.

However, as a relatively new platform, it lacks the extensive knowledge base that Lemlist offers. 

The user interface of Instantly.ai is modern and intuitive, but the heavy reliance on AI could be daunting for some users.

3. Scalability

When buying sales engagement software, you should consider how it can solve your future needs. The best software grows with your growing requirements. 

• For highly personalized campaigns with multiple integrations, Lemlist offers more options than Instantly.ai
• For high-volume outreach, budget-friendliness, and data-driven optimization, Instantly.ai shines better.

Some specific factors to consider:

• Team size and budget: Larger teams with higher budgets might find Lemlist's advanced features more valuable.
• Campaign complexity: If personalization and intricate follow-up sequences are crucial, Lemlist definitely wins.
• High-volume email sending: Instantly.ai's unlimited emails and warmup are better suited for sending thousands of emails per day.

Overall comparing Lemlist and Instantly.ai for scalability, Lemlist is clearly built for scale with more integrations, use cases and the sheer depth of knowledge base.

4. Pricing

Lemlist

Lemlist offers three pricing tiers, with the basic plan starting at $39 per month. This plan covers essential features like email automation, A/B testing, and basic analytics, making it suitable for freelancers or small businesses. 

The higher-tier plans, priced at $69 and $99 per month, include advanced features like priority support, API access, and custom domains, catering to larger businesses or marketing agencies.

Nevertheless, if you’re an early stage startup, you might find Lemlist's pricing to be somewhat steep, especially when compared to some competitors in the market.

Instantly.ai

Instantly.ai adopts a different pricing strategy and their pricing is much more simpler. Their Growth plan starts at $37 & Hypergrowth at $97/mo. While it's more affordable than Lemlist’s higher-tier plans, Instantly.ai does not offer a budget-friendly option for individuals or freelancers. 

The premium plan covers all of Instantly.ai's features, including AI email generation, customer segmentation, and advanced automation. 

If the cost is not a concern, this straightforward pricing model can be advantageous, as it eliminates the need to evaluate different plans and their features.

Limitations: What both Lemlist and Instantly.ai are missing

In a competitive market, personalization is key for successful outreach and both Lemlist and Instantly.ai understand this. They offer AI message personalization features, leveraging LinkedIn profiles to tailor messages. This is especially useful for scaling personalized communication which can lead to better engagement rates.

1. Both Lemlist and Instantly.ai use servers for mass emailing, resulting in higher spam detection

Unlike Plena which runs on your desktop, both Lemlist and Instantly.ai use servers for mass emailing. This can result in higher spam detection rates, lowering the chances of your email landing in the recipient's primary inbox. Therefore, while both the tools offer mass emailing, it comes with limitations.

2. Lack of depth in multi-channel outreach

While Lemlist offers multi-channel outreach, it is limited to email, LinkedIn and calls (given its integration with Aircall). Instantly.ai on the other hand is focused only on email outreach. You need a tool that is truly multichannel ranging from emails, social media, calls, and SMS – including the ability to leave voicemails as part of the campaign set up.

3. Lead is completely isolated from the rest of the efforts

With both Lemlist and Instantly.ai, the lead is completely isolated from the rest of the efforts such as Google Ads, Meta Ads, SMS texting, etc. That means the intent data is not deep and contextual enough to help you personalize your outreach based on the content consumed by your target list.

On that note, here’s a primer on how intent data is acquired that you might want to read:

How intent data is acquired

4. No option to automate voicemails as part of the sequence

Neither Lemlist nor Instantly.ai offers the option to leave recorded Voicemails as part of the campaign set up. This is where Plena makes a huge difference—as part of the sequence flow set up, you can automate and organize voicemails.

If voicemails are part of your outreach routine, you might need to consider giving Plena a spin.

5. No logical if-else construction to personalize based on engagement

Both Lemlist and Instantly.ai do not allow for logical if-else construction for your campaigns. For example, while you construct a sequence based on expected reactions from your prospects (like opening an email or a linkedin message), you should also have the option to nurture the sequence for situations where you might not get a response.

Because both these tools miss that aspect, it makes it hard to provide prospects a personalized buyer experience and targeted communication based on their engagement across the journey.

Final verdict

Both Lemlist and Instantly.ai offer robust email marketing solutions, but they cater to different user needs. However, there are our thoughts that'll help you choose what suits you best:

• If you value advanced personalization, extensive integration options, and excellent customer support, Lemlist might be the right choice for you. While there are many Lemlist alternatives, few offer the same level of detail and effectiveness in their features. 
• If you prefer an intuitive platform that leverages AI for email generation and automation, and prioritizes deep integrations with a few essential tools, Instantly.ai could be a better fit.
• If you’re looking for a truly end-to-end solution that offers you everything from lead building to truly multi-channel outreach with high degree personalization based on AI—we highly recommend you to sign up for Plena and give it a try.

In terms of the Lemlist vs Instantly.ai price comparison, both platforms offer value for money considering their features, with Lemlist having a more flexible pricing model.

Ultimately, the decision should be based on your specific requirements, budget, and comfort with the platform's interface and automation style. Both platforms offer free trials, so it would be worthwhile to test out both before making your final decision. 

Remember, the tool is just a means to an end - the success of your email marketing efforts will largely depend on your strategy, content, and understanding of your audience’s needs.