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In the competitive world of cold email outreach, selecting the right tool can make or break your campaign's success. Instantly.ai and Salesforge are two popular choices, but when it comes to reliability, deliverability, and ethical business practices, how do they stack up against each other? In this article, we’ll dive into a detailed comparison, highlighting both platforms' strengths and weaknesses, and exposing some of Instantly.ai's questionable practices as seen in user reviews. It's a must-read before you make a decision!
Instantly.ai is a cold email outreach platform designed to automate and streamline email sequences. It provides a variety of tools to help sales teams scale email campaigns and improve email deliverability. However, while it offers an array of features, users have reported concerns with lead quality, customer support, and certain practices that may affect deliverability.
Instantly.ai allows users to create and manage outbound campaigns at scale. The platform helps automate the sales process of sending personalized emails, follow-ups, and managing email sequences. This streamlining of outreach ensures sales teams can maintain consistent communication with leads without manual effort. Despite this, there have been complaints about the quality of leads generated and the effectiveness of certain features.
The Instantly Lead Finder tool is designed to help users discover new leads based on specific criteria. By leveraging this tool, sales teams can quickly build a list of prospects to target.
A key feature of Instantly.ai is its automated email warm-up system, which helps improve sender reputation by interacting with various email addresses. The goal is to ensure that emails land in the recipient’s inbox rather than the spam folder. However, many users have voiced concerns about the quality of domains used in the warm-up process, some of which are linked to sensitive or inappropriate content. This could negatively affect deliverability and damage a sender’s reputation.
Instantly.ai integrates with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to help manage leads and track interactions with prospects. By syncing data between the CRM and the cold email platform, sales teams can better organize their outreach efforts and maintain seamless communication.
Instantly.ai provides an email verification feature designed to check the validity of email addresses before sending out emails. This aims to reduce bounce rates and ensure higher email deliverability. However, many users have reported issues with inaccurate email verifications, with some receiving false positives or negatives.
Instantly.ai operates on a tiered pricing model that charges per workspace. While this may be affordable for smaller teams, it can quickly become expensive for larger teams or businesses that require multiple workspaces and multiple accounts.
Users have reported that the pricing structure lacks transparency and may include additional costs for certain features, like A/B testing.
Instantly pricing is divided in 3 categories of plans:
Now, this is something crucial to consider before choosing a cold email tool - what the reviews say. While there are positive reviews of Instantly.ai, there have been accusations that the company incentivizes users to leave false positive reviews in exchange for product credits:
Let's start by looking at reviews of a crucial feature of Instantly.ai - warm up. In the following YouTube video, the co-founder of the company admits at 15:07 in the video that they used an external API to build their warm up feature.
This implies that their warm up is not advanced, and is something anyone could put together, meaning that Google and Microsoft will be able to detect these warm up emails easily.
Additionally, it has been discovered that Instantly.ai's warm up pool contains very questionable domains related to sensitive topics:
Some users have reported their open rates being inflated in Instantly.ai, while other cold email tools showed more realistic results.
This is a problem for users, especially because open rates aren't a reliable metric to begin with but having it inaccurate could prevent them from making the right data-driven decisions about their Instantly campaigns.
Another recurring issue users raise when it comes to Instantly.ai is the fact that they can't transfer out domains purchased with Instantly's Done For You (DFY) service. Many users have reported, after purchasing sending domains inside Instantly, that they were told they can't transfer them out and, therefore, aren't really the domains' owners.
It was also found that their DFY service was infringing on Google's policies. Instantly had signed up to "Google Workspace for Education" (which is only available to education institutions like high schools and colleges) and was reselling multiple email accounts for $5/month under that scheme. The customers were not informed about this, until their email accounts got banned by Google. Here is the full user review detailing this situation.
User have also noticed missing replies that never reached their primary inboxes. This can potentially be a really big issue, especially if you relied only on Instantly's primary inbox. Within our own team, we've had experiences of missing replies with Instantly. It's worth noting that this issue may have been resolved overtime as the last reports related to this are from a couple months back.
Now let's go over an alternative to Instantly: Salesforge is an all-in-one cold email outreach platform designed to help sales teams optimize their email campaigns, increase deliverability, and streamline their outreach process. With a focus on advanced features like AI-powered email personalization, mailbox reputation management, and lead generation tools, Salesforge offers a comprehensive solution for businesses looking to automate optimization to scale and enhance their cold outreach efforts. The platform’s emphasis on data privacy, transparent pricing, and reliable support team sets it apart from competitors, making it a strong choice for teams that want to scale their outreach while maintaining control and ethical practices.
Salesforge provides a robust toolset for creating and managing cold email campaigns. Sales teams can easily set up automated email sequences, personalize messages, and schedule follow-ups to maintain consistent communication with prospects. The platform’s intuitive interface ensures that users can quickly design and execute campaigns without extensive technical knowledge. Additionally, the platform integrates with various CRMs to keep track of leads and ensure seamless data flow between systems, making outreach efforts more efficient.
Salesforge stands out with its AI-powered email personalization tools. These tools use data-driven insights to craft personalized messages that resonate with prospects. By analyzing recipient profiles and engagement patterns, Salesforge's AI ensures that each email feels uniquely tailored to the recipient, boosting response rates and engagement. This level of personalization, powered by AI, enables sales teams to scale outreach efforts without sacrificing relevance or quality, which is key for maintaining a human touch at scale.
Salesforge offers an automated email warm-up tool designed to improve deliverability. By gradually increasing email activity with verified and reputable domains, the tool ensures that your emails are more likely to land in your prospects’ inboxes rather than being filtered into spam folders. Unlike some competitors, Salesforge takes extra care in selecting clean, non-sensitive domains for its warm-up process, which reduces the risk of damaging your sender reputation and ensures more effective email delivery.
Salesforge’s email verification feature is designed to ensure that the email addresses you are targeting are valid and deliverable. This tool helps reduce bounce rates by identifying invalid email addresses and preventing outreach to inactive or non-existent accounts. With accurate and reliable verification, Salesforge helps optimize your email list and improve overall campaign effectiveness, ensuring that resources are spent on leads that are more likely to convert.
One of the standout features of Salesforge is Agent Frank, an AI-powered SDR designed to automate and optimize outreach. Agent Frank uses machine learning and natural language processing to analyze prospect data, craft personalized emails, and follow up with leads autonomously. This powerful AI assistant can handle everything from finding prospects and writing personalized messages to scheduling meetings and managing responses, allowing sales teams to focus on high-value tasks while Agent Frank handles the repetitive outreach work.
In comparison to Instantly, Salesforge offers a very straightforward pricing model with two plans:
Instantly is a decent tool for sending cold emails automatically, but is it really effective in filling your pipeline with warm leads?
Instantly misses out on effective deliverability and personalization. Not to mention some very concerning user reviews.
Here’s a quick recap of how Salesforge turns out to be a better alternative.
