Our review of Instantly

Instantly is a versatile 3-in-1 software solution designed for lead generation (featuring a B2B database of 80 million contacts), cold email campaign management, and sales pipeline management (CRM).

The platform is tailored for handling high-volume email campaigns—ranging from several thousand to hundreds of thousands of emails per month—while maintaining excellent deliverability. The interface is clean and minimalist, reminiscent of Notion, but the tool’s functional depth leaves something to be desired. Despite its promise, we found Instantly somewhat underwhelming. For large-scale email outreach, a tool like Smartlead remains our top recommendation.

My Review of Instantly

Key Features of Instantly

Find New Prospects with the Lead Finder

Unlike tools such as Smartlead, which primarily focus on managing prospecting campaigns, Instantly combines cold email campaign management with access to a B2B database for finding new leads. The Instantly database, known as “Lead Finder,” boasts over 80 million B2B contacts.

However, in our tests, the results were mixed. While the database is undeniably vast, coverage for the French market is limited, with only 160,000 contacts available. On the other hand, if you’re prospecting internationally—particularly in the US—the database is much more comprehensive.

Lead Finder lets you search using a traditional filter system or by leveraging the AI Search bar, where you can enter queries in natural language. For example, typing “Sales managers in France” generates relevant results:

For traditional searches, Instantly provides a variety of filters:

• Job titles
• Sectors of activity
• Number of employees
• Revenue figures
• Domains

The interface is user-friendly and intuitive, albeit somewhat conventional.

Enhance Your CRM with Data Enrichment

Instantly also allows you to enrich your existing prospect lists. The enrichment process is straightforward:

• Import your list in CSV or Google Sheets format.
• Instantly fills in any missing information based on the data in its database.

The quality of data enrichment depends heavily on the strength of the Instantly database. If your prospecting efforts are focused on the French market, the results may be less satisfactory. However, for international campaigns, especially in English-speaking markets, the results are typically more robust.

Instantly organizes leads into lists. You can import these lists in CSV or Google Sheets format, or even manually paste addresses. Additionally, lists can be generated directly via the Lead Finder. Once a file is uploaded, Instantly offers matching rules configuration.

Lists are automatically cleaned upon import: duplicates are removed, and invalid email addresses are discarded.

One surprising limitation of Instantly is its inability to handle address or zip code fields. If your imported files include columns for addresses or postal codes, these will not be processed by the platform.

Manage Email Prospecting Campaigns

In addition to being a B2B database for lead generation, Instantly is primarily a cold email campaign manager. The campaign management tool is simple and easy to use, but its functionality remains fairly basic. Here’s how it works step by step:

• Create a campaign and give it a name.
• Select the list of leads (the recipients of the campaign).
• Draft your email or sequence of emails:
  • You can add an unlimited number of emails to your sequences.
  • Perform A/Z tests on email subject lines. This is one of our favorite features, as it allows you to test multiple subject lines (3, 4, 5, or more) simultaneously. Instantly also offers an AI-powered auto-optimizer that selects the best-performing subject line and applies it across your campaign once the test period ends.

• You can also insert personalization variables into your emails to tailor messages to each prospect:

• Once your emails are finalized, you can schedule the campaign and choose the sending address.

Instantly provides several advanced options to optimize your campaigns:

• Automatically stop sending emails to prospects who reply or send you a message.
• Track email opens.
• Improve deliverability by sending text-only emails (no HTML).
• Set the maximum number of emails sent per day.

These features are primarily designed to safeguard the reputation of your sending addresses and enhance the deliverability of your campaigns. They’re particularly critical when sending mass emails. Instantly also offers advanced personalization options, as illustrated below:

To sum up, while Instantly’s prospecting sequence editor is intuitive, it lacks advanced features, particularly for managing triggers. You can only specify the delay between sending email X and email Y, but there are no options to send follow-ups based on recipient behavior (e.g., whether they open or reply). For users accustomed to more robust marketing automation tools, this limitation may be frustrating.

That said, Instantly compensates with solid customization options and a focus on deliverability optimization. In many ways, it resembles Smartlead, another modern tool in the same category, though Smartlead offers a more comprehensive feature set overall.

Centralized Response Management with Unibox Messaging

Instantly’s Unibox serves as a centralized inbox for viewing and responding to emails received from prospects. While the functionality is fairly standard among cold email tools, it is efficient and simplifies managing interactions.

A standout feature is the ability to filter messages based on specific conditions, such as identifying contacts who opened multiple emails but didn’t reply. This is particularly useful for building lists based on behavioral criteria, allowing you to better target your sales efforts.

You can also set up notifications to your primary email account, ensuring you’re alerted whenever a prospect replies to a campaign:

Optimize Deliverability

One of the biggest challenges in email prospecting is avoiding spam filters and ensuring your emails reach prospects’ inboxes. This challenge has grown increasingly complex as ISPs and email providers enforce stricter standards. Instantly addresses this issue with a range of features specifically designed to optimize deliverability.

For starters, Instantly allows you to use as many email addresses as you want, spreading the sending load across multiple accounts. You can:

• Add your existing email addresses.
• Verify these accounts with Instantly (for Google Workspace addresses).
• Use pre-warmed email addresses provided by Instantly, which are prepared for sending campaigns.

For pre-warmed accounts, simply input a keyword (e.g., your company name), and Instantly will suggest related domains. While this feature is convenient, sending emails from domains unrelated to your business may harm your brand image.

To further enhance deliverability, Instantly includes:

• Box rotation to alternate sending addresses.
• A deliverability dashboard to monitor your performance and identify addresses needing additional warm-up.
• An automated warm-up system to optimize email sending limits and maintain a good sender reputation.

Analyze the Performance of Your Prospecting Efforts

Instantly includes a campaign performance reporting feature that tracks key metrics such as open rates, click rates, response rates, and opportunity conversion rates. These metrics allow you to assess the effectiveness of your prospecting campaigns in real time.

Reports can be filtered by several criteria to refine your analysis:

• Time range
• Campaign name
• Campaign status (active, paused, completed, etc.)
• Mailing addresses

In addition to campaign performance reports, Instantly provides a sales performance report with valuable insights into your team’s results and objectives:

While Instantly’s reporting tools are fairly basic compared to more advanced platforms, they cover the essentials and are easy to use. They should be sufficient for most small to medium-sized prospecting teams.

Integrations with Instantly

Instantly supports several native integrations, enabling seamless connection with a range of popular tools:

• CRM: Pipedrive, Salesforce, and HubSpot
• Collaboration: Slack
• Automation: Zapier
• AI: OpenAI
• Scheduling: Google Calendar

Additionally, Instantly provides an API for connecting with other tools, which is particularly useful if you’re using a CRM that isn’t natively supported (e.g., Microsoft Dynamics). The platform also supports webhooks, allowing you to set up notifications for third-party tools triggered by specific events such as email opens or link clicks.

Instantly Customer Support

The level of customer support you receive depends on your subscription plan. With the basic Growth plan, support is limited to chat. To access premium support, you’ll need the Hypergrowth plan, which costs $97 per month. Based on user feedback, customer support is highly appreciated for its responsiveness and effectiveness, although I haven’t personally tested it.

Instantly also offers a comprehensive resource center, albeit only available in English, and a private Facebook community. This community is fairly active and allows users to share tips and resolve issues collaboratively.

Instantly Customer Reviews

Instantly is highly rated by users on the G2 platform, with an average score of 4.8/5 based on 3,496 reviews. On Trustpilot, reviews are slightly more mixed, with an average rating of 4.1/5 from 393 reviews.

Here are the most common highlights from positive reviews:

• An intuitive and user-friendly interface that is quick to learn.
• Excellent email deliverability, thanks to preheating features for sending addresses.
• Highly responsive and efficient customer support.

However, some criticisms were noted:

• Email quotas can be restrictive for high-volume campaigns.
• Subscription prices are considered high, especially for advanced plans.

Instantly Pricing

Instantly offers three categories of pricing plans, tailored to different needs:

1. Cold Email Campaign Management Plans

• Growth Plan ($37/month): Includes unlimited sending addresses, warm-up features, and 1,000 leads with 5,000 emails per month.
• Hypergrowth Plan ($97/month): Offers 25,000 leads and 100,000 emails per month, along with priority support, team member access, and advanced features such as A/B testing, blacklists, and webhooks.
• Light Speed Plan ($358/month): Designed for high-volume campaigns, supporting up to 100,000 leads and 500,000 emails per month.

2. Email Campaigns + Lead Database Access Plans

• Growth Leads Plan ($47/month): Provides access to 1,000 leads per month.
• Supersonic Leads Plan ($97/month): Offers 4,500 leads per month.
• HyperLeads Plan ($197/month): Delivers 10,000 leads per month.
• Light Speed Plan ($492/month): Allows you to generate up to 25,000 leads per month.

3. Campaign + Database + CRM Plans

• Growth CRM ($47/month): Includes CRM features such as Master Unbox, lead sheets, and task management.
• Hyper CRM ($97/month): Adds advanced AI functionalities, SMS and phone channel integrations, visitor tracking, and in-depth reporting.

Like many prospecting platforms, Instantly offers a 20% discount for annual subscriptions. Additionally, all plans include a 14-day free trial (no credit card required), making it easy to test the platform before committing.