Marketing and sales teams often use email automation platforms to streamline outreach and cold email campaigns.
Instantly and Lemlist are strong contenders in the sea of cold email tools. However, choosing Instantly vs Lemlist can be a make-or-break decision for your business growth.
Which one is the ideal choice for your requirements?
In this blog post, we'll evaluate Instantly vs Lemlist and explore their features, user ratings, use cases, integrations, customer support, pricing, and more.
We'll also touch upon Skua as another emerging player in the field and explain how it stacks up against Instantly and Lemlist.
So, let's dive in and find out which tool best suits your cold email outreach needs.
What is Instantly?

Image source: Breakcold
Instantly is an AI-powered cold email outreach software designed to streamline and automate email outreach campaigns. Its purpose is to help businesses, particularly lead generation agencies, appointment-setting agencies, and B2B lead generation firms create warm conversations that generate revenue.
Instantly's users range from SMEs seeking a more efficient way of reaching their target audience to larger enterprises looking for scalable solutions.
Learn more about Instantly alternatives.
What is Lemlist?

Image source: G2
Lemlist is an email automation and cold outreach tool. It allows users to create personalized cold email campaigns, set up automated sequences, use custom tracking domains, and integrate with other platforms easily.
Lemlist is a suitable solution for sales teams, startups, lead generation agencies, and entrepreneurs who aim to boost responses from potential clients.
Learn more about Lemlist alternatives.
Instantly vs Lemlist: How they compare and contrast
Now, let's explore the differences between Instantly and Lemlist to understand their strengths and weaknesses better.
Instantly vs Lemlist: Basic differences
The primary distinction between these two platforms lies in the features they offer.
Lemlist offers multi-channel prospecting to help you contact your leads on their preferred channels. It goes beyond traditional email outreach and allows you to leverage text, image and video variables to personalize your content and get more replies.
It also provides lemwarm, a paid feature, which gradually warms up your domain to increase the likelihood of successful email delivery and help you maintain a positive sender reputation.
In addition to emails, Lemlist also supports outreach through social media messages and phone calls, making it a more complex solution than Instantly.
In contrast, Instantly offers unlimited email accounts and unlimited email warmup without additional costs, no matter how many domains or emails you have to manage. It also provides a B2B lead database with over 80 million users you can contact.
Instantly also has a dynamic link tracking feature that allows you to create personalized links to boost CTR and monitor leads' engagement with your emails. It reduces the time spent manually adding links to each email, making outreach campaigns more feasible.
Instantly vs Lemlist: User rating
Comparing user ratings is crucial when choosing an email marketing tool.
Instantly scores 4.9 out of 5 stars on G2 based on 319 reviews. Users like its templates, pre-designed email sequences, detailed analytics, user interface, and prompt customer service.
Lemlist has 4.1 out of 5 stars on G2 based on 130 reviews. Users praise its email sequencing, easy CRM integration, customization options, simplicity and intuitiveness.
Instantly vs Lemlist: Key features
Lemlist offers features that can help streamline your lead generation process:
- LinkedIn outreach: Discover potential leads and incorporate them directly into your outreach campaigns to get multiple clients
- Lead enrichment: Automatically find and include additional contact information in your recipient lists
- Hyper-personalization: Customize your outreach based on prospect information and interests to maximize your results
- A/B testing: Evaluate different components of your campaigns to identify the most effective ones for driving conversions
- Lemwarm: Ensure your emails land in recipients' inboxes by gradually building up sender reputation, monitoring deliverability, and boosting email performance throughout the campaign.
- Email verification tool: Validate email addresses to reach out to prospects and improve your email reputation
- Dynamic variables: Include personalization in text, images, and videos to increase response rates
- Multi-channel prospecting: Engage leads on the channels they prefer most, increasing their overall engagement
- Automated cold email sequences: Streamline your follow-up process with personalized sequences of automated emails
- Unlimited email tracking: Monitor real-time metrics such as open, click-through, and response rates without limitations
On the other hand, Instantly provides the following features:
- Unlimited email sending accounts and warmup: Improve deliverability and avoid spam folder with a daily sending limit
- B2B lead database: Use AI-optimized workflows and target potential customers for your business
- Email validation and bulk domain testing: Clean your lists and check your domain to ensure your campaigns reach the intended audience
- Campaign builder: Create and customize email campaigns using dynamic variables, email sequences and campaign scheduling feature
- Inbox rotation: Automatically rotate email account to avoid spam filters and boost deliverability
- Unibox: Manage multiple email accounts and campaigns in one place
- Campaign analytics: Get detailed analytics on email campaign performance, including open rates, click-through rates, and conversions
- Email accelerator: Optimize email campaigns for faster delivery and improved performance
Therefore, if your primary concern is lead generation, personalization, and comprehensive tracking, Lemlist is the better choice. However, if you prioritize deliverability, campaign management, and email performance optimization, Instantly would be more suitable for your needs.
Instantly vs Lemlist: Integrations
One of the key aspects to consider when choosing a cold email outreach tool is its ability to integrate with other applications.
Based on our research, Instantly has fewer integrations than Lemlist, especially in the basic plan. It works with Pabbly, Slack, Zapier and Webhooks.
Lemlist covers a variety of other tools, including HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Dropcontact, Zerobounce, Aircall and many more.
Instantly vs Lemlist: Customer support
In essence, both platforms provide reliable customer service but in different ways.
Lemlist provides courses, playbooks, and templates and leans into peer-led problem-solving within its active community. You can also visit their help center or reach out via live chat.
Instantly prioritizes direct interaction between customers and company representatives through live chat, help desk and Facebook group.
Instantly vs Lemlist: Pricing
Your choice between these platforms will depend heavily on your needs and budget constraints.
Instantly provides a free trial and two pricing plans:
- Growth plan for $37/mo includes 1,000 active leads and 5,000 emails. However, this plan doesn't include premium support, advanced warmup capabilities, integrations or the ability to invite your team members.
- Hypergrowth provides premium support and all the features, 25,000 active leads and 100,000 emails for $97/mo.
You can save up to 20% if you decide to pay yearly.
Lemlist has a similar pricing model, offering a free trial and two paid plans:
- Email outreach for $59/seat/mo with 250 AI tokens and access to the AI add-on and lemwarm essential plan. However, this plan doesn't include LinkedIn outreach, cold calling, custom landing pages or videos, and the Lemlist Chrome extension.
- Sales engagement for $99/seat/mo with 500 AI tokens and access to the AI add-on. This plan includes all features.
If you require additional AI tokens, you may purchase them based on your needs using the pay-as-you-go model. There is also a special plan for agencies, but you need to join the waitlist for more details.
When choosing between Instantly and Lemlist, consider your specific needs, including lead and email volume, desired features, and budget.
Instantly’s Hypergrowth plan may be better if you prioritize advanced features, higher limits, and premium support.
On the other hand, if you primarily require a comprehensive email outreach solution and do not need additional features, Lemlist's Email Outreach plan offers a cost-effective option.
Still can't decide?
If you're having trouble deciding because Lemlist vs Instantly don't meet all your needs, consider Skua: our AI-powered cold email outreach platform for B2B lead generation.
Its automated account warm-up features help you boost deliverability rates while creating meaningful conversations resulting in revenue-generating opportunities.
With Skua, you get all essential elements from Lemlist and Instantly, making it worth considering as an alternative solution.
All you need to do is start a free trial to access our platform.
Let’s further explain what Skua is and how it works.
What is Skua?

Skua is a cold email outreach platform that delivers personalized email campaigns at scale. It is a valuable tool for lead generation agencies, appointment-setting agencies, B2B lead generation companies, and SMEs.
With Skua, you can streamline your outreach process and ensure high delivery rates. It lets you focus on what matters – connecting with your target audience and converting leads into customers.
Why choose Skua

Skua stands out with its innovative AI-powered features. One such feature is its ability to optimize email-sending patterns based on customer behavior and preferences for maximum opens and replies.
It enhances the effectiveness of your email outreach campaigns, leading to improved engagement and better performance, ultimately driving better results and conversions.
What are Skua’s key features?
Skua offers a range of features that can greatly enhance your cold email outreach efforts. Let's discuss the most important ones.
Improved email deliverability
With a single subscription to Skua, you can connect unlimited email accounts to our platform. It lets you send thousands of emails daily without affecting your sender's reputation. As a result, your emails will reach your recipients' inboxes instead of being flagged as spam, increasing the likelihood of engagement with your audience.
Gradual email warmup

Skipping the warmup process, for example, using bulk email software, can lead to email deliverability issues. It results in communication barriers with potential clients and detrimental effects on outreach efforts.
Skua offers a more effective approach. It gradually increases email sending volume, which helps you establish a positive sender reputation with email providers.
As a result, Skua ensures better email delivery rates and enhances the overall success of your outreach campaigns, improving your chances of reaching your target audience and engaging with potential clients.
Effective cold email campaigns

Skua allows you to personalize messages for each recipient and adjust various email components such as headings, body text, and calls to action, making your communication more relevant and meaningful.
This personal touch can lead to more leads showing interest and stronger connections with potential customers. As a result, you'll likely see a positive impact on the outcome of your outreach campaigns.
Removing duplicate emails

Skua's feature to identify and remove duplicate emails helps you create reliable recipient lists. It streamlines your outreach process, allowing you to focus on engaging with genuine prospects and achieving better campaign results.
Strategic email scheduling

With Skua, you can schedule your email messages to reach different locations, time zones, and markets even when you're not in the office. It ensures that your emails are sent at the optimal day and time for your audience when they are most alert and interested in your offer.
Inbox rotation and unified inbox management

With Skua, you no longer need to handle separate campaigns for each sending account. Instead, you can combine all your accounts into one campaign, allowing for optimized email distribution.
Skua will automatically rotate between these accounts while sending emails, giving your campaign a more organic and natural feel.
This approach not only prevents your messages from being flagged as spam but also enhances deliverability and boosts the effectiveness of your outreach.
Skua also facilitates efficient communication management by centralizing all your conversations in one place. You can label your leads and easily search for messages by lead name, simplifying interaction tracking.
This centralized system ensures optimal lead management and provides a comprehensive overview of your results.
A/Z Testing
With Skua, you can maximize outreach success with diverse email content. You can craft multiple versions of subject lines, body copy, and calls to action.
Simplified CRM
Skua allows you to manage leads, appointments, business opportunities, and sales outcomes in one place. You can centralize all data, streamlining your operations for seamless tracking and better organization.
Spintax
Spintax is a feature that improves email deliverability by allowing you to create diverse content for multiple recipients.
You can include variations of words, sentences, or phrases within a single email template. When you send the email, Skua randomly selects different combinations of these variations for each lead.
This randomization makes each email appear unique, which helps you avoid spam filters that might flag repetitive or identical content.
Insightful analytics and detailed reports

You can easily track the performance of your outreach campaigns with Skua and gain valuable insights into the number of leads, open, click, and response rates.
AI-generated content
Skua helps you craft persuasive email copy that resonates with your audience. It also allows you to create and automate the entire campaign sequence, ensuring consistent and timely communication.
What's best, the AI system helps you auto-classify responses, efficiently manage incoming replies, and identify high-value leads based on their interactions.
It leads to a more convincing outreach strategy, increasing your chances of converting leads into customers and achieving your goals.
Sign up for Skua today and connect with your audience like never before.
What integrations does Skua support?

You can connect Skua with popular CRM platforms like HubSpot, Pipedrive, HighLevel, or Hyperise for image or video personalization.
You can also integrate your Gmail account, Google Workplace, and Microsoft accounts or add other email providers to streamline your cold outreach.
With Skua, you can also use Webhooks to optimize your efforts through various integration possibilities.
How does Skua compare to Instantly and Lemlist?
Let's briefly review and compare the most important features of these tools now that we've covered all the essential information.
Instantly vs Lemlist: Final words

Instantly and Lemlist offer valuable features for email marketing and lead generation. Lemlist excels in personalized outreach, lead enrichment, and A/B testing while Instantly focuses on email deliverability, campaign management, and analytics.
However, if you're looking for an AI-powered comprehensive solution combining the best of both worlds, Skua is a superior choice at affordable pricing.
Skua offers powerful features encompassing lead generation, personalized outreach, campaign management, and email performance optimization. It provides advanced functionalities such as unlimited email accounts and warmups for improved deliverability.
With Skua, you can effortlessly streamline your cold email outreach efforts and achieve better results.
Sign up for Skua today and experience the power of an all-in-one solution.
FAQs about Lemlist vs Instantly
Let's share answers to commonly asked questions about Lemlist vs Instantly.
Lemlist vs Instantly: Which is better for cold email campaigns?
Lemlist stands out for lead generation, personalized outreach, and A/B testing. With LinkedIn Sales Navigator scraping, lead enrichment, and hyper-personalization capabilities, Lemlist allows you to find potential leads, enhance your recipient list, and customize your outreach for maximum impact.
It also provides automated cold email sequences to streamline your follow-up process. If you focus on creating targeted and highly personalized cold email campaigns, Lemlist is a strong contender.
Lemlist vs Instantly: Which keeps your emails out of the spam folder?
Lemlist offers Lemwarm, a feature that gradually builds up your sender reputation, monitors deliverability, and boosts email performance throughout your campaign. It can help ensure that your emails land in recipients' inboxes instead of getting flagged as spam.
On the other hand, Instantly provides features like unlimited email accounts, warmup, and inbox rotation to improve deliverability and avoid spam filters.
By rotating email accounts and optimizing campaigns for faster delivery, Instantly aims to maximize the chances of your emails reaching the intended audience.
Lemlist vs Instantly: Which one provides unlimited email-sending accounts?
Instantly offers unlimited email accounts from multiple domains, allowing you to scale your email campaigns without restrictions.
This feature can be handy if you have multiple campaigns running simultaneously or want to target different audience segments with separate email accounts.
You have the flexibility and capacity to manage and execute large-scale email campaigns effectively.