| Functionality | 7 <p>FlashRev offers a fairly rounded set of functionality. On the engagement front, you get all the core channels you'd expect including email, SMS, LinkedIn and phone (the latter also comes with a lot of add ons including parallel dialling and live whisper coaching). Additionally, we were pleased to find a strong native contact database too. Our only critique is that the analytics suite is relatively light.</p> | 5 <p>Mailshake supports the core engagement channels you'd expect - email, phone, Linkedin. However, the functionality within each of these is quite light weight. Additionally, though it offers a native prospecting database, when tested we find it to be too low quality to be helpful.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">FlashRev's web app is intuitive and easy to navigate. Additionally, its onboarding was simple and not overwhelming. It's core sequence building and analytics pages are intuitive and easy to get acquainted with. It would take an average SMB employee less than 30 minutes to master its use.</span></p> | 5 <p>Mailshake is relatively simple to use. It's core sequence builder, though rigid, is fairly easy to understand. It's prospecting database, though non-traditional, is lightweight enough to pick up easily too. It would take an average SMB employee 1-2 hours to master its use.</p> |
| Look and feel | 5 <p>FlashRev's design is fairly middle-of-the-road. It won't win any awards for creativity or simplicity but it remains fairly intuitive to use across both its core prospecting and sequencing interfaces. When tested, pages were relatively fast to load too (around 1-2s).</p> | 2 <p>Mailshake feels extremely dated. Its interface is buggy and slow with some actions (e.g. loading prospects from external sources) taking minutes to complete. We missed the lack of a modern drag and drop sequence builder as well as a more traditional prospecting interface.</p> |
| Customisability | 6 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">FlashRev offers a number of channels for customisation, including basic ways such as creating custom searches in the prospecting database. There are also some deeper levels which you can customise your experience such as by providing their AI with ICPs and details about your value offering which can then be used to improve the output of AI generated emails and sequences.</span></p> | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Mailshake offers a handful of routes for customisation, including basic ways such as integrating your CRM. There are also some deeper levels which you can customise your experience such as by providing their AI with details about your value offering which can then be used to improve the output of AI generated emails and sequences.</span></p> |
| Ease of Setup | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">FlashRev offers a free trial for their platform (though it's unclear what plan you're on). When tested, we found the initial setup to be simple (taking <10 mins). Additionally, connecting email addresses to their outbound platform was relatively trivial too - with a one click connect feature for popular providers like Google and Outlook. However, when choosing a paid plan, their pricing model is somewhat confusing with it being unclear what features are provided on each plan.</span></p> | 3 <p>Mailshake does not offer a free trial. As such you'll need to pay to start using the tool. The onboarding process is rigid and forces you to connect emails and import prospects right off the bat. This would be fine if it weren't a slow and occasionally buggy process. Thankfully, you can one click to connect email accounts from common providers like Gmail and Outlook.</p> |
| Customer Support | 3 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">You can contact FlashRev's support via a live chat widget in their web app. When tested, the initial experience with the AI chatbot is poor, with it failing to answer many basic questions. Additionally, it proved difficult to connect with a real support agent (over 1 day). We also found their help centre docs to be somewhat overwhelming when searching for basic terms.</span></p> | 3 <p>Mailshake offers support via a chat widget within its web app. Unlike many apps, this is not a live chat widget, and it does not offer an AI bot either. As such you will have to wait a few hours at minimum to get a response. That being said, once a response was received, we found them to be helpful and detailed.</p> |
| Integratability | 3 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Though FlashRev does provide integrations with core CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce), automation platforms (Zapier) and email providers (Gmail, Outlook) - we would like to have seen native integrations with more established lead sources such as Apollo as well as an API.</span></p> | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Though Mailshake does provide integrations with core CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive), automation platforms (Zapier) and email providers (Gmail, Outlook) - we would like to have seen native integrations with more established lead sources such as Apollo.</span></p> |
| Ease of Migration | 4 <p>FlashRev offers self-serve export functionality to CSV for contact lists and other datapoints via their web app. They don't currently offer an API.</p> | 6 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Mailshake offers self-serve export functionality to CSV for contact lists and other datapoints via their web app. Additionally, it offers an API through which you can directly interact with the product programatically too. </span></p> |
