| Functionality | 8 <p>As a lead generation platform, Instantly is rounded and covers a lot of adjacent sectors beyond just lead generation. It covers the basics relatively well - including a large contact database and granular prospecting filters.</p><p>Additionally, its adjacent functionalities are also well executed such as its native email engagement/warm up features and its CRM toolkit. On occasion we noticed some missing features that are present in more focused competitors, for example, company profile pages are omitted entirely and features for larger enterprises are light (such as the ability to manage/assign territories to specific sales agents).</p> | 3 <p>At the core of it LeadFuze is simply a contacts database with standard filtering options based on location, company size and role. They have an AI powered sales assistant which allows you to add a certain amount of leads to your list on a daily basis but apart from this there's not much more which is exceptional about the tool overall.</p><p>You can't even natively send email sequences, you'd need to integrate with a third party and there aren't many buyer signal metrics.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Instantly's web app is intuitive and easy to navigate. Additionally, its onboarding was simple and not overwhelming. It's core prospecting interfaces are relatively familiar amongst competitors making it easy to pick up. It would take an average SMB employee less than 30 minutes to master its use.</span></p> | 6 <p>Since it's quite a simple tool, the interface is intuitive and all the features/filtering options are visible and easy to find. The onboarding is not overwhelming and would take a user around 30 minutes to get familiar with the setup.</p> |
| Look and feel | 7 <p>Instantly's design aesthetic is modern and clean. Unlike many competitors, we found most pages to be well laid out and not overflowing with information. When tested, we find its page load times to be fast (often <1s) and search times to be fast as well.</p> | 4 <p>Has a minimalistic design and is pretty neatly laid out. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">However, the setup itself is a bit too simplistic as compared to other tools and could do with a more enriching user experience. </span></p> |
| Customisability | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Instantly offers a number of channels for customisation, including basic ways such as creating custom campaigns (lists), custom searches or adding custom fields to prospects. There are also some deeper levels which you can customise your experience such as by connecting to OpenAI via API and creating custom prompts to do small tasks such as cleaning company names or guessing company pain points. </span></p> | 2 <p>It allows filtering through advanced search criteria allowing you to input keywords but apart from that you can't customise anything else like adding custom fields to contacts or sharing lists.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 7 <p>Instantly offers a simple, self-serve free trial for their platform. 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. However, when choosing a paid plan, their pricing model is very complex with varied plans depending on if you need standalone lead generation or need some outbound sequencing functionality too.</p> | 5 <p>LeadFuze offers a self-serve free trial for their platform. When tested, we found the initial setup to be more complex than needed (taking >10 mins). However, the lack of any native email sequencing functionality means it doesn't take long to get the most out of the platform despite the initial friction.</p> |
| Customer Support | 5 <p>You can contact Instantly's support agents via a live chat widget within their web app. When tested, we find it relatively easy to contact a real agent (<30 minutes). However, we find agents to be relatively unhelpful at times, often referring to unhelpful help centre documents instead of answering questions directly. Additionally, though Instantly does provide a help centre, its articles are often light on detail.</p> | 6 <p>There is an option which allows you to chat to the customer support team which may reply between 1-3 hours and has a pretty extensive knowledge base which you can search through and a sparsely populated user guide.</p> |
| Integratability | 4 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Instantly provides a number of integrations with popular CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot) and automation platforms like Zapier. Additionally, it offers an API through which users can interact with Instantly's database directly. However, we would like to see native integrations with sales engagement platforms such as Outreach and Salesloft as well as the provision of a Chrome extension to capture leads from sites such as LinkedIn.</span></p> | 6 <p>Integrates with a bunch of useful tools like Zapier, salesforce, HubSpot and mailshake but mostly relies on these integrations for providing additional functionality which is sometimes already included in a lead generation tool, like email sequencing and adding contacts from linkedin.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 6 <p>Instantly offers self-serve export functionality within its web app.</p><p>Additionally, Instantly offers an API through which businesses are able to interact with their database directly - however, documentation for this remains relatively light.</p> | 5 <p>You can export lead data in multiple formats and integrates with popular CRM tools which enable direct data transfer without manual exports. However there's a size limitation on lists which can be exported based on the plan that you're on and has a credit based system where each lead export consumes credits and the system may hit the maximum volume of data exports for users on low-tier plans quite quickly.</p> |
