| 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> | 6 <p>Lemlist is not your typical lead generation tool. Instead, it's core functionality is outbound sequencing and as part of that, there's a native prospecting tool built in. Though Lemlist's contact database is large (450M contacts) and the filters it provides are granular - we find it to be inaccurate and cumbersome to use. In many case, it failed to provide emails for our usual test searches. That being said, Lemlist's outbound functionality is well executed and feature rich.</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> | 3 <p>We find Lemlist's web app to be well laid out and intuitive to navigate. However, certain interfaces, such as the prospecting interface, are cumbersome to use. Additionally, list building interface was particularly buggy and confusing to use - often displaying error messages with no clear action for the user to resolve.</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>Lemlist's design aesthetic is modern, clean and easy on the eyes. However, we noticed some elements of the UI were often positioned poorly or cut off by other components - for example, the inability to close toast messages was particularly annoying on many occasions.</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> | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">While Lemlist offers the ability to create custom lists, it lacks some customisability facets that larger businesses may find helpful. For example the ability to manage and assign territories to specific sales agents or score leads.</span></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> | 8 <p>Lemlist 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.</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> | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Lemlist's primary means for customer support is via a live chat widget within their web app. It was quick and simple to contact a real support agent (often <5 mins) and when tested, we find them to be helpful and about to troubleshoot technical questions often in the first response.</span></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> | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Lemlist 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 Lemlist's database directly. However, we were disappointed to see a lack of integrations with external sales engagement platforms such as Salesloft or Outreach.</span></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> | 6 <p>Lemlist offers self-serve export functionality within its web app.</p><p>Additionally, Lemlist offers a well-documented API through which businesses are able to interact with their database directly.</p> |
