Instantly AI Review: The Best AI Email Outreach Tool

Whether you’re working on scaling your digital agency or looking to start one, you're going to have to send emails at some point. We've recognized the massive power cold emails have after landing our first client because of them a few years ago. After one worked, we never looked back. Growing an agency is really hard work. On top of the work you have to do to design websites, produce copy, and run social campaigns, you always have to focus on growing the business while you work inside the business.

After varying levels of success with email-sending tools, we stumbled upon Instantly. Instantly AI is an email outreach automation platform that allows you to scale and optimize your email campaigns. With the ability to send a massive amount of monthly emails with an unlimited number of email accounts, you finally have access to a tool that gives you complete control over the cold email process.

Instantly is the best cold email software our agency has used by far. Other tools limit you to a few accounts (or make you pay for each of them) and complicate the warming process, which can be incredibly limiting & tiresome. Other tools also don't include great analytics, bounce protection, or have a friendly user interface. The platform also includes native integrations with Zapier, HubSpot, Google Sheets, and Pipedrive CRM, plus API capabilities for custom workflows.

Today, Instantly serves over 300,000 users and 20,000+ businesses, with users collectively sending over 1 billion emails monthly through the platform.

With Instantly comes an unprecedented level of control over your outreach, enabling you to customize everything to maximize conversions. With their automatic warm-up feature, AI-driven analytics, and powerful A/Z testing capabilities (which now includes AI-powered Performance Analytics 2.0 with segmented reply tracking that detects positive, neutral, and negative intent), the hardest thing you'll have to do is actually create your campaigns! No more unnecessary stress. Upload your email lists, configure domains and messages, and let the software do the rest. Over the next few minutes, we'll give you our honest review of Instantly, highlighting both the good and bad, and showcase how it's helped us scale our agency faster in 3 weeks than in the previous 3 years.

Why Use Instantly?

There are so many email outreach tools I wouldn't even be able to list 10% of them if I tried. We used to use Lemlist but stopped as you were limited by one email per user (and had to pay monthly for each additional). The tool itself was ok, but we were trying to scale faster & actually liked keeping money in our bank account. There are other tools like MixMax and Reply.io but again, we don't like the limited mailbox capabilities coming with them.

The cold email automation market has exploded recently, now valued at $812 million and growing at 32% annually. About 60% of new Instantly users are agencies or consultants, which makes sense given how the platform's unlimited domain warm-up and volume-based pricing (rather than per-user fees) is built specifically for scaling.

We also bumped into the founders Reio Suun and Nils Schneider on Twitter (they launched the company in 2021 from Tallinn, Estonia) and we were quite surprised to see they were practically building the tool in public, asking the community for feedback, and highlighting client success stories. Starting at $47 a month, their growth plan is cheaper than many other alternatives on the market.

Their Hypergrowth plan allows you to send 200,000 monthly emails, warm up unlimited domains, A/Z test campaigns, and unlock priority support – truthfully this is everything you need to scale.

Instantly currently holds about 33% of the cold email tool market, ahead of Lemlist (26%), Smartlead.ai (18%), and Reply.io (15%), making it one of the top 3 outreach tools by web traffic and user adoption.

It's been about 5 months of using the tool now & after running our new campaign (with multiple domains sending multiple emails a day) we tripled our client count in 3 weeks. Of course this is based on your copy & email lists, but the power to send emails across multiple domains helped us 5-10x our sending volume. It worked so well that we recently purchased the yearly plan – we really don't see ourselves switching to any other software in the near future.

This isn't an overview of how to configure & scale email campaigns with Instantly, but we just wanted to be transparent with the success we've had. Of course email success is representative of the copy you send & people you send to, but splitting 8000 emails across 20+ domains has saved us hours of time & hundreds if not thousands of dollars in new domains & email accounts.

Instantly's Best Features

There are very little negatives we could say about Instantly. Besides a few UI/UX quirks, most of the issues we have are simply due to the novelty of the product. The platform now includes native integrations with Zapier, HubSpot, Google Sheets, and Pipedrive CRM, plus API capabilities for custom workflows. Props to the development team, it seems like they tried to take all the great features of current market email tools & combine them into a product without carrying over the negatives.

Recent updates have made the platform even stronger. The AI Smart Send feature (launched August 2025) optimizes send times to mimic human behavior, while the rebuilt AI Warm-Up engine (May 2025) helps recover from deliverability issues faster. The Unified Inbox View (April 2025) lets you manage replies from all connected accounts in one dashboard, and new Team Collaboration features make it perfect for agencies managing multiple clients.

Recent updates have made the platform even stronger. The AI Smart Send feature (launched August 2025) optimizes send times to mimic human behavior, while the rebuilt AI Warm-Up engine (May 2025) helps recover from deliverability issues faster. The Unified Inbox View (April 2025) lets you manage replies from all connected accounts in one dashboard, and new Team Collaboration features make it perfect for agencies managing multiple clients.

Instantly Pricing

Unfortunately, there's no longer a lifetime deal available, but pricing remains extremely competitive to industry competitors with their Growth plan starting at $47 & Hypergrowth at $97 a month. If you want to send more than 125,000 monthly emails, or upload more than 25,000 contacts you'd have to pay for the Light Speed plan, at $358 a month.

Lemlist is probably the biggest Instantly competitor, and its basic plan starts at $59 per user each month. Instantly is a lot more affordable, especially for more diversified email sending.

While it may lack some advanced features compared to other recruiting software, it offers the best value for its price, especially for small companies looking to scale their email outreach on a limited budget.

Who Is Instantly Made For?

B2B sales representatives - Instantly can assist sales representatives automate their cold email campaigns, enabling them to reach many potential customers in far less time.

Business & agency owners - By automating their cold email marketing, Instantly can help business owners save time and money. This can free up time for other crucial responsibilities like business management or concentrating on different marketing strategies.

Marketers - Marketing experts can utilize Instantly to effectively send cold email campaigns to a huge number of prospective customers. Ideally, marketers would be able to run more campaigns in the same amount of time using Instantly compared to other software

Online retailers - By reaching a larger number of potential customers in a shorter amount of time, Instantly can help increase the visibility and sales of an e-commerce business. Its clever warmup procedure can also help keep emails out of the spam folder, increasing the chances that they will be seen and acted upon by potential buyers.

Our Personal Thoughts

Great software doesn't always need to reinvent the wheel. Some of the best tools I've ever used simply enhance the experience and remove the negative qualities of the tools predecessor. It seems like that's the case with Instantly. Again, how creative does an email sending software actually need to be? It really doesn't.

Instantly has significantly expanded its analytics and A/B testing capabilities throughout 2025, adding AI-powered intent recognition and advanced segmentation that rivals or exceeds competitor offerings. While Instantly has room for minor UI improvements, the platform has matured significantly through 2025 with robust analytics, advanced A/Z testing, and extensive integrations.

Combining high deliverability rates (averaging 88-94% inbox placement depending on warm-up length and domain age) with optimized campaigns & master copy skills will ultimately lead to you 100x'ing your investment on the product. We rushed to purchase the yearly plan when we saw the Black Friday promotion last November and think that was one of our top investments of the year. It has a very fair monthly price for the features it offers and potential return it can provide to a company.

While some users previously expressed concerns about contact management, Instantly added dynamic lists and tagging support in mid-2024 that resolved most of these issues.

Instantly Vs Lemlist

The biggest competitor of Instantly is Lemlist. Lemlist provides many of the same features Instantly offers, but is a lot more costly to scale sending. We used Lemlist for about half a year before switching over to Instantly as it just wasn't sufficient enough. Their best feature was lemwarm, allowing us to warm up our domains to maximize the daily send rate. We switched over to send campaigns with them after having success with the warming process, but stopped after the software became buggy, inconvenient, and simply not scalable enough based on their pricing. I do miss their colorful UI features though!

It's worth noting that Lemlist added its own AI Warm-Up 2.0 in Q3 2025, narrowing the feature gap slightly, though Instantly still maintains better inbox rate stability according to independent deliverability tests (5-10% higher inbox rates per Gmass Labs Q2 2025 benchmarks).

Many users also report lemlist has a terrible support network, although we never ran into these issues when we used it. A lot of users claim they've disputed sketchy charges as it was hard to manage their account. Additionally, their support is aimed at giving customers refunds rather than improving and fixing what customers are upset about.

The founders of Instantly literally build & advise in public:

We put together a chart highlighting the biggest differences between Instantly and Lemlist. Both have their advantages and suit better audiences. They also have fairly different pricing structures.

Instantly currently holds about 33% of the cold email tool market, ahead of Lemlist (26%), Smartlead.ai (18%), and Reply.io (15%), making it one of the top 3 outreach tools by web traffic and user adoption.

It's worth noting that Lemlist added its own AI warm-up 2.0 in Q3 2025, narrowing the feature gap slightly, though Instantly still maintains better inbox rate stability according to independent deliverability tests (5-10% higher inbox rates per Gmass Labs Q2 2025 benchmarks).

While some users previously expressed concerns about contact management, Instantly added dynamic lists and tagging support in mid-2024 that resolved most of these issues.

Final Thoughts

As mentioned before, the actual quality of your cold emails come from within – your ability to craft and run proper campaigns. But why should you have to stress about deliverability, pricing, and connivence when you're trying to grow your business? You shouldn't.

Instantly has significantly expanded its analytics and A/B testing capabilities throughout 2025, adding AI-powered intent recognition and advanced segmentation that rivals or exceeds competitor offerings. While Instantly has room for minor UI improvements, the platform has matured significantly through 2025 with robust analytics, advanced A/Z testing, and extensive integrations. It remains the most cost-effective solution for businesses and agencies looking to scale their outreach without breaking the bank.

There is no doubting the sheer awesomeness of Instantly. With the assistance of its AI delivery optimizations, follow-ups, integrated reputation management, and Performance Analytics 2.0 (which now includes AI-powered segmented reply tracking that detects positive, neutral, and negative intent), in just a few hours you'll see an increase in the effectiveness of your campaigns & decrease in stress levels. Have you used Instantly before? What are your thoughts on it compared to other tools? Regardless of what you use, we hope this helped you, best of luck & happy emailing!