Instantly vs Mailshake - Which Outreach Tool Is Right For You?

We send about 8,000 emails a month across 20+ domains at Gold Penguin, & we've been all-in on Instantly for close to four years now. Before that we ran Lemlist for about six months, & when we were first shopping for cold email software we also kicked the tires on Reply.io & MixMax. Mailshake gets brought up constantly in that same conversation — it's one of the older, more established names in this space, & a lot of solo founders swear by it because it's genuinely easy to pick up. So we re-verified Mailshake's current pricing straight off mailshake.com to see exactly how it stacks up against Instantly today, mailbox limits & all.

Here's the TLDR: if you're a solo founder, a small agency, or a rep who wants email sequences plus the occasional phone call or LinkedIn touch — all inside one simple tool — Mailshake is a legitimately good pick. If you're trying to scale sending volume (more domains, more inboxes, more emails going out the door) without your monthly bill scaling in lockstep with your headcount, Instantly is built for exactly that in a way Mailshake structurally isn't. The rest of this is us walking through why, so you can figure out which camp you're actually in.

What Each Tool Actually Is

Instantly launched in 2021 out of Tallinn, Estonia, founded by Reio Suun & Nils Schneider, who famously built a lot of it in public on Twitter. It's a cold email sending platform first — deliverability, automated warmup, unlimited inbox rotation — that's since bolted on a 450M+ contact B2B lead database & an AI reply agent that sorts responses by intent. The pitch: your bottleneck should be your copy & your lists, not how many mailboxes you're allowed to connect.

Mailshake is a different animal. It started as a "write an email, send it to a list" tool & has grown into a lightweight sales engagement platform — email sequences, a built-in phone dialer, & LinkedIn/social touches, all in one interface. It's priced per user, which is normal for sales tools built around reps, but it's the single biggest structural difference between these two products.

Pricing - The Real Difference

Here's what's actually on Mailshake's pricing page as of this writing. Starter is $29/mo monthly or $25/mo annually, & gets you 1 connected email account, unlimited uploaded contacts, & 50 free Data Finder credits — but sending is capped around 1,500 emails/month. Email Outreach ("most popular") runs $49/mo monthly or $45/mo annually, doubles you to 2 email accounts, & removes the sending cap. Sales Engagement — where things get interesting — is $99/mo monthly or $85/mo annually, gives you 10 email accounts, 2,500 Data Finder credits, & unlocks the power dialer (5 phone numbers, unlimited North American minutes) plus LinkedIn/social automation. There's also an Agency plan with unlimited email addresses that requires a sales call.

The catch: every one of those numbers is per user. Mailshake's own FAQ spells it out — billing is "based on how many users you purchase," & each user you pay for gets a set number of mail accounts for that tier. Add a second rep on Sales Engagement & you're not paying $99, you're paying $198. Totally standard for sales engagement software, but it means your mailbox count is tied to headcount, not sending strategy.

Instantly flips that. Growth is $47/mo (about $37.60/mo annually), Hypergrowth is $97/mo (25,000 contacts, 125,000 emails/mo), & Light Speed runs $358/mo for 500,000+ emails & a private deliverability network. But — & this is the part that matters — every Instantly plan, top to bottom, includes unlimited email accounts & unlimited warmup. You don't buy seats to add mailboxes; you just add domains. Full breakdown in our Instantly pricing guide.

Where Mailshake Wins

To be fair to Mailshake — & we want to be, because this only matters if we're straight with you — it does something Instantly doesn't even attempt: it puts email, phone calls, & LinkedIn touches in the same sequence builder. If you're a rep who wants to email someone Monday, call them Wednesday, & send a LinkedIn connection request Friday, all tracked on one timeline, Mailshake's Sales Engagement plan does that natively. Instantly is (deliberately) an email-sending tool — no dialer, no LinkedIn automation.

Mailshake is also just easy. That's not a backhanded compliment — it's the whole point of the product. New reps can get a sequence out the door same-day without a training doc, Data Finder credits are bundled into every plan instead of being a separate purchase, & the interface doesn't ask you to think about domains, DNS records, or warmup pools first. For a one-person shop sending a few hundred or low-thousand emails a month who also wants to pick up the phone once in a while, that simplicity is worth real money.

Where Instantly Wins

Our gripe with per-user pricing isn't theoretical — we lived it. What pushed us off Lemlist wasn't the product (we actually liked lemwarm & the colorful UI), it was that per-user & scaling costs kept climbing right alongside our sending volume. Mailshake has the same shape of problem. Want more mailboxes on Sales Engagement? You add a seat, at $99 (or $85) a pop, whether or not you actually need another human logged in.

Instantly's structure is the opposite bet: unlimited email accounts & unlimited warmup on every plan, including the cheapest one. Of course this is based on your copy & email lists, but the ability to spread sending across multiple domains — without paying per mailbox — is what let us 5-10x our sending volume without the bill following the same curve. We went from a handful of client accounts to tripling our client count in three weeks off our first big Instantly campaign back in 2022, & being able to just keep adding domains instead of seats was a big part of why that scaled cleanly. (Our biggest early gripe was actually contact management — dynamic lists & tagging fixed it, but it took a minute to get there. Full rundown in our Instantly review.)

Which One Is Right For You?

Pick Mailshake if you're a solo founder, a small team of two to five reps, or someone who wants phone calls & LinkedIn touches baked into the same tool as your email sequences. If your sending volume is modest — low thousands of emails a month — & you'd rather pay for a seat than manage a pile of domains & DNS records yourself, Mailshake's simplicity is a real advantage, not just a marketing line.

Pick Instantly if you're actually trying to scale cold email — meaning your growth plan involves more sending volume & more domains, not more people logged into a tool. Agencies, in-house teams running high-volume outbound, & anyone who's already felt the pinch of per-seat pricing (we have) will find Instantly's unlimited-mailboxes-on-every-plan structure is the one that doesn't punish you for growing.

Somewhere in between? You can run both: Instantly for the bulk of your sending, plus a lighter dialer setup for reps who need to pick up the phone. It doesn't have to be either/or. For a broader look, see our best cold email tools roundup & our Instantly alternatives breakdown.

Final Thoughts

Mailshake isn't a bad tool — it's just built for a different sender than we are. If your bottleneck is "I need one simple tool to run my whole outbound motion as a small team," it earns its price. If your bottleneck is "I need to send a lot of email without my bill scaling per person," that's exactly the problem Instantly was built to solve, & why we bought our first annual plan on a Black Friday deal & have renewed every year since. Regardless of what you use, we hope this helped you, best of luck & happy emailing!