Instantly vs Brevo

Looking for a new CRM? Instantly and Brevo are two popular platforms designed to enhance outreach and customer engagement. Instantly focuses on cold email automation, making it a solid choice for businesses that prioritize lead generation through email campaigns. Brevo, on the other hand, provides a broader range of tools, including email marketing, SMS, and CRM capabilities, aimed at supporting multi-channel engagement and customer relationship management. In this blog post, we will examine key features, ease of use, pricing, and more. But, if you’re looking for a well-rounded solution that blends user-friendly features with enhanced contact management, folk might just be the better alternative.

What is Instantly?

Instantly focuses on automation and email outreach, helping teams send high-volume personalized emails and track responses. Instantly CRM is geared more toward businesses looking to maximize lead generation and email outreach campaigns, often used by outbound sales teams and marketers.

Key features of Instantly

• Email outreach automation: One of Instantly’s standout features is the ability to automate and send thousands of personalized cold emails at scale.
• Advanced email warm-up: Instantly ensures that your emails land in inboxes rather than spam by providing email warming and reputation management tools.
• AI-based insights: Use AI-powered analytics to gain insights into the success of your outreach and optimize future campaigns.
• Multi-account management: Run multiple email accounts and campaigns seamlessly from one dashboard.
• Performance tracking: Track open rates, click rates, and other key metrics to measure campaign performance in real time.
• Integrations: Instantly CRM integrates with tools like Zapier, Google Sheets, and other productivity apps to help streamline workflows.

What is Brevo?

Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing platform tailored for small to mid-sized businesses. Brevo offers a wide range of tools, including email and SMS marketing, chat, CRM, and marketing automation to help businesses effectively engage with their audience across multiple channels.

Key features of Brevo

• Marketing platform: Provides tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns, as well as marketing automation to improve multi-channel campaign engagement and streamline marketing efforts.
• Sales platform: Helps manage pipelines and track sales activities with tools like automated deal tracking, meeting scheduling, and call recording, making it easier for teams to follow leads and close deals.
• Conversations platform: Allows businesses to offer customer support through live chat, a shared inbox, and multi-channel communication solutions, ensuring seamless customer interaction.
• Customer data platform: Enables businesses to unify, manage, and analyze customer data across platforms with a multi-table data model, sourcing library, and customer analytics, improving data-driven decisions.
• Messaging API: Provides APIs for sending emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages, with features for transactional emails, inbound parsing, and integrations with other applications for customized communication.

Instantly vs. Brevo: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of two CRM software solutions and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, and contact management.

1. Sales pipeline management

Instantly lacks a clear kanban view of all your deals, focusing instead on lead status through email campaigns without a comprehensive pipeline management view. In contrast, Brevo's Pipeline feature is designed to manage the sales process effectively by offering custom deal pipelines. This allows teams to track deals across various stages and organize tasks for follow-ups and meetings. Brevo enables users to customize deal stages to match their sales cycle and automate repetitive tasks.

2. Ease of use

Instantly CRM is designed for straightforward navigation, prioritizing user-friendly interfaces that streamline processes. Brevo offers a more comprehensive suite, which may require a steeper learning curve but provides robust tools for those familiar with CRM systems.

3. Contact enrichment

Instantly CRM offers contact enrichment features by leveraging a large database of verified contact information. The platform can automatically enhance contact records by adding details such as company names, job titles, and more. Brevo includes contact enrichment capabilities as part of its Customer Data Platform. This feature allows businesses to unify, manage, and sync customer data, making it easier to create a more complete customer profile.

4. Outreach

Instantly provides a strong cold outreach solution, allowing unlimited email connections and rotations to ensure deliverability, ideal for large-scale campaigns. Brevo focuses on multi-channel outreach via email, SMS, and WhatsApp, with automation features to optimize timing and engagement based on customer behavior.

5. Automation

Instantly CRM automates email outreach and follow-ups, personalizing bulk emails and adjusting campaigns based on engagement metrics. Brevo offers extensive automation across email, SMS, and WhatsApp, using AI to enhance personalization and streamline sales processes with reminders and follow-up tasks.

6. Integration

Instantly CRM integrates with third-party apps via Zapier, connecting with tools like Google Workspace, Slack, and Salesforce, available from their Hypergrowth plan.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Instantly CRM uses AI to optimize email outreach through automation of personalization, scheduling, and follow-ups based on engagement patterns. Brevo's AI enhances email marketing by personalizing content to boost engagement.

Price and plans comparison

Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Instantly and Brevo .

Instantly prices

Instantly offers a few types of plans depending on whether or not you're after its CRM product, leads generator, or outreach campaign product. Their CRM price plan comes as either a monthly or annual subscription. Their yearly subscription plan is as follows.

• Growth CRM: Starts from $37.90 per user, per month.
• Hyper CRM: Starts from $77.60 per user, per month.

Brevo  prices

Brevo has a limited free version that gives you access to 300 emails. After that, the price plans provide you with the number of emails you can send per month. As well as other features. You then also have the option of customizing your plan, so that it can be based on the number of emails you send a month. And, the number of contacts.  The following is an overview of their annual plan.

• Starter: Starting from $8.08/month.
• Business: Starting from $16.17/month.
• Enterprise: Undisclosed.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Instantly and Brevo

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. A multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system. folk can support multiple business functions including sales, marketing, recruitment, investment relations and more. What's more, you can use folk as a solopreneur, small to mid-sized team and large enterprise thanks to its ability to scale with you.

Key features

• Contact management: Bring all your contacts into one place seamlessly, from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram and X to multiple inboxes including Gmail and Outlook.
• Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile in folk, and access them on the go. And assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow-up.
• Sales pipeline dashboard: Manage your entire sales cycle and leads with a highly customizable sales pipeline dashboard that can be used in Kanban-board view or listicle.
• Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
• Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk’s Google Chrome extension.
• Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
• Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
• Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don’t reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.

Price and plans

folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $20 per user, per month.
• Premium: $40 per user, per month.
• Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.

Instantly vs. Brevo: What's the verdict?

Between Instantly and Brevo, it's clear that Instantly excels in automation and email outreach, making it ideal for businesses focused on lead generation and sales. Brevo offers a robust suite for customer engagement with its comprehensive CRM features. However, for companies that need a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk provides a flexible alternative to these traditional CRM options, blending ease of use with customization. Try folk today, free