Instantly vs Freshsales

Instantly and Freshsales are two platforms designed to enhance customer outreach and sales workflows, each with a distinct focus. Instantly specializes in automating cold email campaigns and follow-ups, making it ideal for businesses focused on high-volume outbound marketing. Freshsales, on the other hand, integrates AI-driven insights, sales automation, and communication tools, offering a data-driven approach to managing customer relationships and sales pipelines. In this blog post, we’ll compare their key features to help you decide which platform aligns best with your needs—or if Folk might offer a more balanced alternative with user-friendly contact management and customization options.

What is Instantly?

Instantly is a newer player in the market that 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 Freshsales?

Freshsales is a CRM platform by Freshworks designed to help businesses streamline their sales processes with AI-powered tools and automation. It provides features like lead scoring, deal tracking, email and call management, and workflow automation to enhance efficiency and drive conversions. Freshsales also integrates communication and sales in one place, offering tools for personalized outreach and detailed insights to improve sales strategies.

Key features of Freshsales

• AI-powered insights: Freshsales leverages AI to provide recommendations, predict deal outcomes, and offer actionable insights to improve sales strategies.
• Lead scoring: Automatically prioritizes leads based on their engagement and likelihood to convert, helping sales teams focus on high-value opportunities.
• Deal tracking: Provides a visual sales pipeline to track deals through various stages and monitor progress in real time.
• Email and call management: Integrates email and phone communication, allowing users to manage interactions directly from the platform.
• Workflow automation: Automates repetitive tasks like sending follow-up emails or updating deal statuses, reducing manual work and improving efficiency.

Instantly vs. Freshsales: 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 for managing deals, focusing instead on lead status through email campaigns, which limits its pipeline management capabilities. On the other hand, Freshsales excels with its visual sales pipeline. It allows users to track deals in real-time across various stages with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. This feature provides a comprehensive overview of deal progress, supported by integrated tools like lead scoring and AI insights to prioritize tasks and predict outcomes. While Freshsales’ pipeline is streamlined for sales workflows, it may not be as flexible for teams needing broader project or task management. Ultimately, Freshsales offers a more robust pipeline management system, making it a better choice for sales-focused teams seeking detailed tracking and management tools.

2. Ease of use

Instantly CRM is designed with user-friendliness in mind, offering a straightforward interface that facilitates quick navigation and setup. Freshsales, on the other hand, provides a more robust platform with a slightly steeper learning curve, but it offers comprehensive features that cater to detailed sales processes.

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. Freshsales does not emphasize contact enrichment to the same extent.

4. Outreach

Instantly provides a strong cold outreach solution, allowing unlimited email connections and rotations for optimal deliverability. It supports campaign statistics and large-scale outreach. Freshsales includes tools for managing email, phone, and chat communications, focusing on sales engagement with features like call tracking and real-time chat, offering a centralized approach but less depth in marketing outreach.

5. Automation

Instantly CRM automates email outreach and follow-ups, adjusting campaigns based on recipient behavior to optimize engagement. Freshsales streamlines tasks like lead assignment and follow-up emails with workflow automation, requiring more setup time but enhancing efficiency in complex sales processes.

6. Integration

Instantly CRM integrates with various third-party applications primarily through Zapier, enabling connections with tools like Google Workspace, Slack, and Salesforce. Freshsales offers native integrations with a wide array of business tools, enhancing its utility across different workflows.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Instantly CRM uses AI to optimize email outreach, automating personalization and follow-up sequencing based on engagement patterns. Freshsales' Freddy AI provides predictive analytics and lead scoring, offering insights to prioritize opportunities and recommend follow-up actions, enhancing decision-making and efficiency.

Price and plans comparison

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

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.

Freshsales prices

Through Freshworks, Freshsales provides a few price plans including one for a Freshsales Suite. But the following overview focuses on Freshsales pricing.

• Growth: Starts from $9/user/month.
• Pro: Starts from $39/user/month.
• Enterprise: Starts from $59/user/month.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Instantly and Freshsales

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. There is a reason why folk is a multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system. You can use folk as a solopreneur, small to mid-size team, and large enterprise. folk can support multiple business functions including sales, marketing, recruitment, and more.

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. Freshsales: What's the verdict?

When comparing Instantly and Freshsales, it's clear how each CRM offers unique strengths tailored to different business needs. Instantly excels in email outreach automation, making it ideal for outbound sales teams, while Freshsales provides comprehensive CRM solutions with a focus on sales and customer engagement. However, for companies seeking a more personalized and flexible approach to relationship management, folk emerges as a compelling alternative. With its customizable features and ease of use, it blends the best of both worlds. Try folk today, free