Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Looking for a new CRM? Choosing the right tool that can align with your existing tech stack can be challenging. Instantly and Nimble are two well known options, each offering distinct features tailored to different business needs. Instantly focuses on automation and email outreach, making it ideal for businesses aiming to enhance lead generation and email campaigns. On the other hand, Nimble excels in relationship management by integrating contact details and social engagement. In this blog post, we'll be comparing their key features, pricing, and benefits. We'll also introduce folk which happens to be a popular alternative.
What is Instantly?
Instantly is a new 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 Nimble?
Nimble CRM is a relationship-focused CRM designed to help businesses manage contacts, track interactions, and streamline communication. Nimble's platform can work from your Outlook or Gmail inbox, social and web.
Key features of Nimble
- Contact management: Nimble consolidates contact details from various sources, including email and social media, into unified profiles, making it easier to track communication.
- Social listening and engagement: The platform integrates with social media channels, enabling users to monitor conversations, engage with leads, and stay updated on contacts' social activity.
- Email tracking: Nimble provides email tracking tools to monitor when emails are opened and links are clicked, helping users gauge engagement with outreach efforts.
- Pipeline management: Users can manage sales pipelines with customizable deal stages, allowing teams to track opportunities and monitor deal progression.
- Task and activity management: Nimble includes task tracking and reminders, helping users stay organized with follow-ups, meetings, and to-do lists associated with contacts or deals.
Instantly vs. Nimble: 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 viewing lead statuses within email campaigns. This absence of a dedicated pipeline management view can make tracking sales progress challenging.
Nimble CRM offers a comprehensive pipeline dashboard for tracking sales opportunities. It features customizable deal stages, providing a visual overview of where deals stand within the sales process. Users can easily create and move deals through each stage, set expected close dates, and update deal values, enhancing the ability to manage sales activities effectively. This structured approach in Nimble allows for greater clarity and control over the sales pipeline, making it a more robust option for businesses seeking detailed sales management capabilities.
2. Ease of use
Instantly CRM is designed for simplicity, allowing users to quickly set up and manage their outreach campaigns with minimal effort. Nimble CRM, on the other hand, offers a user-friendly interface that integrates social media insights, making it easy for users to manage communications and relationships effectively.
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. Similarly, Nimble CRM’s contact enrichment feature automatically gathers additional information on contacts from various public sources, including social media profiles. By integrating with social networks, Nimble also enables users to view recent social activity, providing additional context for outreach and relationship management.
4. Outreach
Instantly provides a strong cold outreach solution, allowing users to connect unlimited email addresses, rotate them for optimal deliverability, and send multiple emails in campaigns. Nimble CRM’s outreach feature enables users to manage individual and group email communications, track engagement, and personalize messaging based on contact profiles.
5. Automation
Instantly CRM focuses on automating email outreach and follow-up processes, enabling users to send personalized bulk emails and schedule automatic follow-ups based on recipient behavior. Nimble CRM's automation features are basic, used mostly to streamline tasks like data enrichment and follow-up reminders.
6. Integration
Instantly CRM integrates with various third-party applications primarily through Zapier, enabling connections with tools for email marketing, lead management, and productivity, such as Google Workspace, Slack, and Salesforce. Nimble connects with productivity tools like Mailchimp, QuickBooks, and Zapier, enabling users to automate data flow and enhance functionality through its integrations.
7. Artificial Intelligence
Instantly CRM integrates AI to optimize email outreach by automating tasks such as email personalization, scheduling, and follow-up sequencing based on recipient engagement patterns. Nimble CRM incorporates AI-powered sales intelligence to enhance prospecting and lead enrichment, gathering detailed information from multiple sources.
Price and plans comparison
Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Instantly and Nimble.
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.
Nimble prices
Nimble provides both a monthly and annual subscription plan. With only one tier for each subscription type.
- Annual: $24.90/user/month.
- Monthly: $29.90/user/month.
Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Instantly and Nimble
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 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. Nimble: What's the verdict?
When it comes to Instantly and Nimble, it's clear that both CRMs cater to different business needs. Instantly excels in email outreach and automation, making it ideal for businesses focused on lead generation. Nimble, on the other hand, offers robust relationship management with social integration, perfect for companies emphasizing contact management. However, for those seeking a more customizable and user-friendly CRM solution, folk emerges as a compelling alternative. With its flexibility and ease of use, folk adapts to various business functions beyond sales, providing a comprehensive tool for relationship management. Try folk today, free
Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses