Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Choosing the right CRM for your business can be a daunting task with so many options available. Instantly and Pipeliner CRM are two platforms designed to support sales and lead management. Instantly focuses on cold email outreach and automation, making it ideal for businesses aiming to scale their prospecting efforts. Pipeliner CRM, on the other hand, offers a visually intuitive sales pipeline and in-depth analytics, catering to teams that prioritize detailed sales tracking and performance insights. In this blog post, we’ll compare their features, pricing, and usability to help you find the right fit. We'll also explore folk as a compelling alternative.
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 Pipeliner CRM?
Pipeliner is an AI-powered sales CRM designed for small, mid-sized, and enterprise organizations, focusing on simplicity and scalability. It offers a visual approach to sales management, allowing teams to track pipelines, forecast outcomes, and automate workflows.
Key features of Pipeliner CRM
- Sales force automation: Automates routine sales tasks, helping teams focus on selling while ensuring consistency across workflows.
- Key account management: Provides tools to manage and track relationships with high-value clients, ensuring personalized attention and strategy.
- Communications and activities tracking: Logs and organizes all interactions, calls, and emails, providing a centralized view of customer communication.
- Reporting engine: Offers customizable reports and dashboards to deliver insights into sales performance and team productivity.
- Process and workflow automation: Automates repetitive workflows, such as task assignments and approvals, to improve efficiency and reduce manual effort.
Instantly vs. Pipeliner CRM: Feature Comparison
Let's break down the key features of Instantly and Pipeliner CRM 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 within email campaigns, which may limit comprehensive pipeline management. Pipeliner CRM offers a visual interface for tracking sales opportunities through various stages. Its drag-and-drop functionality allows for easy movement of deals across stages, providing a robust overview of sales progress. Pipeliner also supports multiple pipelines to accommodate diverse sales workflows and integrates tools like automation and reporting for task management and deal prioritization.
2. Ease of use
Instantly CRM is designed for simplicity, offering an intuitive interface that allows users to quickly set up and manage outreach campaigns. Pipeliner CRM, while also user-friendly, provides a more structured approach with customizable dashboards and visual sales pipelines, which may require a learning curve for new users.
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. Pipeliner CRM offers a contact enrichment feature through its Auto Profiling integration, which automatically populates additional data for contacts and accounts. This feature only adds data if there is a high probability of accuracy and does not overwrite existing fields.
4. Outreach
Instantly provides a robust cold outreach solution, allowing users to connect unlimited email addresses and rotate them for optimal deliverability. It supports large-scale campaigns with access to detailed campaign statistics. Pipeliner CRM offers basic outreach through mass email, focusing on existing sales processes, with limited advanced campaign management.
5. Automation
Instantly CRM automates email outreach and follow-ups, personalizing bulk emails and scheduling based on recipient behavior. It adjusts campaigns automatically to optimize engagement. Pipeliner CRM streamlines sales tasks with workflow automation, including task assignments and deal updates, requiring add-ons for advanced setups.
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. Pipeliner CRM integrates with over 50 popular applications, including Google Suite, Microsoft Suite, and various marketing, email, and data synchronization tools, to streamline workflows and enhance productivity.
7. Artificial Intelligence
Instantly CRM uses AI to enhance email outreach, automating personalization, scheduling, and follow-up sequencing based on engagement patterns. Pipeliner CRM's Voyager AI Gen offers data-driven sales insights, providing recommendations and forecasts to prioritize tasks, focusing on sales decision-making rather than broader AI capabilities.
Price and plans comparison
Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Instantly and Pipeliner CRM.
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.
Pipeliner CRM prices
A few versions of Pipeliner CRM is available depending on the price point you go for.
- Starter: Starts from $65/seat/month.
- Business: Starts from $85/seat/month.
- Enterprise: Starts from $115/seat/month.
- Unlimited: Starts from $150/seat/month.
Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Instantly and Pipeliner CRM
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 is highly customizable, allowing it to support multiple use-cases across sales, marketing, recruitment, and more. You can also use folk as a solopreneur, small to mid-size team, and large enterprise.
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. Pipeliner CRM: What's the verdict?
It's clear that Instantly and Pipeliner CRM offer features designed to address different business needs. Instantly specializes in email outreach and automation, which may appeal to outbound sales and marketing teams. Pipeliner CRM, with its focus on sales force automation and visual management, is better suited for organizations needing a more structured sales solution. For businesses seeking a simpler, more flexible approach to relationship management, folk offers an alternative that prioritizes ease of use and customization. Try folk today, free
Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses