Zoho vs Instantly

When it comes to choosing the right tools for managing customer relationships and automating outreach, Zoho and Instantly offer two distinct solutions. Zoho CRM is a comprehensive platform that provides a wide range of features for sales, marketing, and customer support, making it a great choice for businesses of all sizes. Instantly, on the other hand, is designed specifically for automating cold email outreach and lead generation, helping businesses scale their outreach efforts quickly. In this blog, we’ll compare Zoho and Instantly, highlighting their key features and helping you determine which tool is the best fit for your business needs. Additionally, we'll present folk and unpack why it's a popular alternative.

What is Zoho?

Zoho is a CRM system with a strong sales focus. It has journey orchestration, sales process management, and workflow automation features. There's also something for marketing teams, including event management and customer segmentation.

Key features of Zoho:

• Sales automation: Automates sales tasks like lead management, deal tracking, and follow-up actions.
• Customizable dashboards and reports: Allows users to create and customize dashboards and reports for in-depth analytics.
• Multi-channel communication: Integrates with email, phone, social media, and live chat to manage customer interactions.
• Lead and contact management: Manages customer information, tracks interactions, and segments contacts for targeted campaigns.
• Workflow automation: Automates routine tasks and processes to improve efficiency and reduce manual effort.
• AI-powered sales assistant (Zia): Provides predictive analytics, task automation, and intelligent suggestions to enhance sales performance.
  

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.

Zoho vs. Instantly: 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

Zoho CRM's pipeline management feature provides a visual overview of the sales process, allowing users to track deals at various stages and manage the flow of opportunities effectively. Instantly doesn't have a clear kanban of all your deals. You can view your leads' status with the email campaigns, but there isn't a clear pipeline management view.

2. Ease of use

Zoho CRM offers a user-friendly interface with customizable dashboards, making it easy for teams to manage customer data and interactions efficiently. Instantly, on the other hand, focuses on simplicity in its email outreach tools, providing an intuitive platform for managing large-scale email campaigns with minimal complexity.

3. Contact enrichment

Zoho CRM's contact enrichment feature, powered by its AI assistant Zia, automatically updates and enriches records using data from various online sources. The feature can fill in missing details, such as email addresses, phone numbers, company information, and social media profiles. Instantly offers basic contact enrichment by pulling in additional data such as names and company details from email addresses, helping users build more complete contact profiles for their email outreach campaigns.

4. Outreach

Zoho CRM supports multichannel outreach, enabling businesses to connect with leads through email, social media, and other platforms. The platform automates workflows such as lead assignment and follow-up reminders, while AI-driven sentiment analysis helps prioritize customer responses for timely engagement. Instantly provides a strong cold outreach solution, allowing unlimited email connections and rotation for optimal deliverability, tailored for outreach at scale.

5. Automation

Zoho CRM provides comprehensive automation features that streamline tasks like sending emails, updating fields, and triggering alerts through workflow automation. It includes Blueprint for standardizing sales processes, Macros for automating repetitive tasks in bulk, and Zia AI for predictive automation. Instantly CRM focuses on automating email outreach and follow-up processes, enabling personalized bulk emails and automatic follow-ups based on recipient behavior.

6. Integration

Zoho integrates with a wide range of third-party applications, including Google Workspace, Microsoft Office, and QuickBooks, enhancing its functionality. Instantly CRM integrates with various third-party applications primarily through Zapier, enabling connections with tools like Google Workspace, Slack, and Salesforce, available from their Hypergrowth plan.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Zoho CRM integrates AI through its assistant, Zia, enhancing productivity with tasks like data entry, lead prediction, and workflow recommendations. Zia offers predictive analytics for sales forecasting. Instantly CRM uses AI to optimize email outreach by automating tasks such as personalization, scheduling, and follow-up sequencing, adjusting campaigns dynamically for better results.

Price and plans comparison

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

Zoho prices

Zoho offers a free plan limited to three users suitable for small businesses. After that, an annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $20 per user, per month.
• Professional: $35 per user, per month.
• Enterprise: $50 per user, per month.

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.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Zoho and Instantly

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.

Key features

• 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.
• Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile and assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow up even if it is six months down the line.

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.

Zoho vs. Instantly: What's the verdict?

Both Zoho and Instantly offer robust CRM solutions tailored to different business needs. Zoho excels with its comprehensive suite of sales, marketing, and customer management tools, making it ideal for businesses seeking an all-in-one platform. Instantly, on the other hand, focuses on email outreach and automation, perfect for teams prioritizing lead generation and email campaigns. 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