Choosing between Lemlist and Instantly is like choosing between an SUV and a sports car for a cross-country trip. Both can do the job, but in a completely different way. Lemlist is built for email and LinkedIn outreach with high personalization. Instantly has campaign management features for high-volume email outreach.
In theory, both tools can help you reach cold audiences and preserve your sending reputation. However, they’re entirely different platforms. Today, we compare Instantly and Lemlist to help sales professionals choose the best option for their needs.
Lemlist and Instantly at a glance
Lemlist is a better fit for teams or agencies that want personalization, multichannel tactics, and creative touches in their outreach. It combines email with LinkedIn, phone/VoIP, and customizable touches so you can build sequences that feel human and tailored. It has advanced features for personalization and tight integrations with sales and marketing tools.
Instantly is built for high-volume, scalable cold email outreach to your target audience. It’s a good choice for teams that prioritize reaching many leads efficiently, maximizing deliverability, and minimizing overhead per inbox or seat. It centers on email sending, warmup, inbox health and automation rather than multichannel variety.
In short, if you want hyper-personalized outreach, Lemlist is the tool for the job. If you want to reach as many leads as possible, Instantly is better.
If you’re not convinced about Lemlist and need a larger selection of competitors, we have an article on Instantly alternatives on our blog.
Key features
Here are the standout features of each tool, and what they bring to outreach workflows for your team.
Lemlist is all about multichannel outreach and personalization
- Personalization at scale — Lemlist allows dynamic content insertion and merge tags, liquid-syntax variables, custom personalized images or videos, landing-page personalization, and per-lead details. That enables outreach that feels bespoke even at volume, and tools such as their browser extension make day-to-day cold outreach easy.
- Multichannel sequences — Beyond email, Lemlist supports LinkedIn automation (messages, invites), calls via VoIP integrations, and more. That makes it useful for campaigns that mix touchpoints rather than relying solely on email. However, these features are only available in higher-tier plans.
- Campaign and automation flexibility — You can build complex sequences, add conditional steps (e.g., follow-ups, channel switches), combine email + LinkedIn + other channels, and manage lead status per campaign dynamically.
- Lead discovery via large database — Lemlist offers access to a massive B2B lead database (claims of around 450 million contacts) with rich filters (location, job title, school degree, number of connections, etc.). It’s one of the few tools in the cold email space that has an integrated database.
- Creativity and branding-friendly outreach — Because of personalization, custom visuals, and landing pages, Lemlist often works better when outreach needs a “human touch” or branding, not just volume blast.
From email automation to advanced setups like personalized LinkedIn messages with conditional logic, Lemlist does it all. The downside is that the learning curve is steeper, which means that teams just starting with multi-channel outreach or sales tools in general… Might find Lemlist too difficult initially.
Instantly is all about volume
- Flat-fee, high-volume sending with unlimited sending accounts — Instantly lets you connect unlimited email accounts under one workspace at a fixed cost, without per-seat or per-inbox pricing. That enables scaling without per-user cost creep when you need multiple accounts instead of just one.
- Automated warmup and deliverability infrastructure — Built-in unlimited
email warmup on all plans, automated reputation management, inbox-placement tests, bounce detection / auto-pause upon problems, and email account rotation/ IP rotation (on higher tiers) help reduce the risk of landing in spam. - AI Assistants for outreach and replies — Instantly offers an AI Copilot to generate email sequences and audiences, and an AI Reply Agent to handle replies automatically (or with human oversight). Those AI capabilities reduce manual work for high-volume campaigns.
- Built-in lead data & enrichment — Instantly claims a large (though smaller vs Lemlist’s) B2B contact database, and allows for enrichment and verified contacts, enabling you to skip manual list building.
- Unified inbox and team-friendly management — Multiple email accounts feed into a shared inbox, helping teams track replies, follow-ups, and statuses without juggling separate mailboxes.
Users report that Instantly has a very user-friendly interface and that it doesn’t require advanced technical setup to get started.
Instantly vs Lemlist: email deliverability features
If you’re sending a lot of emails, you’ll want to land in the inbox as much as possible and not the spam folder. Both tools have solid deliverability features.
Lemlist offers warm-up (via Lemwarm) on paid plans, plus email/sender-reputation guidance like DNS setup (SPF, DKIM, etc.), and inbox rotation if you use multiple sending accounts.
It lacks more advanced automation around deliverability, like automated inbox-placement tests or dedicated IP rotation out of the box. Those would often require manual monitoring or third-party tools.
Instantly treats deliverability as a system. Warm-up is automated and unlimited. The platform supports automated inbox-placement tests, bounce detection with auto-pause when thresholds hit, rotating sending accounts, and IP isolation/rotation (on higher-volume plans).
That makes it a safer bet for large-scale cold email programs where inbox placement and domain health matter for long-term deliverability stability.
Multichannel outreach tools
When it comes to channels beyond email, Lemlist pulls ahead as the better option. It supports combined sequences that span email, LinkedIn (connection requests, DMs), and calls (via VoIP integrations). This lets you build outreach workflows that mix channels depending on lead behavior.
Instantly focuses almost exclusively on email outreach. It does not offer built-in LinkedIn automation, phone/VoIP, or multichannel workflows; the strength is in email deliverability, automation, and scaling in campaign performance.
Integrations with third-party tools
Both tools offer integrations, though the emphasis is different.
Lemlist: Because it targets outreach across channels and personalization, Lemlist integrations are typically with CRMs, automation tools (Zapier / Make / n8n), and VOIP or LinkedIn sequences when used with third-party add-ons.
If CRM integration and connectivity with the rest of your sales and marketing tech stack is important, Lemlist is the clear winner in this category.
Instantly: integrates with major CRMs, and supports API/webhooks, sheet syncing, Slack notifications, and lead-database/enrichment workflows. That makes it a good choice for teams that want to embed outreach into a broader SaaS stack or workflow automation.
Because of its unlimited-account, flat-fee nature, Instantly often becomes the core outreach engine in a stack with other tools for CRM, detailed analytics, or lead enrichment.
Pricing plans
Here’s a rough comparison of pricing models and the value you get.
Instantly pricing plans
Flat-fee per workspace. The entry-level “Growth” plan (for lower volume) starts at $30/month, while the higher-volume “Hypergrowth” plan costs $77.6/month. The Light Speed plan comes in at $286 per month, giving you up to half a million emails per month, as well as priority, dedicated support.
On all paid plans, you get unlimited email accounts, unlimited warmup, and the ability to scale contact uploads and email sends depending on plan limits.
For more details, check out our article on Instantly reviews.
Lemlist pricing
Lemlist pricing is per user (seat), so the cost scales with headcount. For example, paid plans can start at $55/month per user (for basic email outreach) and $79/month per user for multichannel plans.
Because of this difference, when you have a team of multiple SDRs or reps, Instantly tends to remain more predictable and often cheaper at scale, while Lemlist becomes more expensive with every added user or inbox.
Which tool should you get for your email campaigns?
If you’re not sure which tool is better for your unique needs, here’s a very simple test.
Choose Instantly if:
- You need to send large volumes of cold email reliably without the cost growing per rep.
- Deliverability and inbox health are critical and you want automated warmup, inbox testing, AI features and IP rotation.
- You want automation around replies and outreach follow-up being handled with an AI inbox manager.
On the other hand, choose Lemlist if:
- Your outreach needs to combine email plus LinkedIn, calls or other channels.
- You want deep personalization, such as custom images or landing pages per lead, dynamic variables, multichannel flows.
- Your team is small and you want outreach that feels human and tailored rather than mass-mailed.
- You manage multiple client accounts, dozens of inboxes or a fast-scaling agency and want fixed cost per workspace.
- You value creative, multi-touchpoint sequences (email + LinkedIn + phone) that allow more nuanced sales cadences.
Conclusion
Lemlist and Instantly serve different outreach philosophies. Lemlist is all about personalization, multichannel sequences, and human-feeling outreach. That can matter a lot when quality and engagement matter more than scale.
Instantly prioritizes scale, deliverability, and automation, which is ideal when volume, consistency, and cost per inbox matter more than individual reach.
In practice, for many B2B sales teams or agencies, the choice boils down to these questions:
Do you want to craft tailored, multichannel campaigns that feel personal? Or do you want a lean, high-volume engine for cold email outreach?
Or do you want to do both exceptionally well? If that’s the case, there is a third option that can help you manage campaigns across email and LinkedIn.
With Woodpecker, you can create highly personalized, scalable campaigns that get through to the primary inbox. You can automate complex sequences, warm up your inboxes, set up LinkedIn outreach and more.
And unlike Instantly or Lemlist, you can start as low as $24 per month and try it out for free for 7 days first.