You’re looking to help your sales team crush their quotas through personalized messages and highly targeted emails. However, Reply.io’s steep learning curve and high pricing made you look at other tools for the job.
today, we look at some of the very best Reply.io alternatives for your outreach campaigns. We weigh their pros and cons, pricing plans and more, to help you find out the best sales engagement platform for your cold email campaigns and outreach efforts.
Let’s get started.
What is Reply.io?
Reply.io is a sales engagement platform that is powered by AI. Through email and multichannel outreach, you can get in touch through inbound and outbound methods to reach new and existing customers and win more business.
It’s built for businesses of all sizes and agencies that want to speed up their sales process and automate the tedious parts of sales engagement, all the while staying out of the spam folders. Besides emails, it can hook up to your LinkedIn Sales Navigator, allowing you to reach leads via LinkedIn. There is support for SMS and cold calling as well.
What are the pros of Reply.io?
As a sales engagement and cold outreach tool, Reply.io has a lot going for it. There is a unified inbox, making it easy for sales team to create emails and do automated follow ups from one place. Split testing lets you create variations of sales sequences while detailed analytics help you keep track of email performance.
Follow-ups are done in a single thread, which helps out with a large email volume and allows you to manage mass emails with ease. AI features help you create subject lines and email content with ease.
The Reply Database holds a massive amount of emails that you can either scrape or use to enrich your existing database. You can get new addresses with credits and validate them internally in Reply.io.
The cons of Reply.io
There are some complaints about this tool which many of the Reply.io alternatives fix successfully. First of all, the email deliverability features are only reserved for the most expensive pricing plan, which we’ll talk about in a minute.
Did we mention that the most expensive pricing plan is only billed annually? This means that buying this sales engagement platform plan will set you back almost $1,700 up front.
Even if you look at the cheaper plans, Reply.io is one of the more expensive tools for sales teams.
In terms of the outreach process, many sales reps complain that the customization options are not all that great. To get personalized emails, you have to do a lot of the customization manually, which is far from ideal.
You also don’t get some features that other outreach tools offer, such as a Gmail inbox integration that allows you to reach out directly through your Gmail account. You don’t get your calendar in mail either, or a Chrome extension to scrape emails.
Last but not least, if you send large email volumes, you’re going to need email verification, to check if the emails are real or not. This tool does offer it and you have to pay extra, while many Reply.io alternatives include it for free.
Reply.io pricing plans
Compared to the Reply.io alternatives, this tool has a pretty complex pricing setup. First of all, there is a Business tier, with four different plans, for businesses that want to do sales outreach. Then there is the Agency plan built specifically for lead generation agencies. And then there is the final, Unlimited plan.
In the Business tier, there are four plans: Free, Starter, Professional and Ultimate. The paid ones are priced at $49, $89, and $139, respectively. The differences are in how many email accounts and mailboxes you get in each and how many users you can add.
The Agency plan lets you invite unlimited team members and it starts at $166 per month. It still has features like custom domain tracking and basic email campaigns. The main difference is that it adds features such as custom reports and a centralized inbox with multiple clients.
Last but not least, there is the Unlimited plan, which gives you unlimited team members, unlimited email campaigns, unlimited email accounts, and more. It starts at $166 per month as well.
Top Reply.io alternatives for your sales team in 2024
Looking for a sales outreach tool that does not cost an arm and a leg and offers better email deliverability features? Here are the best Reply.io alternatives we’ve picked out for you to try in 2024.
Woodpecker
Looking to upgrade your sales outreach game? Woodpecker lets you easily create cold email campaigns from scratch, grow your sales pipeline, and get new revenue from email as a channel.
With Woodpecker, you can use email automation to create condition-based email campaigns and determine what happens when someone clicks on an email, opens it, or replies. With advanced reporting and split testing, you’ll know exactly which emails are working and what needs to go to the bin.
The basis for cold email outreach is – email verification. Each address is checked before you send out any cold emails, safeguarding your email account deliverability. There is also a sending volume monitor, ensuring you don’t send too many emails and have your account blacklisted.
There are AI-based email templates that you can quickly adjust to your recipients’ needs and preferences, making it easy for small businesses to do cold email outreach at scale. Woodpecker integrates with many different sales and marketing tools. Besides the Salesforce integration, there is also Pipedrive, Hubspot, Close, and many others.
The best part is, that you can get started with Woodpecker for free!
Quickmail
Quickmail is a cold email outreach tool built for businesses and agencies. This alternative to Reply.io offers some interesting options that Reply does not, such as the inbox rotation feature. You also get email tracking, email inbox warmup, split testing for all your email accounts, as well as detailed reporting features.
But like all Reply io alternatives, it’s not perfect. Users complain that getting started is complex and if you’re new to cold email, it will take you a bit to unwrap all the features. The inbox warmup feature is great, but Quickmail users complain that it’s rather slow. Also, the support team is not the greatest, so if you want to troubleshoot something, you’ll have to do it on your own.
One area where Quicklmail shines in comparison to Reply.io is pricing. It starts at $49 per month, which gets you 30,000 emails, and there is a free trial for 14 days.
Salesrobot
Salesrobot is one of those Reply.io alternatives that lets you reach out to potential customers through multiple channels – email and seamless integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
There is a central inbox that lets you manage campaigns on both LinkedIn and emails. You can upload CSV files as email lists or scrape files from LinkedIn through the native integration with this platform. You can write the emails manually or use the Salesrobot AI writing assistant. Automated follow ups are available, for example, when prospects visit your website – they can get an immediate email.
The biggest downside of this tool is that it’s heavily focused on LinkedIn and not so much on cold email. For more cold email features, you’re better off looking at other Reply.io alternatives. Also, the tool relies on the LinkedIn algorithm, which means that any slight change can result in limited campaigns and outreach success.
Pricing plans start at $99 billed monthly, for one email and one LinkedIn account.
Saleshandy
Saleshandy outreach is built for outbound sales, recruitment and account management.
You get all the good features of standard email outreach tools, such as inbox rotation, unified inbox for all of your team members, multivariate split testing and more. Email verification exists as an option but you have to pay extra for it, unlike most tools that give this feature for free.
As for the downside, they mostly relate to pricing plans. In the lower plans, you don’t get the follow-up automation features. Even worse is the fact that you don’t get access to CRM integrations, rendering the tool useless for many sales teams.
There is no free trial and paid plans for sales outreach start at $36 per month. If you need email validation, factor in the additional cost of another tool.
Salesloft
Calling themselves a sales orchestration platform, this alternative to Reply.io is actually a sales engagement tool that makes it easy to get more sales pipeline with cold email automation.
SalesLoft offers email automation, easy sequences, split-testing, real time email analytics, as well as flexible integrations with CRMs and email marketing tools.
Users report that Saleshandy can be a bit confusing to use since the dashboards look cluttered and personalizing sequences and reports is easier said than done. You’ll witness the occasional crash in this tool and sometimes, it creates double entries in your databases.
There is no free trial and there is no free plan and to find out how much Salesloft costs, you have to get in touch with sales and sit through a demo.
Breakcold
Breakcold is a sales CRM and pipeline management software that helps sales teams win more deals through cold email and LinkedIn outreach campaigns. It’s built for startups, agencies, consultants and just about anyone who needs cold emails and a CRM in the same tool.
The CRM comes with a unified inbox for all campaigns and no limitations on how many email campaigns you can send out. Inbox rotation comes by default too.
Breakcold is very powerful, but at the same time complex, which means that there is a steep learning curve to get started. Integrations do not always function as intended and can break unexpectedly. Since it’s primarily a CRM, it’s missing some cold email features you’ll find in other Reply.io alternatives.
There is a free trial available and paid plans start at $29 per month.
Overloop
Overloop is a full scale sales engagement tool that allows businesses to reach out to their customers using cold outreach through email, LinkedIn messages and cold calls.
Before reaching out, you can use Overloop to find the lead information and scrape it from LinkedIn and you can then manage the leads directly within the app. Multichannel campaigns come with tracking and management so you can stay on top of your performance at all times. Workflows and task management come in particularly handy if you want to manage your sales team within Overloop.
On the downside, it does not scale very well and with a larger number of users and leads in your database. The integrations are not all that great, especially the Salesforce one. It’s also pretty expensive compared to most other Reply.io alternatives.
Speaking of which, prices start at $49 per user per month, which is good for three campaigns at a time.
Smartlead
If you want to combine cold email outreach with social media messaging automation, Smartlead is one of the top choices out there. This alternative to Reply.io is built for businesses of all shapes and sizes, from small to large, as well as agencies for lead generation and recruiting.
You get a variety of useful features, such as a unified inbox for multichannel outreach, a capable API for integration with your favorite tools, email follow-up automation, email templates and deal insights, and much more.
For most users, the user interface is the weakest point as they state it could be better and the tool is not so easy to navigate. Similar to some other tools, you may have issues with data reliability and the tool crashing.
There is a free trial available and paid plans start at $39 per month.
Wrapping up
Running your cold email campaigns on Reply.io may seem like a good idea, but the reality is that this tool has some inherent flaws. Compared to Reply.io competitors, it’s fairly expensive, lacks basic email deliverability features, and as a sales engagement tool, it’s pretty complex to use.
If you want to run cold outreach campaigns effectively, with all the features in Reply.io and some extras, at a lower cost – give Woodpecker a try! Power up your outbound sales with AI email writing, email verification, deliverability monitoring, and many, many more features.
Grab your free trial and get started today.