Instantly vs. Apollo: Which Cold Email Platform is Better? [2024]

Imagine how much time and effort you would save if you could find your ideal prospects and reach them via the same platform. That would be fantastic, right? 

Cold email platforms have become essential parts of modern sales strategies, helping businesses discover new leads, enrich them with valid contact details, ensure the cold emails are delivered to their prospects’ inboxes, and drive revenue growth. With many available options, choosing the right cold emailing tool can be a daunting task. 

Instantly and Apollo are two popular contenders in the cold emailing space, each offering unique features and strengths that stand out. In this article, we will compare two great options, Instantly and Apollo, so you can zero in on the best choice for your business.

Instantly vs. Apollo: A Quick Glance

Here is the summary: 

• Instantly is better if you want to access lead databases, personalize and send your cold emails at scale, and ensure deliverability through the warmup feature. 
• Apollo is an ideal choice for anyone who wants to access its vast database, personalize emails, and reach their prospects via multiple channels such as emails, phone calls, or LinkedIn. 

Here is a quick comparison of the two cold email tools, but keep reading to learn about their differences and make informed decisions. 

What’s Instantly?

Instantly is a sales engagement and lead intelligence platform primarily designed to scale your cold email outreach efforts. It’s an ideal choice for sales and marketing teams, lead generation agencies, or enterprises seeking to improve their cold emailing campaigns.

With its extensive lead database of 160 million contacts, you can find and connect with your ideal buyers. This makes it a perfect choice for anyone seeking to improve their lead generation efforts. Instantly’s outreach feature also allows you to create personalized emails that resonate with your ideal prospects and send these messages at scale. 

On top of that, Instantly’s warmup feature protects your cold emails from spam filters and ensures it delivers to your prospects’ inboxes. Overall, Instantly remains one of the best cold email tools to advance your sales and marketing campaigns. 

What’s Apollo?

Apollo is a cold email automation tool designed for lead generation and outreach campaigns. With its vast B2B database, the cold emailing software identifies potential business leads from various industries and gathers their verified contact information to build targeted lead lists for outreach. 

The cold email software also automates various sales processes, whether email personalization, cold email outreach, or sales call dialing, to create an efficient process for sales teams. Additionally, the cold email platform seamlessly integrates with popular third-party platforms including CRMs to effectively track and manage all leads and customer interactions, enhancing collaboration and productivity. 

Overall, Apollo remains one of the best cold email software options to boost your sales efforts. Businesses can track their outreach performance, identify improvement areas, and optimize their processes for better results. 

Instantly vs. Apollo: Core Features Compared

Instantly and Apollo share similar features such as: 

• Lead Database
• Email Personalization 
• Cold Email Outreach 
• Email Warmup
• Native Integrations

Lead Generation

Instantly and Apollo offer lead generation features to find the ideal buyers that can fill your sales pipeline. Here, we will compare these features and examine their similarities and differences. 

Instantly

Instantly’s lead database of over 160 million contacts helps you to search and discover your ideal prospects. With the right keywords, you can find the most relevant prospects that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). 

The cold email platform also features advanced filters which you can use to filter the search results and target your most qualified leads. It also verifies lead information, allowing you to reach your ideal buyers easily and fostering your lead-generation efforts. 

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‍Apollo

Apollo is a sales intelligence platform where you can get detailed information about your ideal buyers. With a lead database of 275 million contacts from over 73 million companies, you can search and identify the ideal decision-makers relevant to your business. 

The cold email platform also features over 65 advanced filters to help you narrow the search results. In other words, you can filter the search result based on specific criteria such as industry, job titles, technology used, or firmographic details to create a more refined lead list. This approach helps in targeting the most qualified prospects who can advance your prospecting efforts. 

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Apollo also features a data enrichment feature to boost your outreach effort. It gathers valid contact information such as their email addresses and phone numbers to ensure you reach them and prevent loss of leads. 

Email Personalization

Once you have identified your ideal prospects, the next step is to create personalized messages that fit their needs to elicit responses. Instantly and Apollo offer AI personalization features that craft compelling messages for your ideal buyers. 

‍Instantly

Instantly’s AI generator feature is perfect for tailoring cold emails to suit your prospect’s needs. With its advanced personalization features, you can generate AI-powered insights and craft personalized messages based on specific criteria such as the company’s description, pain points, and competitors. 

This feature maps specific variables after importing your leads. You can personalize these variables such as the prospect’s first name, last name, company name, website, and more. This feature also allows you to create custom variables. 

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Additionally, Instantly consists of “Spintax,” a personalization feature that creates variations of texts and phrases in your cold emails. You can use this feature to instruct the cold email platform to alternate words when sending your cold emails. For instance, if you create a syntax such as {{Random |Regards | Cheers | Bye}}, Spintax will randomly alternate between “Regards,” “Cheers,” and “Bye” during the sending process. 

‍Apollo

Apollo, which also serves as a sales engagement platform, has an AI writing assistant that crafts personalized messages that resonate with your ideal prospects. Based on specific prompts, the AI writing assistant can generate your email copies, analyze messages, or rephrase some selected options. 

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Apollo allows users to personalize their cold emails based on three dynamic variables — basic, custom, and advanced. The basic variable personalizes elements such as the {{first_name}}, {{job_title}}, {{company_name}}, and more. The custom variables are the ones you can create, particularly based on your preference. The advanced variables use conditions and often work with the “if-statement.” 

 Cold Email Outreach

Next, let’s look at how to create cold email sequences using the two cold email platforms. 

Instantly

Instantly allows users to create unlimited cold email campaigns using the campaign sequence editor. The feature allows you to set up detailed sequences, whether personalized or follow-up emails and guide your prospects throughout the campaign process. 

Alternatively, you can use the platform’s pre-built templates to create cold email sequences easily. These templates cover various niches that you can modify to align with your prospect’s needs. 

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However, unlike many popular cold email platforms, Instantly doesn’t offer multichannel options for its outreach campaign. In other words, you can only reach your ideal buyers via email. Other channels such as phone calls, LinkedIn, or Twitter are not available for users. 

‍Apollo

Similar to Instantly, Apollo offers comprehensive and diverse ways to create cold email sequences. 

First is the AI-assisted option where you can instruct the platform’s AI to create a simple outbound email sequence. Next is the Pre-formatted option where you can use a pre-built template for your outbound campaign. There is also the Clone option where you can duplicate existing sequences. Finally, you can use the Manual option to create your sequence from scratch. 

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Apollo also offers a multichannel approach to reach your prospects. This is helpful for users whose prospects span across different channels such as emails, phone calls, LinkedIn, and more. By reaching your prospects on their preferred channel, you can boost your outreach efforts. For instance, you can choose to schedule your cold emails to be sent at a particular time or automate various LinkedIn processes such as sending a connection request, sending a message, and more. 

Email Warmup 

Email warmup is another critical part of your cold email campaign. After all, you want your cold emails to reach your prospect’s inbox, not the spam folder. But how do the two cold email platforms work in this regard? Let’s find out. 

Instantly

Instantly offers a comprehensive warmup feature to warm up your cold emails before sending them to your prospect’s inbox. This feature comes with lots of settings that you can customize to your preference. 

It works by gradually increasing your email account’s outgoing volume to ensure emails get delivered to the prospect’s inbox. You can also connect unlimited email accounts to achieve this goal and avoid being blacklisted by your email service provider (ESP). With this approach, your sending process looks more organic, increasing your sender’s reputation. 

Apollo

Unlike Instantly, Apollo doesn’t have a dedicated warmup feature that automatically warms up your cold email. Instead, the cold email software offers a manual approach to warming up your cold emails. With their Inbox Ramp-Up feature, you can connect new accounts, which gradually increase the volume of emails sent over a period of two weeks.

Native Integrations

Integrations remain stellar in the cold email industry, as a single tool can’t help you achieve your goals. As a result, there is a need for multiple tools to work together and streamline all your sales processes for an efficient operation. But how do Apollo and Instantly achieve this? 

Instantly

Instantly integrates with limited sets of tools mainly through API. So, if you intend to work with more tools, you may need to seek an alternative option. It’s also essential to note that these integrations come with the platform’s paid versions, especially the Hyper Growth plan. That said, Instantly integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Google Calendar, Slack, Open AI, and Zapier. As at the time of this writing, integration with CRMs isn’t available. 

Apollo

On the other hand, Apollo seamlessly integrates with more third-party platforms including CRMs, video conferencing tools, marketing automation software, sales engagement and intelligence, and more. Integrating with this software helps to scale your sales operations efficiently. Some common platforms Apollo integrates with include HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Adobe Marketo, Outreach, SalesLoft, JustCall, Koncerto, and more. 

How Much Does Instantly Cost? 

Instantly offers a 14-day free trial for its users. Its paid plans allow you to access more exclusive features that enhance your outreach and overall sales efforts. These paid plans include: 

• Growth plan for $30 per month
• Hypergrowth plan for $77.6 per month
• Lightspeed plan for $286.30 per month
• Enterprise plan which requires a custom quote. 

How Much Does Apollo Cost?

Apollo offers a free plan for users to explore some of its features. However, it’s essential to note that this plan has some restrictions, inhibiting you from harnessing the platform’s full potential. Hence, you may want to consider some of its paid plans which include: 

• Basic plan for $59 per month
• Professional plan for $99 per month
• Organization plan for $149 per month.

Instantly vs Apollo: Pros and Cons

Instantly and Apollo have complementary strengths and weaknesses during usage. Here is a summary of these pros and cons. 

Instantly Pros and Cons

Instantly is renowned for its user-friendly interface, personalization, and email warmup feature that ensures deliverability. However, its lack of multichannel outreach, smaller database, and limited integrations is a drawback.

Instantly Pros

• User-friendly interface: Instantly’s dashboard is easy to use and navigate. You can easily grasp how the feature works and perform your desired action effortlessly, whether it’s lead generation, email personalization, or warmup. 
• Personalization: Instantly offers an AI generator to help craft personalized email messages that resonate with your prospect’s needs. Its Spintax features make your cold emails look more relevant to your prospects. 
• Email Warm-up: Instantly has a dedicated warmup feature to gradually send cold emails to your prospect’s inbox. This approach ensures deliverability and helps you avoid the spam folder.

Instantly Cons

• Smaller Database: Unlike Apollo, Instantly has a smaller B2B contact database of over 160 million contacts. This may not be sufficient for users seeking more ideal buyers that fit their ICP. 
• Lack of Multichannel Option: Instantly only allows users to reach their prospects via emails. You can’t reach them via phone calls, LinkedIn, or other outreach channels. 
• Pricing: Users on G2 complain about the platform’s pricing structure. Smaller teams and startups find it a bit more expensive than other cold email platforms. 

Apollo Pros and Cons

Apollo is renowned for its prospecting, personalization, and multichannel options. However, its lack of email warmup feature and limited email account are reasons why you may want to consider an alternative. 

Apollo Pros

• Ease of Use:  Apollo’s interface is intuitive for users, especially beginners. You don’t need some technical knowledge to use its features. 

• Wider Database: Apollo offers a lead database of over 275 million contacts from 73 million companies. This allows you to quickly identify and reach your ideal buyers. 

• Multichannel approach: Unlike Instantly, Apollo doesn’t restrict users to a single channel. You can reach your prospects via multiple channels such as cold emails, phone calls, and more. 

• Integrations: Apollo seamlessly connects with more platforms such as CRMs, video and web conferencing tools, dialers, marketing automation software, and more. This streamlines your workflow and improves your productivity. 

‍Apollo Cons

• Lack of Email Warm-up Feature: Apollo doesn’t have a dedicated warmup feature to ensure email deliverability. 

• Contact Management: Reviews on G2 showed that users find it difficult to manage contacts on the platform. Whether it’s pushing contacts to CRMs or managing your cold email sequence, users find it a bit challenging to achieve this goal. 

Instantly vs. Apollo: Conclusion and Recommendations

In conclusion, Instantly and Apollo are two unique cold email solutions that cater to the different needs of businesses. While both platforms offer valuable features for sales teams, they differ in terms of operations, particularly in the areas of lead intelligence, sales engagement, and integrations. 

Recommendations

Based on our detailed comparison, here are our recommendations for potential users: 

For lead intelligence, cold outreach, and email warmup, we recommend Instantly.ai. With access to a vast database for potential leads and a powerful warm-up feature to ensure deliverability, Instantly is ideal for sales and marketing teams that want to scale their cold email campaigns. 

For sales prospecting and engagement at scale, we recommend Apollo.io. With its extensive database and sales engagement features, Apollo is perfect for various businesses, especially those focused on multichannel outreach and who need more integrations. 

Conclusion

When choosing between Instantly and Apollo, it’s essential to consider your needs and overall business objectives. After all, these cold email tools significantly impact your sales performance. Consider the type of data you need, the customization process, and how it enhances your workflow.

That said, if you find it challenging to scale your sales process with modern technologies, seeking an alternative can be your best shot. At ColdIQ, our sales team utilizes the latest AI technologies to fill your pipeline with the most qualified opportunities to drive revenue growth. Our unique approaches build valuable relationships to help you get the most returns from your investment. Get in touch with us today. 

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