Lemlist vs. Outreach.io: Which Cold Email Platform is Better? [2024]

If you’re not running a scalable cold email platform in this age, you’re missing out on lots of opportunities. A cold email software sends personalized, targeted cold emails at scale.

With platforms such as Lemlist and Outreach, you can automate various sales processes and focus on high-impact activities instead of repeating manual tasks. But how do you know which platform to choose? This article compares the two cold email platforms, so you can zero in on the best choice for your business. 

Lemlist vs Outreach: A Quick Glance

The summary: 

• Lemlist is a perfect choice if you want a traditional cold outreach platform for prospecting, personalization, multichannel outreach, and integrations. 
• Outreach is a great choice if you want a sales automation platform with a centralized setup for pipeline management, cold outreach, and integrations. 

Let’s compare how both cold email software helps you make a decision.

What’s Lemlist? 

Lemlist is a cold email outreach platform designed for sales and marketing teams to enhance their cold outreach process and generate positive results. Its vast database enables you to identify and target your ideal buyers, making it a perfect choice for your prospecting efforts. You can also leverage its AI message writer to create engaging messages that resonate with your audience at scale.

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Lemlist’s multichannel outreach capabilities make it easy to reach your prospects on their preferred channel, whether through emails, LinkedIn, or cold calls. On top of that, its email warm-up and deliverability booster is essential for any user seeking to land their cold emails in their prospect’s inbox, not the spam folder. Overall, Lemlist remains a top choice to advance your prospecting and sales efforts. 

What’s Outreach.io?

Outreach.io is a sales execution platform designed to help sales teams manage their sales pipeline and improve their workflow efficiently. Thanks to multiple sophisticated features, sales teams can build and scale their sales operations to achieve their revenue goals. 

An interesting feature is pipeline management where users access valuable insights about their sales pipeline’s needs and devise effective strategies to meet them while achieving their revenue goals. Additionally, their sales engagement capabilities enable sales teams to send the right message to their ideal buyers on their preferred channels — cold emails, calls, or LinkedIn. 

With this approach, they can create personalized interactions that build relationships and boost engagement. In short, Outreach remains one of the best sales platforms to create an efficient sales process that yields tangible results. 

Lemlist vs. Outreach.io: Core Features Compared

Lemlist and Outreach.io have distinct features that help sales teams execute their cold email campaigns efficiently. While both sales platforms have similar features, others are quite different. Nonetheless, here are some key features to consider for your cold campaign process: 

• B2B Lead Database
• Personalization
• Multichannel Outreach
• Email warmup and Deliverability
• Reporting Capabilities or Analytics
• Integrations

B2B Lead Database

Every cold email software’s core feature is its ability to improve the lead generation process. While Lemlist offers a vast B2B contact database to achieve this goal, Outreach has varying features to manage your leads and overall sales activities.  

Lemlist offers a 450+ million B2B contact database to help you identify and target the most relevant leads for your cold outreach efforts. You can filter your lead list with advanced filters such as industry size, funding details, technology used, hiring intent, and more. The cold outreach platform also offers an email and phone number verifier to validate your lead’s contact information, enabling you to reach them effectively.

On the other hand, Outreach doesn’t have a built-in lead database to find and validate leads. Instead, it has centralized features to build and manage your sales pipeline. For instance, its pipeline management feature helps sales teams assess the quantity and quality of their sales pipeline. They can identify coverage gaps, and qualified deals, and make predictable forecasts to boost their sales efforts. 

Personalization

Creating your cold email message manually can take time and effort. This is where an AI writing feature appears in the picture. Lemlist and Outreach offer AI campaign generators that create personalized messages at scale. 

Lemlist’s AI campaign generator is your best shot for creating personalized cold email copies at scale. Its custom text variable allows you to personalize various elements such as greetings, introductions, first names, content, closing remarks, and more.

Additionally, you can include personalized images and videos in the email copies to further resonate with your leads. You can also use its liquid syntax, incorporate dynamic landing pages, or include personalized icebreakers to reduce the similarities between each AI-generated message. 

On the other hand, Outreach’s AI email writer allows you to create personalized email copies with custom fields such as the recipient’s name, company name, job title, or other details. Besides, its Blueprint feature provides a framework to customize email templates for specific audiences and industries. It maintains a high degree of personalization, allowing you to connect with prospects at scale. 

Multichannel Outreach

After creating your cold emails, you should send them to your prospect’s preferred channel. Lemlist and Outreach offer features to enhance your outreach campaigns.

With Lemlist, you can implement an efficient outreach strategy through various channels like emails, phone calls, and even LinkedIn. The cold emailing software automates all processes for each channel so you can contact, interact, and follow up with your prospects. 

For instance, you can automate various parts of your LinkedIn interactions whether profile visits, sending connection requests, messages, and even voice notes. Lemlist allows you to delay the sending process by a day or two to ensure delivery and prevent your sending accounts from being blacklisted.

Similarly, Outreach enables you to connect with your ideal buyers on their preferred channel at any stage of the buyer’s journey. The sales engagement platform allows you to interact with your ideal buyers through five key features — auto email, manual email, phone call, LinkedIn, and generic tasks. While the auto email feature allows you to reach prospects at a specific time, manual email is effective for users who require manual intervention. 

Additionally, you can place calls using Outreach Dialer and automate specific LinkedIn- activities such as profile visits, sending messages, and more. You can also use the platform’s advanced email outreach capabilities to set automated follow-ups and supercharge your sales processes. 

Email Warmup and Deliverability

Once you have launched your sequence, you should ensure its delivery to your prospect’s inbox. While Lemlist offers an email warmup and deliverability tool to make this happen, Outreach unfortunately doesn’t have one at this time. 

Lemlist’s warmup and email deliverability tool, Lemwarm, ensures your cold emails avoid the spam folder. All you need to do is to set up your email account’s authentication protocol (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and initiate a warm-up phase which lasts about 3-4 weeks. With this approach, Lemwarm makes the sending process look natural and increases the email domain reputation to improve the email open and response rate.

Conversely, Outreach doesn’t offer this feature at this time. This means that if you can’t handle your sending account’s technical setup (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) or engage in any warm-up process, your sender reputation gets affected and increases the risk of getting banned by your email service provider (ESP).

Reporting Capabilities or Analytics

Lemlist’s detailed analytics provide valuable insights into your cold email campaign’s performance. Its visual snapshot allows you to monitor metrics like email open rate, response rate, click-through rate, and more. This approach enables you to identify areas of improvement and fine-tune your cold outreach strategy for better results. 

Similarly, Outreach’s robust analytic dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of your cold email campaign. With insights into metrics such as track open rate, response rate, click-through rate, and more, you can regularly review your campaign’s data to identify areas of success and improvement. This process enables you to refine your strategies and ensure you get the most returns from your investment in the sales platform. 

Integrations

Lemlist seamlessly integrates with 33 tools including CRMs, data enrichment platforms, and other third-party platforms, helping sales teams streamline their sales workflow and improve productivity. Some common integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Clay, Leadfuze, Uplead, Airtable, Zapier, and more. 

On the other hand, Outreach offers wider integrations with over 90 platforms including CRMs, sales intelligence, and productivity tools, account-based marketing platforms, video conferencing platforms, and more. Some notable integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, Zoominfo, Zapier, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Lusha, and more. Integrating with these platforms scales your marketing and sales operations efficiently. 

How Much Does Lemlist Cost?

Lemlist offers a free trial that allows users to access features such as the B2B lead database, email finder and verifier, and AI message writer. However, its paid plans grant access to more features such as email warmup and deliverability tools, inbox rotation, LinkedIn automation, and more. These paid plans include:

• Email Starter for $39 per month
• Email Pro for $69 per month
• Multichannel Expert for $99 per month
• Outreach Scale for $169 per month 

How Much Does Outreach.io Cost? 

Outreach’s pricing structure is quite opaque. The cost for using specific features or integrating with third-party platforms isn’t available except when you fill out a form or contact their sales rep for a quote. The lack of this vital information makes it difficult for the sales team to budget effectively, as they could bump into unforeseen expenses when scaling their operations. 

Lemlist vs. Outreach.io: Pros and Cons

Lemlist and Outreach.io have complementary strengths and weaknesses with key adoption factors such as user experience, affordability, and sales execution. 

Lemlist Pros and Cons

Lemlist stands out for its user-friendly interface, unique personalization, warmup tool, and seamless integrations. However, its limited reporting and analytics capabilities and expensive rate deter users from using the cold outreach tool. 

‍Lemlist Pros

• User-friendly Interface: Lemlist’s campaign dashboard features a clean and intuitive design that is easy to navigate, enabling even beginners to launch their campaigns effortlessly. With a few clicks, you can execute various sales processes such as finding qualified leads, creating personalized messages, and more. 

• Unique Personalization: Lemlist’s advanced personalization allows you to dynamically include individual details, images, videos, or landing pages into personalized copies for a more engaging experience. 

• Customer Support: Research revealed that many users found Lemlist’s customer support to be effective. This implies that if you encounter any difficulty while using the platform, you can always reach out for help. 

• Automation: The cold emailing tool seamlessly automates various sales processes to improve productivity and efficiency. Whether you’re creating personalized copies, reaching out to prospects on their preferred channel, or integrating with third-party platforms, Lemlist streamlines your workflow to optimize your cold email campaigns. 

‍Cons

• Steep Learning Curve: Although the platform has a user-friendly interface, research from G2 revealed that some users require additional technical knowledge to use some features such as sequences and automation.

• Limited Analytics Capabilities: Lemlist’s reporting feature is quite technical to understand. Users may feel overwhelmed by the dashboard's customizable options. 

• Expensive Rate: Lemlist’s pricing structure could pose challenges to small teams and startups, as some users found it more expensive than other platforms. 

Outreach Pros and Cons

Outreach shines for its intuitive interface, automation, and personalization capabilities, but faces issues with its learning curve, technicalities, and pricing structure.

‍Pros

• Intuitive Interface: Outreach offers a user-friendly interface that is easy to use, even for beginners. With a few clicks, you can manage your prospects, share messages across teams, or create templates.

• Automation: Outreach offers a centralized platform to streamline your sales workflow. It automates repetitive tasks, saving time and enabling sales reps to focus on more demanding sales activities.

• Personalization Capabilities: Outreach personalizes every interaction based on your prospect’s profile and journey. Whether it’s custom subject lines or CTAs, Outreach creates an engaging experience for users. 

Cons

• Learning Curve: Some users found it challenging to use some features, as it requires time and effort to learn.

• Technical Issues: There are complaints about some technical glitches and system lags on the platform. A user on G2 says “It tends to freeze up often and disrupt the flow of the end user's day. Often needing to be hard refreshed before resuming activities and even needing to restart hardware to get it going again.”

• Limited functionalities: Some users reported the non-functionalities of some features on the platform. These features range from the platform’s filtering options to sequences, integrations, and more. This makes it difficult for sales teams to get the full potential of the sales platform. 

• Non-transparent pricing: Outreach doesn’t reveal its pricing information on its website. This makes it challenging for small teams or startups to plan ahead and avoid bumping into unforeseen expenses. 

Lemlist vs. Outreach.io: Which Should You Use?

At the end of the day, both Lemlist and Outreach.io are great tools. They both serve as an “all-in-one” platform and perform excellent jobs in managing your sales pipeline and streamlining your sales workflow. However, if you still want to choose between the two tools, you should consider this guideline: 

• Choose Lemlist if you want an extensive lead database, custom personalization features, and access to a warmup and deliverability tool. 
• Choose Outreach.io if you want a centralized platform that manages your pipeline and reaches your audience on their preferred channel. 

That said, ColdIQ is a perfect choice for scaling your business’ outbound sale processes and hitting your revenue mark. Our experienced sales team utilizes the right platforms to flood your pipeline with the most qualified opportunities and boost your sales efforts. Get in touch with us today!

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