7 Best Mailshake Alternatives for Lead Gen Agencies

With a client base of 75,000+ businesses, Mailshake is one of the most popular cold outreach tools.

But the big names aren’t always the best. Often, you’re paying for the name.

If you’re a lead generation agency, that’s certainly the case with Mailshake. Not only is it expensive, but it lacks a ton of vital functionality.

Fortunately, there are plenty of Mailshake alternatives for lead gen agencies. We’ve rounded up the best options for you and compared them across:

• Key features

• Agency pricing

• Common challenges

Let’s get into it…

QuickMail: The #1 Mailshake Alternative

Here’s why QuickMail is the smart choice if you’re searching for Mailshake alternatives for lead gen agencies:

Mailshake vs QuickMail: At-a-Glance Comparison Table

* Free AutoWarmer with MailFlow included with all QuickMail plans

What Makes QuickMail the Best Mailshake Alternative?

Advanced Deliverability Features

With Mailshake

Mailshake promises to “increase your reply rate 2x” by helping you land in the inbox, not the spam folder.

To be fair, we haven’t seen any major complaints about Mailshake’s deliverability. It provides all the basic deliverability-enhancing features you’d expect — like free email warmup — but it just doesn’t go as far as QuickMail.

And when it comes to something as essential as email deliverability, why would you choose the second-best option?

With QuickMail

Like Mailshake, QuickMail includes all the essentials you need to maintain high deliverability, including free access to MailFlow — one of the top-rated email warmup services. 

But we take things a step further by offering something that no other platform can match: Deliverability AI, our proprietary inbox rotation tool.

Deliverability AI monitors the daily performance of every email account you use. If your deliverability dips on one account, we’ll automatically swap it out for a higher-performing account, ensuring you always have the best chance of hitting the main inbox.

So you get to enjoy high deliverability without the hassle of manually switching out email accounts, freeing your team up to focus on higher-value actions.

Learn more: 10 Best Email Deliverability Tools

In-Depth Analytics and Customizable Dashboards

With Mailshake

Mailshake talks the talk when it comes to reporting, promising to let you view individual or team analytics at a glance and track rep productivity by day, week, or month.

But we’ve seen some comments from real-world users who are less than satisfied with Mailshake’s reports:

We doubt many clients will be happy with that. And even if they are, it means you’re stuck with managing separate accounts for every single client.

With QuickMail

We hate pay-walling, so we don’t demand an upcharge to access any of QuickMail’s performance features.

Instead, our agency plans are based on a simple per-client fee, so you only pay more when you add more clients.

And however much you pay, we let you add unlimited seats and inboxes at no extra charge.

Want to learn more? Speak to us to learn about our agency plans.

6 Other Top Mailshake Alternatives

Instantly

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Built-in email validation and bulk domain testing.

• Add unlimited email accounts on every Instantly plan.

• Manage email, cold calling, SMS, and LinkedIn steps from a single platform.

Agency Pricing

At first glance, Instantly looks like a cost-effective option, but its plans aren’t built for agency users — and, as a result, they’re simply too restrictive.

Take the mid-tier Hypergrowth plan: it’s reasonably priced at $97 per month, but only includes up to 100,000 monthly emails and 25,000 uploaded contacts.

If you need more, you can either upgrade to the top-tier Light Speed plan ($358 per month for up to 100,000 contacts and 500,000 emails), or request a custom quote and sign up for an annual contract.

Common Challenges

• Each client requires a dedicated workspace, so you can’t monitor performance across all accounts at once.

• No deliverability rate data or deliverability monitoring.

• Unified inbox isn’t available on Instantly’s entry-level plan.

• The platform’s warmup email pool is mostly custom SMTP inboxes, not Gmail or Outlook, and some users have complained about its effectiveness:

Learn more: Instantly vs QuickMail: Features, Pricing, and Performance 

Woodpecker

Key Benefits for Agencies

• View always-on email deliverability monitoring reports and share the results with clients via pdf.

• See performance across all client accounts through the agency dashboard.

• Create white-labeled client portals featuring your domain name and branding.

Agency Pricing

Woodpecker’s prices start at $49 per month, plus $27 per month for each additional client. That sounds pretty cheap, but your money only buys you 1,000 contacted prospects, 4,000 stored prospects, and 16,000 monthly emails.

Actually, all of the platform’s plans are similarly restrictive. Even the top-tier option ($395 per month, plus $27 per client per month) only includes 25,000 contacted prospects, 100,000 stored prospects, and 400,000 monthly emails.

Common Challenges

• Email warmup service doesn’t work for Gmail accounts.

• No positive reply rate reports, unsubscribe rates, or send-day attribution.

• Limited sentiment analysis tool only records replies as “positive”, “negative”, or “neutral”.

• Responses from prospects can’t be triaged or assigned to specific team members.

Smartlead

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Leverage automations throughout your outreach process, from uploading leads to booking meetings.

• Create automated follow-up sequences and set follow-up reminders.

• Automatically categorize leads based on contextual reply sentiment.

Agency Pricing

You can only add a single client on Smartlead’s entry-level plan, so you’ll need to choose either the Pro or Custom plans. These cost $94 per month and $174+ per month respectively, plus a further $29 per month for each extra client you add.

Bear in mind that Smartlead’s pricing isn’t exactly transparent. The top-tier plan promises “up to” 12 million active lead credits and 60 million email credits per month — but it doesn’t say exactly how much it costs.

Common Challenges

• Lack of native integrations means you’ll have to use Zapier to connect Smartlead to other platforms (which is expensive and glitchy at scale).

• No single reporting view including all your clients — you have to filter by account instead.

• Auto-warmer mostly uses custom SMTP inboxes, rather than Gmail or Outlook.

• Prospects can’t be verified in Smartlead, added to campaigns in bulk, or created manually.

• Users report that Smartlead can be pretty buggy:

*Quote from unaffiliated agency owner, March 2024

Learn more: Smartlead vs QuickMail: Features, Pricing, and Performance 

Saleshandy

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Use the dedicated agency portal to manage all your clients.

• Boost deliverability with sender rotation, email ramp-up, and sending intervals.

• Add unlimited clients and team members to your portal.

• Option to give clients access to sequences and let them make their own changes.

Agency Pricing

Saleshandy offers four price plans, starting at $36 per month for 2,000 prospects and 6,000 monthly emails.

Prices ramp up quickly as you add more prospects. For example, the Outreach Scale plan costs $199 per month and includes up to 60,000 total prospects, while Outreach Scale Plus starts at $299 per month for 100,000 total prospects.

Still need more? You can pay $1,499 for up to 500,000 prospects, or reach out for a custom quote if that still isn’t enough.

Common Challenges

• Unified inbox doesn’t let you respond from a different inbox or assign replies to specific team members,

• Lacks some important integrations (including Google Drive).

• Some users have seen damage to their domain reputation after moving to Saleshandy:

Learn more: Saleshandy vs QuickMail: Features, Pricing, and Performance

Lemlist

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Personalize campaigns with dynamic landing pages and text variables.

• Create multichannel campaigns by adding cold calling and LinkedIn steps.

• Build smart email sequences based on the prospect’s previous actions (such as email opens and link clicks).

• Create custom emails fast using the AI campaign generator.

Agency Pricing

If you’ve got 10+ users on your team, you’ll have to reach out to Lemlist for a custom quote.

For smaller agencies, Lemlist’s plans range from $39 – $159 per month. Unfortunately, those prices are charged per user, so a five-person agency that needs all of Lemlist’s top-tier features has to pay $795 per month.

Unless you only have one or two people on your team, it’s just not cost-effective.

Common Challenges

• Per-user pricing is cost-prohibitive and unscalable for most agencies.

• Responses from prospects aren’t categorized by client or campaign.

• Emails sent through Lemlist contain lots of html, which can hamper deliverability rates.

• Some Lemlist users report regularly bugs and errors:

Reply.io

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Segment reports by client or team member.

• Control who can view and/or edit reports and campaigns by setting roles and permissions.

• Get unlimited mailboxes, clients, users, contacts, and email warmup on all agency plans (although the pricing is far from transparent).

Agency Pricing

Reply.io offers dedicated agency plans starting at $210 per month.

All agency plans include unlimited sequences, inboxes, and email warmup. Unfortunately, Reply.io charges for the number of leads you add, not the number of clients you work with — and the prices add up fast.

Reply.io also hides a bunch of useful functionality behind paywalls, including cold calling, SMS messaging, and LinkedIn automation. Even if you choose the top-tier agency plan, you’ll still have to pay extra for those features.

Common Challenges

• Reports offer limited customization, which can be restrictive for some agencies.

• No centralized client dashboard makes it difficult to track performance across different accounts.

• Challenging user interface makes it too easy to make basic mistakes like sending from the wrong inbox.

Learn more: Reply.io vs QuickMail: Features, Pricing, and Performance

Switch To the Best Mailshake Alternative Today

There are plenty of cold outreach platforms on the market — but most just aren’t designed for lead gen agencies.

As such, they either lack essential agency features like a unified inbox and client dashboards, or they charge per user (which makes them way too expensive for multi-person teams).

Only QuickMail offers the full package of agency-friendly functionality and pricing. Whichever plan you choose, you’ll get access to all the tools you need to smash your clients’ KPIs. And you only pay more when you win new clients.

For a full overview of how QuickMail can help your agency, speak with us.