6 Best Smartlead Alternatives for Lead Gen Agencies

Smartlead is one of the hottest new names in the cold outreach game, signing up 31,000+ clients since it burst onto the scene in 2022.

But while its simple plans and pricing structure are a big hit with businesses doing outreach for themselves, Smartlead lacks many key features that agencies require to generate leads at scale.

Shopping around for a new agency-grade cold outreach solution? You’re in the right place, because we’ve collated the six best Smartlead alternatives for lead gen agencies.

Let’s get into it…

QuickMail: The #1 Smartlead Alternative

Naturally, we believe QuickMail is the best smartlead alternative for lead gen agencies. 

Sure, we’re biased, but hear us out…

Smartlead vs QuickMail: At-a-Glance Comparison Table

What Makes QuickMail the Best Smartlead Alternative?

Here’s why you should strongly consider QuickMail over Smartlead:

Superior Deliverability

With Smartlead

Smartlead talks a lot about providing “premium email deliverability at scale”. But we’re not sure its claims measure up.

We’ve heard Smartlead’s built-in auto-warmer largely relies on custom SMTP inboxes, rather than Gmail or Outlook. This makes it less effective at boosting deliverability to users of those major ESPs.

So it’s no surprise that some Smartlead users have complained about the platform’s deliverability:

With QuickMail

In our view, email deliverability is the #1 factor for agencies choosing a cold outreach tool. So we made it our main focus.

For starters, we include a free auto-warmer in all QuickMail plans.

We’ve continued to push the boundaries by introducing Deliverability AI, which saves you hours of drudge work by automatically sending emails from your top-performing accounts. 

And we even introduced an immediate solution to the Gmail open-tracking update.

All to help agencies like you hit more main inboxes.

Advanced Agency Analytics

With Smartlead

Reporting and campaign analysis in Smartlead can be a frustrating process for lead gen agencies.

All reports are aggregated together, so if you want to find out what’s going on with a specific client or campaign, you have to filter your view.

This makes it tough to get a clear picture of performance across all client accounts.

With QuickMail

Our reporting and analytics tools are built with agencies in mind.

With our agency dashboard, you can access key cold email metrics like:

• Opens

• Clicks

• Replies

• Bookings

• Bounces

Because we use send-day attribution, you can instantly identify any deliverability drop-offs and course-correct, while campaign-level win/loss tracking ensures you’re always optimizing around what truly matters to your clients.

And we make reporting a breeze by letting you create a white-labeled client portals with customized dashboards based on the data each client wants to see.

Multichannel Outreach and Reply Handling

With Smartlead

Smartlead lets you build multichannel campaigns through platforms like X/Twitter and WhatsApp, but it excludes LinkedIn — the world’s biggest B2B social network. That’s a major blow.

Its reply-handling is also pretty limited, only identifying replies from campaign threads. All replies end up in a single Master Inbox, which is fine for businesses doing their own outreach, but can get super cluttered for agencies with multiple clients.

All of which increases the risk of missing replies from interested prospects.

With QuickMail

QuickMail supports all the platforms lead gen agencies rely on to reach, engage, and convert prospects — email, SMS, cold calling, and LinkedIn.

We pull replies into the Opportunities folder, even if the prospect responded in a different thread. Replies are automatically assigned to the inbox owner, but can be re-assigned, triaged, or previewed without removing the “needs attention” indicator.

We even tell you how long each prospect has been waiting for a response so you can prioritize those requiring immediate action.

5 Other Top Smartlead Alternatives

Instantly

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Scale your outreach campaigns without sacrificing deliverability by adding unlimited email inboxes.

• Get support from a dedicated account manager to help plan, optimize, and grow your campaigns.

• Reduce bounces with the built-in email validation tool and use the one-click bulk domain tester to ensure your domains are correctly set up for cold outreach.

Agency Pricing

Instantly doesn’t offer dedicated agency pricing, so you’ll have to choose one of its standard plans instead. 

These plans get pretty pricey as you add more leads. For example, the top-tier Light Speed plan costs $358 per month, but only includes 100,000 uploaded contacts and 500,000 monthly emails.

Need higher usage levels? You’ll have to reach out to Instantly for a custom quote.

Common Challenges

• Instantly doesn’t provide any visibility into your email deliverability rate. And with no monitoring, you might run into deliverability problems and not even realize it.

• Not only does Instantly get expensive as you scale, but it hides a bunch of basic features behind paywalls, such as its unified inbox. That’s not a premium feature — it’s an essential tool for lead gen agencies. So you shouldn’t have to pay more for it.

• Reporting can be hard work, with each client account requiring a separate workspace. That makes it impossible to quickly understand which clients require immediate attention.

• Like Smartlead, the platform’s warmup pool mostly includes custom SMTP inboxes. So you’re not warming up new inboxes with Google or Outlook, which can limit the effectiveness. Not surprisingly, some users are pretty unhappy with this:

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

Lemlist

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Use smart logic to create automated email sequences that update on the fly based on how a prospect reacts to previous sequence steps.

• Build personalized prospect journeys at scale using text variables and dynamic landing pages.

• Add LinkedIn and cold calling steps to cold outreach sequences to reach prospects beyond the inbox.

Agency Pricing

If your agency has 10+ users, you’ll have to contact Lemlist for a custom quote. But, for reference, its highest non-agency plan starts at $159 per user per month.

At that rate, you’d be paying close to $1,600 per month for 10 users. Not cheap.

Common Challenges

• Arguably the biggest single problem with Lemlist is its per-user pricing, which makes it a poor fit for large and/or growing lead gen agencies.

• Despite the high pricing, some Lemlist users report regular technical problems with the platform:

• Lemlist adds a bunch of messy html to emails, which can affect deliverability.

• Replies from prospects aren’t categorized by client or campaign, so following up on opportunities is tougher than it should be.

Woodpecker

Key Benefits for Agencies

• React quickly to any downturns in email deliverability with always-on monitoring. You can even share the results with clients by downloading to pdf.

• The agency dashboard gives you a single convenient space for accessing reports and managing client accounts.

• Allow clients to access dedicated reports via a white-labeled client portal featuring your own branding and domain name.

Agency Pricing

At first glance, Woodpecker looks super cheap, with agency plans starting at a mere $49 per month (plus a flat fee of $27 per client per month).

However, that rate only buys you 1,000 contacted prospects, 4,000 stored prospects, and 16,000 monthly emails. Any agency owner satisfied with those allowances is probably doing something wrong.

Woodpecker’s most generous plan offers 25,000 contacted prospects, 100,000 stored prospects, and 400,000 monthly email for $395 per month, plus $27 per client. If you still need more, you’ll have to get in touch for a custom quote.

Common Challenges

• Woodpecker’s email warmup doesn’t work for Gmail accounts, which isn’t great for deliverability.

• The platform is missing some important reporting and analytics functionality, like positive reply rate reports, unsubscribe reports, and send-day attribution.

• Prospect replies can’t be triaged or assigned to a team member, making it too easy to miss hot opportunities.

• Sentiment analysis only marks replies as “positive”, “neutral”, or “negative”, which is too limited to be of much use.

Reply.io

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Reply.io’s agency plans offer generous allowances — including unlimited mailboxes, clients, users, contact storage, and email warmup (although it’s hard to work out how much it’ll cost you, as we discuss in the pricing section).

• Data in reports can be segmented by client or team member.

• Control who can see (and edit) reports and campaigns by setting roles and permissions.

Agency Pricing

Reply.io offers a dedicated agency plan, appropriately called “Agency”. 

Pricing starts from $210 per month, including unlimited sequences, inboxes, and email warmup. However, the number of active contacts is described as “adjustable”, which suggests you could end up paying significantly more if you need to add more leads.

What’s more, some key features (like LinkedIn automation) are paywalled — even on the agency plan.

Common Challenges

• Reply.io lacks a centralized client dashboard, making it harder to track results across multiple accounts.

• Report customization is limited, so you might struggle to serve clients with demanding data requirements.

• The user interface can be pretty confusing, even after you’ve been through the (lengthy) onboarding process. So it’s frustratingly easy to make basic errors like sending emails from the wrong inbox.

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

Saleshandy

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Create a dedicated agency portal — featuring your own brand assets and logo — to manage all your client accounts.

• Give access to your portal to unlimited team members and clients.

• Control what clients can see by creating view-only reports.

Agency Pricing

Saleshandy doesn’t offer dedicated agency plans. Instead, its standard cold emailing plans are labeled “business/agency”.

The lowest-cost agency-appropriate plan is Outreach Scale, priced at $199 per month. It includes 60,000 total prospects and 200,000 monthly emails — enough for smaller agencies. However, you only get 50 email addresses (compared to unlimited inboxes with QuickMail).

For higher allowances, choose Outreach Scale Plus, which ranges from $299 per month for 100,000 prospects to $1,499 for 500,000 prospects. If you need more, you’ll have to contact Saleshandy for a quote.

Email verification is available as a paid bolt-on to any Saleshandy plan, at a rate of $60 per 30,000 recipients.

Common Challenges

• Most concerningly, some Saleshandy users report deliverability issues and damage to their domain reputation:

• The platform is missing some basic agency integrations, like the ability to import prospects from Google Drive.

• The unified inbox is also pretty limited, with no way to assign replies or respond from different inboxes.

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

Switch To the Best Smartlead Alternative Today

Now you’ve seen how the competition stacks up, it’s time to choose the only cold outreach solution that’s truly built for lead gen agencies: QuickMail.

With QuickMail, you get all the tools you need to book more meetings for your clients, like:

• Automated workflows to guide prospects from import to “deal won”, helping you scale results without increasing your headcount

• Personalized, multichannel campaigns with custom preview lines, liquid syntax, adjustable wait steps, and the ability to mention/CC a prospect’s colleagues

• Inbox rotation, Deliverability AI, blacklist monitoring, and a host of other features to help you steer clear of the spam folder

And that’s just for starters!

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