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Maybe cold outreach is already your #1 source of leads and sales, or maybe you’re looking to ramp up your outreach activity. Either way, it’s vital you select the best outreach solution for your business, and your search has brought you to two of the most popular tools on the market: Smartlead and QuickMail.
Sure, we’re biased, but we truly believe QuickMail is the smart choice for most startups and SMEs — especially:
Professional services firms
SaaS platforms
Lead gen agencies
Recruiters
Business consultants
Read on and we’ll weigh up the key differentiators in the battle of Smartlead vs QuickMail…
Why Use QuickMail?
QuickMail is an outreach solution that works with Gmail, Outreach, and any other inbox provider. While there’s no shortage of outreach platforms out there, QuickMail stands out from the crowd in three essential areas:
Reliable Results
We’ve been industry leaders for nine years.
In that time, we’ve developed pioneering outreach technology like inbox rotation and free auto-warming, all with the goal of helping our users avoid the disruption and revenue loss caused by constant changes to the email ecosystem.
So we understand what it takes to generate consistent results from cold email, adapting our tools and processes to give your campaigns the greatest chance of reaching your prospects’ main inboxes.
That’s why we’ve got a 4.6-star rating on G2.
Learn how SaaS company Demio used outbound prospecting campaigns through QuickMail to help land 500 new customers in seven days.
Delightful User Experience
We’re confident that if you choose QuickMail, you’ll love our user experience.
We make it easy to manage multiple campaigns, scale your outreach activity by adding new inboxes, and access the clear, actionable analytics you need to improve results.
And if you need a helping hand along the way, you can reach out to our expert support team…
Expert Support
When it comes to customer support, some outreach solutions are all about closing tickets.
At QuickMail, we’re more concerned with actually solving problems.
We don’t bother with one-size-fits-all suggestions and boilerplate replies because we understand no other business has a workflow that’s exactly like yours. Instead, we take the time to dig into the challenge you’re facing and provide tailored guidance.
Whether you’ve got a basic question, a complex workflow, or an unconventional setup, our experts are ready and waiting to help you execute more successful outreach campaigns.
Of course, we don’t expect you to just take our word for it.
Not when our customer reviews do the job for us:
Best of all, you get the same quality support, whatever QuickMail plan you choose.
Not only that, but we’ve created various free educational resources to help everyone from beginners to seasoned veterans get more from cold outreach:
Smartlead vs QuickMail At a Glance [Comparison Table]
| Feature | QuickMail | Smartlead |
|---|---|---|
| Email outreach | ✔ | ✔ |
| Automated email sequences | ✔ | ✔ |
| Email verification | ✔ | ✔ |
| Google-compliant email warmup | ✔* | - |
| Gmail-approved sending API for improved deliverability | ✔ | - |
| A/B testing | ✔ | ✔ |
| Add unlimited team members on all plans | ✔ | - |
| Add multiple inboxes | ✔ | ✔ |
| Zapier integration | ✔ | ✔ |
| Native CRM integration | ✔ | - |
| Inbox rotation | ✔ | ✔ |
| Bulk actions | ✔ | - |
| Expert support on all plans | ✔ | - |
Try QuickMail for free by signing up for your 14-day trial today.
* Free AutoWarmer with MailFlow included with all QuickMail plans
Why Do Businesses Choose QuickMail Over Smartlead?
Now that we’ve listed the key features of each platform, let’s look at the areas in which QuickMail really impresses vs Smartlead:
Stability and Reliability
What Sets QuickMail Apart:
We’ve been leaders in the outreach industry for nine years and pioneered game-changing innovations like free auto-warming and inbox rotation, so we know what it takes to help our users run high-performing, sustainable outreach campaigns.
Individual QuickMail accounts are sending 40,000+ emails daily, without issues — that’s what we call “proven deliverability”.
With our dedicated agency setup, it’s easy (and affordable) to manage 100+ clients without slowing down.
How Smartlead Compares:
Smartlead was only founded in 2022 and has reports of major glitches.
Their auto-warmer feature is out of compliance with Google, and they aren’t Google accredited, which is a major red flag for deliverability.
It’s unlikely that Smartlead is optimized for Gmail’s new bulk sender requirements going into effect February 2024.
*quotes from unaffiliated Agency Owners. March 2024
Inbox Warmup
What Sets QuickMail Apart:
Our native MailFlow integration gives all QuickMail users the benefits of an integrated auto-warmer — inbox warmup, domain monitoring, deliverability scoring and reporting — with none of the associated risks.
Once you connect an inbox, MailFlow sends emails to email addresses in your network and creates automated replies, which makes your inbox look like it belongs to a “real human”.
If your automated warmup emails are marked as spam, MailFlow un-marks and replies to them, strengthening your sender reputation.
How Smartlead Compares:
Outreach is still running an integrated auto-warmer, which — as we’ve already noted — doesn’t comply with Google’s requirements, leaving you at high risk of further complications.
Every disconnect in the auto-warmer means a disruption to your outreach campaigns, fewer leads, and less closed deals.
*quotes from unaffiliated Agency Owners, March 2024
Working With Clients
What Sets QuickMail Apart:
With QuickMail, you can set up client accounts within your workspace to simplify managing multiple timelines and contract volumes.
Each client account can be fully customized with its own plan size, individual integrations, prospect databases, analytics setups, inboxes, and opportunities.
How Smartlead Compares:
By contrast, Smartlead combines everything — campaigns, inboxes, the master inbox, and analytics — for all client accounts.
The only way to narrow down your view is to filter by specific client each and every time. Which gets pretty frustrating.
Smartlead doesn’t offer client-specific integrations, limiting your ability to provide a tailored service to each client.
*quotes from unaffiliated Agency Owners, March 2024
Prospect Management and Verification
What Sets QuickMail Apart:
QuickMail effectively works as a light CRM by tracking all your engagements with a prospect.
Upload prospects from CSV, auto-import from Drive, and create individual prospects manually or via inbound emails.
Narrow down prospects to build lists for follow-up or export using advanced filters, then add those lists to new campaigns — all from within the QuickMail platform.
How Smartlead Compares:
With Smartlead, lead lists are uploaded to specific campaigns.
You can only upload prospects via CSV — no manual creation.
Smartlead doesn’t let you see all prospects for a client in one place, and you can’t filter or search for prospects.
There’s also no way to verify prospects within the platform, create them from inbound emails, or bulk-add prospects to a new campaign.
Integrations
What Sets QuickMail Apart:
QuickMail has native, two-way integrations with a host of outreach-related tools, including HubSpot, Pipedrive, Twilio, Google Drive, and multiple email verification providers.
For everything else, there’s our Zapier integration, which is included with all QuickMail plans.
How Smartlead Compares:
Smartlead doesn’t have any native integrations — in fact, it only integrates with Zapier.
Zapier is fine for smaller campaigns, but it gets pretty dicey (and expensive) at scale.
Time-Saving Features
What Sets QuickMail Apart:
QuickMail offers intelligent bulk actions and automations for all settings and features within the platform.
How Smartlead Compares:
Smartlead doesn’t allow bulk actions for prospects, campaigns, or replies, making it harder to get stuff done at scale.
Reply Handling
What Sets QuickMail Apart:
QuickMail automatically pulls prospect replies into the Opportunities folder — even if the prospect responded in a new email thread.
Replies to campaign emails are automatically assigned to the inbox owner, but you can re-assign, preview, or triage them without removing the bold “needs attention” indicator.
The status label tells you how long a prospect has been waiting for a response, ensuring you never miss an opportunity.
How Smartlead Compares:
Smartlead can only pull in messages from campaign threads, so if the prospect reaches out via a new thread, you might miss it.
All sent emails are displayed in the Master Inbox, which gets pretty clunky when used at scale or to manage multiple client accounts.
*quotes from unaffiliated Agency Owners, March 2024
Reporting and Analytics
What Sets QuickMail Apart:
We pride ourselves on empowering users to make data-backed decisions based on in-depth analytics.
Our dashboard displays computed stats for all the metrics you need to run more successful outreach campaigns: opens, clicks, replies, bookings, unsubscribes, and bounces.
View graphs displaying data on prospect creation, task creation, task completion, emails sent, first opens, repeat opens, first clicks, repeat clicks, replies, bookings, unsubscribes, journey started, journey ended, and errors. Pretty exhaustive, huh?
And if that’s not enough, you can break down statistics into tables by campaign, and export everything to CSV.
How Smartlead Compares:
Smartlead’s reporting and analytics tools are pretty buggy.
When we tested them, there were discrepancies between the Master Inbox and Campaign/Global views, even several hours later.
All reports are aggregated together, forcing you to search by campaign or client to find what you need — it’s all very clunky at scale.
Smartlead vs QuickMail: Price Comparison
A one-person business consultancy has totally different needs to a SaaS startup or a large lead generation agency.
For that reason, QuickMail and Smartlead offer a range of plans aimed at businesses of different sizes and at different stages of their growth journeys. Let’s dig into each platform’s pricing tiers and what you’ll get for your money.
(All pricing information correct at time of publication.)
Entry Level
QuickMail’s Basic plan costs $49 per month, with no minimum-term contract. It includes up to 30,000 emails per month, up to five email addresses for sending, up to 10,000 prospects, and unlimited team members.
Customers can access all the essentials they need to run cold outreach campaigns, plus advanced features like A/Z testing and scheduling automation. They also get an account dashboard incorporating campaign-level stats — essential for optimizing performance.
Smartlead’s Basic plan costs $39 per month and includes unlimited email accounts. Sound too good to be true?
That’s because it is. The Smartlead Basic plan only lets you send 6,000 emails per month and store 2,000 active leads — both five times fewer than QuickMail’s equivalent plan.
Plus you can’t add multiple users, so it’s clearly not a great fit for teams.
Mid-Tier
Priced at $89 per month (again with no fixed contract), QuickMail’s mid-tier Pro plan allows you to send up to 100,000 emails monthly to up to 50,000 active prospects from 20 different email addresses.
It includes all the same stuff as the Basic plan, but with a bunch of additional functionality, including advanced analytics and native integrations with HubSpot and Pipedrive.
Smartlead charges $79 per month for its Popular plan. But even though it claims to be built for marketers and scale-up businesses, you can’t add unlimited seats.
Activity limits are also far lower than our mid-tier plan, only including 10,000 active leads and 40,000 monthly emails.
It pales in comparison for anyone serious about outreach. With the limited feature set, it’s unclear exactly what you’re gaining for this price.
Premium
At the upper end of the scale, QuickMail’s Expert plan costs $129 per month with no minimum term. On this plan, you can send up to 300,000 emails a month, have 100,000 active prospects, and leverage 50 different inboxes for sending.
While all our plans offer all the essential features you need to run high-performing outreach campaigns, our Expert Plan offers a bunch of advanced extras — including API access, LinkedIn automation, and AI-assisted follow-up with sub-campaigns launched based on the recipient’s response and automatic unsubscribes.
With Smartlead, the $94-per-month Pro plan includes unlimited email warmup, unlimited email accounts, and unlimited seats — finally.
But the send limits are still comparatively low, at 150,000 emails per month. So you’re saving $35 (one lunch from DoorDash) per month, but only getting half the email sending power.
Unlimited sending inboxes is a gimmick if the allowed sends are capped that low. QuickMail gives you double the send volume and a generous allowance of senders to reach it without compromising deliverability.
Smartlead Users: Claim Your Free QuickMail Test Drive
Stuck in a contract with Smartlead?
Sick of sharing logins and tired of missed replies?
Don’t worry — there’s no need to wait for your renewal date, or even for the end of the month.
Just send us your last Smartlead invoice and we’ll add equivalent credits to your new QuickMail account.
And you don’t even have to cancel your Smartlead account; we’ll foot the bill for a head-to-head test.
That way, you can see which platform is delivering the best results.
(Just a heads up, we’re pretty confident we’ll win.)
To claim your free test-drive, just sign up for a 14-day free trial and email us your Smartlead invoice.
We were seeing decent success with [previous tool] at the time, but tried some test campaigns in QuickMail. It immediately became clear we needed to make a switch since the QuickMail campaigns were booking 4.2x more meetings…
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What Our Customers Say
“QuickMail allows me to communicate with my client base in bulk, while still coming right from my email address. Open rates and conversions are much higher because of this"
Hans Skillrud
Cofounder, Termageddon
"One of the most important technologies we use is QuickMail, as it allows us to build incredibly complex engagement campaigns simply and efficiently"
Ben Way
CEO, Rainmakers
"After trying the most popular email marketing tools out there & not being completely satisfied with any of them, I was directed to QuickMail. Best decision ever"
Fabi Mersan
Founder, ClinicBuzz
"I switched over to QuickMail.io in Sept and since then my business has exploded. Thanks!"
Marcel H.
Founder and CEO, G2 Review
“QuickMail helped me get the first paying clients for my business and it's still at the core of our lead generation.”
Maksymilian M.
Head of Technology, G2 Review
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