6 Best Woodpecker Alternatives for Lead Gen Agencies

Most cold email platforms are built for businesses doing their own outreach.

Woodpecker claims to be different. It offers a dedicated agency package designed to make day-to-day life easier for lead gen agencies with its “safe and intuitive” tools.

But talk is cheap.

In reality, Woodpecker is missing some of the essential functionality agencies need to deliver results at scale.

Whether you’ve already tried Woodpecker or are simply shopping around before signing up, we’ve analyzed the six best Woodpecker alternatives for lead gen agencies, including:

• Key features

• Agency pricing

• Common challenges

Let’s get into it…

QuickMail: The #1 Woodpecker Alternative

Sure, you expected us to name QuickMail as the best Woodpecker alternative for lead gen agencies.

But we don’t say these things lightly. Here’s our reasoning:

Woodpecker vs QuickMail: At-a-Glance Comparison Table

* Free AutoWarmer with MailFlow included with all QuickMail plans

^ Eats into monthly sending limit

+ Via native integration with 6 different verification tools or via credits

What Makes QuickMail the Best Woodpecker Alternative?

Here are the top three reasons why you should choose QuickMail over Woodpecker:

Advanced Deliverability Tools

With Woodpecker

Woodpecker describes itself as “a cold email tool focused on deliverability”. 

But it’s fair to say that not all users agree:

One of the platform’s biggest deliverability-related issues is its email warmup tool. In a nutshell, Woodpecker’s email warmup doesn’t work for Gmail accounts, which is inconvenient to say the very least.

With QuickMail

On the flip side, email deliverability is baked into everything we do at QuickMail. We’re kind of obsessed with it.

For starters, every QuickMail user gets inclusive access to one of the top warmup tools on the market, MailFlow. So your new inboxes will be ready to go when you need them, helping you scale sending volumes without harming deliverability.

We also include our proprietary deliverability tool, Deliverability AI, with all QuickMail plans. Deliverability AI automatically sends emails from your top-performing inboxes, saving you a bunch of time and effort on manually analyzing deliverability rates and rotating inboxes yourself.

As if that wasn’t enough, we give you a wealth of additional deliverability tools, including blacklist monitoring and MX bounce protection. 

Plus we make it easy to set delay times between email sends and control the maximum number of emails you send in a day.

All of those tools are designed to help you avoid the junk folder and hit more main inboxes — which translates to more opens, replies, and leads.

Learn more: Ultimate Guide to Cold Email Deliverability 

Agency-Grade Analytics and Dashboard

With Woodpecker

Woodpecker isn’t exactly cheap. So it’s a real surprise that its reporting and analytics tools are so limited, with no access to:

• Positive reply rate reports

• Unsubscribe reports

• Send-day attribution

Without key cold email metrics like these, it’s much harder to understand which campaigns are truly working (and why).

As a lead gen agency, it often feels like you’re flying blind.

With QuickMail

QuickMail’s advanced analytics features are second to none.

For starters, you’ll find reports covering all the essential metrics, including…

• Opens

• Clicks

• Replies

• Bookings

• Bounces

…all of which can be segmented by your email service provider or your lead’s email provider, giving you the clearest possible picture of campaign performance.

Our agency dashboard gives you a top-level view of each client through — no more clicking three pages deep to see which clients need urgent attention.

And we have another key differentiator: send-day attribution.

With our reports, all activity is tracked to the day an email was sent. So you can instantly identify deliverability drop-offs and course-correct.

Client Portals for Reporting

While both Woodpecker and QuickMail allow you to create client reporting portals, QuickMail puts more control in your hands for what data you share.

In QuickMail, create up to 20 custom tiles for each client - show future emails scheduled for outreach, positive reply rates, and more.

5 Other Top Woodpecker Alternatives

Instantly

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Add unlimited email accounts on every plan, helping you scale your campaigns without damaging deliverability.

• Use the one-click bulk domain tester and built-in email validation to reduce bounces and ensure your domains are correctly set up for sending emails at scale.

• Plan and optimize your outreach campaigns with support from a dedicated Instantly account manager (only available on the Enterprise-level Custom plan).

Agency Pricing

One of Instantly’s biggest drawbacks is the lack of dedicated agency price plans.

As an agency user, you’re forced to choose a standard plan. Because they’re not built for agencies, they’re either too restrictive or too expensive.

Let’s give you an example: the mid-grade Hypergrowth plan ($97 per month) only includes 100,000 monthly emails and up to 25,000 uploaded contacts. That’s nowhere near enough for most lead gen agencies.

Even the top-tier Light Speed plan is limited to 100,000 contacts and 500,000 emails per month. If you need more than that, you have to reach out for an enterprise-level quote — and the so-called Enterprise plan is only available on an annual contract. So if you don’t like it after a month, you’re kinda stuck.

Common Challenges

• The unified inbox is only available at Hypergrowth level and above.

• Each client requires a separate workspace, so there’s no way to get an instant performance snapshot across all your accounts and campaigns.

• No deliverability monitoring or visibility into your email deliverability rate.

• The warmup pool is mostly custom SMTP inboxes, so your accounts aren’t being warmed up with Google or Outlook. Some users aren’t too pleased with this:

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

Lemlist

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Create dynamic landing pages and text variables to build highly personalized campaigns at scale.

• Use smart logic to design smart sequences that adapt to a prospect’s previous actions (such as whether they opened an email or clicked a link).

• Boost your response rate by adding cold calling and LinkedIn steps to your outreach sequences.

Agency Pricing

Lemlist doesn’t publish pricing information for businesses with 10+ users — so if you fall into that category, you’ll have to get in touch for a custom quote.

But, for context, its highest regular plan starts at $159 per user, per month. Or nearly $1,600 per month for an agency with ten users.

Needless to say, it’s not the most affordable option for agencies.

Common Challenges

• Lemlist’s per-user pricing model makes it way more expensive than a dedicated agency-grade outreach solution.

• Email replies aren’t categorized by client or campaign, which makes it too easy to miss hot opportunities.

• Emails sent via Lemlist contain messy html, which can affect deliverability.

• We’ve seen some users report regular technical problems with Lemlist:

Smartlead

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Add unlimited team members and track their performance via the agency dashboard.

• Set follow-up reminders and build automated follow-up sequences to ensure you capitalize on every opportunity.

• Automate every step of your outreach process, from adding leads to campaigns to managing meeting bookings.

Agency Pricing

Once again, you won’t find any agency-specific plans at Smartlead.

The closest match is the top-tier Custom Plan, which Smartlead describes as “perfect for lead gen agencies”. Prices start at $174 per month, plus a $29 per month for each client you add after the first.

Common Challenges

• Smartlead is a pretty new platform, and we’ve seen reports that it can be glitchy:

*Quote from unaffiliated agency owner, March 2024

• There are no native integrations at all, so you’ll have to rely on Zapier to connect with other tools in your sales stack.

• You have to filter by client to see how your campaigns are performing, rather than getting a single view across all your accounts.

• Prospects have to be uploaded via CSV rather than created manually, and you can’t bulk-add them to campaigns or verify them within Smartlead.

• Just like Instantly, the auto-warmer mostly uses custom SMTP inboxes rather than Gmail or Outlook.

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

Reply.io

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Feature-rich agency plans include unlimited mailboxes, clients, users, contacts, and email warmup (although the pricing isn’t totally transparent, as we’ll explain in the next section).

• Segment report data by client or team member for a clearer view of which accounts or colleagues need your attention.

• Set roles and permissions to restrict who can view and edit specific campaigns and reports.

Agency Pricing

Unusually, Reply.io does have a dedicated agency plan. It starts at $210 per month and includes unlimited sequences, inboxes, and email warmup, which sounds pretty appealing.

However, Reply.io says the number of active contacts on its Agency plan is “adjustable”, so you’ll have to pay more for higher volumes of prospects. In our experience, this can quickly get expensive.

Another headache: Reply.io charges extra for some useful features (like LinkedIn automation and cold calling/SMS messaging), even if you’re already paying for the top-tier Agency package. Which doesn’t seem fair to us.

Common Challenges

• With no centralized client dashboard, it’s a real headache to check performance across individual accounts.

• Reports offer minimal customization, which can be a challenge if you have clients with specific reporting demands.

• The UI isn’t very user-friendly (even once you’ve sat through the lengthy onboarding process), so it’s all too easy to make basic mistakes like sending emails from the wrong inbox.

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

Saleshandy

Key Benefits for Agencies

• Manage all your clients accounts through the dedicated agency portal, featuring your own logo and brand assets.

• Add unlimited team members and clients to your agency portal, and control who can edit what with view-only reports.

• Leverage advanced deliverability features like sender rotation, ramp-up, and sending intervals to hit more main inboxes.

Agency Pricing

Saleshandy is yet another outreach platform that doesn’t offer agency-specific price plans.

At the very least, most agencies will have to start with Outreach Scale ($199 per month), which includes up to 60,000 total prospects and 200,000 monthly emails, plus 12,000 verification credits.

If that’s not enough, you can get up to 500,000 total prospects, 1.5 million emails, and 55,000 verification credits for a cool $1,499 per month. For more prospects, you’ll have to reach out for a quote.

You can also buy additional email verification credits at a rate of $60 per 30,000 emails.

Common Challenges

• We’ve seen some worrying reports from users who say Saleshandy damaged their domain reputation.

• Lacks some basic integrations (such as the ability to import prospects from Google Drive).

• Unified inbox doesn’t allow you to assign replies to a specific team member or respond from a different inbox.

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

Switch To the Best Woodpecker Alternative Today

All the cold outreach platforms in this article are solid Woodpecker alternatives — otherwise we wouldn’t have included them.

But QuickMail is the only option that’s truly fit for growing lead gen agencies.

No other platform offers such a wide range of tools to boost your email deliverability. And with our agency-friendly pricing, agency dashboard, and white-labeled client portals, we make it simple, efficient, and affordable to manage dozens (or even hundreds) of clients.

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