Cold outreach tools like Woodpecker, lemlist, and QuickMail can help you automate starting conversations with qualified decision-makers.

While they’re all good platforms, each has unique pros and cons, which are worth knowing about before choosing one. 

In this guide, we’ll look at the features of each outreach tool, its ideal user, and the benefits and drawbacks so you know which one is right for you.

Let’s start with a quick overview of each platform. 

Woodpecker vs. lemlist vs. QuickMail: Compared


QuickMail

Woodpecker

Lemlist

Send personalized cold emails

✅

✅

✅

Run automated LinkedIn outreach campaigns

✅

Only available on more expensive plans and via a 3rd-party integration

Only available on most expensive pricing tier

Automatically follow-up after no response

✅

✅

✅

Use inbox rotation to improve deliverability

✅

✅Yes, but costs

$54/

month

per email slot


✅Yes, but costs $59 per month per email slot

AI sentiment analysis to segment replies

✅

❌

❌

Advanced analytics and metrics

Standard cold email metrics plus advanced time and sentiment-based analytics

❌ Only standard metrics

❌ Only standard metrics

Free email warm-up system

✅

❌Not available for Gmail inboxes

❌

Cost per seat

Add unlimited team members at no extra cost

Pay at least $54/month for every additional seat

Pay at least $59/month for every additional seat

A/Z testing

✅

Paid add-on and limited to 5 variations

❌Only A/B testing available

Team activity audit log

✅

❌

❌

Central team inbox to track replies

✅

✅

❌

Pricing

Plans begin at $49/month for 30,000 emails and unlimited team members. Start with a 14-day free trial.


From $54 per email slot per month for 1,500 emails

From $59 per seat per month


Now, let’s take that brief snapshot and dive into a more detailed comparison.

Woodpecker Overview

Woodpecker is a cold email tool that’s been available since 2015. It’s a trusted and reliable option for people who want to run standard cold email campaigns.

If you’re already familiar with the platform from a previous company or job, it could be worth testing to see if it still works for you. 

However, when you compare Woodpecker with other tools on the market, such as QuickMail, there are some clear limitations.

Who Is Woodpecker Best For?

Woodpecker's original platform was made for solopreneurs and small businesses. Their core focus was providing a simple cold email tool that anyone could use. Since then, Woodpecker has added new features, including an agency dashboard (similar to QuickMail’s feature). However, these all come with a cost that’s higher than the equivalent in QuickMail.

Woodpecker has an integration with a third-party LinkedIn outreach tool available on more expensive tiers. It also has an AI-based video creator to help you add personalized videos to your cold emails.

If you like building custom workflows, Woodpecker has an API so you can connect it with other sales tools. Working with APIs does have a learning curve if you’re less technically savvy, but it’s a nice feature to have.

What's Missing from Woodpecker?

The primary issue is the price. To access all Woodpecker’s core features costs $54 per email slot per month on the basic plan. For agencies, the cost is $79 per email slot per month. Even if your agency gets good results, those expenses add up.

This is reflected in the company’s reviews on G2, as Woodpecker users highlight that the platform is expensive for what it offers. For example, if you want to take advantage of Woodpecker’s mailbox rotation feature, you must pay for every inbox you’d like to include. 

Source: G2

Even on QuickMail’s Basic Plan, which costs less than Woodpecker’s equivalent plan, customers can use five active inboxes to send emails. They can also access an inbox rotation tool to improve deliverability. 

Another limitation of Woodpecker is its sending limits. You can only email 1,500 prospects per month on Woodpecker’s most affordable pricing plan. On QuickMail’s equivalent plan, you can contact 10,000 prospects per month.

If you want cold email to be a real growth driver, it won’t be long before you need to contact more than 1,500 prospects monthly, so prepare for Woodpecker’s cost increase.

Multiple reviewers on G2 also share that Woodpecker’s analytics and reporting capabilities are limited. This is a problem because the best cold emailers are data-driven. You need access to advanced metrics to determine what’s working with your email templates, sending schedules, and deliverability performance. Without them, you’re relying on guesswork.

If you care about improving your performance with data, QuickMail is a better fit.

Woodpecker does have some email deliverability tools, but if you use Gmail, there’s no access to an email warm-up tool. If you want to warm up your Gmail inbox with Woodpecker, you’ll need to do it manually which is hugely time-consuming and slow. All QuickMail users can leverage the MailFlow integration to easily warm-up their inboxes.

Woodpecker Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Straightforward cold email software with all the core features you need to get started.

  • Mailbox rotation spreads sending volume across inboxes, but the price per inbox doesn’t reduce per team member added, making it expensive.

  • Email verification system helps you minimize bounces to invalid email addresses.

Cons

  • It’s expensive if you plan to use it with more than one team member.

  • Reviews on G2 highlight that the reporting and metrics dashboards lack detail.

  • Users on G2 report that the campaign setup is difficult and time-intensive.

  • A/B testing is only available as a paid add-on.

  • Gmail users don’t have access to email warm-up tools.

Lemlist Overview

Lemlist is a Woodpecker competitor offering a similar suite of tools. Like Woodpecker, lemlist allows you to build multi-step cold email campaigns with automated follow-ups and track your results.

Like Woodpecker, lemlist also has a LinkedIn outreach feature for creating multichannel campaigns. However, it’s built into the platform rather than relying on an external integration, as Woodpecker does. Lemlist’s LinkedIn prospecting tool is limited to users on the more expensive sales engagement Pro package ($99/seat/month).

Lemlist isn’t ideal for growing teams for a few reasons. First, you need to pay a high price per seat. There’s no shared inbox for tracking replies to campaigns, and there’s no audit log to track team activity. 

Who Is lemlist Best For?

Lemlist is ideal for small teams that need to send cold emails but also want the flexibility to include multichannel steps, such as cold calls and LinkedIn outreach.

If you want access to all the features, including LinkedIn prospecting, the cost is $99 per team member per month. If you have ten team members or more, your company needs to be on the Enterprise plan. 

This makes it highly cost-prohibitive for any team that needs to send emails at scale.

What's Missing from lemlist?

If you’re a solopreneur or part of a small team, lemlist does have all of the basic features and may be worth considering. However, it has drawbacks.

First, you need to pay per seat. This pricing model makes it hard to collaborate with your team unless you’re willing to pay a high price. Compared to QuickMail, where you can add unlimited team members to your account on every pricing plan, lemlist is an expensive option if collaboration matters to you.

Second, lemlist users on G2 say the analytics lack clarity and specifics. If you need detailed, actionable data on your email performance, then QuickMail is a better choice.

Source: G2

Even happy lemlist users mention that the UX can initially be overwhelming, and it takes time to create email templates. Other users say insufficient features that could negatively affect productivity include difficulty changing prospect details once imported into the platform. 

There’s also no shared inbox for tracking replies. This means your team needs to monitor multiple inboxes at once and risk missing replies from interested prospects. If response time matters, consider using QuickMail instead as the shared Opportunities Inbox makes it easy to manage replies across multiple campaigns and inboxes.

As with Woodpecker or any other cold email platform, consider these issues before committing to lemlist.

Lemlist Pros and Cons

Pros

  • It contains all the standard features you would expect in a cold email tool, such as personalization, follow-ups, and integrations with CRM tools.

  • It includes a LinkedIn outreach tool, but it’s only available on the most expensive plan.

  • It offers an AI copywriting tool to help you write email templates faster.

Cons

  • The pay-per-seat pricing model, costing $59 per seat per month on the basic plan and $99 per seat per month on the pro plan, means lemlist is an expensive platform if collaboration is important to you. In comparison, QuickMail allows you to bring as many team members as you need at no extra cost.

  • No shared inbox to manage your campaign replies or see which team members are handling conversations.

  • Multichannel outreach steps are only available on the most expensive pricing plan.

  • Some users highlight UX issues like complex email template creation and limited flexibility for modifying prospect details.

  • There’s no free email warm-up tool or integration, so you need to pay for lemlist’s own warm-up tool on top of your subscription. 

QuickMail: The Best Alternative to Woodpecker and lemlist

To take your sales outreach to the next level with powerful automation, multichannel access, detailed analytics, and collaboration features, you want to try QuickMail. 

There’s a risk-free 14-day trial on all plans, and we’re so confident you’ll get results that we’ll even pay you to switch from your current tool.

Let’s take a look at what makes QuickMail unique.

Who Is QuickMail Best For?

QuickMail is for small and medium-sized businesses that want to try or strengthen cold outreach as a growth channel. QuickMail has everything you need to build multi-step outreach campaigns, including cold email, LinkedIn outreach, and cold call steps.

You can bring as many team members as you need onto the QuickMail platform at no extra cost. That makes it easy to distribute your workload across your team, which helps with campaign management and boosts productivity. 

You can also tap into QuickMail’s inbox rotation to spread your email outreach across multiple inboxes. Inbox rotation ensures you never hit your email service provider’s send limits and improves your deliverability for every inbox you use.

5 Powerful Benefits of Using QuickMail for Your Cold Outreach

1. Write Personalized Cold Outreach That Gets Replies

Data from 65+ million emails sent using QuickMail shows that half of all cold email campaigns have an average reply rate of under 10%. However, the best 25% of campaigns have a 20% reply rate or more.

One of the best ways to increase your positive reply rate is to show your prospects that you’ve done your research. How? By adding unique personalization to every touchpoint.

If you had to do this with each individual email, creating your campaigns would be incredibly time-consuming. You’d need to manually connect with prospects on LinkedIn and write your emails one at a time.

With QuickMail, you can write one template and personalize every email or LinkedIn connection request, thanks to attributes. Attributes are unique snippets of text you add to your templates. They pull data from your prospect list and include it in your template when it gets sent to a prospect.

For example, in this email template, the attribute {{prospect.first_name}} would become your prospect’s first name based on the information included in that field during the prospect import process.

You can include any information you need in attributes, from a name to fully customized opening lines, job titles, or even a personal P.S. note at the end of your template. Spending time building templates that leverage attributes to improve personalization pays dividends.

If a prospect doesn’t respond, don’t worry — you can reach out on LinkedIn, make a cold call directly from QuickMail, or even add an SMS to your campaign to boost your response rates.

2. Never Land in Spam with Powerful Deliverability Tools

It doesn’t matter how good your targeting or emails are if you’re not landing in your prospect’s primary inbox. QuickMail has powerful deliverability tools to reduce the risk of your emails landing in spam.

First, you can use QuickMail’s integration with MailFlow to warm up your cold email inbox for free. MailFlow generates positive engagement in your inbox by interacting with other inboxes in a warm-up network. Over time, email service providers like Gmail and Outlook learn to trust your inbox and deliver more of your emails to your prospects’ primary inboxes.

Next, there’s inbox rotation. This feature lets you spread your sending volume across multiple inboxes, ensuring you never hit or exceed send limits. 

Before sending a campaign, choose the inboxes you want to include, and QuickMail automatically spreads the email volume between them.

Unlike other platforms, QuickMail doesn’t make you pay for every sending inbox you want to use. You can use inbox rotation with every QuickMail plan, and the Basic Plan even comes with five sending inboxes included.

3. Analyze Performance with Advanced Metrics

QuickMail gives you every data point you need to understand your outreach performance and improve it. You gain access to all core cold email metrics, including:

  • Open rate

  • Reply rate

  • Click-through rate

  • Unsubscribe rate

  • Bounce rate

This data is helpful and standard in most cold email platforms, but QuickMail takes it a step further and also offers metrics closely related to your core goals, such as:

  • Number of meetings booked per campaign

  • Reply sentiment for each campaign

  • Dollar value of deals won

  • Email open rates from the day your email gets sent

For even greater optimization, you can run A/B tests (part of every QuickMail pricing plan) to compare multiple copy variations in your email templates.

QuickMail also has an AI sentiment analysis engine to help you understand how prospects respond to your email templates.

Plus, you can learn why people unsubscribe to your campaigns and even assign prospects to new campaigns based on the sentiment of their responses.

These QuickMail features are a powerful way to automate issues that arise regularly and are ideal for teams with a proven sales process.

4. Never Miss a Response with the Opportunities Inbox

Running outreach from multiple inboxes is great for improving your email deliverability, but it can make tracking replies and following up messy. 

View all your prospects’ replies in QuickMail’s Opportunities inbox. No matter which email address your prospect replied to, you can gather them all in one place. 

You can assign conversations to specific team members. QuickMail also automatically detects new threads or recipients cc’d by your prospect, so you never risk missing a conversation.

To help track deals, you can add notes to conversations for other team members to reference. QuickMail also integrates natively with Pipedrive and HubSpot, as well as almost every CRM on the market through Zapier. You can always stay on top of your deal flow.

5. Built to Scale

Once your cold outreach starts generating results, it’s time to scale.

With other platforms like Woodpecker and lemlist, you pay per seat. That means you could quickly end up paying hundreds in fees each month to give your core sales team the ability to use the tool. 

QuickMail allows you to bring as many people into your account as you need at no extra cost. You can send outreach campaigns from five inboxes by default or upgrade to add more.

Additionally, you can track every action taken in QuickMail in an audit log. It shows you who made changes to your campaigns, which is useful if you want to review your team’s activity and understand how your updates impacted performance. 

If a mistake gets made, you can immediately see how it happened, fix it, and move on.

If you run an outbound agency, QuickMail lets you separate your campaigns into different client profiles and move between them effortlessly. You can have different team members managing their own accounts without needing to log in and out of various cold email tools or profiles.

Get Started with QuickMail

Woodpecker and lemlist are both great tools. However, when comparing them with QuickMail, it’s clear that both have limitations and cost more than if you use QuickMail.

Make the most of your cold outreach with QuickMail:

  • Build personalized cold outreach campaigns.

  • Add multichannel steps, including cold email, LinkedIn outreach, cold calls, SMS, and more.

  • Bring as many team members to your account as needed.

  • Track every response in the Opportunities inbox.

  • Spread your sending volume across multiple inboxes with inbox rotation.

  • Gain data-driven insights into your campaign performance with advanced analytics.

If you're ready to try out QuickMail, start today with a 14-day free trial.