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Instantly vs Lemlist: We Ran Both for 90 Days on the Same List

Ibby SyedIbby Syed, Founder, Cotera
9 min readMarch 7, 2026

Instantly vs Lemlist: We Ran Both for 90 Days on the Same List

Instantly vs Lemlist: We Ran Both for 90 Days on the Same List

Rafael wanted Lemlist. Kenji wanted Instantly. They'd been arguing about it in Slack for two weeks, citing blog posts, YouTube reviews, and the opinions of LinkedIn influencers who almost certainly had affiliate deals with one or both platforms. I told them to stop arguing and start testing.

We ran both platforms simultaneously for 90 days. Same ICP (Director+ at B2B SaaS companies, 50-300 employees, US and Canada). Same messaging (a four-email sequence we'd already validated). Same sending schedule (weekdays, 8 AM to 11 AM recipient time). Same number of mailboxes (six per platform, all warmed for at least 25 days before launch). We split a list of 3,600 leads evenly: 1,800 to Instantly, 1,800 to Lemlist.

Ninety days is a real test. Thirty days captures initial performance. Ninety days captures trends, seasonal effects, and how each platform handles ongoing operations at scale.

Pricing: The Math Is Different Than You Think

At first glance, Instantly looks cheaper. Their Growth plan starts at $30/month. Lemlist's Email Starter is $39/month per user. For a solo operator, the comparison is straightforward.

It gets complicated with teams. Lemlist charges per seat. If you have three SDRs, that's $117/month on Lemlist's starter tier before you even consider higher plans. Instantly charges a flat rate regardless of team size. Our three-person SDR team on Instantly's Hypergrowth plan cost $77/month total. The equivalent Lemlist setup, with their Email Pro plan at $69/seat, came to $207/month.

Over 90 days, we spent $231 on Instantly and $621 on Lemlist. That's a $390 difference. Not life-changing, but not nothing either, especially for early-stage teams watching every dollar.

Lemlist's per-seat pricing does include features that Instantly charges extra for or doesn't offer: native LinkedIn steps, custom image personalization, and a built-in CRM. If you'd pay for those features separately, the per-seat cost is more justified. If you don't need them, you're paying for capabilities you won't use.

Deliverability: Closer Than Expected

We monitored inbox placement using GlockApps seed lists throughout the 90 days. The aggregate numbers:

Instantly averaged 82.7% inbox placement. Lemlist averaged 84.9%. Over 3,600 leads each, that's a difference of roughly 40 additional emails hitting the primary inbox on Lemlist's side. Noticeable in aggregate, invisible at the individual campaign level.

The more interesting story was in the variance. Instantly's deliverability was a roller coaster during weeks 3-5. It dipped to 74% in week 4, recovered to 86% by week 6, and stabilized around 83% for the remainder. Lemlist was steadier, staying between 82% and 88% throughout. Diana, who was monitoring daily, said Instantly's week-4 dip correlated with a rotation change in their warmup network, though we couldn't confirm this definitively.

Bounce rates were almost identical: 2.4% on Instantly, 2.2% on Lemlist. Same list, so same data quality. Neither platform introduced meaningful bounce issues.

Warmup performance was comparable. Both got fresh mailboxes to sendable health within three weeks. Lemlist shows slightly more warmup analytics (you can see warmup email open rates and spam placement specifically). Instantly's warmup is more of a black box that works.

Reply Rates

Over 90 days and 1,800 leads each:

Instantly: 67 replies, 3.7% reply rate. Lemlist: 72 replies, 4.0% reply rate.

Five replies difference on 1,800 leads. That is not statistically meaningful. We ran the numbers through a proportions test and the p-value was 0.63. The difference is indistinguishable from random variation.

Reply quality was similar too. Both platforms generated roughly the same mix of positive interest (about 35% of replies), "not now" responses (about 40%), and unsubscribes or negative responses (about 25%). Tomás, who handled reply triage, said he couldn't tell which platform a reply came from just by reading it.

The UI Comparison

Instantly's interface is cleaner. Campaign setup is faster. The dashboard shows you what you need without hunting through menus. Marcus, who was new to cold email when we started the test, set up his first Instantly campaign without asking anyone for help. His first Lemlist campaign required a 15-minute walkthrough from Rafael.

Lemlist's UI has more depth. The sequence builder supports conditional steps (if opened, send variant B; if not, skip to step 3). The personalization options let you insert custom images with the prospect's name, company logo, or LinkedIn photo directly into the email. Rafael used the custom image feature in about 30% of his campaigns and swears it increases reply rates, though our controlled test didn't isolate that variable.

Lemlist's multichannel sequence builder is genuinely useful. You can add LinkedIn connection requests, LinkedIn messages, and manual tasks into the same sequence as email steps. Instantly is email-only in the platform itself. If you want LinkedIn touches alongside Instantly emails, you need to manage them separately or use an external tool.

Elena's take on the UI: "Instantly is the tool I pick when I want to send emails quickly. Lemlist is the tool I pick when I want to build a complex sequence with multiple channels. They're optimized for different workflows."

API Quality

This mattered to us more than most teams, because we planned to automate campaign monitoring and lead management with an agent.

Instantly's API covers campaigns, leads, analytics, and account management. The documentation has improved over the past year, though some endpoints still behave differently than documented. Rate limits are reasonable for most use cases. We hit them a few times during bulk lead operations but nothing that caused real problems.

Lemlist's API is more mature in some areas, particularly around sequence management and step-level analytics. You can pull data on individual sequence steps, which is useful for understanding which email in a series performs best. But Lemlist's API authenticates per user, which gets complicated when you have a team and want a single integration point.

We connected an Apollo cold outreach agent to Instantly's API for automated lead loading and campaign management. The integration worked. Not seamlessly — we had to handle pagination carefully and work around a few undocumented response format changes — but it worked. The same agent concept on Lemlist would have required per-seat API keys and separate connections for each team member's campaigns, which added complexity we didn't want.

What Neither Platform Does

Neither Instantly nor Lemlist will tell you that your Tuesday sends outperform your Thursday sends. Neither will notice that leads from one Apollo search convert at twice the rate of leads from another. Neither will flag that Campaign 7 and Campaign 12 share 34 leads and you're double-contacting a VP at Datadog.

Both platforms are execution tools. They send emails according to rules you set and report on what happened. The interpretation of that data — which campaigns to scale, which to pause, which sequences to rewrite — is entirely manual. At three campaigns, manual interpretation is fine. At 15 campaigns, you're guessing.

This is where the debate about Instantly vs Lemlist starts to feel like arguing about which brand of hammer is better while ignoring the fact that neither hammer knows where the nails should go. The sending platform matters. I'm not saying it doesn't. But the intelligence layer above the platform matters more, because that's where the decisions happen that determine whether your outbound program grows or flatlines.

Our Verdict After 90 Days

There is no clear winner, and I say that having genuinely wanted one platform to win so we could consolidate and stop paying for two.

Instantly wins on pricing, simplicity, and speed-to-launch. If you want to send cold emails and don't need multichannel sequences, Instantly does the job for less money and less friction.

Lemlist wins on multichannel capabilities, personalization features, and deliverability consistency. If LinkedIn touches and custom images are part of your workflow, Lemlist is the better native platform.

Reply rates were identical in a controlled test. Deliverability was close. Bounce rates were the same.

We kept Instantly for most of our campaigns and use Lemlist for sequences that include LinkedIn steps. Rafael was not thrilled with this split verdict, but the data didn't give us a single winner.

The more impactful decision was building the automation layer above both platforms. The agent that monitors campaigns, flags anomalies, catches duplicates, and generates daily performance reports improved our results more than switching from one platform to the other ever could have. It works on top of Instantly. It could work on top of Lemlist too. That's the point.

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