Instantly vs Smartlead: What an Agency Running Instantly Actually Uses

Instantly vs Smartlead is the first tool decision most agencies face when they set up cold email themselves. This guide compares the two on what matters to an Australian marketing agency: price, the features that change how you work, and the settings that decide whether your emails reach the inbox.

We've sent every cold email campaign through Instantly since March 2023 and run it for agency clients at scale. We haven't run our campaigns on Smartlead, so where this comparison rests on Smartlead's public pages rather than our own use, we say so. The Instantly sections come from our real settings and our own automation.

You'll get the pricing as at October 2026, a feature table, the Instantly settings we use on every campaign, the retargeting automation that Instantly's API made possible, where Instantly falls short for us, and a short decision table. It sits alongside our guide to the cold email tech stack we use for Australian agencies, and the wider playbook in cold email for marketing agencies in Australia.

Instantly vs Smartlead: which is better for agencies?

Both do the core job. Each lists unlimited email accounts and warmup, so you aren't charged per inbox, and each gives you a way to manage replies in one place. The differences that matter to an agency are narrower: how each handles client workspaces, private infrastructure, inbox-placement testing and automation.

We use Instantly for everything we send. Our site says it plainly: "For email outreach, we partner with Instantly.ai." One workspace, unlimited inboxes, warmup included, and an API we can build on is what fits the way we run many client campaigns at once.

Smartlead isn't our platform. We've only come across it on a client's own account, so we have no campaign history of our own on it to report. Where we describe Smartlead below, the facts come from its pricing page. When we say one tool suits us better, that's about fit with how we work, not a ranking of the two.

How much do Instantly and Smartlead cost?

These are public list prices from each vendor's pricing page as at October 2026, in US dollars. They change often, so check Instantly's pricing and Smartlead's pricing before you budget.

Instantly outreach plans

Instantly's page shows two figures for Hypergrowth emails: 125,000 on the plan card and 100,000 in its comparison table. It also lists a 14-day free trial with no card, an add-on of 25,000 contacts and 125,000 emails for US$87 a month, and a separate lead database sold on credit plans.

Smartlead plans

Smartlead sells white-label client workspaces at US$29 a month each from the Pro plan (Unlimited Prime includes three), private SmartServers at US$39 per server a month, and SmartDelivery inbox-placement testing from US$49 a month. Every plan has a free trial with no card.

Compare plans on your own volume, not the entry price. Work out how many emails a month you'll send, follow-ups included, and how many contacts you'll upload, then see which tier covers both. For reference, our standard client setup is 10 inboxes sending up to 30 new-contact emails each per day.

Feature by feature: what matters to an agency

The vendor columns come from each company's pricing page as at October 2026. The last column is ours: what we do, and why the row does or doesn't matter to us.

Most rows only matter if you're about to hit them. The two that decide it for most agencies are client workspaces, which are a priced feature at Smartlead, and the API, which is where Instantly gave us the most room to build.

How do we set up Instantly for Australian agency campaigns?

Tool choice matters less than settings. These are the settings we apply to every campaign, and why:

Ten inboxes at 30 a day gives 300 new-contact emails a day, which is also our standard campaign daily limit.

Sequences. A campaign has up to five initial email variants, usually followed by one follow-up step in the same thread. The follow-up has a blank subject so it threads under the first email. Instantly's delay is the wait after a step, so the three-day gap goes on step one, and we never leave a step at zero days. We avoid day-specific words like "this week" because a campaign can start on any day.

Named and company-inbox lists. Lists with a decision maker's name open with Hi {{firstName}},. Company-inbox lists open with exactly Hi, and never use the first-name tag, in the body or the subject. A wrong first name is worse than no first name.

Want these settings applied to your campaigns by people who set them up every day? Book a call.

What did Instantly's API let us automate?

Retargeting. A retarget campaign re-contacts leads who finished a sequence without replying, with reworded copy and an easier ask. Done by hand across dozens of campaigns, it's repetitive and easy to get wrong, so we built a tool on Instantly's API. Every morning at 7am it:

1. Finds completed campaigns that finished sending 3 to 60 days ago and still have 50 or more eligible leads.
2. Rewrites the copy, keeping the offer, proof and structure but moving the call to action one rung down a friction ladder.
3. Moves only leads who finished the sequence with no reply. Anyone who replied, bounced or unsubscribed is never moved.
4. Applies the same safe settings as above.
5. Launches the campaign only if every check passes. A failed one is never retried automatically.

The ladder steps the ask down each round, not the proof:

We stop after the fourth. A list gets spent, and our own fifth retarget to the same list of Australian agencies got 2 replies from 1,459 sends.

In its first live week, our retarget automation picked 92 finished campaigns, launched 78 and stopped 14 safely. Across 13 run reports (12 to 20 October 2026), 103 retarget campaigns launched and 23,498 leads moved; 380 leads that had replied and 436 that had bounced were kept out.

One lesson came out of it: show the picks before the first live run. Our first automatic run picked old clients' campaigns, because our client list didn't separate active clients from past ones. About 1,526 moved leads were lost when those campaigns were deleted. Automatic mode now only touches active clients.

Where does Instantly fall short for us?

It does what we need, but these are the limits we've hit:

• Two settings weren't available through our build tooling. "Prioritise new leads" and "Stop campaign for company on reply" couldn't be set through the connector we first used to build campaigns, so we switched them on by hand. Our newer retarget tool sets them directly.
• No Australia/Sydney timezone. Instantly rejects it, so Australian campaigns run on Australia/Melbourne. It's the same clock, but lists in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Darwin need their own timezone.
• Occasional API timeouts when we run automation at volume. Our retarget tool treats a timeout as a safe stop, not a reason to guess.
• No CRM connection per client. In a workspace shared by many clients, we can't connect each client's CRM to Instantly. Replies reach clients as forwarded emails instead.

If you want to give each client their own login to the sending tool, Smartlead sells that as a feature. We run one workspace and send replies to the client's inbox, so we haven't needed it.

Which should your agency choose?

Our position is simple. Instantly is our sending platform: one workspace, unlimited inboxes, warmup included. Deliverability comes from how you use it, not the tool.

The tool is also the easy part. The work is the lists, the lookalike domains, the copy, the exclusions and the checks before anything sends. If you'd rather not build that yourself, see how we run campaigns, or read how the rest of our stack fits together.