Instantly vs Apollo vs Salesforge: Comprehensive Cold Outreach Tool Comparison

For a thorough understanding of what each option offers, a brief comparison table isn't enough to grasp all intricacies that come with each tool, so let's dive deeper into what makes Salesforge, Instantly and Apollo unique.

Salesforge vs Instantly vs Apollo: LinkedIn & Cold Email Outreach Tool Overview & Key Benefits

Before we compare product-by-product, start with the fundamentals: email deliverability, campaign management, and the ability to scale. A tool with an “extensive database” but poor deliverability gives you vanity metrics - opens and bounces - not meetings.

• Instantly offers an email-only playbook and offers some built-in deliverability tuning, which is great if your workflow is email-only campaigns, but that's rarely the case nowadays, as multi-channel outreach results far exceed email-only outreach.
• Apollo's main highlight, along with multi-channel outreach capabilities, is its large business dataset with 210M+ contacts. It emphasizes robust sales intelligence for faster reach. That strength is great for proprietary lead generation, though consequentially increases the starting pricing of the product. (Leadsforge is also a great alternative for lead generation that doesn't force your pricing to be tied to the outreach tool)

• Salesforge pitches a stack-based, scale-first solution for teams that run high-volume multi-channel campaigns, with everything from lead generation to email infrastructure bundled together under one roof so you don’t need separate add-ons or platforms.

Salesforge's positioning is perfect for teams whose sales strategy depends on running prospect lists at scale with little operational friction. That combination directly addresses the four failure modes of cold outreach: poor inbox placement, unmanaged replies, weak multi-channel sequencing, and slow campaign optimization.

Pricing Structure

Instantly's pricing model offers multiple product lines (Outreach, SuperSearch and CRM) with plans scaled for outreach volume and credits (+ a free trial and discounted annual billing), but for this comparison we'll focus on the Outreach pricing.

• $47/mo for Growth plan (you get: unlimited email accounts, unlimited email warmup, 1,000 uploaded contacts, 5,000 emails/month, chat support)
• $97/mo for Hypergrowth plan (you get: unlimited email accounts, unlimited warmup, 25,000 uploaded contacts, 100,000 emails/month, premium live support and team features)
• $358/mo for Light Speed plan (you get: everything in Hypergrowth, 100,000 uploaded contacts, 500,000 emails/month, and the SISR (Server & IP Sharding & Rotation) deliverability system)

Apollo provides 4 plans oriented around outreach scale + a Free plan with limited credits (discounted annual billing):

• $0/mo/user for Free plan (you get: basic contact access and search, Chrome & Gmail extensions, limited monthly credits and export ability, up to a couple of sequences for outreach, basic filters, email campaigns (Gmail only for non-paying accounts), limited API/export access and more)
• $59/mo/user for Basic plan (you get: significantly more credits and export allowance, advanced filters and intent topics, sequence automation, meeting scheduler, CRM & enrichment integrations, more API/export capacity, larger daily send limits and more)
• $99/mo/user for Professional plan (you get: higher credit allocations, unlimited/advanced sequences and A/B testing, dialer & call features (US dialer), AI research/composer tools, advanced reporting & dashboards, increased mailboxes/send limits and more)
• $149/mo/user for Organization plan (you get: the highest credit limits (team/enterprise scale), advanced admin controls (SSO, permissions), API access and integrations for orgs, custom reporting, priority support and account-level controls)

Salesforge provides 2 plans oriented around outreach scale and a 14-day free trial (with 2 free months granted when billed annually):

• $48/mo/company for Pro plan (you get: 1000 active contacts in sequence, 5000 messages/mo, 100 email validation credits/mo, 100 personalization credits/mo, unlimited mailboxes, unlimited contact storage, free premium warm up via Warmforge, unlimited workspaces, connect unlimited mailboxes, a unified inbox (Primebox), mailbox rotation, dynamic IPs, live chat support and more)
• $96/mo/company for Growth plan (you get: 10x the credits from the Pro plan, unlimited seats, A/B testing, personal onboarding, API access, 100 social action credits/month, multi-language sequences, Primebox AI reply crafting, ESP matching, access to a massive knowledge base and more)

Outreach Campaign Management

How easy is it to build, test, and iterate campaigns?

• Instantly emphasizes a campaign builder that supports A/Z testing with unlimited variations, AI prompts to enrich personalization variables, and automation to follow up on out-of-office replies.
• Apollo offers an integrated campaign management layer - AI-powered multi-channel campaign creation, built-in email sequencing, workflow automations, and prioritized task lists.
• Salesforge positions its campaign building around advanced multi-channel conditional sequences (email + LinkedIn) packaged within a very user-friendly interface. Management of replies is handled in the Primebox and campaigns feature premium deliverability-tooling so your sending cadence avoids spam.

Unified Reply Handling

Managing replies across multiple campaigns and multiple channels is where outreach operations either scale elegantly or fall into chaos. Salesforge’s Primebox is a worthwhile highlight in this aspect - it isn’t just another “unified inbox", it’s a core part of the tool that actively ties replies back to campaigns while also layering deliverability-aware tooling and AI analysis on top.

• But Salesforge's Primebox consolidates replies from both email and LinkedIn into a single place, while capturing responses even when prospects reply from a different address, and adds AI-assisted analysis and smart tools that surface context and prioritization so teams don’t miss active leads or lose threads in a sea of mailboxes.
• Instantly doesn't offer much in the way of unique reply inbox capabilities, partly due to its email-only focus, but its Unibox does exist.
• Apollo's primary design is to feed replies and engagement signals back into the CRM or into Apollo workflows so sales intelligence and scoring can take effect.

Email Deliverability, Infrastructure & Inbox Placement

Deliverability is the single biggest practical constraint on any cold email outreach effort: you can have the best subject lines and highly personalized sequences, but if mail goes to the spam folder, outbound sales and response rates collapse.

Instantly touts several deliverability functions, including:

• Unlimited email warm-up
• Mailbox rotation
• ESP matching
• Email verification
• An AI spam word checker

Apollo’s outreach stack also includes some deliverability capabilities, namely:

• Standard email warm-up
• Email verification
• Reply/bounce tracking
• Mailbox rotation

But this is one area where the other options don't hold a candle to Salesforge.

• Unlimited free warm-up via Warmforge
• Dynamic IPs
• Rotating mailboxes
• Spam checkers
• Placement tests
• ESP matching
• Mailbox health monitoring
• A/B testing
• Deliverability metrics

And more. Building sender reputation gradually while spreading volume across addresses and IPs to avoid single-mailbox throttles or sudden reputation hits is crucial for a scaling business. And that's paired with proprietary infrastructure options too:

• Mailforge (shared infra)
• Infraforge (private infra)
• Primeforge (Google/Outlook)
• Or you can connect your own infrastructure

Those infrastructure features reduce the risk of landing in spam and make multi-channel outreach more reliable, especially when you have a leads database and want to integrate email at scale.

If your current sales process is seeing deliverability erosion, prioritizing a platform like Salesforge is a practical way to streamline sales processes and improve campaign ROI.

Multi-Channel Outreach & AI Features

• Cold outreach today is multi-channel and Instantly is email-first.
• Apollo touts AI-powered, multi-channel campaigns and positions itself as a platform to replace multiple tools (such as a data provider, outreach platform, and CRM in one).
• But Salesforge leans into orchestrating conditional multi-channel sequences by combining unlimited mailboxes with unlimited LinkedIn senders - all aggregated within the Primebox. Additionally, Salesforge's state-of-the-art multi-source AI hyper-personalization gives it that additional human touch to maximize outreach optimization to its fullest potential.

If your goal is to keep cross-channel conversations joined together, to make sure scale doesn't include any ceiling, and to make the messages hit the recipient on a deeper level - Salesforge is perfect for the job.

Integrations & Proprietary Stack

Integrations determine whether your outreach becomes repeatable revenue.

Scaling from a handful of reps to an enterprise sales organization changes the platform requirements. At that point, practical outreach depends on clean contact data and tight CRM integrations.

• Apollo sells itself as a comprehensive sales engagement platform with broad native integrations with various CRMs and marketing tools. It demonstrates connectors to HubSpot, Salesforce, common email providers, and it touts integrations like webhooks, Zapier and API access.
• Instantly also highlights various integrations, including some major CRMs, API, Zapier, webhooks and Make.

Salesforge highlights a broad and practical variety of integrations designed to let teams plug the platform directly into existing sales stacks. Notable Salesforge integrations include:

• Major CRMs
• SMTP
• API
• Webhooks
• Slack
• Zapier
• Clay
• Sendspark
• RB2B
• Whitelabel
• The Forge Stack (Salesforge + Mailforge, Infraforge, Primeforge, Warmforge, Leadsforge)

And many more. Salesforge is also available as a Chrome extension and can be downloaded as a mobile app to provide as much convenience as possible.

If your priority is to keep the team aligned and ensure prospects are tracked consistently in your CRM, all tools cover the essentials - but Salesforge’s emphasis on consolidated data and comprehensive campaign tracking makes it slightly better when you want uniform access to replies and campaign insights across both LinkedIn and email channels.

Customer Support Channels & Resources

Customer support channels and resources are an underrated but mission-critical part of selecting the right sales engagement platform. They directly affect time-to-value for onboarding, how quickly you can streamline sales processes, and whether your sales teams can sustain outreach campaigns without frequent operational fire-drills.

• Instantly provides a help center and practical how-to articles (campaign creation, Unibox management, warm-up guidance), plus a Slack community and Facebook group to meet likeminded people. Apart from that, they have the standard support channels covered - live chat and email.
• Apollo’s scale means it provides an extensive knowledge base, guides, and in-app, email and even phone support aimed at enterprise customers. Apollo’s public notes emphasize iterative improvements, which is helpful when you rely on the platform as the center of your sales engagement flow. More expensive plans unlock faster response times and they offer the Apollo Academy for teams new to the cold outreach space.

Salesforge takes customer support & resources very seriously, while coupling product tooling with a people-first enablement stack that’s designed to reduce onboarding friction.

• Salesforge focuses on customer support and convenience and reduces the manual tasks sales teams often struggle with - no separate deliverability vendor, fewer manual data entry steps, and a partner focused on ironing out initial list hygiene and infrastructure.

Besides that, Salesforge customers also get:

• 24/7 email and live chat support
• Extensive documentation
• Youtube tutorials
• An active Slack community
• The Salesforge Academy
• And even weekly AMA sessions

Instantly vs Apollo vs Salesforge Final Verdict - Which Sales Outreach Tool Should Your Team Pick?

If you need a wide, research-grade lead database and advanced filtering for multi-touch plays, Apollo is a great pick. It’s built around sales intelligence and replacing multiple tools in a stack.

If your only outreach channel is email, Instantly can be an option too. It’s fast to deploy and has decent email deliverability tooling.

If, however, your operational priority is long-term, sustainable cold outreach at scale, including multi-channel outreach, enterprise-grade deliverability (with free unlimited warm-up), consolidated reply management (via the Primebox), and a stack that bundles everything from lead discovery to email infrastructure - Salesforge is the holy grail of choices.

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