The biggest problem for cold email agencies, especially lead generation agencies, is that they don’t have flexible CRMs to manage their positive replies from cold emailing 📥.

Indeed, traditional CRMs or AI CRMs often have rigid pricing, which makes inbox management inside a CRM almost impossible. The lack of modernity as well, with AI built in features, also prevents agency owners from having a great CRM experience ⚙️.

In this article, we’ll cover the best 3 AI CRMs for cold email agencies using Smartlead or Instantly 🎯.

Alternative #1: Breakcold - The AI Native CRM for Smartlead and Instantly users

Breakcold has multi-hundred customers doing cold email at scale using Smartlead or Instantly and managing their positive replies in Breakcold CRM. Famous customers include the ColdIQ agency.

Let's see the pros and cons.

Pros

Here are the pros of using Breakcold for cold email agencies.

Unlimited email accounts with Unified Inbox

Smartlead offers unlimited email accounts 📧.

Instantly offers unlimited email accounts.

Breakcold offers unlimited email accounts too. This is a must to limit costs for your cold email agency compared to other AI sales CRMs 💸. From there, you also get a unified email inbox so your sales reps or virtual assistants can manage positive replies directly from the CRM.

Many agencies are already doing this and, as a result, are avoiding Instantly’s and Smartlead’s inboxes altogether 🧠.

Workspace system to manage multiple clients

Breakcold is one of the rare sales CRMs to have a solid workspace system built for agency owners 🧩.

You can easily create multiple workspaces, usually one per client 📂.

Thanks to a strong roles and permissions system, you can navigate across multiple workspaces as the owner, while your clients or sales reps can be limited to only their dedicated workspaces 🔒.

AI native CRM automations to manage leads

What’s super annoying as a cold email agency using a CRM is having to move leads in the sales pipeline and create tasks to follow up with leads in order to maximize the number of calls booked 😤.

With Breakcold, you can:

• Move leads automatically based on email activity with your leads and how you named your sales pipeline stages 🔄

• Create CRM tasks automatically thanks to an AI CRM agent that you can pick or customize 🤖

Cons

Here are the cons of Breakcold:

No 1-click connection of email accounts

If you have 50+ email accounts per client, you’ll have to connect them one by one 😓.

There isn’t an easy system to connect all email accounts via a CSV import or via API ⚙️.

In practice though, connecting accounts is pretty fast, and cold email agencies rarely have more than 10 to 15 email accounts per client 🙂.

Need to pay for another seat to invite client in the workspace

Breakcold’s pricing is very flexible, but it’s not free either 💰. You’ll still need to pay an extra seat for each client you bring onboard.

This fee is usually around $10 per month per seat 👤.

It can scale quickly if you manage a large number of clients, and you’ll also need to pay for seats for your internal team members 📈.

CRM Integration with Instantly

Breakcold integrates with Instantly so you can push your CRM contacts into specific Instantly campaigns 🔗.

It’s a great way to start using the CRM for high ticket leads in account based marketing, and then push them into a cold emailing sequence 🎯.

You can also use this integration for re engagement campaigns. For example, when a lead moves from sales pipeline stage C to D, you can automatically enroll the lead into a re engaging cold email campaign ⚙️.

CRM Integration with Smartlead

Breakcold’s CRM integration with Smartlead works the same way as the Instantly one 🔗.

You can manually or automatically push leads from the CRM into a Smartlead campaign ⚙️.

From my own experience, I noticed that Smartlead’s API is more responsive than Instantly’s, so leads are received faster. It almost feels like magic ✨.

Alternative #2: Instantly - The AI CRM for Instantly power users

Along the way, Instantly released a CRM to help its users to manage their leads more effectively.

Pros

The CRM is native to Instantly, so you don’t have to build any automations to push positive replies from Instantly into another CRM system 🧩.

You can upgrade to Instantly AI agent features to have AI handle positive replies and move leads automatically through the sales pipeline 🤖.

You also get unlimited team members, so you don’t have to pay for seats, which is a big plus for agencies scaling fast 💰.

Cons

I heard that building a CRM was the only technical regret for Instantly, probably because building a fully fledged CRM is extremely demanding 🧠.

You need to upgrade between $47 and $97 per month to access the CRM. It sounds fine at first, but it’s actually quite expensive for something that is not a complete CRM. You’d be better off paying for a dedicated one 💸.

Aside from the kanban view and some segmentation, there isn’t much you can do in the CRM 📋.

CRM is clearly not the focus of the Instantly team, so it’s unlikely to be massively improved in the near future ⏳.

Alternative #3: Smartlead - The AI CRM for Smartlead power users

I don't know if their goal was to copy Instantly or not, but after that they released their CRM, Smartlead did the same. Beyond following the trend, I guess they did that because it's a good way to reduce churn for a cold emailing software.

Pros

• The CRM is native to Smartlead 🧩.

• You can benefit from Smartlead’s AI inside the CRM so that leads move automatically through the sales pipeline 🤖.

• Like Instantly, you have unlimited team members 👥.

• You can also have a different CRM in each workspace you’re working on, so essentially one CRM per client 📂.

Cons

Not a lot to say here without repeting myself, the cons are very similar to Instantly ones.

Smartlead's focus is to have the best cold emailing software to send cold emails at scale safely thanks to a top notch email deliverability, they will never build a full AI CRM.

Are there any other viable alternatives to Breakcold, Instantly or Smartlead for cold email agencies?

Not really. Most CRMs have a rigid pricing structure that doesn’t allow you to plug unlimited accounts, or that prevents you from having multiple workspaces at a reasonable price 💸.

What I’ve noticed in the market is that cold email agencies tend to either build their own CRM using Notion or Airtable (1), or use Front as a centralized inbox tool (2) 🧩.

Front used to be the solution for cold emailers, but over time they blocked this use case by changing their pricing, because cold emailers at scale were connecting way too many accounts 📧.