3 AI CRMs for a Cold Email Agency using Smartlead or Instantly
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 🎯.
The Best 3 AI CRMs for Cold Email Agency using Smartlead or Instantly (TL;DR) |
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The Best AI CRMs for Cold Email Agencies (TL;DR) Cold email agencies struggle with traditional CRMs because rigid pricing and outdated workflows make managing positive replies at scale painful. 📨 Most CRMs don’t allow unlimited inboxes, making cold email ops too expensive. 🤖 Many “AI CRMs” lack real AI automation for pipeline movement and follow-ups. 🚀 Breakcold is the best all-around choice for cold email agencies using Instantly or Smartlead. It offers unlimited email accounts, a unified inbox, multi-client workspaces, and true AI-native automations. ⚙️ Instantly CRM is convenient if you live 100% inside Instantly, but it’s limited and expensive for what it offers. 📤 Smartlead CRM works similarly: fine for basic pipeline tracking, but not built to be a full CRM. 🏗️ Other options don’t really scale. Agencies often end up hacking together Notion, Airtable, or using Front — which became less viable after pricing changes. 🎯 Bottom line: If you want a real CRM experience for managing positive replies across many inboxes and clients, Breakcold is the only serious long-term solution. |
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 ✨.
Other Key Features of Breakcold AI Native CRM |
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Auto-lead movement: Leads move automatically in Breakcold’s CRM based on your interactions with them. No setup required, the AI understands everything on its own. Auto-task creation: Monitors your interactions with leads and automatically creates follow-up tasks so you never lose momentum. This lets you focus on chatting with leads, not on admin work. Vision Builder – by default, leads move automatically by how you named your lists and sales pipeline stages (zero setup). But if you want to control the AI, you can by using natural language to build advanced AI CRM workflows. AI-Powered CRM Dashboard – A self-updating dashboard that highlights your most important tasks so you always know what to focus on. AI Contact Management – Automatically organizes leads into the right lists and groups by analyzing your conversations, notes, and activities. AI Personalities (AI Agents) – Choose an AI personality aligned with your business goals. Your dashboard then adapts, serving you daily tasks tailored to that persona. AI Reasoning – Every suggested task comes with context, so you’ll know exactly why it’s important and why it matters today. AI-Suggested Messages – Get personalized next-message suggestions that match both your tone of voice and your AI personality. Works for email & social conversations. AI Rules – Add rules to each step of your workflow for deeper customization and smarter automation. AI-Powered Contact Deduplication – Automatically identifies and merges duplicate contacts, eliminating hours of manual data cleanup and keeping your CRM lean and accurate. Advanced Data Enrichment – Powered by BetterContact, Breakcold now uses waterfall enrichment to surface verified B2B emails and phone numbers, enhancing the quality and precision of your outreach. AI Notetaker – Breakcold has its owner AI Notetaker but also integrates with tools like Otter, Fireflies, TL;DV, and Fathom to auto-generate and log call summaries directly into the CRM — complete with transcript links and follow-up tasks based on what was discussed. All-in-One Unified Inbox – Manage conversations from LinkedIn, email, WhatsApp, and Telegram in one place, so you can respond faster and never miss a follow-up. Social Engagement Stream – Like, comment, and engage with your leads’ posts without leaving the CRM — build relationships through meaningful and consistent interactions. 20+ native integrations: including Slack, Apollo, Smartlead, Instantly, Lemlist & many other sales tools. |
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 📧.
Written by Arnaud Belinga