Outreach Alternatives—Four Options Reviewed

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Authors
Clay Team
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Date
Apr 5, 2024

Outreach is a capable sales execution platform, but it’s not for everyone’s pocket. It also has its share of drawbacks, from a lack of beginner-friendliness to features that some users consider unfinished.

Luckily, there are numerous Outreach alternatives you can switch to. This guide outlines some of the best-performing solutions and explains how they fix the main issues users have encountered with Outreach.

How We Shortlisted Outreach.io Alternatives

To spare you hours of research and ensure a fair comparison of Outreach alternatives, we took the following steps:

  1. Examining the most popular solutions to see how they compare to Outreach and selecting those that make up for the platform’s weaknesses
  2. Consulting our vast network of industry experts and influences to see what they have to say about our picks
  3. Looking into the reviews of the shortlisted alternatives to identify their main strengths and weaknesses

Our research yielded four platforms worth considering, but that doesn’t mean they’re equally suitable for your needs. To zero in on the right solution, you’ll need to ask a few questions, most notably:

  • How big is your team? 👥
  • What’s your ideal budget? 💰
  • What other tools are you using in your outbound campaigns? ⚙️

By combining our assessment with your individual factors, you should find the most fitting alternative to Outreach without hassle. Let’s get started!

Four Alternatives to Outreach Reviewed

Based on the aforementioned considerations, we’ve selected four platforms you should check out:

  1. Apollo
  2. Salesloft
  3. Mixmax
  4. Outplay

Apollo

Source: Apollo.io

Apollo is a versatile sales engagement app that offers some of the most useful features you get with Outreach, such as:

  • Automated multi-step email campaigns
  • Phone calls with recording capabilities
  • A/B testing

Apollo can be an excellent alternative to Outreach because of its wider spectrum of use cases. Specifically, you also get prospecting and data enrichment capabilities, which Outreach doesn’t offer.

Apollo features an extensive database of over 270 million contacts, which you can enrich with various data points to craft highly personalized messages. Unfortunately, the database isn’t perfect, as many users have reported data accuracy issues. This is a common problem with single-source data providers, which we’ll discuss in greater depth a bit later in this guide.

Another advantage of Apollo is transparent pricing, which is preferable to Outreach's quote-based pricing. You can choose between four Apollo tiers:

  1. Free—$0
  2. Basic—$59/month
  3. Professional—$99/month
  4. Organization—$119/month

Besides inaccurate or outdated information, Apollo users have reported usability issues. While many consider the platform straightforward enough, beginners might need a more intuitive alternative.

Pros Cons

✔️ Sales engagement automation

✔️ Prospecting features

✔️ Transparent pricing with a free plan

❌ Data accuracy issues

❌ Potential usability problems

💡 Pro tip: Maximize your data coverage by using a platform that gives you access to multiple providers. Hint—Clay can find work or personal emails from over 50 data sources.

Salesloft

Source: Salesloft

Salesloft is one of Outreach’s biggest rivals, and it packs quite a few features that make it a solid alternative. It lets you streamline various tasks, from prospecting and opportunity management to forecasting and rep coaching.

The platform leverages in-depth analytics and A/B testing to let you create predictable pipelines, which you can streamline through Cadences that outline all the relevant engagement processes. Salesloft’s AI also lets you automate tasks throughout the sales cycle, such as:

  • Email drafting ✍️
  • Sales call transcription 📞
  • Rep coaching through insights and automation 📚

A particularly notable AI-powered feature is Rhythm, which creates personalized workflows for each team member based on the signals gathered from their leads. It reduces quite a bit of manual work and helps reps focus on the warmest leads without hunting for them.

Much like Outreach, Salesloft isn’t transparent about its pricing structure. You need to request a demo and get on a sales call to learn about the cost. The only available information is that you can choose from three plans:

  1. Essentials
  2. Advanced
  3. Premier

Users who commented on the platform’s pricing said it’s more affordable than Outreach at around $1,000 per user annually. This amount still isn’t cheap, so you’ll need to splurge a bit to use Salesloft’s features.

While many users are happy with the platform’s performance, some believe it takes too much effort to get the most out of it. It’s not the most beginner-friendly option, so you should expect a considerable learning curve. 

Pros Cons

✔️ Various automation features

✔️ Personalized rep workflows

✔️ Rep coaching and insights

❌ Non-transparent pricing

❌ Not particularly beginner-friendly

Mixmax

Source: Mixmax

Mixmax is an excellent Outreach alternative if you need a simple but effective platform for multi-channel engagement. It offers all the standard features you’d expect from a sales execution platform, including:

  • Various email personalization features with AI-powered writing 🤖
  • Real-time insights into leads’ behavior 📱
  • Email templates that streamline repetitive correspondence 📑
  • Integration with Salesforce, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and various other platforms ⛓️

As for standout features, the first is Sidechat—a separate chat interface that lets your team collaborate in real time and instantly exchange useful insights. This means your reps don’t need to forward emails to get answers or advice, which can do wonders for their efficiency.

You can go beyond emails and engage with prospects via phone, SMS, and LinkedIn to maximize the response rate. Mixmax also lets you send out polls to prospects, which makes it easier to get the insights you need if someone can’t be bothered to compose an entire email as a response. 💬

Flexible pricing is another notable advantage of Mixmax. The platform offers a free plan and four paid tiers:

  1. SMB—$34/user per month
  2. Growth—$65/user per month
  3. Growth + Salesforce—$69/user per month
  4. Enterprise—Custom pricing

As for the downsides, Mixmax currently works with Gmail only. The Outlook integration is in the works as of this writing, and there are no predictions as to when it’ll launch. Users have also complained about the platform’s reporting capabilities, which seem too lackluster for successful A/B testing.

Pros Cons

✔️ Multi-channel outreach

✔️ Easy real-time collaboration

✔️ Flexible pricing

❌ Only supports Gmail

❌ Potential reporting issues

💡Pro tip: Use a platform with various integrations to create a cohesive workflow. HInt—Clay seamlessly connects to over 100 tools, fitting your tech stack like a glove. 

Outplay

Source: Outplay

Outplay is another versatile platform that has an edge over Outreach, mainly because of its inbound marketing features you don’t often find with other alternatives. Some of the platform’s unique functionalities include the following:

  • The embeddable calendar you can place on your website 📆
  • Magic Chat, which opens a conversation with a prospect once they click through one of your outbound messages 🙋
  • Round-robin scheduling with custom lead routes for your sales reps 👥

As for the standard outbound features, they’re primarily the same as those you get with Outreach. Besides an email sender, you can use the dialer and SMS sender to engage with leads

Outplay also offers lots of analytics features, such as sales analytics, prospect tracking, and AI-powered conversation intelligence.

Unfortunately, there’s no automated lead scoring, which puts Outplay at a significant disadvantage compared to many Outreach alternatives. Another drawback is the somewhat confusing pricing structure, as Outplay charges for feature categories separately. The pricing is as follows:

  1. Sales engagement—$99/user per month
  2. Meeting scheduler—$49/user per month
  3. Conversation Intelligence—$49/user per month

Note that the above categories also come with free plans you can use to test them out. Still, if you want all of Outplay’s features without limitations, the costs can stack up pretty quickly.

Pros Cons

✔️ Inbound marketing features

✔️ Robust prospect tracking

✔️ Website chat

❌ No lead scoring

❌ Complex pricing structure

The Verdict—Which Sales Engagement Platform Should You Use?

Now that you’ve seen some of the best Outreach alternatives, you can use the factors we mentioned earlier in this guide to choose your preferred platform. As for the actual features to look for, focus on the following:

  • Streamlined campaign building
  • Automated email writing
  • Seamless collaboration
  • Various integrations

Still, perhaps one of the most significant considerations is that none of these features will matter much if you don’t build your campaigns on accurate, abundant data. That’s why some Outreach alternatives like Apollo include prospecting features to help you check all the necessary boxes.

Unfortunately, such platforms come with significant limitations. As mentioned, single-source providers might not get you enough data, which means you’ll either need to miss quite a few sales opportunities or pay even more money for another platform.

The solution is to support your campaign with a platform that provides high-quality prospecting and data enrichment capabilities and helps you get the most out of your cold outreach tool. For one such platform, you can’t go wrong with Clay. It seamlessly integrates with tools like Outreach and Salesloft and offers numerous prospecting and data scraping features for a highly-personalized outbound campaign. 🥇

Source: Product Hunt

How Does Clay Support Your Workflows?

Clay is a robust data enrichment and sales automation platform that lets you find all the data you need to launch hyper-personalized campaigns. It offers various features, most notably:

  • 50+ data providers—With Clay, you don’t need to pay a ton of money for a data source and hope for the best. The platform brings together over 50 major data providers to ensure maximum coverage and help you find everything from basic contact information to hard-to-find company details 📈
  • Waterfall enrichment—Clay lets you get the most out of every dollar you invest by examining data sources one by one and letting you only pay for the data you gather 🔍
  • Email builder—Once you’ve collected the necessary data, Clay’s AI email builder will leverage it to create highly personalized drafts in seconds, letting you automate entire email sequences in one go 💌
  • Claygent—Clay’s AI assistant and web scraper turns hours of research into a simple conversation. Tell Claygent what you need, and it will scour the web in no time to answer all your questions 🧠
Source: Clay

To further simplify your data enrichment process, you can also use dozens of handy templates. They come with pre-built Clay tables tailored to specific tasks, so you don’t need to create them from scratch.

Many teams have saved countless hours with Clay—here’s what they said about the platform:

Source: Clay Wall of Love

Flexible Plans for Every Budget

If you want to explore Clay’s features first-hand, you can use the free plan to see them in action. As your needs grow, you can upgrade to one of Clay’s four affordable tiers:

  1. Starter—$149/month
  2. Explorer—$349/month
  3. Pro—$800/month
  4. Enterprise—Custom

Each plan allows unlimited users, so the costs won’t grow as your team does. If anything, you’ll have an automated workflow that eliminates the need for massive teams, which can drastically cut your costs.

Within each plan, you can choose the number of credits you want to use for enrichments and other tasks. As mentioned, you only pay once the information you need is found, so there’s no guesswork and wasted money.

Want to learn more about Clay’s waterfall enrichment? Check out this video:

Step Up Your Outbound Game With Clay

Creating a Clay account is easy and doesn’t involve any commitments—you can get started in three quick steps:

  1. Go to the signup page 💻
  2. Enter your name, email, and password 🔐
  3. Explore Clay’s features 🧰

If you want to learn more about the platform’s capabilities, visit Clay’s Learn hub and join the Slack community to see the results other users are getting. You can also sign up for the newsletter to receive tons of useful advice on fine-tuning your outbound strategy. 

📖 Bonus read: Want to discover alternatives for other popular sales tools? Check out these articles:

Outreach is a capable sales execution platform, but it’s not for everyone’s pocket. It also has its share of drawbacks, from a lack of beginner-friendliness to features that some users consider unfinished.

Luckily, there are numerous Outreach alternatives you can switch to. This guide outlines some of the best-performing solutions and explains how they fix the main issues users have encountered with Outreach.

How We Shortlisted Outreach.io Alternatives

To spare you hours of research and ensure a fair comparison of Outreach alternatives, we took the following steps:

  1. Examining the most popular solutions to see how they compare to Outreach and selecting those that make up for the platform’s weaknesses
  2. Consulting our vast network of industry experts and influences to see what they have to say about our picks
  3. Looking into the reviews of the shortlisted alternatives to identify their main strengths and weaknesses

Our research yielded four platforms worth considering, but that doesn’t mean they’re equally suitable for your needs. To zero in on the right solution, you’ll need to ask a few questions, most notably:

  • How big is your team? 👥
  • What’s your ideal budget? 💰
  • What other tools are you using in your outbound campaigns? ⚙️

By combining our assessment with your individual factors, you should find the most fitting alternative to Outreach without hassle. Let’s get started!

Four Alternatives to Outreach Reviewed

Based on the aforementioned considerations, we’ve selected four platforms you should check out:

  1. Apollo
  2. Salesloft
  3. Mixmax
  4. Outplay

Apollo

Source: Apollo.io

Apollo is a versatile sales engagement app that offers some of the most useful features you get with Outreach, such as:

  • Automated multi-step email campaigns
  • Phone calls with recording capabilities
  • A/B testing

Apollo can be an excellent alternative to Outreach because of its wider spectrum of use cases. Specifically, you also get prospecting and data enrichment capabilities, which Outreach doesn’t offer.

Apollo features an extensive database of over 270 million contacts, which you can enrich with various data points to craft highly personalized messages. Unfortunately, the database isn’t perfect, as many users have reported data accuracy issues. This is a common problem with single-source data providers, which we’ll discuss in greater depth a bit later in this guide.

Another advantage of Apollo is transparent pricing, which is preferable to Outreach's quote-based pricing. You can choose between four Apollo tiers:

  1. Free—$0
  2. Basic—$59/month
  3. Professional—$99/month
  4. Organization—$119/month

Besides inaccurate or outdated information, Apollo users have reported usability issues. While many consider the platform straightforward enough, beginners might need a more intuitive alternative.

Pros Cons

✔️ Sales engagement automation

✔️ Prospecting features

✔️ Transparent pricing with a free plan

❌ Data accuracy issues

❌ Potential usability problems

💡 Pro tip: Maximize your data coverage by using a platform that gives you access to multiple providers. Hint—Clay can find work or personal emails from over 50 data sources.

Salesloft

Source: Salesloft

Salesloft is one of Outreach’s biggest rivals, and it packs quite a few features that make it a solid alternative. It lets you streamline various tasks, from prospecting and opportunity management to forecasting and rep coaching.

The platform leverages in-depth analytics and A/B testing to let you create predictable pipelines, which you can streamline through Cadences that outline all the relevant engagement processes. Salesloft’s AI also lets you automate tasks throughout the sales cycle, such as:

  • Email drafting ✍️
  • Sales call transcription 📞
  • Rep coaching through insights and automation 📚

A particularly notable AI-powered feature is Rhythm, which creates personalized workflows for each team member based on the signals gathered from their leads. It reduces quite a bit of manual work and helps reps focus on the warmest leads without hunting for them.

Much like Outreach, Salesloft isn’t transparent about its pricing structure. You need to request a demo and get on a sales call to learn about the cost. The only available information is that you can choose from three plans:

  1. Essentials
  2. Advanced
  3. Premier

Users who commented on the platform’s pricing said it’s more affordable than Outreach at around $1,000 per user annually. This amount still isn’t cheap, so you’ll need to splurge a bit to use Salesloft’s features.

While many users are happy with the platform’s performance, some believe it takes too much effort to get the most out of it. It’s not the most beginner-friendly option, so you should expect a considerable learning curve. 

Pros Cons

✔️ Various automation features

✔️ Personalized rep workflows

✔️ Rep coaching and insights

❌ Non-transparent pricing

❌ Not particularly beginner-friendly

Mixmax

Source: Mixmax

Mixmax is an excellent Outreach alternative if you need a simple but effective platform for multi-channel engagement. It offers all the standard features you’d expect from a sales execution platform, including:

  • Various email personalization features with AI-powered writing 🤖
  • Real-time insights into leads’ behavior 📱
  • Email templates that streamline repetitive correspondence 📑
  • Integration with Salesforce, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and various other platforms ⛓️

As for standout features, the first is Sidechat—a separate chat interface that lets your team collaborate in real time and instantly exchange useful insights. This means your reps don’t need to forward emails to get answers or advice, which can do wonders for their efficiency.

You can go beyond emails and engage with prospects via phone, SMS, and LinkedIn to maximize the response rate. Mixmax also lets you send out polls to prospects, which makes it easier to get the insights you need if someone can’t be bothered to compose an entire email as a response. 💬

Flexible pricing is another notable advantage of Mixmax. The platform offers a free plan and four paid tiers:

  1. SMB—$34/user per month
  2. Growth—$65/user per month
  3. Growth + Salesforce—$69/user per month
  4. Enterprise—Custom pricing

As for the downsides, Mixmax currently works with Gmail only. The Outlook integration is in the works as of this writing, and there are no predictions as to when it’ll launch. Users have also complained about the platform’s reporting capabilities, which seem too lackluster for successful A/B testing.

Pros Cons

✔️ Multi-channel outreach

✔️ Easy real-time collaboration

✔️ Flexible pricing

❌ Only supports Gmail

❌ Potential reporting issues

💡Pro tip: Use a platform with various integrations to create a cohesive workflow. HInt—Clay seamlessly connects to over 100 tools, fitting your tech stack like a glove. 

Outplay

Source: Outplay

Outplay is another versatile platform that has an edge over Outreach, mainly because of its inbound marketing features you don’t often find with other alternatives. Some of the platform’s unique functionalities include the following:

  • The embeddable calendar you can place on your website 📆
  • Magic Chat, which opens a conversation with a prospect once they click through one of your outbound messages 🙋
  • Round-robin scheduling with custom lead routes for your sales reps 👥

As for the standard outbound features, they’re primarily the same as those you get with Outreach. Besides an email sender, you can use the dialer and SMS sender to engage with leads

Outplay also offers lots of analytics features, such as sales analytics, prospect tracking, and AI-powered conversation intelligence.

Unfortunately, there’s no automated lead scoring, which puts Outplay at a significant disadvantage compared to many Outreach alternatives. Another drawback is the somewhat confusing pricing structure, as Outplay charges for feature categories separately. The pricing is as follows:

  1. Sales engagement—$99/user per month
  2. Meeting scheduler—$49/user per month
  3. Conversation Intelligence—$49/user per month

Note that the above categories also come with free plans you can use to test them out. Still, if you want all of Outplay’s features without limitations, the costs can stack up pretty quickly.

Pros Cons

✔️ Inbound marketing features

✔️ Robust prospect tracking

✔️ Website chat

❌ No lead scoring

❌ Complex pricing structure

The Verdict—Which Sales Engagement Platform Should You Use?

Now that you’ve seen some of the best Outreach alternatives, you can use the factors we mentioned earlier in this guide to choose your preferred platform. As for the actual features to look for, focus on the following:

  • Streamlined campaign building
  • Automated email writing
  • Seamless collaboration
  • Various integrations

Still, perhaps one of the most significant considerations is that none of these features will matter much if you don’t build your campaigns on accurate, abundant data. That’s why some Outreach alternatives like Apollo include prospecting features to help you check all the necessary boxes.

Unfortunately, such platforms come with significant limitations. As mentioned, single-source providers might not get you enough data, which means you’ll either need to miss quite a few sales opportunities or pay even more money for another platform.

The solution is to support your campaign with a platform that provides high-quality prospecting and data enrichment capabilities and helps you get the most out of your cold outreach tool. For one such platform, you can’t go wrong with Clay. It seamlessly integrates with tools like Outreach and Salesloft and offers numerous prospecting and data scraping features for a highly-personalized outbound campaign. 🥇

Source: Product Hunt

How Does Clay Support Your Workflows?

Clay is a robust data enrichment and sales automation platform that lets you find all the data you need to launch hyper-personalized campaigns. It offers various features, most notably:

  • 50+ data providers—With Clay, you don’t need to pay a ton of money for a data source and hope for the best. The platform brings together over 50 major data providers to ensure maximum coverage and help you find everything from basic contact information to hard-to-find company details 📈
  • Waterfall enrichment—Clay lets you get the most out of every dollar you invest by examining data sources one by one and letting you only pay for the data you gather 🔍
  • Email builder—Once you’ve collected the necessary data, Clay’s AI email builder will leverage it to create highly personalized drafts in seconds, letting you automate entire email sequences in one go 💌
  • Claygent—Clay’s AI assistant and web scraper turns hours of research into a simple conversation. Tell Claygent what you need, and it will scour the web in no time to answer all your questions 🧠
Source: Clay

To further simplify your data enrichment process, you can also use dozens of handy templates. They come with pre-built Clay tables tailored to specific tasks, so you don’t need to create them from scratch.

Many teams have saved countless hours with Clay—here’s what they said about the platform:

Source: Clay Wall of Love

Flexible Plans for Every Budget

If you want to explore Clay’s features first-hand, you can use the free plan to see them in action. As your needs grow, you can upgrade to one of Clay’s four affordable tiers:

  1. Starter—$149/month
  2. Explorer—$349/month
  3. Pro—$800/month
  4. Enterprise—Custom

Each plan allows unlimited users, so the costs won’t grow as your team does. If anything, you’ll have an automated workflow that eliminates the need for massive teams, which can drastically cut your costs.

Within each plan, you can choose the number of credits you want to use for enrichments and other tasks. As mentioned, you only pay once the information you need is found, so there’s no guesswork and wasted money.

Want to learn more about Clay’s waterfall enrichment? Check out this video:

Step Up Your Outbound Game With Clay

Creating a Clay account is easy and doesn’t involve any commitments—you can get started in three quick steps:

  1. Go to the signup page 💻
  2. Enter your name, email, and password 🔐
  3. Explore Clay’s features 🧰

If you want to learn more about the platform’s capabilities, visit Clay’s Learn hub and join the Slack community to see the results other users are getting. You can also sign up for the newsletter to receive tons of useful advice on fine-tuning your outbound strategy. 

📖 Bonus read: Want to discover alternatives for other popular sales tools? Check out these articles:

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