We Tried 4 of the Best Outreach Competitors — Objective and In-depth Review

If you’re looking into Outreach.io alternatives, you’ve come to the right place.

We’ve analyzed several sales engagement platforms in detail, paying particular attention to all the essentials, including:

• Core features
• Pricing
• Best use cases

Our efforts culminated in this ultimate guide on four of the best Outreach alternatives. We hope it will help you find the right outreach software for your sales cycle.

Here’s what we’ll cover in detail:

And for all of you folks who would rather cut to the chase, here’s a short overview of what we found:

TL;DR

• Outreach is an enterprise-grade sales engagement platform with a clunky UI, limited personalization, and sky-high prices.
• Expandi is a great omnichannel marketing option for a wide range of users, including agencies, sales and marketing teams, and individuals. It optimizes and automates hyper-personalized LinkedIn outreach to deliver unparalleled results. You can try Expandi for free with a 7-day free trial.
• Groove is the top Outreach alternative for businesses using the Salesforce suite of products. It’s also good for businesses that need a lead management solution that offers many customization options.
• MixMax’s numerous pricing plans make it easy to adapt to various team sizes and needs. It primarily focuses on email tracking and outreach done via Gmail. 
• Outplay is the best Outreach alternative for sales and marketing teams that want to combine email outreach with website-based lead generation strategies.
• Reply.io is a multichannel sales engagement platform that excels when it comes to automating cold email campaigns. Its price tag and lack of advanced options for managing other outreach channels make it a good choice for larger teams focusing on email outreach alone.

An option for those wanting an omnichannel approach — Expandi

Email outreach suits some teams but others are better off trying an omnichannel approach — such as one that leverages a growing sales platform like LinkedIn.

Expandi is a cloud-based sales engagement platform that takes care of your entire sales cycle by automating and managing hyper-personalized LinkedIn campaigns. Expandi is the best tool for omnichannel outreach. 

Unlike the other top Outreach alternatives on our list, Expandi specializes in LinkedIn outreach and sales.

Expandi’s cutting-edge personalization features enable you to custom-tailor each campaign to every single prospect you reach out to.

As a result, Expandi never fails to deliver a continuous stream of qualified leads down your pipeline.

Why choose Expandi over Outreach.io?

1. It’s optimized for safe LinkedIn outreach — Expandi is cloud-based and will run in the background regardless of whether your device is on or not. This also means that LinkedIn won’t be able to detect it. Expandi takes numerous extra measures to ensure you always stay in LinkedIn’s good books. These measures include:

• Providing each user with a dedicated IP address. This minimizes the chances of LinkedIn’s algorithms detecting anything suspicious about your account’s activity.
• Mimicking human behavior. Expandi does this by adding delays between various actions, withdrawing pending requests, gradually warming up new and previously inactive LinkedIn profiles, and using the working hours and time zones of your choice.

• Having smart safety limits that only allow you to send up to 100 connection requests and 100 messages per day. But don’t worry. Even with these limits, you’ll still get to send more requests and messages than LinkedIn’s weekly limits typically allow. Expandi also lets you customize your own daily activity limits within this range.

2. It has advanced automation options — Unlike Outreach, Expandi is AI-powered, which enables it to easily create powerful smart sequences on LinkedIn. As a result, you can create and run highly-personalized outreach campaigns and get new leads on autopilot.

 

3. It helps you hyper-personalize every step of your campaign — Expandi allows you to send customized images and GIFs to each lead, among other things (example below). You can also send follow-ups via both LinkedIn and email. 

4. It has an exceptionally user-friendly interface backed up with excellent customer support — In addition to having a customer support team available around the clock, Expandi also has an extensive help center and a video blog.

5. It has sophisticated scraping features — Expandi can find and extract data from various sources. For example, you can scrape LinkedIn posts, polls, groups, events, and even your profile viewers.

6. It provides detailed and comprehensive analytics reports — Expandi tracks all the lead generation metrics you need and packs them into actionable reports. This is especially helpful for agencies that need to show results to clients regularly. 

How do Expandi and Outreach.io compare in price?

Unlike Outreach, Expandi is very transparent about its pricing.

It has one pricing plan at $99 per user per month, with no hidden extra costs or set-up fees. 

Expandi is also compatible with all of LinkedIn’s plans, meaning you won’t be forced to adopt Sales Navigator to make the most of it.

Multiple users, such as sales and marketing teams, get a discount on Expandi’s price.

Expandi’s package includes all of Expandi’s numerous features and unlimited access to all its learning resources — including the LinkedIn Outreach Academy and free eBooks like:

• Triple Your Leads on LinkedIn
• 10 Proven LinkedIn Outreach Templates From Top Influencers
• Prepare, Market, and Launch LinkedIn Events

There’s also a 7-day free trial, so you can take Expandi for a test ride to see if it matches your needs.

Who is Expandi for?

Expandi is the best choice for successful sales teams who focus their efforts on LinkedIn as the #1 channel for B2B outreach.

However, its versatile features, ease of use, and affordable price make Expandi the perfect solution for more than one user type.

Sales and marketing teams, agencies, and individuals alike will all find that Expandi delivers precisely what they need. Namely:

• Better-targeted prospecting
• A surge of qualified leads 
• More successfully closed deals and recurring customers

Have we sparked your interest yet?

Try Expandi’s free 7-day trial and discover how it can transform your outreach efforts.

Why are Outreach.io users switching to competitors?

Outreach is a sales engagement platform with features designed to make the jobs (and lives) of sales and marketing teams easier.

Outreach achieves this thanks to its versatile AI-powered functionality that’s supposed to help engage and manage leads on the one hand and guide and empower sales reps on the other.

As great as it may sound at first, many Outreach users find this sales engagement platform to be lacking in several vital areas.

So, what are the main downsides that put users off Outreach?

What’s not so good about Outreach.io?

• Terrible UI — Outreach’s interface is clunky, complex, and exceptionally difficult to navigate for both beginners and seasoned users. The platform has issues with efficiently running all of its numerous functions and is prone to crashing often. To make matters worse, its customer support leaves much to be desired, as they’re notoriously tough to reach.
• It’s low on personalization options — Especially regarding email campaigns. For example, you can’t include compelling visuals in your email or customize email templates beyond some basic changes. As a result, the emails users send via Outreach end up in spam more often than expected.
• Its integrations are anything but seamless — Moreover, most of them cost an arm and a leg.
• It’s one of the most expensive sales engagement platforms — Numerous users on review sites have complained about Outreach’s cost. Some have even reported five-figure prices. Furthermore, Outreach only offers annual contracts. This is a massive issue for sales and marketing teams who don’t want such a long-term commitment upfront.

What’s good about Outreach.io?

1. It deploys AI and machine learning to provide the best sales engagement results — Outreach has an AI-powered virtual assistant called Kaia that does a number of things to help sales and marketing teams excel in their jobs. For example:

• It transcribes live meetings and takes notes
• It learns to recognize crucial terms and expressions for your line of business and captures them
• It performs sentiment analyses regularly to improve lead management and nurturing
• It provides actionable summaries of each meeting

2. It has Success Plans and Deal Health Scores — These provide users with an overview of every deal’s progress and health. Outreach also recommends actions you should take to close each deal successfully.

3. It integrates with Gmail and Outlook — These integrations enable email tracking and help you create automated email campaigns. Email tracking can tell you who opened your emails, when they opened them, and how they interacted with them.

4. It has an integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator — This allows users to execute some LinkedIn tasks from Outreach directly (for example, you can send a connection request or view a profile) and add those tasks to your Outreach sequences. However, Outreach doesn’t include LinkedIn automation, so you’ll still have to do all the heavy lifting manually.

How much does Outreach.io cost?

Outreach doesn’t publish its pricing information online.

We believe that Outreach’s exact price depends on various factors, such as a company’s size, requirements, and industry.

However, as we mentioned earlier in this article, many Outreach users have been pretty vocal about its pricing policy (or rather, their displeasure with it). Most of them found Outreach to be significantly pricier than its competitors. 

Another key theme is that its functionality doesn’t justify the cost.

Who is Outreach.io for? Who isn’t it for?

Outreach’s AI-powered features can definitely give your sales and marketing teams a hand with managing your sales cycle, especially when it comes to deal and lead management.

However, Outreach doesn’t provide sophisticated automation options that enable you to delegate all the grunt work to a smart tool. As a result, the most you can expect from Outreach is some elementary email automation that often results in pretty generic campaigns.

Considering this — as well as its seemingly obscene price — Outreach is a viable option solely for enterprises that have:

1. Enormous budgets 
2. Sales and marketing teams that are big enough to take care of most of the workload manually

We’re guessing that doesn’t describe you. But don’t worry: we’ve got four Outreach alternatives you can try instead…

Outreach.io competitor #1. — Groove

Groove is a sales engagement platform designed to increase the productivity of sales and marketing teams that use Salesforce CRM.

As you might have guessed, this means that using Salesforce is pretty much a prerequisite for choosing Groove to aid with your sales cycle management.

Why choose Groove over Outreach.io?

• It has a much better UI — Groove’s interface is significantly cleaner and simpler to use than Outreach’s. Additionally, Groove’s dashboard helps users manage and organize more complex workflows in one place (which enables easier team collaboration).
• It can automate multichannel campaigns — Groove allows users to set up various automated flows of actions, including sending emails, sending SMS messages, and making calls. It also includes some basic LinkedIn Sales Navigator automation, as you can automate sending InMail and connection requests.
• It has more personalization options — You can send GIFs and images in your emails, customize emails with your brand colors, send customizable meeting scheduling links, etc.
• It automatically syncs your email and calendar with Salesforce — This two-way sync enables easier and smoother lead management, as you won’t have to enter the same data twice.

How do Groove and Outreach.io compare in price?

Like Outreach, Groove doesn’t publish off-the-peg prices, so we can’t say how much this sales engagement platform costs.

But, whenever a SaaS provider opts not to publish even the tiniest hint on its pricing policy, it usually means only one thing — it’s probably not cheap.

Who is Groove for?

Considering Groove’s functionality and the fact that it’s so closely connected to Salesforce, there can be only one conclusion:

Groove is one of the best Outreach alternatives for businesses that use Salesforce or Salesforce Industry Clouds but want to further improve their sales engagement and lead management efforts.

Outreach.io competitor #2. — MixMax

MixMax is an email tracking and sales engagement platform designed for Gmail.

Yes — this means that the only supported browser and email providers for MixMax are Google Chrome and Gmail.

Why choose MixMax over Outreach.io?

• It enables more personalization, especially regarding emails — In addition to embedding custom images, GIFs, and videos, you can also embed polls and surveys. You can also increase email open and click-through rates with links and live webpage previews.
• It has excellent reporting features — MixMax provides a clear insight into which emails have the highest open, click, and content download rates. You can also see which emails bounce the most.

• Its email tracking is more seamless than Outreach’s — You can receive desktop, email, and Slack notifications whenever a lead opens an email or clicks on a link.

How do MixMax and Outreach.io compare in price?

MixMax has five plans:

• A free-forever plan

• SMB — At $29 per user per month
• Growth — At $65 per user per month
• Growth + Salesforce integration — At $69 per user per month (but this plan is only available with annual billing) 
• Enterprise — At a custom price based on your business’s size and requirements

MixMax is significantly cheaper than Outreach, but it’s not cheap in itself, especially for bigger plans.

Namely, its best traits (e.g., personalization, detailed reports, etc.) are only available with the Growth plan and above.

MixMax doesn’t have a free trial. But its free plan can give prospective users a taste of the more basic features.

Who is MixMax for?

MixMax’s versatile pricing makes it one of the top Outreach alternatives for sales and marketing teams with different budgets, as almost anyone can find a plan that fits their purse.

However, we should note that MixMax doesn’t have that many automation features, and the ones it does have are primarily available only to subscribers of the Enterprise plan.

Furthermore, those functions leave much to be desired for more advanced users, especially those focusing on LinkedIn as their main outbound marketing channel.

Thus, sales and marketing teams that are dedicated to email outreach above all else and use G Suite products for it could find MixMax to be a suitable option.

Outreach.io competitor #3. — Outplay

Outplay is a multichannel sales engagement platform that combines email outreach with cold calls, on-site chats, WhatsApp, and SMS messages.

It also has a Chrome extension that enables users to capture leads on LinkedIn and add them to their campaign sequences.

Why choose Outplay over Outreach.io?

• It has an AI-based email writing assistant — It combines your input with knowledge gained from drafting the best sales emails across various industries to draft optimal email copy.
• It integrates with more email providers than Outreach — Besides Gmail, Outplay comes with native integrations for Microsoft Office 365 and Zoho Email. You can also connect it with any other email provider using IMAP.
• It has a “Magic Chat” feature — This means that when a lead clicks on a link provided in your email or SMS, they will be redirected to the landing page you’ve set up and placed into a chat with you or your sales and marketing reps. This can significantly increase your chances of engaging leads and getting them to convert.

• It can track your website visitors — In addition to email tracking, Outplay notifies you when a prospect visits your website. Moreover, it identifies what pages a prospect has viewed and how they interacted with them. Knowing this can help you transform your website into a lead generation machine.

How do Outplay and Outreach.io compare in price?

In addition to a free-forever plan, Outplay has three more paid-for plans, as shown in the image below.

Some of Outplay’s most attractive features, such as website tracking and outbound chat, are only available with the two most expensive plans.

Since Outplay can also find email addresses and phone numbers, you can purchase more search credits if needed.

Moreover, if you want to include a scheduler link in your emails and messages, it will cost you an extra $29 per month (when billed annually).

Either way, Outplay is a much more reasonably priced option than Outreach.

There’s also a 14-day free trial.

Who is Outplay for?

Despite its primary focus on email outreach, some of Outplay’s features, such as Magic Chat and website visitor tracking, make it a pretty attractive solution for users who need more than an email-oriented solution.

Moreover, Outplay is easier to use and more affordable overall than Outreach.

So, it’s safe to say that Outplay is the best Outreach alternative for sales and marketing teams who need a versatile engagement platform with flexible pricing.

Outreach.io alternative #4. — Reply.io

Reply.io is a multichannel sales engagement platform that emphasizes cold email outreach and marketing.

In addition to automating email campaigns, Reply.io has some — limited — options for LinkedIn automation.

Why choose Reply.io over Outreach?

• It can scrape and verify email addresses from LinkedIn — But it needs a Chrome extension to do this. In addition, it has options for verifying phone numbers from certain countries.
• It can automate LinkedIn to a certain extent — Reply.io can automate several LinkedIn actions, such as sending messages and connection requests, liking recent posts, and viewing profiles. However, this feature requires you to download a Chrome extension, and you’re limited to no more than 30 of each activity per day.

• It has an email warmup solution — Warming up your email account amps up your email open rates and decreases the risk of your email ending up in spam. 

How do Reply.io and Outreach compare in price?

Reply.io’s pricing can seem confusing because it has different plans for sales engagement, email search, and email warmup. 

Reply.io has three sales engagement plans. You can see them in the image below. 

The most affordable plan omits multichannel campaigns, which immediately excludes it as an opinion for many advanced users. 

If you opt for the Custom plan, you’ll get to connect one LinkedIn account and use Reply.io’s automation features on it for free.

If you want LinkedIn automation thrown in, it will cost you an extra $49 per month for each LinkedIn account you connect. 

The Professional and Custom plans include email warmups in their packages. Subscribers of the Starter plan will have to pay extra for it.

Email warmup itself costs $29 per email account per month. If you only need email warmup, you can purchase this plan separately.

Reply.io’s email search solution also has three plans in total: 

1. A free plan — This plan includes up to 200 email searches 
2. Advanced — This plan costs $49 for 5000 email searches
3. Unlimited — This plan costs $99 for unlimited email searches

The Unlimited search plan is free for users who buy any of the annual sales engagement plans.

Reply.io also has a 14-day free trial for all of its plans.

Who is Reply.io for?

Reply.io is slightly more advanced than Outreach when it comes to LinkedIn automation and email warmup options.

However, although it’s cheaper than Outreach, Reply.io isn’t the most affordable of tools.

Namely, its standard plans omit some of Reply.io’s most attractive features, and you’ll have to pay extra if you want things like LinkedIn automation and email search and warmup.

As a result, Reply.io is a viable option only for big sales teams and agencies that primarily want a sales engagement tool optimized for cold email outreach that’s not as expensive as Outreach.

Final thoughts: Top Outreach.io alternatives

Ultimately, it all comes down to what you need from a sales engagement platform and how much you’re prepared to pay.

All the tools we’ve reviewed have better overall user experiences and provide better value for money than Outreach.

But, one platform stands out from the rest thanks to its ability to boost LinkedIn outreach, enabling individual reps, teams, and agencies to crush their goals every time.

That platform is Expandi — a tool guaranteed to supercharge your sales cycle before you know it.

Find it hard to believe a tool can do all that?

Start Expandi’s free 7-day trial right now and discover what it can do for you firsthand.