We Tried 3 Salesloft Competitors — Objective and In-depth Review

10 mins

If you’ve been looking into Salesloft alternatives and searching high and low for the sales engagement platform that’ll fit you most, we’ve got some good news for you.

We’ve researched a large number of sales engagement software platforms. And as a result, we’ve narrowed them down to a list of the top three Salesloft competitors. 

In this article, we’ll share them with you. Specifically, we’ll analyze these sales engagement platforms’:

  • Key features
  • Pricing policies
  • Best use cases

Here’s a quick overview of what we’ll cover in detail:

And if you’d like to just skim over the crucial tidbits, here’s a summary of our findings:

TL;DR

  • Salesloft is a sales engagement platform for large enterprises with big budgets looking for a tool that can help with the training and onboarding of new sales reps in addition to basic sales pipeline management
  • Marketers wanting an omnichannel approach should try Expandi instead of Salesloft. Expandi suits teams, individual sales reps, and agencies that focus their efforts on LinkedIn outreach. Its cutting-edge functionality enables Expandi to personalize each step of your outreach. You can try Expandi for free for 7 days.
  • Klenty is the top Salesloft competitor for cold email outreach. It’s best suited to smaller teams and individual sales reps. 
  • Smartreach is a basic and affordable email outreach tool fit for users with elementary needs. 
  • Apollo.io is the best Salesloft alternative for users looking for sales intelligence software.

Email outreach vs. omnichannel approaches

Salesloft and its competitors offer email outreach services, but these services likely won’t suit every business. Now, many businesses are opting for omnichannel approaches — meaning approaches that use more channels than email. 

Omnichannel approaches offer:

  • More leads 
  • Access to leads who don’t respond to email outreach 
  • A more efficient approach (and often, one that’s cheaper)
  • The ability to automate basically every part of your outreach campaign 

As you might imagine, Salesloft does have competitors in the omnichannel space. 

Expandi is one such competitor. Expandi is a cloud-based platform that allows you to leverage LinkedIn in your outreach campaigns.

How Expandi compares to Salesloft 

  • Expandi offers integrations with Zapier, Google Sheets, and numerous popular CRM systems.
  • Expandi can help you scrape data from Linked — Expandi provides you with untapped access to LinkedIn’s sales intelligence database. With this, you can scrape LinkedIn posts, polls, groups, events, and even your profile viewers. This is a game-changer, as you’ll find qualified leads in just a few clicks.
  • Expandi is safe to use on LinkedIn — You don’t need to download a Chrome extension to use Expandi, so LinkedIn won’t be able to detect it. Expandi takes extra measures to ensure you always stay in LinkedIn’s good books. These measures include:
    1. Using smart safety limits that only allow you to send up to 100 connection requests and 100 messages per day. That ensures you won’t raise any red flags on LinkedIn. Even with these limits in place, you’ll still be able to send more requests and messages than normal. Expandi also lets you set up your own daily activity limits .
      A screenshot of Expandi's connection request limit settings
    2. Providing each user with a dedicated IP address to minimize the chances of LinkedIn’s algorithms detecting anything suspicious.
    3. Mimicking human behavior. Expandi uses the working hours and time zones of your choice, adds delays between various actions, gradually warms up new and previously inactive LinkedIn profiles, and withdraws pending requests.
      A screenshot of Expandi's timezone settings
  • It has a user-friendly interface and extensive learning resources — Including a comprehensive help center, video blog, LinkedIn Outreach Academy, and free eBooks like:
    1. 10 Proven LinkedIn Outreach Templates From Top Influencers
    2. Prepare, Market, and Launch LinkedIn Events
    3. Triple Your Leads on LinkedIn
  • It has automation — Expandi can create elaborate smart sequences on LinkedIn. As a result, you’ll get highly-personalized outreach campaigns that deliver leads on autopilot.
  • It helps you personalize every step of your campaign — Expandi allows you to send customized images and GIFs to each lead. You can also customize each connection request, message, and follow-up email thanks to dynamic tags and placeholders. 

Price — Expandi vs. Salesloft

In contrast to Salesloft, Expandi has a perfectly transparent pricing policy.

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

A screenshot of Expandi's pricing plan

Expandi is compatible with all of LinkedIn’s plans — so you won’t need to buy a Sales Navigator subscription to use it.

Expandi offers a discount for companies with multiple users.

There’s also a 7-day free trial that lets you get a taste of Expandi’s capabilities before committing financially.

Who should try an omnichannel approach?

Expandi is the perfect sales engagement platform for users of all types and sizes looking for a solution that goes deeper than email outreach

It’s suitable for brands with:

  • Customers on LinkedIn
  • Customers who won’t engage through email
  • Limited budgets
  • Limited contact details 

Try Expandi for 7 days free and see if it’s a match.

Why are Salesloft users switching to competitors?

A screenshot of Salesloft

Salesloft is a sales engagement platform focused on helping sales reps increase their productivity. 

Moreover, some of its features can give you a hand with the onboarding and training of new sales reps to ensure that each trainee will become the perfect agent your sales processes require. 

However, Salesloft isn’t all fun and games, so quite a number of its former users are migrating to other sales engagement software options.

Why?

Let’s look into some of the main factors that make many sales reps turn to Salesloft alternatives…

What’s not so good about Salesloft?

  • Clunky integrations — Although Salesloft integrates with several Customer Relationship Management platforms (CRMs) like Salesforce, Zoho, and Hubspot, none of these integrations work as seamlessly as they should. Moreover, Salesloft puts too much emphasis on its Salesforce integration, and by comparison, the others are pretty underdeveloped.
  • Lousy UX — Salesloft leaves a lot to be desired in this area thanks to its glitchy and unintuitive UI. Once you combine this with its multifaceted functionality, limited learning resources, and notoriously unresponsive customer service, you get a formula for disaster.
  • Bad value for money — Although Salesloft doesn’t publish off-the-peg prices, its ratings and reviews show that it’s not exactly cheap for most users. Though, even high prices wouldn’t be that much of an issue if Salesloft’s features justified its cost (and they currently don’t).
  • Lack of advanced multichannel automation — The most you can get from Salesloft is basic email campaign automation.
  • Difficulty with data imports, exports, and syncing with CRMs — You’ll have to do all of these tasks manually more often than not.

What’s good about Salesloft?

  • Its Live Call Studio feature — This feature enables managers to oversee or, more precisely, overhear sales reps’ live calls. Additionally, managers can step in at any time to guide sales reps through sales processes without customers knowing about it.

A screenshot of Salesloft's call studio feature

  • Sales pipeline management options — Salesloft has a comprehensive dashboard that shows the statuses of all of your ongoing deals and highlights the ones at risk of falling through and the ones that are near closing. This will enable sales reps and managers to focus on those deals and take appropriate actions at just the right time.
  • Options for video recording and call transcribing — This will enable sales reps to keep their focus on the conversation, as they won’t have to take notes or struggle to remember all the vital details. Moreover, there are options for saving recordings of stellar sales calls and using them as examples in training materials.

How much does Salesloft cost?

Salesloft has four pricing plans, including:

  • Prospect
  • Sell
  • Engage 
  • Enterprise

However, there are no exact prices published on Salesloft’s website, so we cannot provide any precise information on the exact cost of each plan.

A screenshot of Salesloft's pricing form

The fact that Salesloft withholds its pricing policy can really only mean one thing — it’s probably not a very budget-friendly sales engagement platform.

Who is Salesloft for? Who isn’t it for?

Salesloft is a good option primarily for enterprises with big budgets looking for a sales engagement platform that can help them be more efficient with:

  • Training new sales reps
  • Tackling their sales pipeline management
  • Outreach

On the other hand, smaller businesses, individual marketers, and companies of any type and size that need a solution that’s adept in multichannel automation won’t find Salesloft to be a match.

That brings us to…

Salesloft competitor #1. — Klenty

A screenshot of Klenty

Klenty is a sales engagement platform primarily designed for cold email outreach. As such, it can automate email campaigns, track emails, and warm up email addresses.

It also has options for including additional channels in your outreach strategies. For example, you can send SMS messages, make calls, and perform basic LinkedIn activities (e.g., visiting profiles and sending bulk messages and connection requests).

Why choose Klenty over Salesloft? 

  • Better integrations — Klenty integrates with various CRMs, and all of its integrations are significantly slicker than Salesloft’s. And thanks to its CRM plugins, Klenty performs two-way data and activity syncing very quickly and smoothly.
  • A multichannel inbox — This way, you’ll get immediate insight into all your communications across multiple channels in one place. 

A screenshot of Klenty's multichannel inbox

  • Account-based selling options — Klenty will automatically create separate accounts for a company and all the individual agents and stakeholders in it. This enables you to engage with all of them at the same time, and you can tailor each campaign step and message to each lead and their job role. You’ll also be able to see who responds best to your sales processes, so you’ll know where to focus your efforts.

How do Klenty and Salesloft compare in price?

Klenty has fixed prices. So, unlike Salesloft, its cost is no mystery.

It has three plans:

  • Startup — At $60 per user per month 
  • Growth — At $85 per user per month
  • Enterprise — At $170 per user per month

A screenshot of Klenty's pricing plans

Klenty’s most attractive features, such as multichannel outreach and account-based selling, are only available with the two more expensive plans.

Moreover, while prices are calculated on a monthly basis, you can only pay annually and quarterly. So if you choose Klenty, you need to commit for at least a few months at a time.

Who is Klenty for?

Although it’s marketed as a multichannel sales engagement platform, Klenty’s main outreach channel is email

Klenty has an entire suite of features dedicated to optimizing email outreach, including email warmup and deliverability reports.

Moreover, considering that only Klenty’s priciest plan includes all the juiciest multichannel functions, it’s the only one that could satisfy more advanced users.

Since this sales engagement software isn’t on the cheap side, and there are only long-term contracts, Klenty is best suited for smaller teams and individual sales reps.

Salesloft competitor #2. — Smartreach

A screenshot of Smartreach

Smartreach is a cold email outreach platform with some — although they’re pretty basic — CRM options.

Namely, you get a single dashboard view of your prospects and the option to further organize them by tags. Smartreach also offers insights into each prospect’s engagement with your campaign.

Why choose Smartreach over Salesloft? 

  • It has options for finding and verifying business emails — In addition to having a Chrome extension for finding emails on LinkedIn, Smartreach integrates with a number of email finder tools to help you scrape emails from other web platforms.
  • It performs real-time spam tests — This feature primarily checks for any problems with email authentication and helps you fix them. It also scans your email for any broken links, inspects your formatting, and examines whether your address or domain is blacklisted.
  • It has decent reporting features — Smartreach tracks a number of metrics, including the number of emails that were opened, clicked, and replied to. It also tracks classic metrics like your bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and the best time to send emails.

A screenshot of Smartreach's reporting features

How do Smartreach and Salesloft compare in price?

Smartreach has three plans for individual users and three plans for agencies.

The individual packages are charged per user. They include:

  • Standard — At $24 per user per month 
  • Pro — At $39 per user per month
  • Ultimate — At $59 per user per month

A screenshot of Smartreach's pricing plans for individuals

Each of the agency plans includes five users, and access for every additional user is charged at a discounted price.

These plans include:

  • Standard — At $99 per month
  • Pro — At $149 per month
  • Ultimate — At $199 per month

A screenshot of Smartreach's pricing plans for individuals

Smartreach includes almost all of its core functions in every package, though there are some limitations regarding the number of prospects you can reach per month.

Moreover, the cheapest plans omit integrations with CRM platforms — something that’s a major issue for many, many users.

Helpfully, Smartreach offers a 14-day free trial and discounts for annual billing.

Who is Smartreach for?

Smartreach is a sales engagement platform designed solely for elementary email outreach.

However, it does a pretty good job for users with less advanced needs in that niche.

As a result, we believe that Smartreach is one of the best Salesloft alternatives for micro teams and individual sales reps that need an email-only outreach tool at an affordable price. 

Salesloft competitor #3. — Apollo.io

A screenshot of Apollo.io

Apollo.io is a sales engagement platform that’s power lies in its rich database and sales intelligence.

In addition, it can automate email campaigns and integrate with many CRM platforms in order to provide better sales pipeline management. 

Apollo.io’s key advantage is that it provides sales reps with relevant information that helps them find and reach a highly targeted audience quickly.

Why choose Apollo.io over Salesloft? 

  • Sales intelligence — Apollo.io has an extensive and regularly updated B2B contact database, including phone numbers, business emails, and job titles. But it doesn’t stop there. It also keeps track of things like job changes, funding, Alexa rankings, etc. In addition, Apollo.io has a Chrome extension that helps users get verified emails and phone numbers directly from LinkedIn.
  • Buying intent — This feature helps you identify businesses that have expressed interest in solutions similar to yours. You’ll also get insight into when and how often they’ve searched for these solutions, so you can pinpoint which companies are most likely to be a hit.
  • AI-powered prospecting — Once you enter the attributes from your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) or buyer persona, Apollo.io’s algorithm will spit out a list of potential prospects that fit these criteria. 

A screenshot of Apollo.io's AI powered prospecting

How do Apollo.io and Salesloft compare in price?

Apollo.io has four plans: a free-forever plan and three paid-for ones.

The paid plans include:

  • Basic — At $49 per user per month
  • Professional — At $99 per user per month
  • Custom — Starting at $5K per year 

A screenshot of Apollo.io's pricing plans

Of course, users who want to make the most of Apollo.io’s sales intelligence will have to opt for one of the paid-for packages.

Unfortunately, the free plan has very low limits on various features, such as the number of export credits, Buyer Intent topics, sequences, emails you can send, etc.

Helpfully, Apollo.io offers a discount for annual billing and has a 14-day trial.

Who is Apollo.io for?

Apollo.io is one of the top Salesloft competitors for sales reps who need access to comprehensive sales intelligence more than they need advanced automation.

And thanks to its versatile plans with pretty reasonable prices, Apollo.io can fit various purse sizes.

Final thoughts: Salesloft competitors

And there you have it — a detailed list of the best Salesloft competitors for various use cases.

Where Salesloft fails, these three sales engagement platforms deliver without exception.

Klenty and Outreach are the most suitable Salesloft alternatives for cold email outreach, whereas Apollo.io provides extensive sales intelligence.

Finally, users looking to slay their sales and outreach game by automating their sales processes on LinkedIn should go with Expandi.

Expandi’s latest generation AI enables it to easily create hyper-personalized multi-step campaigns that deliver more qualified leads and successfully close deals in less time.

Ready to jazz up your outreach efforts and crush the competition?

Start a free 7-day trial with Expandi and watch your sales pipeline transform.

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