Instantly vs lemlist for HubSpot Users: Which Cold Email Tool Fits a Small Team?

• You want every email and reply on the HubSpot timeline without extra tools: lemlist.
• You want the most sending inboxes for the lowest entry price, and HubSpot only needs replies and deals: Instantly.
• You send a few dozen personal follow-ups a week and already pay for HubSpot Sales Hub: maybe neither. Try HubSpot sequences first.

Instantly's Growth outreach plan is $47 a month. That covers unlimited email accounts, unlimited warmup, 1,000 uploaded contacts and 5,000 emails a month. Instantly's pricing page also has Credits plans and Bundles, so check which one you're actually buying.

lemlist's Email plan shows two prices on its pricing page, $69 and $55 a month. The page doesn't say in plain text whether $55 is the annual rate. The plan lists unlimited users and email senders, an email and phone finder, warmup (lemlist calls it lemwarm) and CRM integrations including HubSpot. The Multichannel plan shows $109 and $87 a month and adds LinkedIn and SMS automation and a built-in call dialer.

One thing on lemlist's page doesn't add up. The Email plan says unlimited users, but the same page says pricing is based on the number of users. Ask lemlist which applies to your team before you buy.

I'm not going to total per-seat costs or yearly savings. The billing terms aren't clear enough to do that honestly.

Count the whole cost for Instantly, though. If you add a sync tool to log activity in HubSpot, its subscription is part of the bill.

This is the section that matters if HubSpot is your system of record.

lemlist

lemlist's HubSpot integration syncs at the contact level, in both directions. You set the direction for each field: sync both ways, HubSpot wins, lemlist wins, or off. If you're not sure, lemlist's own help center says to make HubSpot the source of truth. Good advice.

What it writes into HubSpot:

• Sent emails and replies: HubSpot Email activity.
• Opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes and campaign events: Notes.
• LinkedIn messages sent and replied: LinkedIn Message activity. Other LinkedIn actions go to Notes.
• Calls made in lemlist: Call activity.

Details worth knowing before you connect:

• Sync usually takes 2 to 10 minutes.
• Field mapping isn't retroactive. Contacts already in HubSpot don't get backfilled.
• lemlist checks for an existing HubSpot contact by email before it creates one.
• Unsubscribes you add by hand in lemlist don't push to HubSpot. Only ones the lead triggers do.
• Call recording links lemlist logs are public and permanent. Think about that before you record client calls.
• One HubSpot account can't connect to more than one lemlist team.
• lemlist says the integration works with all paid HubSpot plans and needs HubSpot admin access. It doesn't say free HubSpot works.

You can also import from any active HubSpot list or view, with dedup by email and company. Leads can drop out of a campaign on their own when their lifecycle stage changes, a deal is created, or they stop matching the list filter. That's the feature that stops a sales email from landing on someone who signed yesterday.

Instantly

Instantly connects to HubSpot natively. It does two jobs:

1. 01Import. Pull a HubSpot list into a campaign, map fields, and skip duplicates across campaigns and lists.
2. 02Automations. HubSpot events like contact or deal changes can trigger Instantly steps. Instantly events like a reply or a status change can create or update HubSpot contacts, tasks and notes. Instantly calls this two-way.

To put every send and reply on the HubSpot timeline, Instantly's help center walks you through OutboundSync, a third-party app that logs activity via Instantly webhooks. Instantly also documents a Zapier recipe that creates a HubSpot contact when a lead is marked Interested.

Two details trip people up. Instantly has two separate HubSpot connections: "Old HubSpot" for importing leads, and "New HubSpot" for Automations and for exporting Lead Finder leads. Connect the one that matches the job. And automations only fire on events after you switch them on. Nothing that already happened gets pushed to HubSpot.

The full Instantly setup, including the two separate HubSpot connections and what to configure first, is on /tools/instantly.

What this means for your portal

lemlist puts more into HubSpot by default. That's good for visibility. Your rep sees the whole thread on the contact. It also means a lot of Notes, because every open and click is one.

Instantly puts in only what you automate. That's cleaner, but HubSpot shows less unless you add a sync tool.

Neither is wrong. Decide what you want to see on a contact record, then pick the tool that writes that and not much else.

Either way, check your portal first. Duplicates and messy lifecycle stages get worse once a sending tool starts writing to them.

• An agency doing outbound for itself with one or two senders, and it wants everything in HubSpot: lemlist. Native logging means nobody has to remember to log anything.
• A firm sending to large lists across many inboxes and domains, using HubSpot only for replies and deals: Instantly. Unlimited accounts on the entry plan is the point.
• A founder sending under about 50 personal emails a week, already on HubSpot Sales Hub: HubSpot sequences may be enough. No affiliate link here because there's nothing to sell you.
• A firm that needs contact data more than sending: start with Apollo.

• Send from separate domains, not your main one
• Give new inboxes time to warm up before real volume
• Build a HubSpot "do not contact" list from customers and open deals
• Decide which system owns lifecycle stage. One
• Run both trials side by side on the same small, clean list

Both trials are 14 days. That's enough to see what each one writes into HubSpot before you pay for either.

How I'd run the side-by-side:

1. 01Pick 20 to 50 contacts you're allowed to email. Not customers. Not anyone in an open deal.
2. 02Make a test HubSpot list and connect each tool to it, not to your whole database.
3. 03Send a short sequence from each tool. Same copy, same list size.
4. 04Open five of those contacts in HubSpot after a few days. Look at what's on the timeline, what landed in Notes, and whether any fields changed that you didn't expect.
5. 05Then decide. The tool whose HubSpot record you'd actually want to read is the one to keep.