A smaller, open source Instantly alternative

Why do teams look for an Instantly alternative?

Teams look for an Instantly alternative when they send less than Instantly is built for. Its plans are sized for thousands of emails a month across many email accounts. A founder or a small team that emails a few hundred people a month from one domain often wants something lighter.

Instantly.ai is a cold email platform. Its website describes automated outreach, a B2B lead database, email deliverability tools and a CRM. The costs depend on which parts you use:

• Two price lists. Outreach and Instantly Credits, which pay for lead data, are priced separately.
• Contact limits. The entry Outreach plan allows 1,000 uploaded contacts and 5,000 emails a month.
• Volume features. Every Outreach plan includes unlimited email accounts and warm-up. A team that sends from one domain may not use them.

Some teams also want to read the code, or to run the tool on their own server. That needs an open source option. And each extra tool holds a copy of your contacts. Under the GDPR, you answer for every copy, and fines can reach 4% of yearly global turnover.

How much does Instantly cost?

Instantly's Outreach plans cost $47 (Growth), $97 (Hypergrowth) or $358 (Light Speed) a month on monthly billing, according to the Instantly pricing page. With the yearly option selected, the page shows $37.60, $77.60 and $286.30 a month. Enterprise pricing is custom. We compared every plan on 12 October 2026.

Every listed Outreach plan includes unlimited email accounts and unlimited warm-up. The plans differ in volume:

• Growth: 1,000 uploaded contacts and 5,000 emails a month.
• Hypergrowth: 25,000 uploaded contacts. The plan card shows 125,000 emails a month, and the comparison table on the same page shows 100,000.
• Light Speed: 100,000 uploaded contacts and 500,000 emails a month.

Lead data is bought with Instantly Credits, on its own tab of the pricing page. Those plans cost $47 a month for 1,500 to 2,000 credits, $97 a month for 5,000 to 7,500, or from $197 a month for 10,000 to 200,000. So finding leads in Instantly and emailing them starts at $94 a month on monthly billing: $47 for each. We did not find a separate price for Instantly's CRM on the pricing page.

MagpieCRM charges for the work you use. On Magpie Cloud you pay £0.004 per prospect credit (1 for each prospect a search shows you)$0.006 per prospect credit (1 for each prospect a search shows you), 1 prospect credit (£0.004)1 prospect credit ($0.006) per verified email reveal and £0.15 per 1,000$0.25 per 1,000 emails sent. You choose a monthly allowance of each, paid up front, from £10/month$15/month:

• 500 prospects found, 250 verified email reveals and 500 emails sent a month comes to £3.08 on Magpie Cloud (750 prospect credits and the emails), within the £10 monthly minimum500 prospects found, 250 verified email reveals and 500 emails sent a month comes to $4.63 on Magpie Cloud (750 prospect credits and the emails), within the $15 monthly minimum.
• 2,500 prospects found, 1,500 verified email reveals and 5,000 emails sent a month comes to £16.75 on Magpie Cloud (4,000 prospect credits and the emails)2,500 prospects found, 1,500 verified email reveals and 5,000 emails sent a month comes to $25.25 on Magpie Cloud (4,000 prospect credits and the emails).

Unused allowance does not roll over. If you run out, you can upgrade and pay the difference for the rest of the month. Self-hosted MagpieCRM is free. You pay your data and email providers directly.

MagpieCRM vs Instantly: feature comparison

MagpieCRM and Instantly both find B2B contacts and send them email sequences, but Instantly sends at far greater volume. MagpieCRM is a smaller, open source tool for prospecting and email. The table puts the two side by side. Instantly details come from the Instantly pricing page, its CRM page and its help centre.

The main difference is scale. Instantly is built to send cold email from many email accounts at once. MagpieCRM finds verified contacts, sends them a campaign or a short email sequence from your own domain, and tracks the deals that follow in a pipeline.

Where is Instantly stronger than MagpieCRM?

Instantly is stronger on sending volume and the tools around it. The Instantly pricing page lists unlimited email accounts and unlimited warm-up on every Outreach plan, and up to 500,000 emails a month on Light Speed. It also lists A/Z testing, a global block list and a database of 450M+ B2B leads.

Replies land in Unibox. Instantly's help centre calls it a centralized inbox for lead replies from all your connected email accounts. The Instantly CRM page describes a master inbox for email, calls, SMS and tasks, with unlimited seats on one subscription.

Instantly is likely the better fit if:

• You send high volumes of cold email across many mailboxes.
• You rely on inbox warm-up for every sending account.
• You want every reply in one shared inbox inside the tool.
• You test many versions of a sequence against each other.

MagpieCRM is early access software, at version 0.9.41. It has no warm-up tool, no inbox rotation and no unified inbox. Its sequences are plain-text email, with no A/B tests. For a small team that sends modest volumes from one domain, that trade can be worth it. If volume is how you win, stay with Instantly.

What do you get with MagpieCRM?

MagpieCRM gives founders, small B2B teams and agencies one open source tool to find verified contacts and email them. We built it to keep that job simple and cheap. Here is what the app includes today, at version 0.9.41:

• Prospect search. Look up companies by keyword, industry, headcount and country. Look up people by title, seniority, country and keyword.
• Verified emails. Each email is checked with the company's mail server. Unless you choose otherwise, only verified emails are saved.
• Contacts and lists. Import from CSV or paste, add custom fields, build lists and personas, and export whenever you like.
• Sequences. Send a few plain-text emails to each person, days apart. A sequence stops for a person when they reply, unsubscribe or bounce.
• Campaigns. Build an email with drag and drop or from a template, schedule it, and track opens and clicks.
• Deals and pipelines. Track deals on a drag-and-drop board, with a value, owner and close date. Run more than one pipeline, each with its own stages.
• Forms and surveys. Collect sign-ups through forms or an API, and run surveys with branching.
• AI. A copilot on your own Anthropic or OpenAI key, and an MCP server for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and the OpenAI Codex CLI.

MagpieCRM keeps only a prospect's name, title, seniority, company, domain, country and profile URL. Search results are never stored.

How does cold email sending work on Magpie Cloud?

On Magpie Cloud, email goes out through our sending servers, signed for your own domain. There is no warm-up tool and no pool of mailboxes to rotate. Each workspace has a daily sending limit that starts low and steps up each week its email is received well. Email to people you found in Prospect Search starts at 30 a day and rises to 300 a day.

• The cold email limit steps up week by week: 30, 60, 100, 150 and 200 a day, then 300 from week six.
• Email to people who signed up, or that you imported, starts at 200 a day. After about five weeks it is limited only by your plan's allowance.
• A limit rises after a week of email that is opened and not bounced or marked as spam. It steps down if results are poor.
• A sequence waits for room in the limit, then carries on. You choose the days and hours it sends.
• Each sender connects their inbox over IMAP, so replies are detected and the sequence stops.
• Emails are verified from our own pool of IPs, so your domain is never used for those checks.

The limits exist because workspaces share our sending servers, and mailbox providers judge a new sender by how people react to its email. They also mean Magpie Cloud is not built for bulk cold email. A self-hosted copy has no daily limits: its sending is between you and your email provider.

How do you move from Instantly to MagpieCRM?

You move from Instantly by downloading your leads as a CSV file, then importing them into MagpieCRM. Then set up your sending domain and write your first sequence. Let any running Instantly campaigns finish first, so nobody gets two sets of follow-ups. Check each email against the FTC's CAN-SPAM guide before you send.

1. Download your leads from each Instantly campaign as a CSV file.
2. Import the CSV into MagpieCRM, and map each column to a field.
3. On Magpie Cloud, add the DKIM record we show you, and DMARC if you don't have it yet. Self-hosted, connect SMTP or your own email provider.
4. Connect your inbox over IMAP, so replies stop a sequence.
5. Write a short plain-text sequence, and start within the daily limit.
6. Keep Instantly for any outreach that still needs high volume across many mailboxes.