What's great
Used Instantly for about 8 months running cold email campaigns for our IT managed services company in the NJ/NY area. The deliverability tools are the real standout — the email warmup network actually works and our inbox placement rates stayed above 60% even at scale. Setting up campaigns with multiple sending accounts was straightforward, and the analytics dashboard gives you what you need without overcomplicating things.
Where it fell short: Instantly handles the sending side well, but you still need separate tools for lead sourcing, enrichment, and CRM. We ended up cobbling together Apollo for leads, Instantly for sending, and HubSpot for tracking — three subscriptions, three dashboards, three places where data could fall out of sync. The UI also gets clunky once you're managing more than 10 active campaigns. For a small B2B team without a dedicated ops person, the multi-tool stack becomes its own full-time job.
Solid tool if sending volume is your main bottleneck. Just know it's one piece of a larger puzzle.