The best Smartlead alternative

Autocloz is the strongest free alternative for outbound teams: a free-forever, AI-native CRM with email, calling, LinkedIn, SMS and WhatsApp built into one login. Unlike most Smartlead alternatives, the core CRM stays free for 5 users and 100,000 contacts, and every paid plan lifts the seat count to unlimited — you only pay to raise per-channel daily limits.

For most teams, yes. Autocloz charges no per-seat fee, so adding users never raises the bill, and the CRM is free forever. Calling uses carrier pass-through (your own Telnyx, DIDLogic or FreJun rates, with no per-minute markup), so you scale on volume instead of seats or bundled minutes.

Import your contacts, companies and deals by CSV or API, connect your mailboxes (Google, Microsoft or SMTP) and carrier, and rebuild your sequences as multichannel. You keep every channel — email, calling, LinkedIn, SMS and WhatsApp — on one lead timeline, and built-in warmup means you can move sending over without rebuilding your stack.

For cold email, yes — Autocloz matches the essentials Smartlead is known for: unlimited mailboxes on paid plans, automated warmup, inbox rotation, deliverability monitoring and bounce auto-pause. It then goes further with calling, LinkedIn, SMS, WhatsApp and a built-in CRM. The one thing it doesn't try to be is a bundled contact database — you bring data by CSV, API or an Apify actor.

No. Every paid Autocloz plan includes unlimited users with no per-seat fee, and the CRM is free forever for 5 users — you can start without a card and invite the whole team. Paid plans simply raise per-channel daily limits, mailboxes, contacts and verifications, and you can change or cancel any time.

Most teams are sending the same day. Importing contacts and connecting a mailbox takes minutes; rebuilding your best sequences as multichannel is the bulk of the work. Built-in warmup and deliverability tooling mean you can ramp sending safely rather than cutting over cold.

Yes. Autocloz covers the same cold-email essentials (unlimited mailboxes on paid, warmup, rotation, deliverability monitoring) and adds calling, LinkedIn, SMS, WhatsApp and a free CRM in the same platform.

Yes — connect any number of Google/Microsoft/SMTP mailboxes. The free plan includes 50; paid plans are unlimited.

No. Every paid Autocloz plan includes unlimited users. You scale per-channel daily limits, not seats.

Smartlead is a mature, focused cold-email sender, and if email is your only channel it does that job well. Moving to Autocloz means trading a specialist for a platform: you keep unlimited mailboxes, warmup, rotation and deliverability monitoring, and you gain calling, LinkedIn, SMS, WhatsApp and a CRM in the same login. If you have built deep workflows around Smartlead-specific integrations, budget time to rebuild them.

Smartlead meters AI as add-on credits. Autocloz is bring-your-own-key: you connect your own OpenAI or Anthropic key and pay that provider directly at cost, with no per-credit markup from us. On high personalisation volume that is usually the larger of the two savings.

Yes, and it is the safer path. Point a subset of mailboxes at Autocloz, run a campaign side by side, and compare reply rates on the same list before you move the rest. Nothing about connecting a mailbox to Autocloz disconnects it from Smartlead.

That is the whole argument, and it is worth being concrete. On a specialist sender, the step after 'no reply on email three' happens somewhere else — a dialer, a LinkedIn tool, a WhatsApp inbox — and the record of it lives there too, so nobody can see the sequence a prospect actually experienced. In Autocloz that step is another row in the same sequence against the same contact, and the call recording, the LinkedIn reply and the email thread land on one timeline. If email is genuinely your only channel and you have no plans to change that, this buys you nothing.

Only where it should. It matters the moment a sequence contains a call or an SMS: quiet hours, TCPA windows and DNC lists are enforced per channel in the recipient's timezone before a touch is dispatched, so a mis-set schedule cannot place a call at 6am local time. For a pure email sequence you will rarely notice it. It exists because the failure it prevents is a legal one rather than a deliverability one, and that is not a failure you want to discover from a complaint.

5 users, up to 100,000 contacts, 10 mailboxes, unlimited email verification, booking pages with calendar sync, and the full CRM with companies, deals and pipeline. It is not a trial with a clock on it — paid plans raise per-channel daily sending limits and mailbox counts rather than unlocking the CRM. The practical consequence is that you can put the whole team in it, including people who only read, without that being a budget conversation.

Run one campaign in each against a matched slice of the same list, from different mailboxes, for a fortnight. Compare reply rate rather than open rate — opens are inflated by privacy proxies that fetch images on the recipient's behalf and tell you very little. Then look at where the follow-ups went: if the sequences that produced meetings all needed a call or a LinkedIn touch that happened somewhere else, that is the measurement that should decide it, not a feature grid.